Essay

Creed

Trauma

27 March 2024

8 min read

Pain’s scars and the difficult hope they demand

The tension of pain and hope is hard-wired into the human condition.

Trystan Owain Hughes

Trystan Owain Hughes is a theologian and vicar based in Wales.

A close up of the face of a bruised and bloodied cyclist with a large bandage on his forehead.

When I felt a twinge in my lower back at the age of 30, little did I know that this would lead to chronic pain for over 20 years and counting. Defined as persistent or recurrent pain that is present for more than three months, chronic pain can lead those of us who battle it to struggle to carry out daily activities or to socialise freely. Research shows that up to 15 per cent of the UK’s population live with pain that is moderately or severely disabling. Whether discal, muscular, arthritic, or related to auto-immune or other conditions, medical researchers inform us that we are facing a silent epidemic of chronic pain in our society.

In the past 20 years, pastoral work has opened my eyes to the fact that those of us who face the ignominy and anguish of chronic pain cannot claim a monopoly on suffering. No stranger to significant hardships himself, psychologist and Auschwitz-survivor Viktor Frankl suggests that all suffering should be taken with utmost seriousness, however brief or minor it proves to be. The “size” of suffering, after all, is relative. It is, he claims, like releasing gas into an empty chamber – it doesn’t matter how much gas is released, it will fill the chamber completely. In other words, it does not matter how great or small our sufferings are, they will always hold the potential to darken our hearts completely.

Behind even the brightest smiles and the most cheerful demeanours are the scars of a thousand cuts.

Suffering and struggle have been particularly marked in our society in recent years, with the twin-tribulation of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis leading to so much grief, illness, depression, loneliness, poverty, and isolation. Some years back, I undertook hydrotherapy at the local hospital. With each patient having endured various injuries, many quite serious, I was struck by the plethora of scars in the pool each week – on backs, shoulders, arms, knees, and ankles. The many years of struggle and pain in that pool was all too visible, but, as I undertook my aquatic exercises, I recall thinking to myself: if we could peer into the souls of those around us, how many more deep-seated scars would we notice? Behind even the brightest smiles and the most cheerful demeanours are the scars of a thousand cuts.

Neither should we fall into the trap of believing suffering merely impacts us as we age. While it is true that there is a correlation between age and bereavement, illness, and disability, the dark hand of suffering is not partisan to age or circumstance. Many children and young people go through all manner of serious trauma and illness, often hidden to those on the outside. Research is showing a sharp rise in chronic pain in young people, for example, while teachers bear testament to the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of so many of their pupils. Moreover, when I was a university chaplain, I saw how deeply young people were affected by incidences and events, even those that, to others, may have seemed trivial. Younger generations are certainly not immune to life’s struggles.

Like that tenacious and resilient tree breaking through the harsh concrete, we witness hope and promise shining out of the pages of his letters.

Christians, of course, have always been aware of the philosophical questions surrounding the existence of suffering. The book of Job in the Old Testament details one of the earliest attempts to consider theodicy, while numerous scholars down the ages have grappled with the “problem of pain” (C.S. Lewis) and the question of “where is God when it hurts?” (Philip Yancey). Their musings are well documented and discussed, but, as a Christian with chronic pain, I have become less interested in the “why?” of suffering and more concerned with the “what now?” In other words, I am increasingly interested in how faith responds when confronted with the crippling and dehumanising personal impact of pain, grief, illness, disability, relationship break-ups, depression, loneliness, poverty, or anxiety.

During a particularly acute flare-up of back pain recently, I took short walks around our immediate locality. We live in a concrete jungle – there are houses, streetlights, cars parked down both sides of the road, and vehicles driving up and down, especially at school drop-off time. In my pain, I was struggling to see any hope in the incarceration of a city. Then I noticed something on our road that I’d walked past on many occasions. It was a small, solitary tree, which is about twice my height. For a brief moment it lifted my heart and I thought to myself how wonderful that someone had planted that tree, just to give some greenery to this urban sprawl. But then I noticed that this beautiful little tree had not been planted at all. Rather, it had broken through the hard, unforgiving concrete, desperate to reach up to the sunlight and take in the oxygen in the air. That small tree is, in many ways, an apt metaphor for the Christian response to personal suffering.

