Leader, Volume 13 #4

To Learn from Pain Instead of Fleeing It

Five years ago, my mother died of hepatitis contracted from a blood transfusion received during her treatment for leukemia. Her death has been the pivotal event in my life, colouring everything that has happened since and giving new meaning to all that came before. And yet, two weeks later, I returned from Montreal to Toronto to begin a PhD, throwing myself into my work and telling virtually no one that I had just lost one of the most important people in my life.

In the years that followed, I experienced more pain than joy, suffering a series of losses and health problems. I ignored what my body was telling me because to acknowledge it was to give in to a terrifying unknown. Only recently have I begun to understand that I could no longer escape a confrontation with my anguish. After much soul searching, I decided to go back to Montreal to mourn my mother and try to make sense of my life.

In his recent encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II argues that we live in a cultural climate that fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering. Given our regular media diet of violence and death, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that we have become largely inured to the affliction around us. Many in our society ignore or flee pain. It is simply too terrifying.

But in trying to discard death and suffering, we also discard much of the meaning of our lives. Faith has been replaced by what we perceive as a superior cynicism or, as the pope puts it, the "culture of life" has been replaced by the "culture of death." We no longer know who we are, only that we don't want to suffer. While we are right to reject a martyr mentality that advocates suffering as a good, we sometimes fail to see that pain can also teach us many things. It reminds us of the mystery of our being, the spiritual nature of our physical bodies, our immense power as human beings and our terrible fragility.

Our inability to understand the mystery of our suffering results in our fear of it, and in the apt words of a friend of mine, when fear kicks in, legislation isn't far behind. Rather than seeking to understand the suffering around us, we rush to judge it, through blind avoidance, clinical eradication or religious moralizing.

In this issue, Compass looks at the cultures of death and life in western society. Three writers examine the implications of Evangelium Vitae, in terms of Catholic teaching (Ronald Mercier SJ), culture (Peter Larisey SJ) and democracy (Mark MacGuigan). Rosalie Bertell reflects on her life's work of trying to get society to place a higher value on life and health, while Brit Griffin sees media circuses such as the Paul Bernardo trial as symptoms of our failure to "give death its due."

I have learned a great deal about life through my mother's death. One of the most surprising discoveries was that the emotional heartache and spiritual longing she, like most of us, experienced at different times were as challenging as the physical pain of her last months. Although her final ordeal was unbearable and neither she nor we believed in prolonging it unnecessarily, she expressed not long before she died that it had transformed her in some way. She had chosen to live through the unavoidable pain and learn something from it. I now see in a new way why she had such grace and dignity in her dying, and why her death held a kind of beauty for those who witnessed it.

The only emotion more powerful than fear is love, and it is only through love and compassion that we can encourage a fearful and judging humanity to begin to move beyond self-destruction.

Wanda Taylor is an associate editor of Compass.