Q. Tell us about pain. What kinds of it might be considered sacred?
A. There are so many it's hard to list. There are mystics who cut themselves or prick themselves with thorns, who drive crosses into their bodies, wear garments with nails pointed inward, sit in cold streams or walk barefoot in the cold -- cold is technically a form of pain, as is heat. There are painful body postures, walking barefoot for long distances on hot ground, sitting in front of burning fires, sleeping on hard surfaces, having people whipping you, or whipping yourself. There are various forms of body mutilations (circumcision, subincision, superincision, female circumcision), scarifications, tattoos, piercings. There are hangings by hooks inserted into the flesh, dancing in the hot sun. The list could go on and on. What makes these religious pains is the ritual context and goals toward which these are aimed.

Q. What good is pain? Or, in other words, what makes it sacred?
A. Pain can be "tweaked" or regulated, like calories intake or amounts of sleep. Religious users of pain control it as a form of irritation that modulates the levels of activity in certain regions in the brain. The result is that some experiences are enhanced and others are diminished. The single most important outcome of this experimentation is the weakening of the sense of self. You still have thoughts, beliefs and emotions, but you come to feel that they are not yours -- that some other source of being is having them. When accompanied by other techniques and beliefs -- for example, that you can become one with God or a spirit -- this results in transcendent experiences.

Q. At what point does sacred pain become so great it crosses over into the profane?
A. The line is so fine it's hard to objectify. When is a mystic who scours his or her body with thorns acting "pathologically"? The church has certainly struggled with this question all along, and most psychotherapists would regard all forms of self-hurt as "illness." My sense is that there is no need to hurt yourself. I mean, right now I have at least three distinct and bothersome pains in my body. Everyone has pain. The trick is to learn how to change that profane pain into something meaningful, a form of self-sacrifice.

Q. When and why did pain become a less prominent part of religion?
A. Our entire worldview changed in the 19th century, both in terms of the medicalization of pain, and in terms of defining who and what we are. The modern person is a patient or a citizen -- someone with individual rights, including the right to avoid pain. No one wants to go back to surgeries or even dentists without anesthetics. But the result is that we forgot that life's many pains used to have distinct and vivid meanings. Those meanings -- that pain can be healing, or initiating, or instructive -- have been lost despite the fact that many of our pains are still right there.

Q. Does our modern aversion to pain distance us from God(s)?
A. I believe it does. People might say I'm being thoughtless when I link pain to God, but my research leads me to this conclusion. It's not that if I have a backache, a bad chronic case, and come to like it then God will appear to me out of the pain. It's a more complex connection in which I come to recognize that pain is much more than a sensation. The pain is not just in the back: It has emotional, cognitive and intellectual components that make it feel the way it does. And not just the backache, all the pains of our life. As long as pain is just a biological-medical issue, those other dimensions are neglected and in the past that would have been a form of distancing from God. But of course, our God has also evolved.

Q. How so? Is God painfree?
A. God has evolved in a variety of ways, but the main one that I have in mind is that He has become completely marginalized. You might not know from observing the reaction of Americans to the recent [World Trade Center] tragedy because in that context God has returned to the "center." This would have been the norm before modernity and not just because God is a consoler. The pre-modern person localized his or her center of being outside the individual. The absolute center was God.