Jane Marie Thibault likes to tell this real-life story. Recently, she shared it with a group of professionals who serve older people or do research on aging. She has allowed me to repeat the story.

She told us about a woman who was a patient, years ago, at Detroit’s Mercy Hospital, suffering from a painful life-threatening cancer. During her stay there, she showed herself “really nasty,” especially to the nurses who served her. As a result, no one on the hospital staff wanted to come near her unless they had to.

The hospital’s director of pastoral care, however, decided to take a new approach to this difficult woman. He told her that, if he were in her position, he would hate to waste his pain and he did not see why she should either.

The man then described the situation of a young couple who were also in the same hospital. The husband, at age 30, was dying of Hodgkin’s disease. His wife, age 25, was confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis, and they had three young children at home.

“What’s that to me?” asked the difficult patient.

The director suggested that she might find value in an old Catholic devotional practice that could take the place of prayer. It might seem strange to her, he warned.

Then he asked her this question: “Do you think that every time you need medication for pain, between the time that you ring the nurses and the time they come, you could offer the pain to God to turn it into loving compassion for that couple?”

A long silence ensued.

“You’re right; that is really weird,” replied the woman. But she agreed to try it anyway.

Some time after following through with this agreement, the woman impatiently asked for the pastoral care director to see her. When he came to her room, she confronted him with the question, “So what happened?”

When he said he did not know, she ordered him to go down and find out.

He did so and then came back to report the following news. The wife’s older sister, long estranged, had come to visit the couple. She had driven all the way from Kansas to Detroit to offer the wife a place to live after her husband’s death. This had been one of the husband’s greatest concerns as he faced death.

When she heard about this change of heart, the formerly nasty patient promptly took credit for the whole thing! Not only that, but she wanted all sorts of further details about the couple and their children.

Jane Marie Thibault, who told this story, is a clinical professor and gerontologist at the University of Louisville. In addition to her work in a medical setting, she consults widely and serves as a spiritual advisor to the Trappist monks at Gethsemane Abbey.

She grew up Catholic in Rhode Island and remembers various facets of her religious education at home. Among them was the practice of “offering up’ pain or suffering whenever she experienced it. It was a way of applying the spiritual value of these sufferings to others in need of help.

In recent decades, the church has said little about this custom. It was judged to be subject to misunderstanding and abuse.

Thibault, however, has translated this old practice into a more modern and universal concept. She calls it “dedicated suffering.” That means dedicating one’s pain to the welfare of other people or other causes that you care about.

“It’s not a Catholic thing,” she says. “Anybody can use it.” People of other religions or of no belief in God can apply it to pain and suffering. It can be seen as a way to repair the world, to set free the energy of love that can bind people together.

Of course, every effort should be made to diminish the pain, if not to get rid of it entirely. Dedicated suffering should not be seen as tolerant of pain.

Thibault, a master of the spiritual life, also warns against expectations that the person who dedicates her suffering to others will make her own suffering decrease. That may happen, but dedicated suffering makes no such promise.

If suffering does decrease, says Thibault, it would probably happen because the sufferer’s  isolation had been reduced.
In the case of the difficult hospital patient, this spiritual device enabled her to emerge from the isolation that was one cause of her pain. It put her in touch with other people in a way that had a therapeutic effect.

I have shared the story because of its value for those people who feel cut off from others by reason of pain or other suffering. The approach outlined in Jane Marie Thibault’s anecdote about the woman in the hospital offers one way of wresting  meaning from difficult experience.