Edifying Pain

Prison sentences are meant to be a serious form of punishment, yet many inmates later declare that their time inside was the best thing to ever happen to them. Serious writers like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn have written great big books about the experience, after having been somehow transformed by the extraordinary suffering they endured during the years of torment and toil inflicted upon them. 

The suffering that transformed them is of a particularly extreme character - it isn’t the kind of suffering where you stub your toe and wince but ultimately know that things will go back to normal in a conceivable amount of time. It’s the kind of suffering where you have absolutely no hope of things ever going back to normal, where the possibility of power and success and well-being in the human-knowable world has been utterly extinguished. For the happy inmates, such suffering serves as powerful stimulus to look beyond the human world and experience a connection with a higher reality, one where moral victory is assured and all pain is forever relieved. The happy inmates carry this elevated experience with them once their prison terms have expired, everywhere aware of this higher reality. 

For many people the same holds true of other forms of suffering - hurt badly enough and you will absolutely have to ask for help, and if you get that help then you’ll forever become aware of the power of the world that exists beyond your understanding and capabilities. You’ll be left humbled, and in being humbled you paradoxically become more confident. You can move through life knowing that help will be there when you need it and that the saving power of the world transcends your own pain and limitations.

There are people who go through life without ever really suffering, without ever really bumping into their own human limitations, and that’s great! I cannot imagine what that life is like, but I know that every day that we all work to improve the world is a day where there is a little less pain and a little more possibility. For the rest of us, though, who for whatever reason at some point encounter a pain that is overwhelming, it is critical that we keep those stories alive - stories of salvation, secular or otherwise. I think that no matter how well we improve the human condition that finitude will always be a part of it, and that as long as we have limits we will inevitably bump into them and that it is critical to be there for each other when we do. 

That’s the only way we can really make it, after all. 

Prison sentences are meant to be a serious form of punishment, yet many inmates later declare that their time inside was the best thing to ever happen to them. Serious writers like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn have written great big books about the experience, after having been somehow transformed by the extraordinary suffering they endured during the years of torment and toil inflicted upon them. 

The suffering that transformed them is of a particularly extreme character - it isn’t the kind of suffering where you stub your toe and wince but ultimately know that things will go back to normal in a conceivable amount of time. It’s the kind of suffering where you have absolutely no hope of things ever going back to normal, where the possibility of power and success and well-being in the human-knowable world has been utterly extinguished. For the happy inmates, such suffering serves as powerful stimulus to look beyond the human world and experience a connection with a higher reality, one where moral victory is assured and all pain is forever relieved. The happy inmates carry this elevated experience with them once their prison terms have expired, everywhere aware of this higher reality. 

For many people the same holds true of other forms of suffering - hurt badly enough and you will absolutely have to ask for help, and if you get that help then you’ll forever become aware of the power of the world that exists beyond your understanding and capabilities. You’ll be left humbled, and in being humbled you paradoxically become more confident. You can move through life knowing that help will be there when you need it and that the saving power of the world transcends your own pain and limitations.

There are people who go through life without ever really suffering, without ever really bumping into their own human limitations, and that’s great! I cannot imagine what that life is like, but I know that every day that we all work to improve the world is a day where there is a little less pain and a little more possibility. For the rest of us, though, who for whatever reason at some point encounter a pain that is overwhelming, it is critical that we keep those stories alive - stories of salvation, secular or otherwise. I think that no matter how well we improve the human condition that finitude will always be a part of it, and that as long as we have limits we will inevitably bump into them and that it is critical to be there for each other when we do. 

That’s the only way we can really make it, after all.