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author photo by Jay Paul

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Kristin M. Swenson (Ph.D. Boston University) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.
http://www.has.vcu.edu/wld/faculty/swenson.html
In Living through Pain Kristin M. Swenson charts the multifaceted personal and social problems caused by chronic pain and surveys professional efforts to mitigate and manage it. Because the experience of pain involves all aspects of a person—body, mind, spirit, and community—Swenson consults an ancient resource for wisdom, perspective, and insight. Her close reading of selected psalms from the Hebrew Bible demonstrates that the challenge of living through pain is timeless. Swenson shows how these ancient texts offer a vocabulary and grammar for understanding and expressing the contemporary experience of pain. Pain is a universal experience, and this book invites readers to consider more fully what is involved in the process of healing.

publicity

Many thanks to Kelly Hughes and Ingrid Perlongo of DeChant-Hughes & Associates, Inc. for their publicity help through 2005!

If you are interested in lining up an interview with me, or if you would like me to lead a workshop or give a lecture, feel free to contact me directly. Please also have a look at my (developing) webpage: www.kristinswenson.com

Endorsements

…a wise and poignant evocation of the circuitous journey of chronic pain winding from suffering, anguish, and despair to dependence, self-knowledge, acceptance, and ultimately transcendence.
—Dennis C. Turk, John and Emma Bonica Professor of Anesthesiology & Pain Research, University of Washington

Swenson shows how the process of living through pain—not the denial of pain or in an all-consuming search for relief—can be understood as a quest to reintegrate the fractured self into a fully alive, whole person.
—David B. Morris, University Professor, University of Virginia, author of The Culture of Pain

Living Though Pain is an important study for men and women of faith who live with pain and for those in the helping professions who live with the pain of others.
—Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of The Threat of Life

Must reading for those who want to understand how shrieks and groans and desperate sighs both fracture and bring unexpected healing to the human spirit. This book is not for the faint-hearted or for those who seek easy answers. And that is good news! —Joan E. Hemenway, President-Elect, Association of Clinical Pastoral Educators


Swenson presents the psalms as living companions to persons in pain. Her reading of the psalms prescribes no doctrine. Instead, she guides us in opening ourselves to this often strange language and allowing the verses to resonate within us. Swenson shows how the psalms can help people to renew meaning in their lives, without ever imposing that meaning.

—Arthur W. Frank, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, author of The Wounded Storyteller

This is a powerful, insightful and challenging meditation on a universal human experience that challenges us to examine how we engage the experience of pain. —Ana Maria Catanzaro, Research Fellow in Spirituality, Theology and Health, Duke University

Study Guide and Discussion Questions

• Study Guide and Questions for Reflection
  Living through Pain: Psalms and the Search for Wholeness
  
  The following pages are meant to aid readers in thinking about and applying the ideas of Living through Pain. They may serve as the means of discussion in a group or simply as reflection for an individual reader.
  
  Organized according to the book’s chapters and reflecting its broad readership, the questions in this guide do not presume a Jewish or Christian audience and use. Furthermore, although some questions are specifically directed to people in pain, most are applicable also for medical personnel and the family and friends of people in pain.
  
  
• Introduction
  
  What is your primary relationship to chronic pain now? – you suffer from it; someone you love is in pain, your profession involves dealing with people who suffer chronic pain.
  
  What led you to pick up this book?
  
  What comes to mind from the title Living through Pain?
  
  What do you hope to gain from reading this book?
  
  Swenson writes of pain as a “whole-person experience.” Think about events in your own life that you have thought of as painful. What made them painful?
  
  Although the author starts with physical pain, what difference would it make to start with emotional or psychological pain?
  
  The author includes relationships to others, a social component, in her understanding of a whole person. Do you think that this is appropriate? Why or why not?
  
  How do you define healing, health?
  
  
  
• Chapter 1: Problems with Pain
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  In his Zen Buddhism classes at VCU, Cliff Edwards describes the sense of dukkha, translated suffering in the chapter’s epigraph, as disjointedness or dislocation. How have you felt disjointed/dislocated by chronic pain?
  
  How has pain been a problem in your life? How has your pain been a problem for others?
  
  In what ways have you sought to communicate your pain to others? Or in what ways have you sought to understand another person’s experience of pain? What worked? What didn’t work?
  
  How might you define pain?
  
  In what ways do you distinguish chronic pain from suffering? In what ways have you found them to be the same?
  
