Sunday, March 7: Acknowledging the Agony

I am posting Anne Doyle's comment on this summary page of our session on March 7.  During our time together, we talked about ways that we emerge from agony into acceptance. I mentioned my friends whose son died las September. While I had offered to go see them then, they declined, saying: "We can't see anyone now. We will let you know when, if ever, that will change. I understood completely, even the "if ever" part. And then, last week, a message in my mail box: "We remember your kind offer to come. we are emerging from that first awful trauma, and now think it would be good to see old friends." I made my plane reservations immediately. They are emerging from agony.

I had brought in a copy of Henri Nouwen's book, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom. I had planned to use his writing on "Going into the Place of Your Pain'" but we got there with Anne's and others' comments about understanding the need for feeling the pain before healing the pain. The quotation Anne provides below says it well.

From Anne Doyle:
At our gathering on Sunday, 7 March, I mentioned a reading from Fr Richard Rohr's daily meditation. I thought folks might like to read what it actually says instead just hearing my summary:

"Our remembrance that God remembers us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer (Luke 3:4). Memory is the basis of both pain and rejoicing: We cannot have one without the other.

Do not be too quick to heal all of those bad memories, unless it means also feeling them deeply, which means to learn what they have to teach you. God calls us to suffer (read 'allow') the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it.

Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. It is much more common to gather our life energy around a hurt than a joy, for some sad reason. Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both. And most of all, 'remember that you are remembered by God.'"

This is the reference provided: Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 26, day 25 (Source: Sojourners, “The Energy of Promise”)

I especially like the idea of "learning what they [the bad memories] have to teach you."

Anne

We have often talked about the need for community in healing; on Sunday the 14,  we will talk about group spiritual direction.