THE PLEASURE IN PAIN

Sometimes in life doing good things can cause us pain: mentally, physically and spiritually. We help a neighbor put in a fence and the body aches with pain afterwards. We sit with an aging parent and are mentally stressed. We see so much hatred and division around us and are spiritually wrought with pain: mankind’s inhumanity to one another that should not be.

The pain can sometimes be overwhelming and, yet, at the same time there can be pleasure in the pain. It is good that we can help a neighbor in need; and though our body aches afterwards, the joy and pleasure we feel having done something good alleviates the pain to a great degree. It doesn’t remove it, nor should it; but the pleasure makes the suffering worthwhile.

Sitting with a parent who is near death is painful. We can do nothing to relieve whatever suffering the person is going through nor can we make it end. We are there to hold hands, to make a meal, to help bathe and dress. There is joy in the thankfulness that is ours because we are doing all we can do for the one we love. We’re still mentally and physically exhausted doing what we do. It is painful. That is a given, but joyful in its own way even though it’s difficult to explain or even understand that joy and pleasure.

Trying to find joy and pleasure amidst the anger and division among us is certainly difficult to do, sometimes seemingly impossible. But it is accomplished in the same way as helping a neighbor build a fence or tending to the needs of an ailing loved one: it is done one-on-one, one person at a time. And because it is so much of a spiritual dialogue that is going on we can never be certain if the anger has abated or the division begun to heal. But the inner joy comes because we tried as painful and as difficult the effort was.

The pleasure that comes in pain is almost always and after-awareness. We tend to be oblivious while enduring the pain. The body aches from all the lifting. The mind is overwhelmed with all that we have to do to make her as comfortable as possible. Our souls are heavy because we feel we are up against it when in conversation with someone who believes we are the enemy. There is no pleasure in the here-and-now. It only comes in the hereafter, sometimes the real Hereafter: Death. But it comes.

When we set out to help another in need, we do not do so because we are looking for some kind of reward in doing so. We do so because that is what our faith is calling us to do at that moment in time. Then, afterwards, when we have time to look back on what we did and reflect upon the pain we endured, we also become aware that we are pleased, pleasured, by what we were able to say and do.

In many ways I think that finding that there is pleasure in pain is life’s, God’s, little secret that we only discover afterwards. And what a joy and pleasure that is!