"Sickness will take the mind where the mind doesn't usually go."  So sang the Who on their classic rock album "Tommy," released in 1969.  When I hear these words, which I did recently, I think of the American novelist Flannery O'Connor.  O'Connor, who died of lupus at the age of 41, suffered terribly from various ailments, including lupus, for most of her adult life.  And her novels reflected this.  In story after story, O'Connor depicted people on the margins of society, people whose appearance most found repulsive, people whose lives seemed marked by exceptional chaos and pain, people who lived lives that, as the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre might have put it, were abjectly cruel and lonely.  With these motifs as backdrop, O'Connor was able to explore the meaning of pain, a fact of life with which she constantly had to deal.  Tellingly, however, she painted pictures of lives in which pain, although it crumpled many a person, proved, in the end, to be redemptive.  It bequeathed a greater sense of meaning.
     Almost any religion (O'Connor was a deeply devout Catholic) will agree that this is true.  Be it the effects of karma, the virtues of asceticism, the self-abnegation of piety and sacrifice or, to paraphrase Jesus as Luke's gospel records him, letting go of everything for God, religion affirms the redemptive nature of pain.
     We can divide pain into roughly two categories.  One, pain that we invite.  This could include the pain involved in achieving athletic prowess, scholarly acumen, vocational success, or familial comity. Two, pain that we do not invite but which comes anyway, such as O'Connor's lupus or any other debilitating disease.  Either way, we learn from it. We may not always like it, we may not always appreciate it, but in an almost perverted way (given our fallen world) pain opens up our minds to things of which we have not previously thought.  It's almost cleansing.
     Looking at this from another angle, if we hold the world to be a broken but still viable medium of existence, a medium in which pain is inevitable, pain, it seems, may be the only way out of it.  O'Connor recognized that although pain is a terrible thing to endure, the greater pain is that it took God's pain, to wit, watching his only Son die on a cross, to definitively overcome it.  As a holy God well knew, human brokenness--spiritual fracture in particular--cannot heal itself.