Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God’s suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our personal suffering connects us to a greater divine love and hope found in Christ's suffering.
Henri Nouwen's quote illuminates the idea that personal suffering is not isolated but is part of a larger narrative of love and healing that encompasses the world's anguish. It invites us to recognize that our own pain can lead us to both a deeper empathy for others and a profound connection with the suffering of Christ, offering a pathway to hope and healing through shared experiences of love and compassion.
In practice
In a sermon about compassion, one might refer to this quote to illustrate how personal suffering can lead to empathy.
The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. God loves us, not because of what we do or accomplish, but because God has created and redeemed us in love.
The immense joy in welcoming back the lost son hides in the immense sorrow that has gone before....our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.
To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, welcome, to accept.
Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)
Becoming the beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about and doing from hour to hour.
The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love.
'T is heaven alone that is given away; 'T is only God may be had for the asking.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
Is it not a grotesque civilization which sends missionaries across the sea to save the souls of the heathen, and yet permits conditions at home that debauch the children at our very doors?
It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.
One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
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