  
• Chapter 2: The Hermeneutics of Pain
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  The epigraph (from Rabinadrath, not Babinadrath, Tagore) suggests that there is sometimes more to thinking than strict logic. In what ways has a purely logical interpretation of pain created more distress for you?
  
  Think of a time when you found a particular meaning for your pain. How did you interpret it? How did it affect the experience? In what ways did your interpretation change over time?
  
  How can the search for meaning be at the same time a search for wholeness?
  
  Have you ever felt that the quest to find such meaning was itself misplaced or even “tyrannous,” as Arthur Kleinman calls it?
  
  How does narrative, telling your story, actually affect the experience, or not?
  
  
• Chapter 3: Pain and the Psalms, beyond the Medicine Cabinet
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  How do you think about the Bible? What is its significance for you?
  
  Does it matter to you to know that the book of Psalms is a collection of poems written by a lot of different people over a long period of time? How do the psalms then differ, in your mind, from other kinds of biblical literature such as stories, laws, practical advice, and history?
  
  How has your experience of chronic pain been “non-linear”?
  
  What other literature has helped you with pain, and why?
  
  
• Chapter 4: On Whose Account, This Pain and Its Relief? (Psalm 69)
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  When has your experience with pain made you feel like you’re drowning?
  
  What layers does your experience of pain have?
  
  Were you surprised at the changes of perspective and interpretation in Psalm 69? If so, what was particularly surprising, and why?
  
  Have you felt the same bitterness towards others as the psalmist describes? What helps resolve such anger?
  
  Have you been the object of pained person’s anger? If you could do it over again, would you react in the same or a different way? Describe this.
  
  Have you found relief from your own pain by caring about/for others?
  
  How would you feel/react if the pained person that you are caring for tries to care for you?
  
  
• Chapter 5: From Justified Pain to Self-Justification (Psalm 38)
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  Have you ever interpreted your pain as justified for something you did wrong? If so, how did that make you feel? How do you think it made your friends, family, and medical care-givers feel?
  
  Is it easier to stay with the interpretation of pain as justified than to accept mercy? Why, or why not?
  
  What is the difference between interpreting your own pain as justified punishment and interpreting someone else’s that way?
  
  The psalmist finally supposes that God is not limited by justice but can choose mercy. How does this affect your own thinking about pain? About God?

• Chapter 6: Finally Darkness (Psalm 88)
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  When have you felt that your pain brings on a kind of darkness? What was it like?
  
  Have you ever found in succumbing to the darkness of chronic pain a kind of relief? How did that happen?
  
  With whom do you know that you can be angry without destroying the relationship?
  
  How would you be with a person whose pain leaves them in the midst of darkness? How would you like others to be with you in such a condition?
  
  How can the feelings of helplessness, despair, and depression that chronic pain sometimes elicits be a spiritual experience?
  
  
• Chapter 7: Shared Treasure from a Lonely Journey (Psalm 22)
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  How has your experience of pain isolated you? How has your experience changed your relationship to others?
  
  In what way(s) are you disabled? In what ways have your experiences enabled you?
  
  What does it mean to say that “help is knit into the fabric of the world” (a description of Psalm 22, from chapter 8)? How have you experienced such help?
  
  What from your experience of pain would you especially like to share with others?
  
  
  
• Chapter 8: Moving Pain out of the Center (Psalm 6)
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  What forces (people, circumstances) have you felt hold or held you back from the process of coming to terms with your condition and living through it? How can you stand up to such forces?
  
  How have you determined to move pain out of the center of your life?
  
  What is the difference between moving pain out of the center and simply denying the pain?
  
  In what ways has your experience with pain led you to “hold fragments” without tidy resolution?
  
  
• Chapter 9: Meanwhile the World Goes On (Psalm 102)
  
  What new insight(s) have you gained from reading this chapter?
  
  How has your experience of pain been a kind of death? That is, what about you has died in the process of dealing with your own or another’s pain? How do such losses make you feel?
  
  When have you felt selfish about your life? How and why?
  
  In the face of your mortality and limits, when and how have you found comfort in the greater world?
  
  What do you want for your own death?

• Conclusion
  
  Which of the psalms did you find particularly meaningful to you and why?
  
  What do you make of God’s silence in these psalms?
  
  Think about a time when you found relief by talking to someone about your experience and thoughts. How did that repair you?
  
  How might pain actually make a person feel more not less whole?
  
  What aspects of your experience of pain have not been addressed in Living through Pain?
  
  What discoveries have you made, in the course of reading this book, about how to live through pain?