Religion

Ch.5.pdf

FIVE Feeling No Pain. Feeling No Joy

A soUT a year after my book on coping with suffer- ing came out, I was invited _to take part in a conference at Randolph-Macon College m Ashland, Virginia, entitled "f ive Religious Perspectives on Suffering." It was one of the most stimulating weekends I have ever spent. I was the Jewish representative, along with a Christian, a Buddhist, a Moslem, and a Hindu, each of us explaining his or her faith's perspective on why people suffer and what religion can tell them to do about it.

The Hindu representative explained to me over dinner one night that his religion taught him to deal with pain and suffering not by denying it or ignoring it but by rising above it. His religion taught him to say to the most painful experiences imaginable, "I will not let you hurt me. I will experience the worst that can happen and triumph over it. 1 will learn the art of detachment and transcend the pain." We have all seen pictures of Hindus walking on hot coals or resting on beds of sharp nails. They are doing with their bodies what they try to do with their souls, teaching them- selves not to feel the pain. The pain is real, but it does not hurt. I remember reading of how G. Gordon Liddy of

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

Watergate fame would show how tough he was by h id' his hand over a burning flame. When asked, "Doesn?t tg hurt?" he would answer, "Of course it hurts. The tri tk ~t not to let yourself feel it." c 15

My dinner companion sai~ to me that evening, "How lucky you are to have lost a child when rou were so youn so that you could learn to conquer gnef and pain. M~• people don't have an opportunity like that until they ar

much older." He went on: "When a person dies, it is no~ a tragedy. His soul returns to the great stream of Life, like a drop of water returning to the ocean, its source. Dying is not painful. It is living that is painful, because being alive isolates us from the rest of life and leaves us vulnera- ble. When we complete our period of individual existence, we rejoin the stream of Life. Your son's life was pain-filled and tragic, and not only because he was sick. Everyone's life is pain-filled and tragic. But his death was not tragic, His death brought him peace, and it should have brought you peace and a sense of completeness as well, except that your habit of wanting things, wanting health, wanting children, wanting everything to tum out favorably, keeps you in pain." He leaned across the table and said to me, "You are a wise man and a fine writer but you still have to learn the most important truth of all: Nobody suffers in this world except people who want things they cannot have, When you learn not to desire, you will rise beyond suffering."

I looked at him incredulously. Here was a man I liked personally and respected for his religious sincerity. But what he was saying was so totally the opposite of what I felt and believed. What his religion taught him about life a~d death was so different from what mine taught me. I did not feel lucky to have lost a son whom I loved. Neither

Feeling No Pain, Feeling No Joy

had I achieved tranquility or t_ranscended the pain. (To ihat, IIIY friend would h~ve _rephed that my mourning and religious growth were still mcomplete.) The sense of loss .11 hurt years later, though I had learned to live with 1-1 stl I b !' d h . . !,{ore than that, e 1eve t at 11 supposed to hurt In

the same way that dead cells, o~r hair and fingernails, feel no pain when they a_re cut but hvmg cells bleed and hurt,

50 1 believe that spmtually dead souls can be cut into, separated from other ~ouls, and not feel pain. But living, nsitive souls are eastly hurt.

s• I don't like being hurt. I don't enjoy experiencing pain. But I believe that I become less of a human being if I learn the art of detachment so well that I can experience the death of a friend or relative, or watch a television news show about starving children, and not be emotionally affected by it. Maybe people living in a land of grinding poverty, infant mortality, and frequent floods, famines, and natural disasters have to armor themselves against the constant threat of calamity, the way doctors have to pro- tect themselves against becoming too emotionally close to the seriously ill patients they treat. But I feel that the price we pay for that sort of protection is too high.

When I protect myself against the danger of loss (by death, divorce, or just having a close friend move away) by teaching myself not to care, not to let anyone get too close to me, I lose part of my soul. When I try to avoid pain by skipping the articles about famine and torture in the papers and turning to the sports pages and gossip columns, saying to myself, "It's too bad but that's the way the world is," I let myself become less human, less alive. When I protect myself from disappointment by not want· ing to be happy, by telling myself that happiness is a mirage and an illusion, I diminish my soul. To be alive is

J WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

to_ feel pain, and to hide from pain is to make yourself 1 abve. CSs

My Hindu friend at the weekend conference was talk' about transcending pain and sorrow, accepting them lllg absorbing them rather than fighting them. (Oriental a:d gion in general tends to see things in terms of the blen;e • of opposites to produce a sense of the whole. Where wing

I. . d h est. em re 1g1on ten s to see s arp contrasts between, for ample, male and female, divine and human, good and e:~- for the Eastern believer the dividing lines are much le:; clear.) He was not talking about'denying pain and hiding from it, the way many people do. Too often, if something hurts us, either we pretend it does not hurt, or we take a pill to make the pain go away, without ever dealing with the real cause of the pain. Maybe we are supposed to hun, and hiding from the pain only enables us to evade that lesson. Nobody ever tells us that there are dangerous side effects to the habit of turning to painkilling medications, and one of them is our diminished ability to feel anything at all.

So often, I officiate at a funeral and the bereaved rela- tives in the front row are manifestly uncomfortable. They know they ought to be feeling something-grief, pain- but they do not feel anything because they have never learned how to let themselves feel. Except perhaps for anger and annoyance, they have never learned the Ian· guage of emotions, and now that they need to express themselves in it, they find themselves tongue-tied. So often, when I am alone with the family in the moments before the funeral service, there will be an old woman crying at the top of her voice, "Why? Why did this have to happen? He was so good!" And there will be a forty• year-old man in a three-piece suit who will become very

Feeling No Pain, Fttltng No Joy

comfortable and sa~, "Can't som~body make her shu iJll? can't somebody give her a sedative?" The fact .

1 up . h 1 • h 1s, the id woman 1st eon y one m e room who is in her ri ht 0 . d she knows that somethmg painful has happe edg min · . d' . n to and she 1s respon mg to 11. The rest of us a 1 bef, . 1 ' h reoo numb, 100 in~1cu ate m t e language of grief, to know what is happening to _us. .

MY dinner ~mpan1on was telling me that the way to I through a life full of tragedy and uncertainty was t ge ' Id ' h h o ,capt it and y1~ to _it, rat er t fight it, like an Orien-

tal wrestler usmg hts op":°nent s weight and strength against him rather than trying to meet him head-on. But he also tried to tell me that the way to keep from going through life in const~t pain w~ to lower your expecta- lion!, Do not expect hfe to be fm, and you will not have your heart broken by injustice. There have always been crime, corruption, and accidents, and there always will be. II is part of the human condition. (A teacher of mine used to say, "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you arc a vegetarian.") Ecclesiastes Jet himself in for so much pain and confusion because he Jet the imperfection of the world get to him. There was no need for him to be so upset by it. His life would have been so much more pleasant had he learned to shrug his shoul• ders at suffering and unfairness, and say, "I am truly sorry that this is the way the world is, but I won't change it by being aggravated by it, so why be aggravated?"

Do not let anything become that important to you-not your job, not your car, not even your health or your family -and you will make yourself immune to the fear of losing them. Instead of working so hard to raise the level of what you have to equal what you want (or what advertisers have

r WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUG!i

persuaded you to want), lower the level of what You 1 Want to that which you already have, or even ower, to the 1 , eve1

of what cannot ever be taken away ,rom you. Then instead of frustration and want, you will have tranquility

' d ¾d peace of mm . In the Second World War, the Nazis rounded up in

cent civilians by the millions and sent them to concent:: tion camps. Those ~riso~ers w~~se sens<: of sci~ depended on their wealth, their social position: their prestigious jobs tended to fall apart when those things were taken away from them. The prisoners whose sense of self grew out of their religious faith or their own self-esteem, rather than other people's opinion of them, tended to fare much better.

