Living through Pain charts the multifaceted personal and social problems caused by chronic pain. While its focus is on the biblical Psalms and how those texts wrestle with and speak out of the experience of pain, this book also surveys professional efforts to mitigate and manage pain. Chronic pain affects all aspects of a person — body, mind, spirit, and community. With this book, readers are invited to listen to ancient texts that do not differentiate body from mind or spirit from social experience for new wisdom, perspective, and insight. Swenson's close reading of selected psalms from the Hebrew Bible demonstrates that the challenge of living through pain is timeless. Living through Pain chronicles how these ancient texts offer a vocabulary and grammar for understanding and expressing contemporary experiences of pain. With this book, readers consider what is involved in the process of healing.

Listen to Kristin discuss Living through Pain with Sarah McConnell on Virginia's only statewide public radio show "With Good Reason."

Pain preoccupies, prohibiting full engagement in the present, the only time any one of us really has.  The quest to live through pain is the quest to reintegrate the fractured self into a whole person, fully alive at any given moment, even when that moment includes pain.  It is, in a sense then, to take the suffering out of pain.  To determine one's integrity, even in the presence of pain, is to make oneself whole, holy, and to heal.  The process of identifying one's authentic self, in the present moment, wholly cognizant of and engaged in whatever bears on that experience, enables a person to find purpose and place; and sometimes the pain is mitigated, too.

I ask how psalms might aid in that process of reintegration and engagement for several reasons.[1]  One is that I am trained as a biblical scholar, particularly of the Old Testament or "Hebrew Bible."  But such training is inseparable from my abiding interest in these ancient texts, an interest that has flowered into an awe-filled respect for those involved in the centuries-long process of composing, editing, and compiling what we now have as "Bible."  Another reason for listening to psalmic voices in considering the shades of pain is that they do not so easily divide a person into body, mind, and spirit.  Neither do they separate an individual's experience from his or her social relationships.  In other words, each of the psalms begin with the assumption that any person is a complicated product of internal and external relations.  The six psalms that I have chosen to consider closely in light of the matter of pain speak out of both broken and reintegrating conditions, decrying pain's propensity to fracture, and seeking a means of being whole and engaged in life, even in light or darkness of great pain.

• from the Introduction

From the Introduction

"It's not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry." —Barbara Kingsolver

Telling politely curious people that you are working on a project concerning pain can be like pulling the plug on a cozy bath.  Soon you sit there, naked and shivering, in an empty tub.  Pain is hardly an inviting topic; yet I have found that once people get beyond an initial aversion, everybody has something to say about pain, frequently personal, and usually including wonder at the difficulty of pinning it down.  Adding religion to the conversation stimulates the same paradoxical effects of aversion and fascination.  I do not look like someone who is suffering chronic pain, so when people ask me what is the book that I have been working on, their first reaction to my answer frequently is a delayed "what?"  After clarifying that the book concerns pain, "p-a-i-n," most people ask if it is about "physical pain" or about "pain in general, like psychological or emotional pain."  My response to this question normally also addresses some part of the next question: Why the Psalms?

"The interface between the psalms and the reality of human suffering is a long established conversation. In this book Swenson brings new life and freshness to that interface. She does so by exacting engagement with contemporary literature on the reality of pain and medical research. The outcome is a rich dialogue whereby "pain theory" illuminates the psalms and the psalms, in turn, offer a suggestive dimension to pain theory. The book is "down and dirty" in its engagement with real life. It will be 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. Swenson shows how the psalms, when read and heard, are indeed instruments for the existential, concrete processing of pain in healing ways."
—Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of TheThreat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness

"This is a powerful, insightful, and challenging meditation on a universal human experience that requires us to examine how we engage the experience of pain."
—Ana Maria Catanzaro, Associate Professor, LaSalle University School of Nursing

"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 renew meaning in their lives, without ever imposing that meaning."
—Arthur W. Frank, Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary, author of The Wounded Storyteller

"A must read 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 fo the fainthearted or for those who seek easy answers. And that is good news!"
—Joan E. Hemenway, President, Association for Clinical Pastoral Education

"... 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 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