There is something about physical pain that strips away illusion with ruthless kindness. It does not ask our permission. It does not consult our theology. It simply arrives, settles into the body, and tells the truth.
For a long while now I have lived with a knee that has steadily refused to cooperate with my plans. There has been the slow narrowing of movement, the quiet calculations before stairs, the careful choreography of getting in and out of cars. Now the consultant has spoken plainly and a date is set for a total knee replacement. The body has spoken, and I am listening.
Pain has a way of bringing clarity, and one of the things it has clarified for me is how uneasy I have become with what might be called the modern cult of the present moment. We are urged, almost relentlessly, to remain in the now. We are told that the past is illusion, that the future is illusion, that suffering dissolves if only we can anchor ourselves fully in the present. We are encouraged to release our stories, transcend our wounds, and rise above the messy terrain of human experience.
There is truth here, of course. The present moment is a place of encounter. It is where breath happens, where prayer happens and where God is always available. Yet somewhere along the way this wise insight has hardened into something less helpful and far less compassionate. It has become, at times, a form of spiritual bypassing that quietly denies the depth and dignity of human pain. To suggest that pain is not real if we are sufficiently present is not wisdom. It is a denial of incarnation.
The Christian story does not begin with transcendence but with embodiment. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” is no metaphor for rising above human experience but a declaration that God enters fully into it. Notice that the gospel never rushes us past suffering toward a serene present moment. It walks us, slowly and truthfully, through wilderness, exile, lament, crucifixion and only then resurrection. Even the risen Christ carries his wounds.
Scripture is saturated with story. Again and again the people of God are told to remember: remember that you were slaves in Egypt, remember that you wandered in the wilderness, remember the covenant, remember the promise. The past is not dismissed as illusion; it is honoured as the terrain through which God has been faithfully at work. Memory becomes a sacrament of identity. Story becomes a vessel of healing.
When we are told to abandon our story in order to live in the now, something essential is lost. Our wounds do not heal by being declared unreal and trauma does simply will not dissolve because we refuse to name it. We can't pretend that the shadow has no substance, it must be faced and integrated. In fact, the refusal to engage honestly with our pain can lead to a subtle spiritual self-centredness, where maintaining our own equilibrium becomes more important than entering compassionately into the suffering of others. We learn to avert our gaze from grief lest it disturb our carefully curated peace.
The great mystics of the Christian tradition offer a very different path. They speak not of bypassing suffering but of passing through it. The dark night of the soul is never a failure of spiritual practice; it is often its deepest unfolding. It is the place where illusions fall away, where false identities crumble and where we come face to face with both our wound and our longing for God. It is neither comfortable nor tidy; and it is most certainly not avoided by a simple act of remaining in the present moment.
To live truthfully is to hold a paradox. On one level we belong to eternity; our deepest identity is held in God beyond time and fragmentation. On another level we are human beings moving through a three-dimensional world where bodies ache, hearts break, and histories shape us in ways that cannot be wished away. While we inhabit this human story, pain is real. Loss is real. Trauma is real. They must be faced, named, and compassionately held if they are to be transformed.
This does not mean we become trapped in our suffering or defined by our wounds. Rather, we allow them to become part of the larger narrative of redemption. We remember that we were created in the image of God, made a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory. We remember that this glory is our origin and our destination. Yet between origin and destination lies a landscape that includes exile as well as homecoming, shadow as well as light. To deny that landscape is to deny the very path by which we are healed.
There is, I think, a more spacious way of understanding presence. Not a brittle insistence on the now that excludes all else, but a compassionate presence that includes the whole of our story — past, present, and unfolding future — within the embrace of God. A presence that allows us to sit with pain rather than dismiss it. A presence that permits lament as well as gratitude. A presence that leads not to self-absorption but to deeper service, because we no longer need to flee the suffering of the world or our own hearts.
My knee will soon be opened and repaired. There is no spiritual technique that will render the surgery unnecessary or the recovery painless. Nor would I wish for one. This, too, is part of the human journey. This, too, is holy ground. And perhaps the task is not to escape the reality of pain by clinging to an abstract present moment, but to meet pain honestly, courageously, and with the quiet confidence that nothing in our story — not even suffering — lies outside the redemptive gaze of God.
(Jim Palmer wrote an article on spiritual bypassing - 'The Cult of Now' and in response my dear friend Angie McLachlan simply commented how she too struggled with this. That comment inspired me to write this piece stating my own view on what I see as a serious affliction of both the religious and non religious contexts)
See Angie's page here https://www.facebook.com/groups/159073262811309