Sermon Archives : 2006/2007

The Body In Pain

Rev. Gail Seavey  ·  September 10, 2006

This year the board and I will be inviting you to join us on a vision quest – a search for the church’s current guiding vision - so today I ask us to prepare for the journey. The first modern European vision quest failed or succeeded upon the quester’s inability or ability to acknowledge the physical pain of another human being. Through out this fall, I will be telling you the story of Parzival as written by Wolfram von Eschenbach almost 1,000 years ago. The quest had not even begun when a naive young fool who had just learned the rudimentary skills of knighthood chanced upon a king fishing in a boat. The king pointed him ahead to his castle with an invitation to visit him there. Without even searching, Parzival had found the Castle of the Holy Grail. Silently, Parzival was directed to stand by its ruler, the Fisher King, who was weakly lying upon a couch at the head of a great hall during a glorious ritual in which the Grail itself was brought before them.

The Grail, rather than a cup or chalice, was a beautiful stone - more like a miniature Black Stone of Ka’ba at the center of the vast Muslim world, where Parzival's father had valiantly served the caliph of Baghdad. As each knight and lady in the hall looked upon the stone, their plates were filled with whatever food they desired. As they ate, the weary were refreshed, the wounded were healed and the aged grew young. All, that is, except for the Fisher King. Parzival saw that he continued to lie weakly, as if he were very ill or in great pain. He wanted to ask his host what ailed him, but had been told by his teacher that knights should not ask too many questions, and didn't want to make a fool of himself. So he said nothing.

When the ceremony was over, everyone looked at him with great disappointment. Parzival was rudely led out of the castle and sent on his way without a word. He soon discovered that many knights before him had spent lifetimes fruitlessly questing to find that castle and the grail within. The young knight had no idea why he was so easily led to success, or why he failed once he was there – until his grieving cousin tells him – “Oh, alas,” she cried, “That I must look upon you!” And she stared with loathing, “You should have felt pity for your host and have asked concerning his pain.” In the years that follow, Parzival becomes a successful knight in King Arthur’s Court and becomes the first man in western literature to marry his Queen for love, but he still feels empty. His failure at the Castle of the Grail gnaws at him. He rides off again, but this time he is no fool. This time he rides with a vision - in search of the Grail.

So our first task, before we embark on our Vision Quest, is to consider our inability or ability to acknowledge the human body in pain. If we do not, our quest may stop before it begins.

We all know what it feels like to be in pain, but it is the most difficult of human experiences to express. Every time a friend, showing their scars, gives you a blow by blow description of an operation, they are trying to express the nearly inexpressible. Medical people have tried to find words to give pain objective reality in the world. Ronald Melzack developed the “McGill Pain Questionnaire”, a system to describe people’s subjective experiences: throbbing, burning, quivering, pulsing, pinching or gnawing. Yet, I’ve seen doctors who still refuse to believe a patient’s pain. Amnesty International, in its reports of torture from all over the world, also tries to bring pain into the public discourse. Torture, as we will see, depends upon systematic denial of pain by the torturers.

To a person in pain, the discomfort is one of great certainty, but to the person who stands near them, the pain is invisible and therefore uncertain. Have you ever seen a person pull into a handicapped parking space, put their permit on their rearview mirror, get out of the car and walk into the store? This person has no cane, no wheelchair, no visible handicap. Have you ever doubted their right to the handicapped parking permit? This is the doubt that naturally attends our reactions to another’s pain. We cannot see the pain of the person with a cane either, but the cane objectifies it for us.

It’s easy not to believe in the pain of another. Torture systematically allows people to transform that disbelief of one person’s pain into belief in another person’s power. Elaine Scarry, in her book, The Body in Pain, reviewed volumes of Amnesty International reports and found a similarity in the interviews with tortured people from all over the world. People, when tortured, are overwhelmed with intense pain which isolates, numbs and silences them. The torturer denies the pain but uses the silence, becoming the voice for both of them. The torturer is then able to define his own experience and deny the experience of the one he hurts. The one with the voice is able to name the world and create culture.

