The Pain of Getting Well

 The late Ojibway author Richard Wagamese is best known for books like Indian Horse, Medicine Walk, One Native Life and my favourite Ragged Company. A collection of his short non-fiction writings was published as What Comes from Spirit in 2021.

This book is short and is comprised mostly of scraps and fragments that Wagamese wrote online on his various social media accounts. One of these fragments stood out to me:

I’ve come to understand that the pain of a wound or a loss is over as soon as it happens. What follows is the pain of getting well.

Richard Wagamese knows more than a little about the pain of getting well. His story is a hard one that included being abandoned by his parents, raised in an assortment of severe foster homes, wandering down paths of addiction and poverty and relational dysfunction of all kinds. In the second half of his life, he seemed to settle into a kind of peace with himself, his family, his spiritual beliefs, his identity, his place in the world. His writings would be a powerful window into his own experience and with indigenous experience more broadly. He died, too soon, in 2017.

Getting well isn’t always easy or straightforward. In John 5, Jesus asked a man who had been ill for nearly forty years and was lying by the pool of Bethsaida, if he “wanted to be made well.” It’s an interesting question. On the surface, it seems like an odd question. After four decades of suffering, who wouldn’t want to be made well? But Jesus knew—and knows—that human beings often resist wellness for a number of reasons.

• Sometimes the incentives to remain unwell are difficult to resist.
• Sometimes the rewards for creating and curating unwellness are attractive. Frederik deBoer has written compellingly about our complicated, conflicted, and very often incoherent relationship with “mental health culture.” It is sobering reading.
• GenZ kids have echoed much of what deBoer says. They have told me about being in social contexts where there was almost a stigma around not having some kind of identifiable affliction or diagnosis or medication. Illness, like almost everything else in our world, is now often absorbed into and incorporated into the totalizing category of personal identity. It is part of our brand, a fixed feature of “who I am,” a mark of status and affirmation.
• Sometimes we don’t know who we are without our pain.
• Sometimes we don’t want to. This does not portend well for genuine wellness.

Getting well cannot happen without the truth.

• It requires unlearning lies that have been internalized and are hard to dislodge, lies that have been embraced, even cherished.
• It requires the hard journey of forgiving people who have done terrible things and hurt us in deep and defining ways.
• It requires taking a hard look in the mirror, seeing unflattering truths, embracing personal responsibility, and deciding to pursue different paths. There are inevitably illusions and idols that need to be thrown off on the road to wellness.

From a Christian perspective, getting well means encountering God. The truth of God and the mercy of God, for all that was inflicted upon us that we could not control. We are called by God to more, to what is beyond that which keeps us tied to our pain in unhealthy ways. The freedom and hope of God. It means facing honestly who we are in the light of who God is. It is not painless, but it is purifying. It is not a simple or seamless process, but it is the path to wholeness and salvation.