Don’t Let Your Pain Go to Waste Part 3

How Pain Shapes Character

A realization dawned on me a few years ago when a student, wondering what time it was, stood in my classroom staring at the large analog clock on the wall. Asking myself why she stayed fixed under the clock for more than 20 seconds, I realized she didn’t know how to read it. The realization that most of my students didn’t know how to do a task I assumed was commonplace shifted my thinking about technological progress and moral regress. Is this overly dramatic?

Along with the spectacular technological achievements we enjoy, there are downsides. Technology enables us to avoid boredom, struggle, and demanding personal questions. Its rapid growth tends to disconnect us from the past, from its metaphors, lessons, and wisdom. Perennial wisdom taught that human flourishing is a result of delayed gratification borne of struggle. Last week’s post introduced Leo Tolstoy’s claim that humans avoid the anxiety aroused by demanding questions and intellectual work, but that it is only when thinking becomes difficult that it becomes fruitful. Why do people avoid discomfort and struggle? Perhaps it is because they want to please the animal part of their natures more than the spiritual part, as Tolstoy argues.

He offers a helpful anthropological perspective to explain how we impede our own moral development. Humans have two natures: animal and spiritual; the animal part of humanity seeks the path of least resistance and the spiritual part is the moral conscience or “consciousness,” the source of character and true change. A clock metaphor applies here. We influence the animal being by moving the outer hands of the clock and the spiritual being by adjusting the inner mechanism. “And just as it is better to change the time by moving the inner mechanism, so it is better to move a man…by influencing his consciousness” (56). Effective change happens when we influence the deep inward core of our being, our conscience and heart.

What stands in the way of becoming a good person? We do, our desire to appear moral. This is especially true today as people posture and declare their morality in public ways. Tolstoy ascribes this to our need to deceive ourselves. Instead of allowing our conscience to work correctly, we want our actions to appear just. We want to look moral—to ourselves and others. “Life does not accord with our conscience, so we bend our conscience to fit life” (57). Take the example of cheating on your income taxes. Your conscience raises a moral dilemma, which requires attention and true labor. The labor prompts you to abandon the dilemma with justifications of why the government doesn’t deserve your money. The moral questions are driven away as soon as they arise until the next moment of clarity. But again, the desire to maximize comfort and avoid anxiety pushes the moral questions away. It’s possible to remain months, years, even our whole lives avoiding the resolution of moral questions. We end up not only stunting our own moral development but our purpose as humans. We remain “unable to break through the wall because [we have] unconsciously blunted the blade of thought which alone could penetrate it” (58).

When disrupters clarify priorities, it’s easy to neutralize the opportunity for change. Take the example of CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s disrupter, reflection, and next day back-peddle. He was working from home after being diagnosed with COVID-19 at the end of March 2020 when he appeared to bump into the existential part of quarantine. In an article, Sarah Midkiff explains that Cuomo expressed major frustrations with his role in journalism, politics, and what it means to be a celebrity on his SiriusXM show in his momentary crisis:

“’I don’t like what I do professionally. I don’t think I mean enough, I don’t think I matter enough, I don’t think I can really change anything, so then what am I really doing?’ He further explained that his experience with COVID-19 has made him rethink his values and question what he does. ‘I don’t want to spend my time doing things that I don’t think are valuable enough to me personally,’ he continued. ‘I don’t value indulging irrationality, hyper-partisanship.’” (Midkiff, Sarah. “Chris Cuomo Had A Major Existential Crisis — But He’s All Good Now.” Yahoo News, April 14, 2020.)

The next day, Cuomo took it all back saying he loved his job. I don’t know what changed and what it’s like to be in his position. But it’s common to have an insight that we don’t act on. It’s common for a moment of clarity to abut the barricade of the status quo. Perhaps it’s too demanding to act on moments of clarity, too destabilizing. Is it arrogant to generalize that we blunt the blade of thought by avoiding discomfort and pain?

How do we keep our own blades sharp in everyday life to be ready when the crisis hits? What is an effective knife-sharpener for everyday cutlery? We can’t rely on the crisis alone to clarify priorities. When we are forced, against our will—as when disrupters hit—to confront the issues we face, it’s harder to find escapes and gravitate toward comfort and ease. Pain forces us to check our attitude of entitlement and offers us the opportunity to purify our character. But, keeping the blade of thought sharp in everyday life requires paying attention to the inner mechanism of the clock. It requires tolerating discomfort and pain and doing the hard work of resolving moral dilemmas. This is not a quick, superficial exercise like so much of our self-righteous posing today, which is motivated by the desire to see ourselves as moral without doing the work of becoming moral. And this is no small issue if Tolstoy’s teleology is right that it is “the resolution of moral questions that constitutes the movement of life” (57). Moral development is our purpose as humans.

Ultimately, I have to look at my own heart and ask myself if it is hard. Do I have a heart of stone or a heart of flesh, as Ezekiel 36:25 differentiates? What is a hard heart? In an excellent talk on this subject called “Our Emotions Matter to God,” Rankin Wilbourne asserts that it is literally the inability to feel pain. (Click http://subspla.sh/m2x2jb9 for more.) Do I make room for the pain that comes from bending my life to fit my conscience instead of bending my conscience to fit my life? Pain plows the overwrought soil of the heart, which lies fallow for a season of pruning, weed abatement, and tilling. But then the soil becomes deeper, richer, and more absorbent. It nourishes an abundant harvest.

Feeling pain is an entry point to a flourishing life. Struggle maintains it. Growth sustains it.

Source cited:

Tolstoy, Leo. The Lion and the Honeycomb: “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” Collins, 1987.

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