The war on pain has been raging since the beginning, and from the most primitive forms of life to sophisticated humans. Life is a struggle with death, and it fights a seemingly losing battle. Seeking food, shelter, safety, comfort and pleasure have only one aim – survival. Yet death always seems to have the last word.
But does it? Evolution seems to indicate that it is life that always has the last word. Not only does life overcome death. It actually grows and develops through it. Would not evolution be one sign of how all species have continued to live on thanks to successive generations?
How could there exists a creature like me writing this? How come there exist so many other creatures free to agree or disagree with this? Had the first living unicellular organisms been effective painkillers and achieved immortality, then, we would have remained the same, zillion-year-old unicellular organisms – stagnated, monotonous, zillion-year-old, insignificant organisms.
The marvel is that, thanks to evolution, we have arrived at a stage when some are able to feel grateful for the life-giving pain and life-giving death of living organisms. Actually, the great majority of us are convinced that this has put us humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Please, stop to say thank you to all the life that died a painful death, so that you and I can read and write this today!
Where can we find the real source and fulfilment of our life? Is it by waging a merciless war on pain or by waging a merciful war on short-sighted despair and hopelessness?
When shall we learn the lesson that pain and death are not our enemies but our only way to live on and grow to become more of what we can be, right here and now? When shall we learn to see our brothers and sisters as this ‘more of who we are’ and not just threats to our fragile smallness?
When shall we learn that our war on pain will never be won if we just become merciless painkillers? Only one power can help us win the war on pain and death – the power to love our brothers and sisters within the throes of their painful fragility and disability. Killing them out of sham mercy amounts to killing the very carriers of our own inner greatness, beauty and humanity.
What a miserable humanity it is when, blinded by our fears, we turn ourselves into merciless painkillers. We deflect our war on pain by targeting the brother or sister who suffers pain.
What a divine kind of humanity it is when we lovingly share the pain of those who are suffering and choose to be healers rather than killers.
We believers call this kind of love God. We Christians adore this kind of love in Jesus who freely chose to share our pain and death. We can live in hope rather than despair, if we, like Jesus, muster the strength to walk with those in pain and be the life of those who die, rather than the death of those who live.
Fr Paul Chetcuti, member, Society of Jesus