From the book of Acts and his letters in the New Testament, it is clear that St Paul had walked the gruelling path of pain and struggle. He faced prejudice, persecution, and prison, not to mention his battle with a personal affliction, which he called a “thorn in my flesh”. Scholars posit this may have been an illness or a disability, such as blindness. Yet Paul does not allow his letters to become dark, depressing diatribes of fear and hopelessness. Like that tenacious and resilient tree breaking through the harsh concrete, we witness hope and promise shining out of the pages of his letters. Here was a man who knew suffering, but, through his vivid encounter of the person of Jesus, he had also grasped the profound meaning of hope. When we attend a funeral or a wedding, we will quite often hear uplifting passages of hope and joy written by him. Discussions around the tension in Paul’s epistles between “flesh” and “spirit” are well worn, but, when I read his letters, especially in light of the life and death of Jesus, it is the tension between “suffering” and “hope” that is most conspicuous.

“I have seen the light – it flickers on and off like a badly-wired lamp”.

Andrew Motion

This tension, of course, is not just prevalent in the Christian scriptures. It is hard-wired into the human condition. Just take the years of the pandemic, when people were either isolated, lonely, stressed, and anxious themselves or were journeying alongside others facing illness, grief, worry, and fear. During that period, I was a parish priest and would regularly visit people, standing socially distanced on their doorsteps. Yet, despite suffering seemingly being omnipresent during the pandemic, people did not generally regale me with their miseries. Rather, they wanted to inform me of moments of uplifting hope that had broken through their difficulties – the beauty of nature on their daily walks, the tireless care of the NHS workers, and the joy of meeting with friends and family, on zoom or outside in the garden. They seemed naturally aware that hope and suffering are inextricably linked. This fact is at the heart of our Christian experience – its recognition is one of those things that define Christians as Christian. After all, the very symbol that has come to represent the Christian faith – the cross – is both an emblem of torture and suffering and a symbol of liberation and hope.

Not that opening our eyes to moments of hope, love, and wonder is easy when we are going through difficult times. In the dark moments when my own chronic pain seems overwhelming and utterly debilitating, I am inspired by the words of the former poet laureate Andrew Motion: “I have seen the light – it flickers on and off like a badly-wired lamp”. There will be times when Christians will see God’s light clearly and its beauty and glory will dazzle daily. But there will also be times of doubt, grief, depression, anxiety, and physical pain. During those moments, we can learn to be sustained by the occasional spark of hope that will come to us, even in the very ordinariness and humdrum of our daily lives.

And so, in travelling through life’s dark moments, Christians recognise two powerful realities. One of these has long been championed by preachers and spiritual teachers – it is the presence of a kingdom to come in a heavenly future where there will be no more tears and no more suffering. The other one, though, can speak powerfully into the present predicament – it is the presence of a kingdom all around us now, breaking through the harshness and bleakness of life, like that small tree bursting through hostile concrete. Theologians refer to these two realities as “inaugurated eschatology” and they can also help us to recognise profound moments when transcendent hope breaks into our lives. Opening our eyes to compassion, beauty, wonder, and awe can help us transcend our suffering, which so often seems all pervasive, and can lead us into a strange new world of God’s providence.

In the soil that the broken concrete had revealed were little green, sprouting shoots. Hope had begotten hope.

So, Christians hold onto the hope of the “not yet”, confident in the hope of life after death. But, as the old Christian Aid advert put it, we also believe in life before death. However dark and long our journey seems, hope is birthed when we take time and space to notice strange and uplifting moments of beauty, grace, and guidance breaking through our daily lives now. In these, Christians find, in the words of theologian Karl Barth, “indications, intimations and parables” of the coming reign of God.

