After Frederick Buechner had shared an upsetting, heart-rending scene from his childhood, a person told him “You have had a fair amount of pain in your life, like everybody else. You have been a good steward of it.”
“That phrase caught me absolutely off guard,” Buechner testified. And yet it also crystallized something for him. The moment was an epiphany of self-understanding. Here was a new way to understand his calling: the stewardship of pain.
I suggest that this is also a helpful hermeneutic lens for understanding what Buechner is doing in his memoirs, particularly The Sacred Journey, focused on his earliest years.
In his talk on the stewardship of pain, Buechner says there are at least two ways to fail to be a steward of one’s pain:
- Like the fearful servant in the parable of the talents, one might simply bury the pain. This is a defense mechanism, an act of fear. We imagine that if we can bury the pain, we can avoid it. But we don’t realize how much we are burying parts of who we are. We become alienated from ourselves, and the pain has a tendency to emerge, zombie-like, devouring us and those around us.
- Conversely, Buechner says, one could make a spectacle of pain, displaying it as a way of centering attention on oneself. Neither of these responses to pain steward it.
To steward pain is to face one’s own suffering for the sake of others. Service to others is an obvious path to God. So, how do you deal with the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain in your life? How do you steward pain? How is service to others wise in terms of our dealing with pain?
No matter where you are in your journey of life – full of pain, pain-free, or anywhere in between – you are welcomed here.
Shalom, Paul