Facing the shadows

Just before his death from cancer, the theologian Alan Lewis wrote the following:

We face suffering, distress, and death with courage, faith and trust, not by maintaining serenity of psyche or buoyancy of soul within, but precisely by casting ourselves in all the times of emptiness, aridity, and wordlessness – as well as those still more spiritually dangerous times of optimism or elation – upon the gift of grace outside us and around us. God promises to do what we cannot do, and go where we need not go, to enter the dark valley ahead of us and defeat on our behalf the frightening foe. And the Spirit undertakes to pray for us, and stirs others to intercede on our behalf, just when we feel awful, overwrought in body or in spirit, when faith eludes intellect or consciousness and our tongues have lost all utterance.(Between Cross and Resurrection, p. 430f.)

There’s not much one can add to that, except perhaps ‘Amen!’ And, of course, this applies as much to times of darkness and depression as to when facing terminal illness.

Emily Dickinson on pain

Pain—has an Element of Blank—
It cannot recollect
When it begun—or if there were
A time when it was not—

It has no Future—but itself—
Its Infinite Contain
Its Past—enlightened to perceive
New Periods—of Pain.

In this little poem, Emily Dickinson has captured one of the insidious features of chronic pain – the way it makes you forget what it was like to live without pain.