After 20 years of daily struggle, I have made peace with the fact that I am likely to battle chronic pain for the rest of my life. However, I have also come to recognise that hope is not all about smiles, sunshine, and flowers. Hope is often difficult and demanding. It is about delicately holding the joy and challenge of life in a wonderful balance. For the Christian, it’s about both recognising God’s kingdom in the beauty, awe, and wonder of his created world and glimpsing it in our very earthly, wearisome, and draining lives.

But there was also something else about that small, resilient tree that was breaking through the hard and unforgiving concrete. On another walk, a few weeks later, I noticed foliage growing around the base of the tree. In the soil that the broken concrete had revealed were little green, sprouting shoots. Hope had begotten hope. And it is certainly true that the more we open our lives to recognising hope, however brief it may be in our struggles, the more it can inspire us to bring moments of light and comfort to others. And thus we live out, in the words of Karl Barth, so many “little hopes”, and, by doing so, we scatter seeds of new life and resurrection as we go, trusting that God will water them and bring his “hope, faith, and love” to fruition in the world around us.

Article

Belief

Creed

Weirdness

24 June 2024

6 min read

Revival – really?

Are we moving beyond the secular scepticism of religion?

Abigail Frymann Rouch

Abigail is a journalist and editor specialising in religious affairs and the arts.

A cross held aloft is illumminated by a shaft of light that also reveals hands raised in priase.

Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash.

Whisper it if you will, but an increasing number of observers are wondering if we are creeping towards some kind of Christian revival. High-profile public figures such as former atheist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, novelist Paul Kingsnorth, comedian Russell Brand and storyteller Martin Shaw have converted. Articles and podcasts from secular writers and thinkers extolling Christianity’s influence on Western culture, the societal benefits of faith, or a renewed appreciation of the sacred, are becoming a more common sight than those tub-thumping for atheism.

Among these thinkers is historian Tom Holland, who has argued that Western values, including secularism, socialism, feminism and human rights have their roots in a “Christian seedbed”. Some secular female writers are finding in the sexual revolution much to regret: Mary Harrington, author of Feminism against Progress, and writer Louise Perry, who penned The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, are opposed to casual sex and in favour of marriage.

Then there’s the Canadian academic and YouTube hit Jordan Peterson, currently on a speaking tour titled, “We who wrestle with God” and offering Bible-based life lessons to his hungry, mainly male, hearers. Even the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins said in a radio interview this Easter that he considers himself a cultural Christian and “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.”

A term has been coined for someone close to Christianity but just outside it, such as Holland: “Christian-adjacent”. The broadcaster Justin Brierley has devoted a book to this apparent renewed interest, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. In it he argues the New Atheism that fed off the horror of the religious extremism behind 9/11 is “a largely spent force” that has splintered into factions. (Sunday Assembly, the gathering for non-religious people, has seen its income plummet from £267,161 in 2016 to just £28,120 in 2022. Its leaders were approached for comment.)

What does all this amount to? Are we moving beyond the secular scepticism of religion? Does anyone want to return to the judgemental, Anglo-centric Christianity of a previous age?

I wish to be somebody who goes, ‘But look, come with me, see this, see that. Does that speak to you?’ The whole of my writing is to help people get away from preconceptions.”

Iain McGilchrist

The author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says of a possible religious revival: “I feel that there is [one], and I feel that there will be. And I think it's important.” Already, he says, “It's much easier to talk about religion and one's religious beliefs … than it would have been 20 years ago [and] a lot of people say that.” Some young people who are not from a religious background have surprised him by finding their way to religion.

People he knows who have turned to Christianity in mid-life have moved “to the Catholic Church, but most of them to the Orthodox Church, because they see … genuine valid, uninterrupted tradition of the divine and the sacred, of worship of it, of the sense of wonder, the sense of relative humility, not triumphant exaltation, and the sense of a shared oneness that is encaptured in these ancient rituals.”

