Beauty Behind the Brokenness
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real.
-Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails
Sometimes, suffering gets really loud. It feels like the only thing that’s real. I’ve sat with middle schoolers and seniors and everyone in-between, and I’ve come to recognize, through tears, that pain doesn’t distinguish between age, sex, class, income, even religion.
Mark Epstein approaches the problem of pain from a Buddhist perspective in his fascinating book The Trauma of Everyday Life, and there isn’t much I can disagree with about his diagnosis as a Christian. Trauma isn’t an outlier, he says. It’s ubiquitous. It’s unavoidable. We’re born into a “groaning creation,” St. Paul says, and soon enough we learn to groan, too. Learn to embrace it, to befriend it, Epstein counsels. And I’d agree.
Yes, sometimes it feels like pain is the only thing that’s real. I wrote these words years ago in my second book called Toughest People to Love:
Turning onto Highway B40, I accelerated. It was dark. It was icy. And I was alone on the road, which wasn’t unusual at this time of night on an Iowa highway. I continued to accelerate. When my ’85 Olds Cutlass passed 80 MPH on its speedometer, I turned off my headlights and accelerated. But as the speedometer needle passed 100 MPH, something deep reached up from within me, and tears began — deep, convulsive tears that start in your gut and come pouring out of your eyes. In the blur of the next several minutes, I found myself curled up on the front seat of my car, now safely stopped, groaning, “It hurts so bad. . . . It hurts so bad.”
I’ve experienced other moments like that since, moments still too raw to record in a book or a blog. Paraphrasing CS Lewis, it feels like the lights go out, the door shuts, and God is on the other side. Utter darkness.
But thanks be to…trauma theory…we’re now aware of something deeper within, resources which can be tapped amidst our despair. In a remarkable shift from when I first trained as a therapist, we’re now aware of innate capacities for resilience, an in-built body-awareness of states of regulation, places of calm and rest accessible through practices of breathing and centering. Our pain isn’t the final story, it seems. Our bodies hold a deeper intuition of beauty, goodness, hope.
I’m pitching a book to publishers right now, in fact, that tells this story, but tells it through a wider lens. Because, thanks be to God, trauma theory is merely stumbling into a story Christians have told for millennia. You see, even amidst your pain, I’m convinced you can still hear Eden’s whisper. Even in your brokenness, I believe you can still experience beauty’s invitation. We are held in “the memory of God,” Nouwen writes, and though pain pulses through the arteries of history, our story begins in original goodness and glory, in attuned relationship and unimaginable union. “We are inexplicably held in God’s arms,” says James Finley.
I’ve seen it as I’ve worked with people pummeled by abuses of all kinds, resigned to a story that ends in aching misery. Mysteriously, light always seems to burst through. Defying the circumstances of their story, they discover within a joy, even if for an instant, which reminds them that suffering isn’t final. One woman felt it as she stood before an ocean, captivated by its immensity, met by the whispered words, “You are held in the ocean depths of God’s love.” Another felt far from hope on a gloomy and overcast West Michigan winter day when sunlight magically burst through my office window, defying the rules of Michigan winters and eliciting the most beautiful smile I’d seen on her face. As Mary Oliver writes, “Though Eden is lost, its loveliness remains in the heart and the imagination.”
Epstein speaks of befriending suffering, and though he tells the story of the Buddha I can’t quite unsee Christ’s arms outstretched on the cross. While there is much to learn from Epstein’s tale of the Buddha’s wisdom for trauma sufferers, I’m mindful that the Buddha likely died from food poisoning while Christ willingly opened himself to the world’s sufferings, the “forgiving victim” as James Alison writes, absorbing and transforming suffering even amidst a brutal form of torture that most of his followers thought was his final act. But the pain wasn’t the only thing that was real. Eden’s whisper remained ever-present for Jesus, a story of relationship, of wonder, of beauty, of reconciliation, of justice, of goodness never lost, even as nails pierced his hands. He remained in God, inexplicably held in his arms. Resurrection bursts through death.
Trauma invades our bodies and suffering seems unending, at times. But there is a deeper story still, friends. “At the innermost heart, at the farthest reach, of our remembering, there is peace. The secret place of the Most High is there. Eden is there, the still waters, the green pastures. Home is there.” (Frederick Buechner).
Listen for it. Look for it. It’s all around you. It’s in you. Beauty behind, even beyond, the brokenness.