Does pain confuse you as much as it does me?
I'm not talking about how the divine can coexist with suffering but rather, what pain is. Where it is.
It's here when I have a stomach ache at 3am that fights my sagging eyelids. It's there on the West Coast when my best friend can't lift the bar of loneliness from her chest.
It scares be how concentrated it is in the hair-raising condition of the homeless man on the streets of Boston in March. How did he make it? His back folds over, far more crooked than my 96 year old grandpa's. It's in the wide-eyed slave of human trafficking with her posture forever lost. I see it when I come out of the safety of a private college's walls and remember that crucifixion is not just an abuse of the past.
But I think pain goes even deeper--do you ever feel it in its physical absence? I sense it in times of peace, when all is as it should be; when the family reunites for holidays and the kitchen is giddy with smells of wild rice soup; when I drive home from work and auburn rays hit the road ahead. This evil lingers in my every day because these days, these "good days," are a lie.
They try to convince me to be satisfied so I try to drink them up, every last drop, and savor the taste--but no! My glass shatters against this warm kitchen wall where complacency dies and we all remember to imagine true good.
