Aspirin, alcohol, and analgesia

To avoid pain.
This, is what our society is bent on.
Because pain is the enemy.
There is a war--on pain and death.
And can I let you know it's a war on the unavoidable human condition?
Do you get that you're human?

Dr. Paul Brand, who is on his way to legendary status in my mind, says this of pain:
"...(speaking of western countries) I have noticed an ironic law of reversal at work: as a society gains the ability to limit suffering, it loses the ability to cope with what suffering remains. (It is the philosophers, theologians, and writers of the affluent West, not the Third World, who worry obsessively about "the problem of pain" and point an accusing finger at God.)"

The problem of pain. If we could only eliminate it....then we could...lose communication.
With our bodies.
With our selves.
Pain and pleasure...both signals from the same neurons. The difference?
How your body perceives it.
Pleasure signals are associated with reward
Pain signals are associated with punishment
'Reward' defined as moving towards homeostasis; punishment, away.
Just what is spiritual homeostasis anyway? The Jews knew. Even named it.  
Shalom.

Imagine life with no sight, no touch, no hearing. Your body can no longer communicate with you, and you can no longer communicate. Cut off inside your ivory skull of a prison.

Here's what our society has done with pleasure.
We've extracted it from it's natural habitat. On almost every level.
Sugar is found naturally, in fruit for instance. And humans like sweet. So we process, refine, pure sugar itself, get rid of the fruit, inundate food with this sugar. 
The longing for adventure, for a wild life of free abandon sits somewhere in your chest beneath your obligations and above your flat-lined pulse. So we pay to sit in a movie theater to have our hearts race and our sympathy wrung and our terror palpable.
Down sugar, overdose on sex, amass money, minimize work.

How is it that coming in first is so much sweeter if there are agonizing months of training behind it?
How is it that a meal tastes so much better with hours of labor and sweat preceding it?
And we never quite value toys that are given to us as much as the ones we painstakingly save up for and buy.

And here's what our society has done with suffering.
We've elevated it to public enemy #1 status.
We've sought to eliminate it from our experiences-now everybody gets to make the team.
Now performance is within injection's reach.
Take the aspirin, down the vodka, squeeze that syringe, drip the morphine.

And what we perceive as pleasurable gives no nourishment.
And what we cannot perceive as painful destroys us.


Someone once told me:
"At the end of the day, I cannot reconcile the fact that a loving God would allow pain and suffering."

And I thought to myself, "They have a point."
I thought that until I realized what the implications of a life without pain were.

And now, the inverse question reverberates through my head.
 I begin to understand a little bit more the excessive depth of God's wisdom.
 To be honest, I am half ashamed to behold His silence at so many vitriolic accusations against Him that stem from such a deficiency of understanding.

How could a good God not allow pain?
To feel pain is to be free.