[On Pain]

Baptism joins us to the pain of Christ; it takes our pain, already present, or at least potential and inevitable in the circumstances of the human condition and consecrates it, gives it another meaning. What does this mean?

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It means that a toothache is no longer only a toothache. I would dare to say that Christ’s teeth are aching in my head. I used to say (inwardly) when I carried a postman’s bag that Christ’s feet were sore and Christ’s back was tired. If I am right, it is an extraordinary privilege not dependent on sanctity, on a will wholly conformed to the will of God, but communicated to us all by Baptism.

A nun said to a friend of mine when he spoke roughly to a deadbeat alcoholic at a soup kitchen – ‘Don’t talk to those men like that. They belong entirely to God. They will go straight to Heaven when they die.’ I think her intuition was that their affliction was in fact the Cross, though part of their affliction was not to know this.

But when, bowing our heads in the house of Rimmon, we write half-truths to serve the State or some other master less than our Master, we cannot say – ‘It is Christ who tells these lies.’ It may be Christ in us who voicelessly suffers what we do. But it is not Christ who does it. Christ gradually detaches our souls from the pains that belong to falsehood and evil and leads them into the pain of truth.

The pain God gives us is the deepest evidence of His mercy. He will not let us alone; He, to whom we belong, grasps, through pain, the very centre of the soul. I have seen men purified by long and heavy sickness so that they had the sweetness and unclogged charity of young children. We count a friend lucky when he has money and health and reputation. Perhaps we should count him luckiest when he lies helpless in the hands of God, sick, penniless, alone, forgotten by the world. We can then speak to him kindly and offer him a cigarette. But if our attempted consolation could remove the hard grasp of God from his soul, would this be deliverance?

I heard of an old Catholic lady to whom a young doctor offered some pain-relieving drugs when she was dying. ‘You won’t know anything,’ he said. ‘You’ll be free of pain.’

‘Young man,’ she said, ‘I know you mean well. But don’t presume to come between me and my God.’

In the eyes of the world this looks like masochistic folly. In the eyes of the Church it may be the deepest wisdom. Pain is not given us for the sake of pain. Pain is given us for the sake of the highest joy to which we cannot come without pain. Our Lord explained to us the true meaning of pain when He said that a woman suffers when she is bearing a child; but when the child is born, all her pain is forgotten, because a person has come into the world. This is the Christian joy, clothed in pain, achieved by pain, but a joy that disregards the pain that brings it about. And the holiest ones have always suffered not only their own pains but the pains of others. Pope John, when he was dying, carried inside himself the pain of the whole Church – her blindness, her sins, her disunity – and though he carried it willingly, there came a time when he told his Master that he could bear no more. What a great light shone out on page 47 the world from that little window above St Peter’s Square! Was the pain of the martyred Pope less pain because it was endured for love of Christ and of us? No. It was true pain. It was Christ’s pain. And it may already have brought a million souls into Heaven.

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