I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
Interpretation
Pain can be difficult to discuss until it has passed.
Arthur Golden's quote highlights the complex relationship we have with pain. It suggests that while we are in the midst of suffering, it might be challenging to articulate our feelings or experiences authentically. Once we have moved beyond the pain, we gain a clearer perspective, allowing us to speak more openly and honestly about it without the cloud of current suffering interfering with our thoughts and emotions.
In practice
In a support group discussing the journey of healing from trauma.
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.
An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
Incompetence is a better explanation than conspiracy in most human activity.
It's a great responsibility before God, the judge who guides us, who draws us to truth and good, and in this sense the church must unmask evil, rendering present the goodness of God, rendering present his truth, the truly infinite for which we are thirsty.
A narrative that branded Africa as little more than an economic, political and social basket case was not likely to provide the investment needed to drive development.
The right to freedom being the gift of God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
Condemning all women in order to help some misguided men get over their foolish behaviour is tantamount to denouncing fire, which is a vital and beneficial element, just because some people are burnt by it, or to cursing water just because some people are drowned in it.
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