On Pain (or, The Spirit Drove Him Into The Wilderness)

Imagine being eaten by wolves. After they rip out your hamstrings, you can't run or hope to fight, so they leave your throat intact so you're fresh for as long as possible. Then it's just red snarling teeth tearing the cheeks from your skull, munching and yanking at your braincase, burrowing, tugging the entrails out of your stomach yard by yard. And the whole time you're shrieking and begging them to stop, but they don't understand and they wouldn't care if they did, and God won't make it stop because apparently that's not how God works. Now imagine being eaten by your own mouth.

Sonya's teething this week. How that works is, we have rows of teeth tucked up in our heads like manticores, and at a certain point they just start descending and pushing their way out through the flesh of the gums. The skin doesn't retract or soften or anything like that; the teeth just chew their way through our own faces. So at the age of three months, with no concept of self or time or this too shall pass, nothing but PAIN IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, she's tossed into a tiny Hell, a universe with nothing in it but suffering, and left there for days at a time. You rock her, feed her, wash her, give her Tylenol, and some of it helps for a while, but ultimately you stand in the kitchen at three in the morning and just hold her while she cries and flails and claws at your chest and screams.

Ever notice when you're praying the Joyful Mysteries that by midway through they're already turning sorrowful? Contemplate the funeral spice at the Nativity. The Presentation at the Temple comes with Simeon helpfully pointing out that a sword will pierce Mary's heart, and the Finding of the Child Jesus comes with Mary's own remark that "for three days we have sought you, sorrowing." It's hard to find pure joy; it can't not come with the inevitability of loss. But pure agony? Take a look at a teething baby.

After the Baptism in the Jordan (mind you, I can't fully approve of the Luminous Mysteries; they throw off the three-act structure), Jesus goes to the desert to be tested. But there are two translations of Matthew 4:1. One goes, "The Spirit led Him into the wilderness." The other one says the Spirit drove Him. Seems like kind of an important distinction. Sometimes we can choose to accept our suffering, offer it up, learn from it. Sometimes we can't choose anything because it's so intense that the person disappears and there's nothing there but a human shape filled up with pain. My last several posts have been about the importance of being in the moment, good or bad, living it, not just holding on and waiting for it to be over. But God knows there are days when even just holding on is almost more than we can do. I suppose those are the times we have to let the Spirit drive.