Pain and Its Uses

When I was two or three weeks old my mother carried me as she went about her weekly shopping in our little community. The town was small and stable: - people lived there and knew each other at least by sight reasonably well. As she walked toward the grocery story an acquaintance, a member of our church, stopped her and said, "Mrs. Wilke?" My mother said, "Yes" and the lady said, "Your baby?" and my mother rather quizzically said "Yes?". At that point the woman said to my mother 'II heard the church bells this morning toll the death of an infant and I hoped it was your poor little crippled baby."

My mother's firm response was "No, life is better."

The pain my mother experienced, not alone in that particular incident but in more than a few like that, was a pain that somehow was redeemed not by by-passing it, not by becoming a recluse, "staying home", but redeemed as we all can redeem pain, redeemed by an affirmation of life, "Life is better."

It was redeemed as well by her memory of what our physician had said at the time of my birth. He blurted out to her, "I've never heard of anything like this, I've never seen anything like this, but somehow I am sure, knowing you, that it will be all right."

So pain counts, not in running away from it, but in its redemption - redeeming it by our affirmation of where we stand: Where we stand in relationship to life it-self.

How could I ever understand the pain of my mother? How could I sense something of the psychological and personal suffering she went through? Her life had come unraveled. My father was numb, sandbagged by this thing over which he had no control and could do nothing about. My paternal grandmother, who lived with us cried at the thought of me - for most of a year. It could even be that my mother had a deep sense of guilt in response to the hope expressed by the acquaintance, that the "poor little crippled baby" would have died. Maybe that was her secret hope as well, a hope that her Christian faith told her she should not have and about which she therefore feel doubly guilty. To the best of my knowledge any such doubts and any such half-formed hopes were never expressed, and resolutely she turned toward the next step, seeking out the future and its possibilities.

What Are, If Any, The Uses Of Pain?

What do we do with pain and suffering? What do we do with anxiety and disability? Can we look within ourselves and see the ways we have responded to the pain, the difficulty, the anxiety, the problem, everything else that society sees as negative? How have we responded? I have related one such way, and I would like to add other incidents related to the uses of pain, incidents that most of us can share in one way or another in our own life.

Layers of Pain

There are layers and layers of pain, from being unable to remember a friend's name at a crucial moment to a sense that everything about one is unacceptable. Whatever layer we experience - it all dips into the same phobic pool that says I am not all right. My experiences of pain could indeed seem to trivialize it when compared to the sufferings of persons within catastrophic circumstances: Holocaust, war, oppression, Hiroshima. But pain is always personal to the one who experiences it - and it is out of this perspective that I speak - out of what I know and experience. I may indeed project into the suffering of others and empathize, but in that I am still once removed. So be it: I speak here of my pain, psychic pain) the pain of living with hurtful experiences. Unremitting bodily pain has it own cost, but I speak of what I feel.

The bumps inevitably suffered as an infant learning in the usual kerplunk method peculiar to babies as they master balance and locomotion and finally walking were painful, I'm sure, when my top half - the center of gravity - got too far ahead of my base of support. I could not catch myself with fat little hands and arms - as I later would watch each of my five sons do. I landed on my collar bone, my head, my nose, whichever touched down first. That broken profile of my Roman nose attests to a break in one such fall!

Pain of Difference

So the pain of which I speak from my experience is the pain of facing the fact of my difference - and the even harder fact that many of those "normal" folk around could not either face or accept my difference. This fact is still a daily component of my life - but most days the frustration I face are not those of the judgement of my fellows - not even the frustration a physical world set up - and sometimes poorly at that - for persons with the usual component number of appendages, but instead that occasional rejection because of a difference seen as pejorative and negative.

Those pains, and the potential redemptions, go way back in my history, and relate to the following incident: in my early attempts at dressing myself. Everything I need to do to take care of myself I do by myself, for myself. That total independence came about piece by piece as I coped with growing up as every child does who is given the precious opportunity to cope.

I was two or three years old, sitting on the floor in the bedroom of our home, trying to get a shirt on over my head and around my shoulders, and having an extraordinarily difficult time. I was grunting and sweating, and my mother just stood there and watched. Obviously (looking back on this from hearing about it a long time later), I realized that her arms must have been held rigidly at her side, every instinct in her wanted to reach out and do it for me. Yet she kept those arms tight at her side. Finally, her neighbor, a woman friend, turned to her and said in exasperation: "Ida, why don't you help that child?!" My mother responded through gritted teeth "I am helping him!"

Her pain in with-holding help was actually a granting of help, in assurance that even though the pain and sweat level was high in the short run, it was being reduced in the long run. She expressed for me most graphically her own feeling that I must learn by myself. She helped me by not helping.

STILL ANOTHER REDEMPTION OF PAIN IS IN SEEKING ALTERNATIVES, in searching for new ways. After the immediate pain of knowing that a particular way is closed, seeking a new alternative, a new outlet is redemption for that pain.