The Talmud makes a similar point when it says, "Who is wealthy? He who is content with what he has." Measure a man's wealth not by how much he has, but by bow much he wants and does not have. A rich man who, because of some psychological hunger, feels he needs still more is not really rich.

I listened respectfully to what my dinner companion was telling me that evening, and was moved and enlight- ened by much of it. But ultimately I had to disagree. When it was my tum to speak and his tum to cat his meal, I suggested that when we lower our expectations of life to avoid the pain of disappointment, we forfei t part of the image of God in us. To accept crime and political corrup- tion because they have always been part of society is to give up too easily. Yes, it will spare us much anguish and frustration, but at what cost? To become less attached to my children, less ambitious about my work because life is unfair and unpredictable immunizes me against great pain but also serves to rob me of great hope and great joy, Like

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Fte/ing No Pain, Feeling No Joy

~an at the funeral who wishes the best but d . the ,,. "C , a vises badly when he says,. ant someone give her a sedative?", Uke the overprotective fat~er who won't let his child ride her bicycle for fear she will fall ~nd hurt herself, we en- velop ourselves and each other with misdirected concern. putting on the armo~ keeps us from being hurt, but it also keeps us from growing.

And yet we have to gro:,v .. A.ny woman who has had a bsbY knows how muc~ ~am 1s involved in giving birth to

new life. In a sense, 1t 1s almost as painful to give birth ~o a new self during our lives, to outgrow the person we used to be, shed the skin which protected us so well and take on the risk of a new identity. Being an adolcscen; was 8 painful experience for many of us, because we were giving birth to a new self, a new sense of who we were. And changing our habits later in life can be an equally painful, and equally necessary, ordeal.

I am the rabbi of a congregation of some six hundred families, many of them young parents in their thirties and forties. I have seen the impact of the epidemic of divorce and marital conflict on the families of my congregation, sometimes affecting as many as one-third of the members of a given age bracket. I have seen what divorce does to adults and to children.

Adults hurt, but for the most part they survive intact. If forty percent of marriages end in divorce, eighty percent of divorces end in remarriage, often very stable and satis- fyi ng remarriages. And even when both parties may not remarry, they often experience a degree of personal growth, once the initial hurting is over. I have had any number of women tell me that going through a marital separation, with its financial worries and sense of rejec- lion, was painful, but once they came to terms with what

WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

had happened, they found themselves stronger h . and more independent than they had ever ~n :Prier, Many of them found, through necessity that the e ore.

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capa e o bemg much more resourceful and com than they ever knew they could be. Instead of bem' pctent half f

. gone o a marned couple, they found themselves be'

whole people in their own right. tng But young children are often more vulnerable, less ab!

to take charge of their own lives and put things bac~ together. Some of the effects of divorce on children are all too familiar to us: the sense of rejection, the guilt that they may have caused the split, the absence of a role model. But from what I have seen, the most damaging effect of di- vorce on children, and even on their friends who have not experienced a divorce personally but have heard so much about it, goes beyond these. I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disap- pointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.

So Simon and Garfunkel sang to the young people of the sixties, "If I never loved, I never would have cried . , . I touch no one and no one touches me . . . I am a rock, I am an island . . . and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries." Psychologist Herbert Hendin has written of the fear of true intimacy in people growing up today. ~erious involvement is a trap; it limits your options. Car- mg leaves you vulnerable to disappointment and rejection.

Feeling No Pain r // • rte ng No Joy

II ving children does not represent fulfillme t . • bli · d · n and 1m rtalitY, but o gallon an mconvenienc H . · mo d h . . e. e writes, "iwentY years ago, etac ment and inabili ty to , 1 'd d . f h' ,ee plea- e were cons1 ere signs o sc tzophrenia T d sur . 1 . • o ay, pea-

le believe that emottona involvement invites d' P ,., h bes 1saster, d detachment ouers t e t means of surviv I .. 1 an . a • n our work, in our play, even m our sexual lives, we want t b

l ike machines (we speak of being "turned on") p ,

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ing but not caring too eep y. A young couple came to see me one evening ·

Id b ffi . . . m my

study. I wou e o ct~tmg at their wedding in a few months, and b~cause I dtd not really know them, I asked them to come m so that we could meet each other a d . n go over the mamage ceremony. At one point, the young m

"R bb ' Id · an said to me, a 1, wou you obJect to one small chang in the wedding ceremony? Instead of pronouncing us hus~ band and wife till death do us part, could you pronounce us husband and wife for as long as our love lasts? We've talked about this and we both feel that, should the day come when we don't love each other anymore, it's not morally right for us to be stuck with each other." 1 said to them, "Yes, I do object, and no, I'm not going

to make that change. You and I both know that there is such a thing as divorce, and you and I both know that a lot of marriages these days don't last until one of the partners dies. But let me tell you something, If you go into this marriage with an attitude of 'If it doesn't work out, we can always split,' if psychologically you don't entirely unpack your bags when you move in together, then I can almost guarantee that things won't work out for you. I appreciate the honesty implici t in your request, the desire not lo live hypocritically. But you must understand that what a marriage commitment is all about is not just a

WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

mutual willingness to sleep :,vith each other, but a co . ment to accept the frustra!Jons and disappoint lllnut.

. . bl f . mcnts th are an inevtta e part o two imperfect human be' at i~g to each other. It's ~ar~ enough to make a g:!~relat. n age even when you give 1t everything you've got Bllla~- ?art of ~ou is in:ol~ed in the ~ela~ionship and part· of ut if 1s standing outside 1t, evaluating 1t, deciding wheth still worth it, then you have virtually no chance.,. er

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Those young people had been frightened by the . they had seen others go through when marriages rafi:t They were so afrai~ of losing t~eir emot(onal investmen; that they were willing to commit only a little bit of the . selves to the relationship. That way, if it did not work 0 : it would not hurt them so much to lose. But the resul; would almost inevitably be a fragile, tentative relationship that was so " undercapitalized" in an emotional sense that it was sure to fail.

I think of all the letters I have received from women who told me that when they became seriously ill or learned that they had a seriously ill child, their husbands left them. I don't believe that all those husbands and fathers were cruel, callous, unfeeling people. On the con- trary, I suspect that they felt the pain of the situation very deeply, and because nobody had ever taught them how to live with pain, they could not handle it. So they panicked and ran away from a threatening, emotionally overpower- ing situation. Perhaps some of them, like the young couple in my study, entered into marriage expecting it to make their lives pleasurable, and when it seemed to offer pain, conflict, and uncertainty instead of pleasure, they decided this was not the bargain they had contracted for and they got out.

Dr. Hendin contrasts the fairy tale of the frog prince,

Feeling No Pain F, . . • eellng No Joy

where the beautiful_ prmcc_ss kisses the frog a . .

10 a handsome pnncc, with the version h nd 11 turns

in St t " h · e saw on d "Sesame ree ' w ere she kisses 1·1 d e ay on an tum · f og herself. A funny scene, but is it teach' s mto a

1 ; some level that intimacy, emotional giv;~g ~ur children d can leave you hurt? g s dangerous

an . h . d If we believe t at in or er for life to be od 10

avoid pain, the danger is that we will bcgo • we have 1 . • h . come so good

11 not fee mg pam t at we will learn not to fi 1 . , I h ee anythmg _ 001 JOY, not ovc, not ope, not awe. We 'JI b

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emotiona y anest cuze . e will learn to !iv . . . c our whole lives w1thm narrow c~ot1onal range, accepting the fact that there will be few high spots in our lives 1· ha . n exc nge for the guarantee that there will be no low moments • h • d · cit er, no pam or sa ness, Just a perpetual feeling of monotony, one gray day after another. Because of our fear of pain, we wiU .have .mastered the art of detachment so well that nothing will be able to reach us emotionally.