Torture splits, through pain, the body from the voice. The injured body is seen as powerless. The voice, made loud because it is now two voices, is seen as powerful. Others come to believe that powerful voice.

I have been thinking a lot about torture this week in between hearing pieces of news on the radio.

• Fourteen people from the secret European detention centers that don’t exist have been transferred to Guantanamo.
• Our president says: We don’t use torture.
• The U.S. Army has issued a new rule book that adds to the list of tortures not allowed, many of which are the methods U.S. soldiers used to assault Iraqi prisoners at Abu Grave.
• Our president says the terrorist prisoners were interrogated, and therefore lives have been saved.

Who am I to suggest that these words are misleading? Studying the structure of torture has led me to hear them with skepticism. Interrogation is always used in torture to give the torturers a more seemly motive than destroying a human body to make visible the power of one’s own regime. The torturer can then blame the torture on the prisoner, who, after all, has vital information, and focus attention on the torturers vulnerability: “We have lives to save.” According to the Amnesty International reports, this is a consistently used fiction. Only a very few tortured prisoners have any useful information. As they are being tortured, they are clearly more vulnerable than their torturers. These fictions are necessary to the torturers, because they refocus them away from the pain they are imposing on another, distancing them from their ability to empathize.

Torture systematically uses pain to destroy another’s voice, their power, and ultimately, their world. The opposite of torture is empowering those in pain to give voice to their world. The most radical thing we can do in this world of pain is to ask, ‘Uncle, Aunt, Stranger, Friend, what ails thee?’ The bravest thing we can do is empathize. We do not have to be guards in detention centers to hear the pain of the world. Some of the youth here were recently telling me that cutting – a form of self mutilation - is something of a fad at the local high schools. It reminded me of more than one women I have known who cut themselves for decades before it was the fashionable thing to do. I think of them as a composite figure I call Cinderella because she grew up in a wealthy home, did all the hard work around the house, was dressed in rags and had a loving father who refused to hear his daughter’s pain.

This Cinderella was regularly tortured at home throughout her childhood by her brothers. For instance, they would tie her to her bed and cut her with a knife that their father had taken from a Nazi prisoner of war. She survived by splitting, not just voice from body, but into several distinct personalities – what was once called multiple personality disorder. She escaped by joining the army. Her brothers gave her the Nazi knife as a parting gift. Totally unseen by those around her, she lived in her own secret, fragmented and very painful world. When the pain got too much to bear, she cut herself with the knife. The pain of the cuts destroyed her unbearable world for a moment. Eventually, someone was able to ask the nearly impossible, ‘Sister, what ails you?’ She rolled up her sleeves and showed that brave soul the old scars, the healing, and the open wounds crisscrossing both her arms. First one brave soul, then another, and yet another, heard her into speech. Slowly she became less fragmented within herself. Slowly she became less isolated and more connected to others. Eventually, she learned to use a knife, not as a weapon but as a tool, to carve beautiful works of art. She finally gave away the Nazi knife to one of her listeners, to keep it in sacred trust, never to be used to cause pain again.

This Cinderella found a vision that, like the Fisher King’s Grail, healed her wounds and gave her new life - only after she was able to speak of her pain to another. Magically, those who listened, like Parzival, were made whole as well. For we all know pain. My dearest uncles and aunts, torturers and tortured, soldiers and knights, presidents and kings, feminist theologians and artists, sisters and brothers, we all know pain. When we can hear another into speech, we become those who can really hear – those who can hear the body and the heart and the mind and the soul, all as one. And it is from this wholeness that we can claim the grail, the vision, the source that gives us renewed, empowered and abundant life.

So I ask you to prepare for a Vision Quest by the practice of listening. Listen to yourself and to others, listen until that which can never be spoken, is indeed said out loud.