Such alternative-seeking happened to my father and also to me. The one for my father came when I was excluded from school. The superintendent of the public school system said to my father "Your son is not acceptable in the city school system". This was a shock for my father who held to the intellectual life as being of tremendous importance. For this youngster of his to be denied schooling was searing. What he had to do therefore in finding a way out of his pain, out of an almost numbing shock, was to find alternatives. At that point he found a one-room country school house which I attended for numbers of years. The deep pain endured for him. For me the alternative school was a great experience. I didn't know the complexities of what was happening, or what lay ahead for me. What I did know was the fact that I could attend that one-room country school house with all its special joys. For numbers of years I walked through two forests on the three-mile trek to school, across several streams, cutting through the pasture where the neighbor kept his bull, so that at least several times a year we had to run for it to escape the enraged animal. The very way I mention this shows how much I enjoyed the whole experience. I don't know how much I enjoyed my studies but I sure did enjoy going to and coming from school!

Rejection Pain

Some years later the rejection pain hit me. I applied to a college and was told "We cannot have a crippled kid on the campus." The fact that within the week, I received an acceptance from Princeton may have alleviated the pain level for me somewhat. But the fact of rejection, the knowledge of the reason for the rejection, occasioned real pain. I know full well I overcame the pain, not by with-drawing, not by taking this denial "on the chin", but by bouncing back. I AFFIRMED MY OWN IDENTITY. I KNEW WHO I WAS AND WHAT MY IDENTITY WAS. All of this I owe tremendously to parental and sibling response to me. It helped create a sense of identity to me, so that nobody, not even the president of some college or other could beat me down, because I knew who I was, and indeed - - from my church relationship - - whose I was.

Pain at this level has an element in it that draws out the resilience of the human spirit. It reaches out for us to affirm once again the identity which is ours.

A Holding Pattern

Still another of the uses of pain is in the delayed response, a kind of delayed response, a kind of acceptance of a temporary nature. It is the "holding pattern" response, in which the painful situation is accepted, one continues to live within it, and various means are sought to overcome the situation and to endure the pain.

It happened in my first year in college when it was judged I could not eat in the college dining room, but alone at a hallway between the kitchen and dining room...It happened when I was initially rejected in my efforts to study for and enter into church ministry. But by keeping the "holding pattern", affirming my own identity, knowing who I was, each situation changed, and persons who initially rejected me, changed.

Understanding the Other

When a person sees another with a severe disability, a frequent response is the "pity and terror" syndrome. It is important to understand that THE INDIVIDUAL WITH THE DISABILITY DOES NOT CREATE THE PITY AND ANXIETY AND FEAR. The visible disability brings into consciousness for the so-called "whole person" something in his or her own background, own being, either from the recent past or far back in repressed memory, some experience that has not been fully assimilated in their life. Every individual has fears and anxieties which must be dealt with. My anxiety and fear is my hangup, my difficulty, my problem, NOT theirs.

False Religious Interpretations

Unfortunately, religious interpretations of disability and consequent religious practices and structures have themselves contributed to ostracize and reject. Such ideas as being punished by God, either for one's own sin, or that of another; of being "abnormal", unworthy", or not fitting" are not true Christian concepts. Jesus clearly stated the need of the religious community for participation of persons with handicaps - and that surely means participation in worship both as the one receiving and the one giving, both as congregant and parishioner on the one hand, and Priest or worship leader on the other hand. Chapter IX of St John expressed this clearly: "We must do the work of the Lord...Neither sinned, but in this man's blindness there is still the possibility - yes, necessity - of glorifying God. The blind man even as blind remains one who proclaims the glory of the Lord."

My RELIGIOUS FAITH has provided the under-girding it does for any of us who call upon that strength - - the strength to respond to the task. For me, two religious-based understandings have been of enormous help: The attribution or imputation of wholeness is the doctrine that says God sees us as WHOLE PERSONS, even with our problems of disabilities. The teaching is implicit in St. Paul, searching for a righteousness he could not secure for himself. God sees you and me as whole, with nothing lacking, and no negative aspect present: Made to be "without blemish in the sight of God" as Paul's letter to Ephesians points out.

Another teaching is that the disability is not as important as what we do about it. What forward steps do we undertake? "Go and wash in the pool of Siloam" said Jesus to the blind man. We act! We do!

Isaiah reminds us to "enlarge the place of our habitation, to lengthen the cords and strengthen the stakes". Our home, in earth and heaven, is to be constantly extended, stretched out. We are to go beyond our immediate armor plated protected place where we now hide. We are to "build these more stately mansions, Oh my soul"

• Dr. Harold Wilke, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and a world known professor, author, lecturer and organizer, was born without arms. This article is part of his lectures at the Third International, Ecumenical Congress on "Pain, Suffering and 'Marginal Life', sponsored by Stauros.
• Dr. Wilke is the founder of THE HEALING COMMUNITY, an ecumenical organization for bringing the alienated and handicapped persons into the mainstream of life. Its Quarterly periodical, THE CARING CONGREGATION, is an excellent, up-to-date resource on all aspects of disability.
• Dr. Wilke's book, CREATING THE CARING CONGREGATION, Abingdon, Nashville, 1980, is a remarkable, easily readable compendium on disability as regards religious organizations and society as a whole.