2nd interlude: The anchoress speaks

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No one understands sin today and that no doubt includes myself and tempers what I am about to say. I will say it anyway -- you know me.

Here is my stab, however dark. To understand sin first you must think of the 2 kinds of pain we experience: pain as subject and pain as object.

Pain as object is something one feels as from the outside. It is a feeling put on from without. When you have it relieved, the relief is like having something taken off the way a sheath is taken off a sword -- or a sock off the foot. Such pain is not you but something you undergo. Some people say that therapy or an operation or the sheer passing of time will remove it. It is not you. It does not have you.

The other pain is pain as subject and cannot be removed. It is not something you feel. It is you. Whenever you feel it also feels and whatever you feel it indeed feels. It does your feeling for you, against you. Whatever thought you have it is the pain that thinks.

No operation takes it off. A subject cannot be "removed" but only annihilated or (from far within "within") somehow healed. No doctor can bring a help or a cure, not for this. Only a brand new "you" can escape a pain that is "you".

No one who has not touched this second pain -- and been burned past the point of healing -- will understand me when I say it is a privilege to have it, if and only if you in fact know that you have it -- and know what it draws you to do. It is not enough to have it, you need to know that you have.

Without the need, what would relief of need even mean? Could you be relieved of what you deny? Yes, but denial actually *is* this second pain, in hardened form, like the crust of a bruise. So you would have to deny the denial and get back to feeling the pain, to the point where it throws you to the floor. And on the floor, thrown, maybe the next step can be taken.

So... the two pains. Pain as object can be a great teacher, the anchoress said. In its small window, pain can be good. So it needs to be listened to -- walked through -- learned from -- and only then relieved. Relieved within awareness.

But as for the second pain, avoid it with every inch of your strength and conscience! Never let pain become you and eclipse your own being. Even if you can only hold onto one small thread of yourself, you can still hand that thread to God and implore him to pull, so that the evil will at last unravel. Never forget that pain as subject is unmitigated evil. Feel the pain but never let it feel you.

Any pain can be borne and is tolerable as long as it is only that one thing: pain.

But do not imagine that you are strong enough and Christly enough to go any deeper than this. Because you are not.

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The next morning, early November with its frayed leaves shrinking with the cold, the anchoress stood like Dwight Moody, with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And she was livid with anger, out of control, tearing the newspaper in her pain. Elf and the others ducked but could not get away as she began to speak.....

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