Devotional
May 2012
This month we bring you the writing of Henri Nouwen, a Dutch-born Catholic priest and writer who authored 40 books about spirituality.
Go into the place of your pain
What is your pain? It is the experience of not receiving what you most need. It is a place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the love you most desire. To go back to that place is hard, because you are confronted there with your wounds as well as with your powerlessness to heal yourself. You are so afraid of that place that you think of it as a place of death. Your instinct for survival makes you run away and go looking for womething else that can give you a sense of at-homeness, even though you know full well that it can’t be found out in the world.
You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not the final experience, that beyond it is a place where you are being held in love. As long as you do not trust that place beyond your emptiness, you cannot safely reenter the place of pain.
So you have to go into the place of your pain with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits. The more roots you have in the new place, the more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died. Still, the old pains, attachments, and desires that once meant so much to you need to be buried.
You have to weep over your lost pains so that they can gradually leave you and you can become free to live fully in the new place without melancholy or homesickness.*
Scripture to Remember: Isaiah 43:19
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
Question to Consider: Am I running from my pain and attempting to fill the void on my own?
Prayer: God, I trust You with my pain and choose to believe that this emptiness is not my final experience. Lead me in your tender mercy and use this path to draw me ever closer to You. Amen
Thought for the Day: Today, I will acknowledge and even enjoy some of the fruits of this new place in my life.
*Nowen, Henri J.M (1996). The Inner Voice of Love. New York: Doubleday.
