the Problem of Pain...

This week, I had the privilege of listening to several online episodes of Ravi Zacharias’ program, Let My People Think. I have always valued Ravi’s wisdom, his insight, and his compassionate heart for humanity, and I was challenged this week by one of his itinerant pastors, Arun Andrews, who did a two-part series called “My God, My God, Why?” He addresses what he calls “the memories we cannot erase, and the feelings we cannot escape.” At one point in his address, he remarked, “There is this pain we go through in which we feel that life is not fair to us, and we discover, as this pain strikes us, that we are locked in a struggle of sleepless nights, the desire to hide away from all people, the scary nightmare of depressive thoughts and even suicide, and the realization comes to us that time does not heal—it only makes the reflection deeper.”

I wondered for a moment if that were really so. Is it true, that when we say, “time heals all wounds,” we are merely lying to ourselves, trying to create an illusion of future relief to help us cope with the agony of the pain we are experiencing in that moment?

It’s September 11. Nine years have passed since the day when hundreds of men, women, and children stared in disbelieving horror at the image on their television screens and realized that their lives had changed forever. Maybe they lost a father, a brother, a sister, a mother…or maybe it was simply their illusion of security that had been forever shattered. Does time heal those wounds? Does it ease the pain of remembering? Do we forget what it felt like to experience that kind of desperate agony—the moment we realize that someone we loved is never coming home again, never going to walk through that front door and smile, never going to say the words “I love you.” Does time heal that pain? Or does it merely change it?

In speaking of suffering, Arun brought up the story of Elie Wiesel, one of the young men who, by virtue of his being Jewish, was taken to the living hell of Auschwitz…and then Buchenwald…and somehow survived.

As he remembers the horror of passing through the gates of Auschwitz for the first time, Elie says this:
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget the smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw turned into smoke under a silent night sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God himself.
Never."

Does time heal this kind of pain? I don’t think it can.

Elie speaks of a time when he was made to watch the execution of three Jews within the camp…two men, and a small boy. The three of them had been hung, while others in the camp were forced to look on.

Elie describes it thus:
"The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where--hanging here from this gallows..."

Arun points out that such, indeed, is the nature of our God. Not that He ignores our anguish, or refuses to feel our pain…but that He suffers with us…that He is the God who is right there, hanging from the gallows.

Does it lessen our pain to know that we have a God who understands and experiences it with us? Perhaps not. But if should give us a sense of purpose and hope in the midst of that pain. And it should motivate us to DO something with that suffering. Elie expresses that better than I could:

"Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling …if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all."

It is our most painful moments which most powerfully transform us, which change us into something we were not capable of before. For Elie, the horror of Auschwitz was the agony which drove him to challenge the way men think:

"We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph."

"I've been fighting my entire adult life for men and women everywhere to be equal and to be different. But there is one right I would not grant anyone. And that is the right to be indifferent."

"We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."

For each one of us, there are going to be many moments in life when we are confronted with a situation where our actions determine the spiritual, emotional, or physical fate of a human being. And we need to take that seriously. That situation needs to become the center of our universe. For most of us, the problems we deal with may not be as dramatic as the pervasive horror of Auschwitz, but may we have the courage to stand up and testify for truth in the face of whatever twisted darkness we are called to confront…because our faith is supposed to change us, to make us different…and cause us to care in a way that leads to action.