Persistent Thorn May Have A Purpose

What good is our grief? What possible good can come from carrying the pain of a “thorn in our flesh” that just won’t go away?

If you’ve wrestled with the despair of an emotional wound that will not heal, you are in the company of a biblical saint.

Many saints, actually.

Right now I’m thinking about St. Paul the Apostle. Even biblical scholars are unsure what tormented Paul enough for him to label his pain as a “thorn in the flesh.”

Whatever it was, it stayed put his entire life. Its tenacity forced him to look at that thorn through new eyes, through eyes of faith in Christ’s message to him that “my grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

After what I can only assume was a time of great anguish, Paul reconciled his unending wound as a constant reminder that for the “power of Christ (to) dwell in him,” he would have to learn to be “content with … calamities for the sake of Christ.” (2 Cor. 12: 8-10) Do you have a thorn that just stays put? A wound that won’t go away - no matter how much you pray or psychologize your way through the frustration, or weep through your days of dark nights? Many of us do.

Are you one of the fortunate few who have embraced that thorn as a constant reminder of God’s love for you, not to mention through you?

If you have read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” you will remember the concentration camp survivor’s transforming insight that when we cannot change our circumstances, we still have the freedom to determine how we respond to those circumstances.

“It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

I think of this thorn that stays put when reflecting on a comment shared with me by a mother responding to my column on tears a while back.

She made the assumption that my poem on tears and laughter came out of grieving over a lost child. Then she briefly shared that she had lost two children herself.

Aha! I quickly understood how her assumption was born out of her own thorn-that-would-not-go-away.

I have not lost a child, but that possibility is perhaps the greatest human fear I have. I cannot imagine how I would survive that loss.

But thousands upon thousands of parents have done just that! The thorn of that loss stays put even while the strength to survive is somehow embraced day after day.

Blessed are the surviving parents who are able to respond to that thorn by becoming wounded healers for other parents who despair.

“Wounded healers” - some kind of contradiction in terms? Not at all. When blessed by God, our wounds can be a source of healing not only for ourselves but for others.

One of my favorite books by the Rev. Henri Nouwen is “The Wounded Healer.” The person who is able to share the deepest of pains with another person offers a sacramental moment to each person involved.

It is certainly not the sharing of superficial personal pains that Nouwen calls sacramental. That can be merely being on the prowl for someone to feel sorry for you.

The sharing of deeper pain, more intimate pain, allows another person to “enter our lives” even through the doorways of our own wounds.

Deborah Smith Douglas, in her Weavings magazine article titled “Wounded and Healed,” tells of a priest who spoke on gratitude who said we should be especially grateful for whatever breaks our hearts.

Then he reminds us of Jeremiah 31:33, in which God promises to write “upon” our hearts. The suggestion is that our hearts are so hard that all God can do is write upon them.

Douglas goes on to say, “It is only when our hearts break, that they break open: Then the word of God can enter deeply, like a seed in a harrowed field.”

Douglas then reminds us of the wisdom of some desert fathers who highly prized the gift of tears. They urged one another to weep urgently: “Before all else, pray to be given tears, that weeping may soften the savage hardness which is in your soul.”

Alas, this kind of sacramental crying is not even possible for those of us who do not understand that grief of all kinds, that tears of grief, are the gifts of a God who understands the depth of our wounds and the unrelenting passion of our hearts for healing.

If God is not the wounded One, the “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah. 53:3), our tears flow away and the thorn stays put. All is for nothing.

But when we know God knows our sorrow, the tears we shed for that thorn remind us we do not cry alone. We do not weep for nothing. We weep for healing that will come.