Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

I got into a very interesting discussion with my husband this morning about the Catholic obsession with pain and suffering. Both my husband and I were raised Catholic but neither of us remained with the faith. Actually, when we were first dating he and I got into a heated debate because he said that he had rid himself of guilt. I didn't believe him. Growing up, I never really grasped the teachings or beliefs of Catholicism. Too many inconsistencies, too much reliance on mysticism and relic worship and basically too many limitations without reasonable cause. Eternal damnation wasn't a convincing threat after a certain age.

But there is that lingering Catholic guilt that I have never been able to rid myeslf of. This morning's discussion about pain and suffering had me wondering why do Catholics put themselves through the wringer physically and menatlly for their faith. Why is this glorified? Any kid who attended Catholic school or even CCD would remember the "Lives of the Saints" books they gave out to us. A sort of Little Golden Book of all of the Catholic martyrs and the horrible, physically tortorous ways they proved their devotion to God.

I need answers to this because I feel that I have unwillingly participated in this masochism of self most of my life to alleviate some transgression or another. For what?! Why would this be the solution?

Excepts from "Pain, Suffering, Mind, Body, and the Jesus Thing"

St. Sabastian, for example, was shot through with arrows until it was said, "he was covered with barbs like a hedgehog." A Christian widow miraculously nursed him back to health, whereupon he was again ordered to be put to death, this time by stoning, whereby his certifiably lifeless body was thrown into a sewer.

I don't want to minimize or seem dismissive about Christ's suffering, which must have been horrific: even before Jesus was mounted to the cross, it is said he was beaten with leather whips loaded with bone and metal; death came slowly over many hours; the cause of death, exhaustion, a slow depletion of the body. Cicero described the crucifixion method as " 'the most cruel and frightful of punishments,' combining, as it did, extreme bodily pain, the tortures of hunger, thirst, heat and insects …" But what to make of this sacrifice? Like all physical experience, the pain itself is set in a context, and it is this context that ultimately drives the crucifixion story.

Pain has been described as "sensory," that is, the sensation itself, and "affective," meaning how the person feels about it, how the consequences of those physical stimuli manifest and reinterpret the person's life. 3 It is the affective nature of pain, I think, that we most often think of in relation to the crucifixion - the way that Jesus suffered as an innocent, the suffering chosen as a solution to a redemptive end, and perhaps worst of all, the suffering born of a knowledge that this was the script he was asked to play.

The traditions of our faith have been wonderfully adaptive to the rigors of life, and it is this very adaptive quality that I believe led to the idea that identifying with the suffering of Christ had resonance to our forebears.

Imagine life in the Middle Ages when the threat of plague was at your doorstep, and produced an agony that was described as "so painful…it was equal to the most exquisite Torture;…some not able to bear the Torment, threw themselves out at Windows, or shot themselves… others vented their Pain by incessant Roarings, and such loud and lamentable Cries…that would Pierce the very Heart to think of."

Pain of this magnitude was too grand to be considered manufactured by the body alone, and in a day when the mind, body and spirit were not fragmented as they are today, the assumption was that the afflicted was under assault from outside forces. The English word "pain" derives from the Latin poena, meaning "punishment," and so it was believed that inflictions came as "divine visitations" from which one hoped to be "delivered." 5 It's not hard to see how this kind of reasoning was no distant cousin to the gods of antiquity who seemed to make sport of humans and their vulnerable bodies. The primary - and critical - difference, of course, is that God brought these visitations not for divine amusement, but for some Godly purpose.

Extending that possibility led people like Saint Teresa of Avila to embrace pain as an invitation to communion with God, making possible a kind of "visionary pain" that frequently bordered on the erotic (and who would want to give that up?) Taken to the extreme, religious flagellants didn't even wait for the affliction, but took matters into their own hands, beating their backs mercilessly, and paving the way for an S&M variation.

Finding meaning in suffering is at the very core of the story of Job. He asks for deliverance from boils and worms and scabs and sleepless nights, and loss of property, family and community standing. This punishment without justification, for remember Job is a righteous and faithful man, presents only one explanation: God is testing him, it is some twisted divine test of obedience. Job struggles to understand why God has forsaken him, and just what he's supposed to be learning from the experience. The ordeal is finally over for Job when he essentially gives up, and in the words of the singer Iris DeMent, decides to "just let the mystery be."

That physical affliction has divine roots, either through punishment or in teaching a lesson or for communion with God, has been our inheritance up to the modern age. It is rooted in this most human of needs - to give meaning to all this, to understand why bad things happen to good people, bad people, and the rest of us.