Better Is Better
About ten years ago, my mother told me she was hurting all over in ways that were new and awful. Like many career nurses, she’d suffered back pain made worse by a couple of car accidents and a couple of kids who stressed her out. But this feeling was different, comprehensive, and she consulted a pain specialist who diagnosed her with a chronic condition.
Soon after her diagnosis, I asked her doctor what I could do, besides maybe stressing my mother out a bit less (not likely), to be supportive. The doc said understanding might provide the most comfort, so I did what I do when I don’t understand: got a book and read it. Although I still can’t claim to understand what it’s like to have a chronic pain condition, I have a better language for it and maybe — maybe? — I’ve become a better listener.
In her memoir and study, The Pain Chronicles (Picador, 2010), Melanie Thernstrom writes about her journey through early onset shoulder arthritis and the piercing, distracting, discouraging, constant pain it caused. She also writes about the ways in which human communities have drawn meaning from pain over the centuries, where some who suffer receive a hero’s welcome, and others receive unmistakable messages that everything bad that’s happening to them is their own fault.
Over the years since reading Thernstrom’s book, and others resources on chronic and irresolvable pain, I have worked through a number of comparisons between chronic pain’s effect on the body and long-term dysfunction’s effect on communities and institutions. One example of ideas I’ve explored includes the differences and connections between acute and chronic pain, where untreated traumatic and acute injury to a body can result in chronic pain as a secondary illness with a long tail. The same phenomenon strikes institutions after a crisis: without healing for the initial trauma, pain will linger.
A new metaphor came to mind more recently as I’ve continued to note the intense reactions communities I care about are exhibiting in the face of unfathomable and seemingly unresolvable suffering in the distant land(s) of Palestine and Israel: when our bodies suffer discomfort, we don’t want them to get better, we want them to get well. The same tendency plays out in families, institutions, and even nations.
In seeking treatment for shoulder pain, Thernstrom learned that, through intensive physical therapy, she might not resolve the pain entirely, but she could get it from an eight, on a scale of one to ten, down to a 3. Thernstrom found this news difficult to accept. She wondered if the effort would be worthwhile. Her initial anger and obstinacy when presented with a partial solution made complete sense to me.
All of us want what is not going well in our lives to get 100% better immediately. In the face of an option that would require compromise on that expectation, we act out like a toddler who’d been promised and then deprived of a new toy. In the area of addiction treatment, clinicians are placing new hope in therapies that endeavor to reduce harm. Can’t immediately cease to use opioids? Well, at least we can prevent you from overdosing and dying. Can’t stop drinking right now? Maybe we can help you salvage your job and relationships.
Resistance to harm-reduction treatment techniques come from the two groups they could benefit most: patients and communities. Patients, like Thernstrom, want to be entirely free from cravings that keep them in an addiction loop. Communities, for reasons ranging from cluelessness about how addiction works to fear of addicts themselves, resist any healing practices that don’t demand cold-turkey cessation of substance use. Methadone clinics and needle-exchange programs strike panic into the neighborhoods that surround them, even though they help. Even though they work.
When institutions confront that which cannot be resolved, tensions soar. In the historic seminary I serve, we have been reckoning with the ways in which our Christian ministerial and missionary predecessors colluded in the sins of slavery, racism, and settler colonialism. We’ve sought to do so through honest conversation and building relationships with those whose communities bear scars from harm caused, and those conversations and relationships have been richly meaningful.
Any resistance to conversation and relationship-building we’ve encountered hasn’t come from communities that have suffered harm, but from our “neighborhood” of constituents. We’ve heard critiques of our outreach efforts from secondhand sources, and in the words translated back to us, I hear understandable resistance to pain that can’t be made to go away. Past actions were unacceptable, and the scars will never fade. Where I part ways with critics relates to what we’re supposed to do now. I’m leading initiatives focused on fostering dialogue and relationships. If someone comes to me with a better idea, I’ll be all ears. But freezing up, thus saying no to an approach that might get the pain down from an eight to a three, doesn’t feel like what ministerial leadership scholar Scott Cormode calls “the next faithful step.”
I see faint hope and a glimmer of possibility for a harm-reduction approach to engaging the topic of the war between Israel and Hamas: the ultimate in painfully irresolvable conflict today.
The horrors of October 7 and subsequent attacks on Gaza are overwhelming, elevating tensions on our campus and every other I know. Among the many reasons to despair the violence and suffering in that region is the fact that no end is in sight. Histories in the region are so complicated, positions so entrenched. What plunges me at times into a situational depression over the war is the ways in which Palestinians and Israeli people have been pitted against each other by capitalistic and militaristic powerhouses elsewhere, most notably these United States. Whenever historically marginalized groups turn to violence against each other, I can practically see empire’s strings, and I weep for the proxies.
I gleaned advice from a Lebanese Christian friend who’s a member of another faculty at my university about how to conduct myself amidst the anger and tension on our campus: whenever she’s invited to take a stand, she does so if the stand favors building bridges. I can decide, right here and right now, that I’m not going to be part of any dialogue or debate about the war unless the engagement’s goal is making things better. Not fixed, maybe not even good, but better at least than silence that erupts occasionally into rage.
We resist making things better when we cannot make them perfect, and perfect is the terrain and territory of God alone. So we can resist humanity’s innate imperfection all our lives, or we can make things better and save our energies for making them better still.
