By Henri Nouwen
Healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes, all of creation. In so doing, we become participants in the great battle against the powers of darkness. Our little lives participate in something larger.
We are called to grieve our losses. It seems paradoxical, but healing and dancing begin with looking squarely at what causes us pain. We face the secret losses that have paralyzed us and kept us imprisoned in denial or shame or guilt. We do not nurse the illusion that we can hopscotch our way through difficulties. For by trying to hide parts of our story from God’s eye and our own consciousness, we become judges of our own past. We limit divine mercy to our human fears. Our efforts to disconnect ourselves from our own suffering end up disconnecting our suffering from God’s suffering for us. The way out of our loss and hurt is in and through. When Jesus said, “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Matthew 9:13), he affirmed that only those who can face their wounded condition can be available for healing and enter a new way of living.
Sometimes we need to ask ourselves just what our losses are. Doing so reminds us how real the experience of loss is. Perhaps you know what it is to have a parent die. We may experience the death of a child or of friends. And we lose people, sometimes just as painfully, through misunderstanding, conflict, or anger. I may expect a friend to visit, but he does not come. I speak to a group and expect a warm reception, but no one really seems to respond. Someone may take from us a job, a career, a good name.
Typically we see such hardship as an obstacle to what we think we should be—healthy, good-looking, free of discomfort. We consider suffering as annoying at best, meaningless at worst. We strive to get rid of our pains in whatever way we can. A part of us prefers the illusion that our losses are not real, that they come only as temporary interruptions. We thereby expend much energy in denial. “They should not prevent us from holding on to the real thing,” we say to ourselves.
Several temptations feed this denial. Our incessant busyness, for example, becomes a way to escape what must some days be confronted. The world in which we live lies in the power of the Evil One, and the Evil One would prefer to distract us and fill every little space with things to do, people to meet, business to accomplish, products to be made. He does not allow any space for genuine grief and mourning. Our busyness becomes a curse, even while we think it provides us with relief from the pain inside. Our over-packed lives serve only to keep us from facing the inevitable difficulty that we all, at some time or another, must face.
The voice of evil also tries to tempt us to put on an invincible front. Words such as vulnerability, letting go, surrendering, crying, mourning, and grief are not to be found in the devil’s dictionary. Someone once said to me, “Never show your weakness, for you will be used; never be vulnerable, for you will get hurt; never depend on others, for you will lose your freedom.” This might sound very wise, but it does not echo the voice of wisdom. It mimics a world that wants us to respect without question the social boundaries and compulsions that our society has defined for us.
Facing our losses also means avoiding a temptation to see life as an exercise in having needs met. We are needy people, of course: We want attention, affection, influence, power. And our needs seem never to be satisfied. Even altruistic actions can get tangled with these needs. Then, when people or circumstances do not fulfill all of our needs, we withdraw or lash out. We nurse our wounded spirits. And we become even needier. We crave easy assurances, ignoring anything that would suggest another way.
We also like easy victories: growth without crisis, healing without pains, the resurrection without the cross. No wonder our communities seem organized to keep suffering at a distance: People are buried in ways that shroud death with euphemism and ornate furnishings. Institutions hide away the mentally ill and criminal offenders in a continuing denial that they belong to the human family. Even our daily customs lead us to cloak our feelings and speak politely through clenched teeth and prevent honest, healing confrontation. Friendships become superficial and temporary.
The way of Jesus looks very different. While Jesus brought great comfort and came with kind words and a healing touch, he did not come to take all our pains away. Jesus entered into Jerusalem in his last days on a donkey, like a clown at a parade. This was his way of reminding us that we fool ourselves when we insist on easy victories. When we think we can succeed in cloaking what ails us and our times in pleasantness. Much that is worthwhile comes only through confrontation.
The way from Palm Sunday to Easter is the patient way, the suffering way. Indeed, our word patience comes from the ancient root patior, “to suffer.” To learn patience is not to rebel against every hardship. For if we insist on continuing to cover our pains with easy “Hosannas,” we run the risk of losing our patience. We are likely to become bitter and cynical or violent and aggressive when the shallowness of the easy way wears through.
Instead, Christ invites us to remain in touch with the many sufferings of every day and to taste the beginning of hope and new life right there, where we live amid our hurts and pains and brokenness. By observing his life, his followers discover that when all of the crowd’s “Hosannas” had fallen silent, when disciples and friends had left him, and after Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then it was that the Son of Man rose from death. Then he broke through the chains of death and became Savior. That is the patient way, slowly leading me from the easy triumph to the hard victory.
I am less likely to deny my suffering when I learn how God uses it to mold me and draw me closer to him. I will be less likely to see my pains as interruptions to my plans and more able to see them as the means for God to make me ready to receive him. I let Christ live near my hurts and distractions. I remember an old priest who one day said to me, “I have always been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted; then I realized that the interruptions were my work.”
The above article is excerpted from Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope During Hard Times by Henri Nouwen; compiled and edited by Timothy Jones. Copyright © 2001 Estate of Henri Nouwen. Published by W Publishing Group. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson. www.thomasnelson.com. All rights reserved.
Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope During Hard Times is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway.
Bio: Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932-1996) (@nouwensociety) was the author of With Open Hands, Reaching Out, The Wounded Healer, Making All Things New, and many other bestsellers. He was the senior pastor of L’Arche Daybreak in Toronto, Canada, a community where men and women with mental disabilities and their assistants create a home for one another.
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