Pain: blessing or curse?

One of the biggest and most controversial issues raised by

humanity is that of pain and suffering and the reasons for which it
exists and rattles our lives. It has been highly debated and it still is
controversial. However, before we detail lets establish what pain is.
Pain is a complex experience consisting of a physiological and
emotional response to a noxious stimulus. Pain is a warning
mechanism that protects an organism by influencing it to withdraw
from harmful stimuli; it is primarily associated with injury or the threat
of injury. Pain is subjective and difficult to quantify because it has both
an affective and a sensory component. Although the neuroanatomic
basis of pain reception develops before birth, individual pain responses
are learned in early childhood and are affected by social, cultural,
psychological, cognitive, and genetic factors, among others. These
factors account for differences in pain tolerance among humans.
Athletes, for example, may be able to withstand or ignore pain while
engaged in a sport, and certain religious practices may require
participants to endure pain that seems intolerable to most people.
An important function of pain is to alert the body to potential
damage (nociception). The pain sensation, however, is only one part of
the nociceptive response, which may include an increase in blood
pressure, an increase in heart rate, and a reflexive withdrawal from the
noxious stimulus. Acute pain can arise from breaking a bone or
touching a hot surface. During acute pain an immediate, intense
feeling of short duration, sometimes described as a sharp, pricking
sensation is followed by a dull, throbbing sensation. Chronic pain,
which is often associated with diseases such as cancer or arthritis, is
more difficult to locate and treat. If pain cannot be alleviated,
psychological factors such as depression and anxiety can intensify the
condition.
In spite of its subjective nature, most pain is associated
with tissue damage and has a physiological basis. Not all tissues,
however, are sensitive to the same type of injury. For example,
although skin is sensitive to burning and cutting, the visceral organs
can be cut without generating pain. Overdistension or chemical
irritation of the visceral surface, however, will induce pain.
Some tissues do not give rise to pain, no matter how they are
stimulated; the liver and the alveoli of the lungs are insensitive to
almost every stimulus. Thus tissues respond only to the specific stimuli
they are likely to encounter and generally are not receptive to all types
of damage.
Pain receptors, located in the skin and other tissues, are nerve
fibers with endings that can be excited by three types of stimuli—
mechanical, thermal, and chemical; some endings respond primarily to
one type of stimulation, while other endings can detect all types.
However, it is merely the issue of minor pain that is raised, but
rather the one of suffering, which can be consist in any physical,
emotional or mental experience of a high intensity. The questions that
are often raised are: ‘Why do pain and suffering exist?’, ‘How can God
allow them to proliferate?’ or ‘Is suffering a message from God?’.
As mentioned above, acute pain has the role to protect us from
injuring and hurting our bodies. If we are to take as example leprosy,
known as the Hansen Disease, or diabetes in an advanced stage, both
lead to the deficiency of the nervous system and they can no longer
feel pain, be it at the level of skin or visceral organs, which leads to
unnoticed cuts, bruises and infections that result in the gradual loss of
extremities. Because of their condition they are deprived from a
normal active life, which healthy people are blessed with. Pain is not an
inconvenience that we must avoid, but in many ways it serves us every
day, making possible an active life. It warns us when we change our
shoes, when we’ve sprained an ankle, or if something is wrong with our
organs. Without it we would live a disoriented and unprotected life.
When confronted with reality, most of us will have to admit that
suffering can have a beneficial role in some its forms. If we didn’t have
the alert system based on pain, our existence would be threatened by
unknown dangers every day.
There is another aspect that has been ignored almost
completely, and that is the connection between pain and pleasure.
Socrates said: “ How seldom we experience pleasure and yet how tied
it is, curiously so, to pain, which can be considered its opposite […],
nevertheless, he who searches for the first is bound to accept the
other; they have two bodies, but one head”. Modern people reject the
mindset that dominated the previous centuries that pain is an
integrant part of life, rather than an enemy that we have to eliminate,
considering only then will they be happy. But pain is part of the ocean
of sensations that we experiment and most of the times it is the
prologue of pleasure.
We live in a world that is marked by suffering: natural disasters,
epidemics and incurable diseases. What we see in not “the best world
of all”, but a depraved and ailing earth. Most sufferings on our planet
are caused by two principles that God placed in his creation: a physical
world running on natural laws and freedom of will. They both are good,
but because God decided to respect both, he allowed their abuse. For
instance, wood is a useful raw material on which we depend. We can
use it to build houses or to make pieces of furniture or fire. On the
other hand, it can be used to hit and harm another person. God could
intervene and turn the piece of wood into a sponge or something soft,
but this is not what he wants. He instituted certain laws that rule the
universe, but he allowed human beings to exert their right to freedom
of choice, even if that means abusing them. The Bible affirms that
suffering and evil entered the world because of human’s abuse of
freedom of will. Even though we have rebelled against God, he still
gave us the right to choose. Theologians use the expression “the fall of
men” to mark the breach that was produced in creation by the first
rebellion, when evil entered the world. The account in Genesis 3rd gives
summary information about the consequences of what happened, but
we see that the whole creation, not only the human being, was
affected. Pain and suffering has proliferated on earth due to the abuse
of human will. At the begging, the world was perfect, but we have
strayed from the initial pattern.
C. S. Lewis says: “ God whispers through our pleasures, speaks
to our conscience and cries through our pain that is the megaphone
through which he awakens a deaf world”. Pain is the sign that things
on Earth aren’t as they should be and it constrains us to stop and
search for the things that are truly valuable.
Different passages of the Bible point to different causes of
suffering. Genesis 38:7 affirms clearly that God was the direct cause of
Er: “he was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death”.
In Luke 13:10-16 the cause of the woman’s invalidity was Satan or “a
spirit”. Job 2:4-7 shows that suffering can be caused by Satan only
after he has permission from God and in Proverbs 26:27 we see that
suffering is a direct consequence of a person’s actions. From these
passages we learn that some of our actions can be followed by painful
consequences and that God used suffering as a form of punishment,
after repeated warnings, the second being specific to the Old
Testament. However, in the New Testament, Jesus says that suffering
is not always caused by our actions. In John 9, his disciples ask him
whether it is the blind men who sinned and deserved to be in that
condition or whether it was because of his parent’s sin. Jesus replied:
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the
work of God may be displayed in his life”. The disciples were looking in
the past to discover the cause of the man’s suffering, in order to find
out the answer to the question: “Why?”. Jesus pointed their attention
to a different direction, to the future, answering the question: “What is
the purpose?”. If we look in the past and try to see why things
happened we won’t find a clear answer, but if we look to the future we
have the hope that our suffering will be transformed. Earth is a “valley
of shaping our soul”(John Keats). The reason that we are here on Earth
is to be constantly changed, and if we learn that we will see the value
of suffering, even though sometimes pleasure appears in the midst of
pain, evil can be transformed in good and suffering can have valuable
results. It is the way we react to suffering has a crucial role in
overcoming it.
We have seen that pain was intended to protect us rather than
make out lives difficult. And if we learn to search for an answer to the
question ‘What’ rather than ‘Why’, knowing that it can have a
beneficial outcome for our character will make it bearable.

Bibliography:

• www.britannica.com

• Where is God when it Hurts? By Philip Yancey

• The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis