The problem of pain

"How different would our approaches to the world be if... we worked to see that our pain isn't the only pain that matters in the world?"

Says the man who insults and ridicules transgender people - who he seems to know nothing about and doesn't care to - by calling them freaks and making fun of them, and saying that it is wrong to "believe that the individual has the right to do whatever he or she wants to his or her body, or live in whatever manner one prefers to." You have no idea what these people go through, yet you are quick enough to judge yourself better and discount their pain.

From the CS Lewis book to which your headline refers:

"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."

Anyone with serious claims to Christianity should not accept injustice in any way. This is in direct disobedience to the clearly stated will of God through the teachings of Jesus. We are, as believers, commanded to fight for justice until the end. The "social gospel" put into action, as it were.

That said, personal slights, with no real profound impact except for our egos, are probably best left unchallenged.

"It is better to suffer wrong than to commit wrong." - Socrates, The Gorgias of Plato

"We are, as believers, commanded to fight for justice until the end." - mm

This was perhaps best put for all time in the First Epistle of Freddie to the Mercurians:

We are the champions, my friend
And we'll keep on fighting till the end

I could not agree more.
I am amazed at how some people can ONLY see their own particular pains, okay granted injustices occured it was wrong, it was malicious ,evil whatecer one chooses to refer to it But sometimes I want to scream open your eyes look what has happened to other people and is happening now.

Maybe narcissm (sp?) explains the total inability of one to be cognizant that ALL people suffer some much much more than they do.

I abhor ANYONE experiencing pain be it my son or a boy in Canada.
Do you know in Brazil young girls start the prostitute business as young as 11? do you know our oil companies are tearing up the Nigerian's very survival for oil?

I can only do what I can do. I do believe this pain is an essential tool used in this earthly experience for something possibly refinement. god knows what god is doing and I'd bet my life our tremors at others pain and our pain is NOTHING compared to how God hurts when his people hurt. We are just not seeing the WHOLE picture.

Let us never make our god too small when it is indeed us who are limited/

"That said, personal slights, with no real profound impact except for our egos, are probably best left unchallenged." mm

In the eastern Christian tradition, we would assuredly omit the word "probably" from mm's maxim. Coincidentally, I just heard (not the first time, but heard again) a story of a monk who went to Father Macarius and, as is usual in such stories, asked "give me a word, Father, that I may be saved."

To shorten up the response a bit, Father Macarius sent the monk to the graveyard to abuse the dead for a day. They didn't respond. Next day, Father Macarius sent the monk to the graveyard to praise the dead, which the monk did in the most lavish terms. Again the dead didn't respond.

Father Macarius then gave the monk the word he had asked for: If you wish to be saved, become like the dead, not being angered by abuse or puffed up by pride.

My pedantic failure begs your forgiveness, Reader John.

It is certainly true that God can bring good out of evil, and even out of pain. But in the Jewish tradition, we do not seek out pain, we do whatever we reasonably can to avoid or relieve it, and only when it is unavoidable do we accept it as a means of "sympathetic communion with the whole world's pain."

Ha! Welcome to my world, Rod. I found this out when I was a little kid. The usual gang of bullies was hot on my trail after school. It was a snowy day, which made it harder to run away. They started out throwing snowballs, but soon got into the spirit of the thing and began hurling sizable chunks of ice. One of them cut my ear open. I felt the sting and the hot blood trickling down, and the spirit of my berserker ancestors took over. I tore into the pack and grabbed the leader, threw him on the ground and held him down. I really, really wanted to pound him to a pulp, but retained just barely enough self-restraint to wash his face with snow instead. I was still enraged and he was still struggling, so I then stuffed snow down his shirt collar. None of his pals dared approach me to interfere. He was still cursing me, so I stuffed snow down his pants as well, and shoved his head into a snowbank. I didn't stop till he was crying like a baby. Then I let him up. He ran off with his friends. I walked home alone, still bleeding.

I learned one big thing that day: hurting someone else will never make you hurt less. I made another child cry. Where's the victory in that? I grieved for myself, and not because my ear hurt. Losing all reason and kindness and trying to hurt or destroy another child of God is a far worse harm. When I got older and read that saying of Socrates, I knew by experience that what he said was true.

Doug, please think a little more about what you said. I understand the feeling. I have children too. But everyone is someone's child. Would it help your family to know that you're a killer? I don't think so. I know my family appreciates that I would defend them. But to hunt someone down out of revenge is quite a different matter. To do your best to protect without having to hurt anyone else is the best possible solution. It's important to have that at the forefront of your mind, because sometimes peaceful solutions exist, but don't appear as possibilities unless you're open to them. If you go in with a warlike mindset, war is what you'll find. If you go in seeking the best for everyone, you MAY find it. And if you can't, it's not a victory. It's another tragedy even if you "win." This might be what Jesus meant when he said that if you live by the sword you'll die by the sword.

I learned that lesson when I was pretty young. Of course I had to learn it again and again--and putting it into practice is the work of a lifetime. But the sooner you figure it out, the sooner you can get started practicing.

The anecdote launching sig's stirring post recalled the snowcased fight scene in A Christmas Story, in which Ralphie confronts the freckled, redhead ringleading bully and, as it were, pounds the flock out of him, literally and in the sidelining of his posse, in a self-perpetuating rage, broken when Ralphie's mom steps in to stem the mayhem, an uncannily siglike scene: Snow! Tears! Humiliating Retribution! I'm almost tempted to head outdoors amid the last days, knock on icicles, of our winter snow here in pasty-scarfing Superiorland, and press my tongue to a frozen pipe in Ralphiean tribute...

We close now in turning to the epistle of Frederica the Hyphenated to the Evangelicals, as she closes her already anthologised essay, "Loving the Storm-Drenched":

frederica.com/writings/loving-the-storm-drenched.html

The “old books” can help us discern the prevailing assumptions of our cultural moment, not only concerning the content of our discussions, but their style. We expect that combatants will be casual, rather than formal. We expect that their arguments will be illustrated by popular culture, rather than the classics or history. Conservatives and liberals agree that it is admirable to be rebellious and challenge authority, and both sides are at pains to present the other side as authority.

More serious, however, is a tone of voice we adopt from the culture: sarcastic, smart-alecky, jabbing, and self-righteous. We feel the sting of such treatment, and give it right back; we feel anger or even wounded hatred toward those on the “other side.” But God does not hate them; he loves them so much he sent his Son to die for them. We are told to pray for those who persecute us, and to love our enemies. The weight of antagonistic and mocking big-media machinery is the closest thing we’ve got for practicing that difficult spiritual discipline. If we really love these enemies, we will want the best for them, the very best thing we have, which is the knowledge and love of God.

Smart-alecky speech doesn’t even work. It may win applause but it does not win hearts. It hardens the person who feels targeted, because he feels mocked and misrepresented. It increases bad feeling and anger. No one changed his mind on an issue because he was humiliated into it. In fact, we are misguided even to think of our opponents in the “culture wars” as enemies in the first place. They are not our enemies, but hostages of the Enemy. We have a common Enemy who seeks to destroy us both, by locking them in confusion, and by luring us to self-righteous pomposity.

Culture is not a monolithic power we must defeat. It is the battering weather conditions that people, harassed and helpless, endure. We are sent out into the storm like a St. Bernard with a keg around our neck, to comfort, reach, and rescue those who are thirsting, most of all, for Jesus Christ.

Was going to reply, and then read Fr. Macarius' contribution via Reader John... so much of what I had intended to reply was rendered moot in light of that. Thank you, Rdr. John; Abba said it all (as usual lol). But, oh, how hard it is to be thus unmoved! A life's work.

STARBUCKS????

Why were you there, and not at a small, family-owned shop serving organic coffee raised by communal local farmers??????

Dorfman's words make sense on an interpersonal level, since they involve the divine commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself. However, all too often, such words become nothing but sentimental gibberish in the face of unadulterated, unrepentant evil, whether interpersonal or geopolitical. Sometimes, another person's or group's POV is so fundamentally evil that it must be opposed regardless of the cost to protect the innocent. Unfortuntately, protecting the innocent or fighting evil aren't as hip or as intellectually fashionable as the gooey, superficial sentimentality plaguing most of the institutionalized Church world today.

Jesus Christ was no gooey sentimentalist. This is a man who cursed a fig tree, after all, for not producing figs! If you don't believe that, then just ask the moneychangers he whipped in the Temple...

You're quite welcome, Another, though credit for all substance beyond my opening japes is due the formidable Frederica Mathewes-Green, whose wise words quoted take over anon unto close.

"...I learned the lesson of...stating...'You know, you may be right.'" - Another Believer

This was perhaps best amplified for all time, with conditions, from the Epistles of St. Joel to the Americans, in the Glass Houses parables:

Though may be righteous
I may be wretched of mind
But it may come to pass
That the mad man proveth
That which though seeketh

Or, if you like, the words of the Four Fabian Apostles of Merseyside, from their conversion in crossing the Abbeyan Way:

And, upon the Omega
The love thou taketh
Proveth of like measure
Unto the love thou maketh

And to close on a less solemn note, after your reference to your Viennese scholar days, an Austrian recherche of my own, four years after closing my undergraduate studies at NYU with disciples of the great Austrian-school economist Ludwig von Mises. It is my first semester, in the fall of 1988, as a graduate student in modern European history at the University of Virginia. I am in a colloquium on early-20th-century Europe, when my turn comes at the conference table to present an oral report, on the WWI-era father of Czech independence, Tomáš G. Masaryk.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomáš_Masaryk#Biography

After sketching to my newly-fraternal Virginians Masaryk's early life and philosophy studies, I mention his then having "earned his Ph.D at U.Va - the University of Vienna..."