Everyday Torture

Every two weeks my roommate goes to get tortured.  They take her to a back room, sit her in a chair, and start pumping poison into her veins.  The chemicals are so strong they burn her skin around the injection site.  She returns home to us, weak and inarticulate, unable to eat or breathe normally, and most cruel of all, unable to sleep normally.  She identifies with her torturers.  After all, they’re part of the medical profession, a profession she shares (we do not dare to use the past tense).  She asked them to do this.  This was her choice, the dreadful choice for life at any cost over death.  She wants to see her daughter graduate from college (four long years from now).  She wants a chance at seeing her grandchildren.  She has liver cancer, and she will do whatever she has to in order to survive.

My roommate is not alone.  There are many people who have gone through this, although most have not chosen it.  In Latin America repressive regimes snatch innocent men and women from the streets and subject them to torture.  They beat and rape them, inject them with poisonous chemicals, burn them and subject them to electric shocks.  They manipulate their emotions and weak psychological state, convincing them that this agony is their own choice or their fault, that the torturers have no choice but to do these things.  The torturers are not trying to save lives or cure cancer, but to shore up totalitarian political regimes.  Their victims do whatever they have to in order to survive.  They choose life at any cost over death.  Then they return to their families, weak and inarticulate, sometimes unable to eat or breathe normally, almost never able to sleep normally.  Their experience of pain has cut them off from normal human interaction, and the suspicion and fear of those around them increases their isolation.  While their bodily wounds may heal, their minds and souls possibly never will.

William Cavenaugh, in his book Torture and Eucharist (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 199 says that pain is the ultimate isolater.  We have words to describe degrees of pain (fierce, agonizing, excruciating) and words to describe kinds of pain (piercing, throbbing) but all of those words do not really capture what it is to feel that pain.  When pain becomes intense, the sufferer starts using metaphors (the headache was like an ice pick), then loses words entirely in inarticulate moans, groans, and sometimes howls.  The reality of pain is that it is eternally your own.  No matter how much sympathy or empathy another person might have, they can never really “feel your pain.”

So what are we to do in the face of so much anguish?  Is there any hope for us?  Can our world heal from so many mortal wounds?  Cavenaugh seems to say that it can.  The answer is found in the title of his book: Torture and Eucharist.  When we go to take part in the Lord’s supper, we are not just celebrating a liturgy.  We are making ourselves again, still, part of the Body of Christ.  We are no longer fragmented, but one with those around us and with all those who partake in this sacrament throughout the world and throughout time.  My roommate is not alone in her pain, but joined with us and with her fellow sufferers here and around the world.  Through the grace of the Eucharist, she receives the courage to go on, to return to the hospital one more time, to climb out of bed one more morning.  Through the Eucharist I receive the grace to continue to love her.  Through His stripes, we are healed.  This is our hope, both for ourselves, and for our world: that though His stripes, we all will be healed.

~ by Bernadette on March 5, 2007.