Sherry Chandler

Pain and the Other

New Madrid’s Mexico in the Heartland issue is published in conjunction with an art exhibit, Cincos Maestros Michoacanos. That exhibit toured Murray State and three other Kentucky colleges and universities under the aegis of the Kentucky Institute of International Studies (KIIS).

KIIS is a consortium of colleges and universities founded in 1975 for the purpose of providing quality international education. Over the years, in addition to student programs, the KIIS has expanded to include a number of professional programs for teachers, faith-based organizations, law enforcement officers, and health care providers. Their award winning exchange programs with Mexico provide not just for language immersion study but also for cultural liaison with fellow professionals. Law enforcement officers form professional collaborations with Mexican law enforcement officers, medical students study in Mexican healthcare facilities (including traditional medicines!).

One of the features of the issue is a long interview, Language as Sacrament, with Fred de Rosset, designer of the KIIS Spanish Language Immersion Project and director of the KIIS program in Morelia,Mexico.

In spite of his many years of work with exchange programs, Dr. de Rosset declares himself one

…whose belief in the importance of travel abroad is seriously bankrupt…seriously bankrupt. I have great, great reservations about this whole proposition. …To me, the whole proposition of going abroad is to be able to go somewhere which takes you outside of yourself; that is, to truly encounter the other.

This kind of encounter is increasingly difficult in Dr. de Rosset’s view because of cell phones, the internet, and the general homogenization of culture. No student, now, ever has to really leave home or get outside the personal comfort zone.

My favorite example of this phenomenon comes from a band tour my sons and I went on when they were seniors in high school. Some people on the trip didn’t eat until they found a McDonalds. Some people went to McDonalds for coffee in Vienna.

No good, says Dr. de Rosset, to go to the Louvre and view the Mona Lisa if it’s just an item you check off your agenda.

Given my near obsession with concepts of the Other here lately, I was somewhat intrigued by Dr. de Rosset’s remarks. He is the son of Baptist missionaries who spent 42 years in Peru. de Rosset himself didn’t come to the United States until he was 13. He was very much an outsider, identified with U.S. foreign policy which hasn’t often been kind to our southern neighbors. And he was very much immersed in a Third-World culture.

I was particularly intrigued by his explanation of his conversion to Catholicism. He takes me pretty far outside my own comfort zone here:

I was raised Baptist, and I am forever grateful for that because one of the things that Baptists do—and I think the evangelical tradition does—is teach you your story. It is all about a narrative. The Bible is a narrative. It is a story of betrayal, reconciliation, failure and hope. It is a story people proclaim and buy into, and yet it is amazing how few people know that story.

…

Now in a sense from a very early age, I was raise amidst people who had nothing, whose Sunday Best would have been our dust rags. I was raised with kids who had lots of cavities. I was raised in a world where braces were inconceivable—that is, where people couldn’t even think about the illusion of perfection. I was raised in a world where people had Typhoid and Tuberculosis, sicknesses I also had. I was raised with people who should have been angry at God, who should have been bitter, and yet it is there where I discovered the most convincing and persuasive expressions of faith. I am not persuaded by the expressions of faith that I see so much of in the U.S. I really think that we should use these words very carefully because our faith has never been tested.

Christ, as I understand Christ, is the Christ who meets us in our brokenness, the Christ who meets us in our suffering, the Christ whose life was given. The Christ of Mexico, Peru, and of Spain … I think of a painting—”La Piedad”—by Ribera that hangs in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid on the Paseo del Prado or I think of the crosses and the crucifixes that are in the museum of colonial art in Morelia … . These are Christs with whom sufferers can identify because He has met them where they are, battered and bruised. These are people who don’t know, frequently, where their next meal comes from. I have seen a woman with tuberculosis nursing her infant child, desperate, and yet what recourse did she have but to feed her child? By so doing, she killed the child, and they died together. It is a Christ who meets them in that … in that terrible, terrible wrongness, but in the midst of that He has been there.

This is the Christ that makes sense, not the Christ of Crystal Cathedrals or of televangelists. These are the images that I have found to be most persuasive in my own life, and whereas Protestantism champions the empty cross of the Resurrection, I guess, because of my own humanness, I prefer the broken body on the cross, knowing that I look through that to the Resurrection. I need to have the reminder of that brokenness, so that I never stray to far from it.

La Piedad, 1633. Jose de Ribera. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

I don’t know. I don’t buy into the prosperity gospel preached by so many of the televangelists. I do think Christ is more likely to be with the tubercular woman and her baby than in the Crystal Cathedral. And yet, I remember being very offended by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ because it seemed to take this idea of suffering to the point of masochism. de Russet pushes further at this idea of pain:

None of us want to be uncomfortable. In fact, a friend of mine, Daniel Berrigan, pointed this out to me one evening as we were watching the news. An ad for aspirin came on that said, “I haven’t got time for the pain.” Berrigan said to me, “That is the very problem of American culture; we don’t have time for the pain.” Pain is there to teach us something, and it is a great educator if we allow it to do its work. We take Prozac, Zoloft, aspirin, Tylenol, whatever, and avoid lessons that can be profoundly important. That isn’t to say that I want people to suffer. I don’t—it is just that I think that we have to be willing to face the pain that sometime accompanies poor decisions or circumstances.

I have chronic sinusitis and sometimes I have pain in and behind my eyes (frontal sinus pain) that I can only describe as knifelike, like having some one run a blade into my eyes. This pain isn’t going to kill me quickly, the way tuberculosis killed the mother and the baby, but I have read that chronic inflammations like this are thought to be precursors to Alzheimer’s disease. So I might get to live demented. Not a particularly comforting thought. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that I find this pain to be de-humanizing. When it is at its worst, it becomes the bright focus of my consciousness and interferes with my ability to think or to love. And what I have is not the worst kind of pain.

Doctors have proven that when pain is controlled, people heal better and faster.

So I can’t buy pain as a spiritual teacher. I think I understand Dr. de Russet’s contempt for the notion that we have to keep busy, that we don’t have “time for the pain.” (Especially if we pop pills to cover symptoms without finding the underlying disease.) I think I understand the point about being pushed out of the comfort zone to confront the other. And I understand that we in the United States are very reluctant to look squarely at the pain and suffering in the world, especially when we have caused it. When we do look at it, we often sentimentalize it and send money instead of trying to change the root causes.

But what de Russet says makes me antsy. Hard nose, I think. Flagellation and hairshirts. Fatalism.

And my mind veers off. Insofar as I am Christian, I think I’ll stick with the Protestant’s empty cross. But I think I’m more of a classicist, preferring a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Pass me the ibuprofen.

Possibly related posts:

Wanda Darlene Campbell

Cincos Maestros Michoacános

Kentucky Town Grapples with Oxycontin Addiction

Belief is not an issue

Walt Whitman, May 31, 1819

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