The affliction w~ich drains so much of the sense of meaning from our lives these days is the disease of bore- do~. So man~ of us. find our jobs_ boring, our marriages bonng, our fnend_sh1ps and hobbies boring. In pathetic desperation, we look for a movie, a vacation trip, an outlet of some sort to lift our lives above the level of the mun- dane. Some of us will find ourselves doing all sorts of pot~ntially self-destructive things, driving too fast, hang gltdmg, white-water rafting, because "only then do I feel alive." Some people will turn to drugs in a desperate effort to rise above the emotional flatness of the everyday and learn what it feels like to feel again. A generation ago, d~gs were the escape mechanism of the ghetto, an alter- native to hopelessness and despair, a way to stop feeling the pain. Today, with a commensurate rise in price, they

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have become the plaything of the jaded upper lllidd class, not to relieve the pain but to escape the bored le

oodd . h ' om to feel high and feel g an expenence etghtened se ' sations of sight and sound and touch, because nothing ~- the real world gives them that feeling. tn

The teenager who shoplifts or steals cars and ends u with a police record and the housewife who drifts into a p extramarital affair and ruins her marriage and her reputa~ tion may not be trying to do something wicked and hann. ful. They may just be loo~ing desp~rately for something to add excitement to their otherwise humdrum, boring lives. Like Faust, they are prepared to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for one moment of feeling alive.

We keep thinking that the fault is in what we are doing or with whom we are doing it, and that the cure for the plague of boredom is to change jobs, to change mates, to change neighborhoods, and life will become more interest- ing. Sometimes a change may in fact be called for, but often the problem is in ourselves. Because of our fear of being hurt or being disappointed, we have chosen a life of emotional flatness. We have built for ourselves an emo- tional floor below which we will not sink, to make sure that nothing ever hurts or depresses us, and an emotional ceiling beyond which we cannot rise, because then the risk of falling would be too great, and we wonder why we feel so hemmed in. We inject ourselves with a spiritual novo- cainc so that we can walk through the storms of life and never be hurt, and we wonder why we feel so numb.

One of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm is entitled "The Tale of the One Who Went Forth to Learn Fear" (The Juniper Tree, L. Segal and M. Sendak; Farrar Straus Giroux, 1973). It is about a young boy who, no matter what he does, never feels afraid. He feels incom·

Feeling No Pain, F,e//ng No Joy

Without the emotional dimension of fear s h plete h . . . · o e goes out and has ~ahny a1dr-fira1s1bng adhventures, encountering

ts and w1tc es an re- reat tng dragons but ghotseven a shudder. In his last adventure he fr°ces neve1r fee s . , ' a cast c front a wicke~ spell, ~nd tn gratitude the king gives him h' daughter tn mamage. The hero tells his bride that l,shough he is fond of her, he is not sure he can marry h ' at h' . . f er until he complet_es 1s m1ss1on_ o learning to feel fear. On

their wedding ni_ght (at l~st _m the version the Brothers Grimm tell to children); hts wife pulls back the covers and throws a bucket of cold wat~r full of little fish over him. He cries out, "Oh my dear wife, now I know what it is to shudder," and he is happy.

What is this strange tale about? As interpreted by Bruno Bettelheim in his book The Uses of Enchantment, the story seems to imply that a person is not really grown up and ready for adult life, no matter what he or she may have accomplished in the world, until he or she is emo- tionally mature and open to feeling. Our hero cannot feel love or joy until he is able to feel fear and dread. He is perhaps a symbol of all of us who, in our efforts to avoid being hurt, deaden ourselves to all feeling and, unlike the hero of the fairy tale, don't even know what we are missing.