Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as “whenever you are not in control.”
All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter. If there isn’t some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
We must learn how to walk through the stages of dying. We have to grieve over lost friends, relatives, and loves. Death cannot be dealt with through quick answers, religious platitudes, or a stiff upper lip. Dying must be allowed to happen over time, in predictable and necessary stages, both in those who die graciously and in those who love them. Grief is a time where God can fill the tragic gap with something new and totally unexpected. Yet the process cannot be rushed.
It is not only the loss of persons that leads to grief, but also the loss of ideals, visions, plans, places, and our very youth. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross helped us name those stages as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. Grief work might be one of the most redemptive, and yet still unappreciated, ministries in the church. Thank God, it is being discovered as a time of spacious grace and painful gift.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace
We must go through the stages of feeling, not only in the last death of anything but also in all the earlier little deaths. If we abort these emotional stages by easy answers, all they do is take a deeper form of disguise and come out in another way. So many people learn that the hard way—by getting ulcers, by all kinds of psychosomatic diseases, depression, chronic irritability, and misdirected anger—because they refuse to let their emotions run their course, honor them consciously, or find some appropriate place to share them.
Emotions are not right or wrong, good or bad. They are merely indicators of what is happening, and must be listened to, usually in the body. People who do not feel deeply finally do not know or love deeply either. It is the price we pay for loving. Like Job we must be willing to feel our emotions and come to grips with the mystery in our head, our heart, and our body. To be honest, that takes years.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections
Spiritual life is always about letting go of unnecessary baggage so that we’re prepared for death’s final letting go. That can only happen if we’re willing to know that our protected self-image is not the deepest me. Our passing personas are important and a good part of the journey and they even help us to taste moments of the Great I Am that is God. But there’s so much more than my small self, which is so defended, constricted, and insecure.
Finally, like the great Paul, we can all say, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ living in me” (Galatians 2:20).
~From Richard Rohr, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety
