It’s now almost a week after my holy baptism.
In younger years when I was beginning to struggle with chronic illness, I contemplated the possibility of all the pain and suffering and disabling symptoms suddenly disappearing. What if I could wake up one morning with all that relieved? And strangely enough, I hesitated, because my sense was that it would somehow be wrong. It would be like getting rid of the breadcrumbs that would allow me me to find my way home, and I would truly be lost. This thought was unsettling, because I misinterpreted it as some neurotic desire to continue suffering, in which case my feelings of distress and efforts to relieve it shouldn’t be taken seriously. And that tied in with the popular idea that you’re supposed to be able to visualize the outcome you want, and if you don’t, well, “you made your bed, now lie in it.” That kind of terrible misunderstanding followed me around for decades.
But there was truth in the breadcrumb story, which I only had an inkling of at the time.
A simple removal of suffering without a transformation of being would not be the divine gift. It would actually be a terrible loss, which God in His wisdom and mercy has withheld from me until such time that the remission of pain could be deeply understood and participated in a mystical way. Last night a sense of this appeared to me as a spiritual experience, the possibility of the removal of pain as part of the fullness of divine mercy.
What was missing before in my exploration of suffering was Christ. The idea of being present to the pain, going deeply into the pain, had a kernel of truth. Better to be present than shut down and resist. Then the saying, “what you resist persists” applies.
But that secular notion has no deeply healing divine potency, and separated from that, it led to great frustration. All the many years of grabbing onto this and that mental trick, magical incantation and such, were superficial band aids at best and demonic influences at worst. Of course there is no wasted effort – everything is under God’s providence. But to have a clear focus for ascetic practice and worship, and to be transformed in the love of Christ with holy baptism, changes a person at the level of being, more fundamentally than any other treatment or technique that could be thrown at them.
So instead of trying to apply remedies that we have understood in the usual way, in order to insist on understanding how to overcome unbearable pain, we enter into the experience in a new way because we are not the same. We become worthy of the remedy, and what we have become makes all the difference. The focus on seeking the best remedy distracts us from what the remedy really is – our own spiritual transformation in Christ.
May it Be Blessed: An Orthodox journal 