Journal of Sacred Work

After great pain a formal feeling comes. – Emily Dickinson

   I always think first of childbirth when I see Dickinson’s line. I remember my wife’s long and challenging labor leading to the birth of our son, the relief when pain finally released his grip, the joy of that birth. But we have all known the weight of personal pain in our lives. There’s no avoiding it. And it is not always followed by "a formal feeling." To live is to face some time of suffering.
   In western culture, the increasingly aggressive use of pain relievers seems to be creating the illusion that we may live our lives pain-free. But no drug can take away the agony of some losses. For to love is also to face some season of suffering. To seek to escape this pain with indifference is to stop living…

   What is this "formal feeling" that often follows great pain? We have felt it but we turn to poets to describe it for us. "The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs," Dickinson writes, "the stiff Heart questions…" And in the middle of our darkest hours we, too, question. The desperate voice within wonders why this pain has fallen into our lives and how much longer we will have to endure it.
   Emotional loss often mimics physical agony. The "stiff heart" contracts in horror at news of the death of a loved one the way a muscle contracts when it is assaulted. "Time heals all," people say to comfort us. But I have not always found this to be true.
   I still feel the loss of my father who died twelve years ago. And there are days when that loss feels more acute than it did on the day I learned of his death. I still mourn the loss of a job once taken from me. And I mourn the loss of stable physical health I have not enjoyed for more than forty years and cannot ever regain.
   But so what? Don’t these difficulties, for each of us, simply prove that we don’t own anything? My father, my job, my health? None of these things were ever truly mine, were they?
   How does this understanding and acceptance help guide empathetic caregivers who live beside pain and loss every day? Perhaps what Dickinson wants us to know that we can simultaneously love and also learn to let go – that we can heal, even if we cannot be cured.
   Dickinson traces the arc from pain to relief in the final four lines of her poem:

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow–
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

   Is pain as grim as all this? Yes, sometimes it is. And is "the letting go" a true answer? All I know is that when I try to "fight" pain, it gets worse. And yet the letting go requires a conscious decision. Perhaps that is why it is so important for us to cultivate the virtues of faith, hope and love. And why the greatest of these is love.

-Erie Chapman