by: Curtis Healy

It has been very eye opening for me to go through my pains and see that my pain is not as severe as others’.  It’s definitely not something major compared to others, but as I look and as it builds, it more often than not doesn’t change how I feel. Pain is pain and suffering, suffering. Jesus didn’t come to mend the severely broken hearted, or the quasi crippled, or the half way orphaned; he came for us all, not caring about the severity of our suffering but that it was suffering at all. Our major and minor malfunctions unified every single one of his actions from his conception to ascension, and it will motivate his return. His love for us, and his desire to correct pain in whatever form is what unified Christ’s life; that was where God the Father was working – where there was pain and injustice.  The only worthy suffering was the passion of Christ, and in all our places of agony no matter the minute, we are united to Christ in his passion and his work. And he begs us that his mission would unite us all under the banner.

But we use pain as an excuse to separate and to justify ourselves. Pain must only justify compassion and service and a broken heart, or you make your own pain meaningless in the face and to the heart of God. It crucifies Christ a second time, because you say that his suffering on behalf of your pain is not worth your sacrifice for the sake of compassion. It is no different than the parable of the debtors. [I'm not saying that we should in any way flaunt our pain, etc, but we cannot put it on a pedestal and we cannot pretend like ours makes us special or unique, even if the causes are.]

It is ironic, though that because we all struggle we have less ability to band together and change with corrections. But that simply means the need for us to bind together and support each other in all things is more desperate. A community of Christians should be a marriage to each and every one of us – a partnership both emotionally and monetarily – where none are wanting and all pick up the slack everywhere. But that is not the case for our communities – Christian or not – they are poisoned by the ‘necessity’ lie of the business world, where the slack ends up hanging those who encounter it. This is a lie that would disappear if we became more concerned with pooling our resources and becoming communally ’self’ sufficient. In essence, we would pool ourselves and become the perpetual of body and soul, the person and the shell, the body of believers and the identity of its tenants – a functional contemporary monastery. But we fail at this because of the trap to survive and that drives us apart and keeps up from coming together.

The thing is that barriers are manifested unconsciously, based on our need to be ourselves. It is being ourselves at the expense of being Christ, that is the issue. We watch movies like ‘Mean Girls’ and look at the plastics and think we’re not like them in the effort to preserve ourselves and our identities.  We should never wish to lose them or cease to be ourselves. But how many times do we do that to real people? We see someone like in ‘Mean Girls’ (though we’re not as vindictive and conceited and vain as the plastics in that movie) and we put up a barrier.  And then we make it impossible for us to be Christ; we make it impossible for them to see us and Jesus holding hands, because we have closed off the unifier that God has placed inside all of us: Pain. Whatever the reasons or the extent of that pain and suffering, pain is pain and it is the unifier of humanity. 

We take on the attitude that ‘we’re not plastic, we’re real’ when encountering other people.  But we make our hearts a harder stone than any plastic, and we make ourselves more like those who crucified Christ. We forget one very important thing when we do that; that we are struggling through the same battlefield, because we all experience pain.  To whatever degree, pain is pain and struggle is struggle. The difference is, as Christians we need to seek to bring unity with everyone through compassion because sin separates us all.  Whether someone becomes a Christian or not, if you can cast down a barrier between you, them, and others, then you have served in the mission of Christ and thwarted some aspect of sin and upheld the Cross and resurrection. Until we seek to support ourselves in a way such as that then we Christians will be the reigning kings of friendly fire incidents, shooting down our brothers in the fight. I think we need to take up the attitude expressed in a quote from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.  “If I see a man suffering then that man is my brother.” And guess what, whether shown or not, we all are suffering.

Now that I have been side tracked, and have expressed two ideas, which do link together in some form, how might we learn to be vulnerable and daring, unthreatening and mending, and actually change the world?  As I see it we are all, myself included just making merry with injustices that are not only killing the world but us and our ability to Christ; we just accept this as normal life. I will make no excuses; life is hard and painful, and it always will be.  As for us making it or accepting everything that makes it harder by system, it’s about time that ended and we stopped helping it.