Appreciating What Suffering Teaches – Part 9: Readings – 1
Pain itself, the hurt of pain, is a gift. After years of working with lepers, Dr. Paul Brand learned to exult in the sensation of cutting a finger, turning an ankle, stepping into a too-hot bath. “Thank God for pain!” he says.
Doctors once believed the disease of leprosy caused the ulcers on hands and feet and face which eventually led to rotting flesh and the gradual loss of limbs. Mainly through Dr. Brand’s research, it has been established that in 99% of the cases, leprosy only numbs the extremities. The decay of flesh occurs solely because the warning system of pain is absent.
How does the decay happen? Some villages in Africa and Asia have a unique job for the town leper: he stands by the heavy iron cooking pot watching the potatoes. As they are done, without flinching, he thrusts his arm deep into the scalding water and recovers the cooked potatoes.
Dr. Brand found that abusive acts such as this were the chief cause of body deterioration in the leper. The potato-watching leper had felt no pain, but his skin blistered, his cells were destroyed and laid open to infection. Leprosy had not destroyed the tissue; it had merely removed the warning sensors which alerted the leper to danger.
On one occasion, as Dr. Brand was still formulating this radical theory, he tried to open the door of a little storeroom, but a rusty padlock would not yield to his pressure on the key. A patient, an undersized, malnourished ten-year-old, approached him, smiling.
“Let me try, Sahib doctor,” he offered and reached for the key. He closed his thumb and forefinger on the key and with a quick jerk of the hand turned it in the lock.
Brand was dumbfounded. How could this weak youngster out-exert him. His eye caught a telltale clue. Was that a drop of blood on the floor?
Upon examining the boy’s fingers, Brand discovered the act of turning the key had slashed the finger open to the bone; skin and fat and joint were all exposed. Yet the boy was completely unaware of it!
The daily routines of life ground away at these lepers’ hands and feet, but without a warning system to alert them, they succumbed. If an ankle turned, tearing tendon and muscle, they would adjust and walk crooked. If a rat chewed off a finger in the night, they would not discover it until the next morning.
The discovery revolutionized medicine’s approach to leprosy. And it starkly illustrates why Paul Brand can say with utter sincerity, “Thank God for pain!” By definition, pain is unpleasant, so unpleasant as to force us to withdraw our finger from a stove, lightning-fast. Yet it is that very quality which saves us from destruction. Unless the warning signal demands response, we might not heed it.
Brand’s discovery in the physical realm closely parallels the moral argument for pain offered by C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. Just as physical pain is an early warning system to the brain, it is a warning system to the soul. Pain is a megaphone of God which, sometimes murmuring, sometimes shouting, reminds us that something is wrong. It is a “rumor of transcendence,” which convinces us the entire human condition is out of whack. We on earth are a rebel fortress, and every sting, and every ache reminds us.
Without pain, we would contentedly build our kingdom of self-sufficiency and pride, professing not to need God (didn’t Adam?). Pain removes that privilege. It proves to us that reality is not the way it was meant to be. Something is wrong with a life of wars and screams and insults. We need help.
If you once doubt the megaphone value of pain, visit the intensive care unit of a hospital. In the face of extreme suffering, the human masks are stripped off. Nothing else is important. Blue collar, white collar, black, white, male, female, beautiful, ugly, brilliant, stupid—those status games don’t matter in Intensive Care. What matters is life and death. Pain—and only pain—can shout loud enough to bring us to that point.
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The Reformed journal, “In Defense of Pain,” Philip Yancey, November 1975.
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