Pain and Patience
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 2, 2021
Pain and Patience
When I first started to practice yoga, I had to learn the difference between the discomfort of muscles stretching and the pain of muscles tearing. My yoga teacher would talk about finding what he called “your edge” or the space where the healthy discomfort becomes unhelpful pain. After over ten years of yoga practice, finding my edge is still elusive. It changes by the day and requires careful attunement. The results over ten years are not only the ability to perform odd yoga postures that make for fun party tricks but, more helpfully to me, a trusty practice of healing the stresses and traumas of life. Over ten years, I have learned to welcome the healthy discomfort that I know will lead toward a greater feeling of health and ease.
In today’s letter from the Apostle Paul to the ancient church in Rome, he writes of a different kind of pain that brings new life--the pain of labor. He writes that Creation was led to this pain by the very Creator, “in hope that the creation itself will be set free.”
I think here we walk on dangerous interpretative territory. For I know of too many stories throughout history and up to the present day in which unjust leaders have used the Bible and the authority invested in them by the church to justify others’ suffering and even demand the exploitation of those they deemed less worthy than themselves for their own benefit and prosperity. The genocide of the native peoples of this continent, American chattel slavery, and the holocaust all being prime examples. In no way can I believe that is the kind of pain God ordains for creation.
Rather, I have found that healing, like childbirth, often travels through valleys of pain. And, I can believe that God accompanies us and invites us to paths of healing that are not by any means easy. Even childbirth of course is dangerous, and the pain that brings life has often tipped over into pain that brings damage and loss. It can be hard to tell the difference.
In his New York Times bestselling book, My Grandmother’s Hands,[1] Resmaa Menakem invites readers to a deeper understanding of racialized trauma and what he calls a pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Menakem argues that work for racial justice will be ineffective without attention to the healing of trauma that is different but just as vital in Black bodies, white bodies, and law enforcement bodies.
In his therapy office, he tells clients “there are two kinds of pain: clean pain and dirty pain. Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It’s the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really, really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. It’s also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you’re scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honesty and vulnerability.”[2]
“Dirty pain is the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.”[3] A part of us may seek some healing through hurting others but the sad truth is hurting others only causes us more deep-seated pain.
Allowing ourselves to become “settled, anchored, and present” within our clean pain, allows us to metabolize our trauma, digest it, move through it, and beyond it. We do this work so that we can experience greater health for ourselves and we do this work so that we can stop trying to heal our hurt by hurting others.
Menakem points back to deep European ancestral trauma in violence enacted on other Europeans as the seed for the historic and ongoing trauma of what he calls “white body supremacy” in America. As I understand it, the key to becoming a country that is a safer place for Black and Brown bodies, he believes, is working through each of our own pieces of that racialized trauma.
The Apostle Paul was no stranger to trauma. In his life as Saul, he violently persecuted Christians and effected trauma on others. After his conversion, he stood with the persecuted and followed a leader who was crucified despite the real hardships that came his way.
It’s also true that Paul was a Roman citizen who could write and read. He certainly experienced some elements of privilege as well. Still, I believe when Paul writes “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us,” he is not oblivious or trying to dismiss real suffering and pain. Rather, he is that hopeful that despite the realities of pain and suffering, God can lead us on paths of great and glorious healing in this life and in the next.
Paul is offering a word of encouragement to the church in Rome and, by extension, to all of us as well, when he invites us toward healing and toward saving hope. For, hope allows us to glimpse beyond our current pain and to open the possibility of healing and wholeness ahead. We can hope and trust in the promises of God, who accompanies us through valleys of pain, as we seek healing, wholeness and justice.
That hope allows us to have patience for the long haul that sustains us
in the work of overturning unjust systems and structures,
in the healing of broken bones,
in enduring as a caregiver,
in finding freedom in forgiveness,
in navigating deep grief,
and in mending our families and communities.
Patience helps us to tell the difference between healing pain and harmful pain. Patience humbles us and reminds us that we are not called to do all the healing work ourselves or to get it all done today. Getting swept up in hopeful urgency without that patience will only lead us to more dirty pain. Rather, with help from God we can hold hope and patience in balance as we seek to live in a world where Jubilee is brought to fruition, where all of us are free, where all of us are treated fairly, and where all of us can come home to a place of love, safety, and rest.
I work and pray and hope to see that vision come to fruition in the relationships and communities around me. I also trust that even if I never see a world in which everything is set right, with God’s help, I can find a place of Jubilee in my own heart and soul that will sustain me through the trials of this life and carry me through the next.
As we come to what seems like a transition season in this global pandemic, at least in the Midwestern US, I pray we will find hope for the future and deep wells of patience. I trust that God will accompany us through this transition and any pain that meets us as we adjust our lives once again to the changing health conditions.
You know what will feel like a Jubilee day to me? It will feel like Jubilee to me when we can gather back together in the sanctuary and sing together safely as one congregation. I still think we’ve got some time to go until that day, and even hoping for it allows me to experience it a little bit in my heart.
Until that day, I pray for God’s comfort, courage, and patience. I pray for God’s comfort, courage, hope, and patience to accompany you through any pain you face. I pray you will find your own ways to experience even a little bit of Jubilee that will leave you both hopefully and patiently waiting for its fullness to break open, in God’s time, like the dawning of a new and glorious day. For as Paul writes, “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
May it be so. Amen.
[1] Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017). Resmaa is a renowned mental health professional who has studied and trained at Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, as well as with Dr. David Schnarch and Bessel van der Kolk, MD, who are both known for their bestselling books on relationships and trauma respectively. Resmaa lives and works in Minneapolis.
[2] Menakem, 19. He credits the popularization of these terms to his mentor Dr. David Schnarch.
[3] Menakem, 20.