McGilchrist believes the route of fulfilment “is oneness with nature, with the Divine and with one another,” and that rediscovering a connection to the Sacred (he refers to the Sacred or Divine rather than religion) would address other pressing issues such as the “poisoning of the oceans”, due to “a proper understanding of our position in the cosmos, not as the exploiter, but as the caretaker.”

Of his own views, he says: “I genuinely am not sure how to understand what it means to be a Christian really, but I suspect that I am one.” He stresses that he doesn’t want anyone to be put off by their preconceptions of what that might mean. “I wish to be somebody who goes, ‘But look, come with me, see this, see that. Does that speak to you?’ The whole of my writing is to help people get away from preconceptions.”

“There is an intellectual revival, if you like, because the complacent secularism, which culminated in people like Richard Dawkins, is obviously broke.”

Andrew Brown

Mark Vernon, a psychotherapist, author and former Church of England priest, also perceives a shift in the conversation around religion, and a new sense of enquiry that did not exist 20 years ago. He believes “a mystical Christianity” would be needed to reach the many people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.

Author of Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, Vernon enjoys the silence of a Buddhist meeting or being out in nature on pilgrimage to holy places, “feeling different energies, different pulses, different rhythms … Being in a place where you just feel there's a different thing going on here, that can be healing. I think a lot of mental health is due to just people being trapped in very narrow worldviews.”

Dr Vernon, whose faith journey has included atheism, follows what he calls a “commodious” Christianity – “my perspective on the universal story, which I think is ultimately beyond any one expression of it – and focuses on the “Christ [that] lives within me”, in contrast to “more socially driven” or “conversion-driven” Western Christianity.

For Abby Day, Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, any talk of religious revival is “wishful thinking” but like Vernon she believes that if anything were to speak to the “spiritual but not religious” it would be “within them, or maybe within nature” and “non-institutional”.

Professor Day is wary of the interest in Christianity from the populist right, as seen in the European elections and US Evangelicals’ support of Trump. They “claim Christianity, but what they're claiming is a national identity, and so we're seeing Christianity be weaponised” to deliver a conservative agenda, she says.

Day, author of Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion, takes issue with some of Holland’s arguments, saying: “The Churches have not shown themselves to be exemplary models of equality or human rights.”

Veteran religious affairs journalist Andrew Brown, co-author of That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England lost the English people, is less hostile. He says: “There is an intellectual revival, if you like, because the complacent secularism, which culminated in people like Richard Dawkins, is obviously broke.” But he adds: “Most of the stuff that's interesting and new is coming from people who are either Christians or Christian-adjacent.” But, he adds, “It takes a long time for the ideas of the intelligentsia to filter down … “If there is to be anything like [a revival], it has to start locally, and far below the radar of news.” So, for example, what impact has 14 years of austerity had that have led to millions of people attending food banks and warm spaces in churches? (According to 2023 data from Savanta and the National Churches Trust 5 per cent of UK adults visited a church last year to access a food bank (equivalent to around 3.4 million people) and 4 per cent (2.7 million) for a warm space.) “That has to be doing something, but I don’t know what,” he laughs, adding: “There really isn’t enough decent religion reporting because journalism is in crisis.”

That puts established religion in good company. But the Churches the Boomers rejected may have become humbler during their exile, and alternatives are available that offer different emphases. Vernon notes that the Orthodoxy that has attracted Kingsnorth and Shaw – Vernon’s “favourite convert of this revival” – is comfortable with other faiths and is more about participation through liturgy than converting to safeguard your immortal soul. And one attraction of the silence Vernon enjoys is that it doesn’t give glib answers, including to the profound questions around meaning, purpose and identity that beset nation, Church and individuals alike.

Putin’s violent ambitions could yet drive people to prayer. For now, at least, the more thinkers publicly take Christianity seriously and rediscover its wonder and mystery, the fairer hearing its stories, values, social benefits and cultural legacy will receive in the rowdy market-place of ideas, offering – at the very least – the cradle agnostic a more informed choice.