katholicchik,
LOL! What an excellent topic. How do you find joy in suffering? Wow. Do I have some things to say to you. You want detailed suggestions and not pie in the sky theory? How about both? I have theories along with personal experiences through which I’ve tested the theories – both in advance and after the fact compared to the actual “suffering.” Might as well get started w/o further intro.
First, let’s distinguish between “pain” and “suffering.” For example, a good massage can “hurt good.” That is, one can have the sensory experience of pain, while knowing even during the feeling of the pain that this pain is part of the process to feel rejoicing as soon as within three seconds when, for example, my back pops and suddenly feels a ton better. Does that mean the pain is not really pain? No, it’s real pain – we just don’t judge it the same as some other types of pain because we know that feeling this pain is a step into something better than before you felt the pain. Yes it’s real pain. Is it unpleasant to experience it? For most of us, no it isn’t. It’s the key to relief.
Now consider a model used in the Bible a great deal. Labor pains are a very extreme form of physical pain, compared to anything I ever hope to experience.
John 16:
20 Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.
21 When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world.
22 So you also are now in anguish. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.
So the question becomes, has the woman suffered? Well, I don’t know. Like I showed before, just because it hurts doesn’t mean we have to interpret it as “suffering.” Women look forward to their due date knowing there will be pain, but putting that knowledge aside because of what that pain will bring. They say, “I’m due in 12 weeks,” the answer is, “congratulations.” The answer is not usually, “oh, my poor dear. On that day you will suffer greatly.”
There are more examples, but if we’re OK so far I’ll skip them.
So for this post, I’m assuming that pain is something that is inflicted upon you in some way, while “suffering” is a bit more subjective and is a function of attitudes toward the pain or the cause or result of having experienced the pain.
So, not knowing the type of trauma you have to deal with, I ask you to consider this. What if you were emotional super-ninja? Would you be able to avoid pain? Not always. Would you call it “suffering?” Maybe, maybe not. Emotional super-ninja has no preference over whether others perceive my pain as my suffering, through empathy. They can think it hurts, but I don’t have to just because I’ve been trained with the over-simplified idea that if something is painful, then it’s automatically bad. So take away the “good/bad” aspect of pain for a minute. If you call it bad, the pain becomes suffering. If you call it good, the pain takes on meaning and may even be seen as “good pain.”
Second, I note that we can use the concept of pain and misery, and apply it to any part of the human being we wish. The pain may come through any of the six realms of the person, namely physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, sexual, or social.
Let us further expand the idea of “pain” to include not only individual human beings, but groups of human beings.
Next we can come up with an engineering model, that is good enough to gain insight on this suffering and provide some ideas for relief.
The first part is that you promise not to let things you already believe to be true, false, possible, or impossible, limit the ability of your imagination to fancy a world in which those things were, in fact, possible. A world in which “true” and “false” are beside the salient point. Easier said than done, so all I can realistically ask is that you keep your mind and heart as open as possible to listen without trying to figure or judge or evaluate at the same time. That’s multitasking that’s hard for most of us to do.
I’ll go ahead and post this, but I intend to take this further and give some ideas how to reframe a situation in which there is pain, so that it is possible to reclassify it and it will no longer affect us as “pointless suffering.”
Right now, the important part is to believe that it’s possible for this to happen. Believe that you can learn things that will help you breeze through many types of pain and stress, without it hurting your feelings or controlling your emotions. If you can’t dream of such a world, that will make it harder to pray to the Lord to bring about such a world to you.
Being in the, what I’ll call the “kingdom of peace and joy” is another way of saying to be in a certain frame of mind that things do not take away your peace that Jesus gave us, because your mind and spirit are renewed and you come to fully experience and accept the gift Jesus gave us.
Here’s the difference: the world teaches us that our happiness depends on our behavior or the behavior of others or the weather or whatever, because such things bring components of pain, pleasure, or maybe challenges – like if our plan is thwarted by circumstance, we must now take time and effort to decide what to do next.
We know that we have the technology to control of confine a person and his actions physically. We try to control their thoughts, too, but we don’t do so good a job of that,
I’ll leave it at this for now: first, believe that all is possible for God, including things you might have been led to believe are impossible without hope. If you can do that, the rest will fall into place.
This post is done. God willing, I’ll post more unless you tell me not to.
Alan
But we hang in there. Our Lady is a great source of comfort!!! Love her! (we named our 2nd daughter Mary for good reason 
)
,
