�鶹��

Available for over a year

I’m sure many of us listened jealously to the story of Jo Cameron this week, the so-called “woman who feels no pain”. Not only did she give birth, and break her arm once, without ‘feeling it’ - but she has an unusually happy disposition, thanks to the presence of a mood-altering enzyme in her system, named after the Sanskrit word for “bliss”. It would be wonderful if her unique genetic mutation could help scientists to find ways to ease the chronic pain that 6-per-cent or so of people endure daily. But a pain-free life has its consequences, too. Jo Cameron spoke of burning herself repeatedly on the stove. The psychoanalyst Stephan Grosz, in his book The Examined Life, mentions how doctors came to realise that the deformities of leprosy were caused less by the disease than by “the devastation of injury and infection ... which occurred because the patient was unable to feel pain”. Such physical numbness translates emotionally, too. “At one time or another,” Grosz says, “we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing, we lose the only means we have of knowing what’s hurting us psychologically, and why.” That’s why contemplative Christians practise a form of “welcoming prayer” to help us, in stillness, to notice emotions arising, and to sit with them hospitably; if you like, to befriend them. You don’t have to welcome the diagnosis itself, or the break-up, for instance. But you don’t have to run scared from them, either. And when I stop to think of some of the most spiritually ‘whole’ people I know, they tend to be those who’ve faced most deeply into pain. I’ve friends who, years ago tragically lost a child, yet today exude a joyful, beautiful kind of love - for the world, for life. They do have a faith, and part of their spiritual challenge was perhaps to reframe how to see and love God, too - not as anaesthesia or escape, but as our way into and through “the valley of the shadow”. And somehow, there can well up, along that way, the mystery of joy - from the Greek word chairo, meaning "the good mood of the soul" ... another kind of bliss, I guess, which hints to me of the hope we can have in a better tomorrow, by finding friendship with today. As that lovely old hymn puts it: O Joy, that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee; I trace the rainbow through the rain, And feel the promise is not vain That morn shall tearless be.