LIFE

'We live the given life, and not the planned.'
Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.178.

WHAT LOSS DOES

'Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same.'

Jerry Sitser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, p.62.

OUR CULTURAL MOMENT

'The consciousness of being wounded permeates our times like a swirling mist.'
Erik Varden, Alight with Hidden Glory, p.104.

JESUS GETS US

'He is affected with our infirmities, he feels them, he is touched with the feeling of them. He has a sense of them which touches his soul, and makes an impression on it; as one who not only has suffered what others feel, but suffers with them in what they feel.'

David Clarkson in Tim Chester, Enjoying Jesus: Experience the presence and kindess of the Son of God in everyday life, p.38.

MIDDLE-AGE

'One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.'

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, p.44.

THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY WRONG EXPECTATIONS

'Trauma in reponse to disaster often stems from the unbiblical fiction that the world is, and ought to be experienced as, all right. To declare it instead sick, "a vale of tears", is not pessimistic. It is to own that the world needs saving still; that Easter is not a past event, but present; that is our life, our joy and our hope depend on it. Only in paradise, when we are home at last, with Jesus, will God make all crying case. For now, we eat our fill from his table as wanderers, his bread, seasoned with our tears.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.169.

WHAT BIBLICAL LAMENT DOES

'Lament allows a person to do two critical things: to express the pain and bewilderment of suffering, and to do so in a way that maintains an orientation towards God.'

Steve Midgley, Understanding Trauma: A Biblical Introduction for Church Care, p.151.

THE SUFFERINGS THAT COME FROM FRIENDSHIP

'Jim Stedman then felt in his heart one of the hardest of human sufferings: the wish to help his friend more than he knew he could.'

Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, p.25.

THE POWER OF FANTASY

'My childhood was surrounded by a communal daydreaming, the richest sort of imaginative talk, that began this way - in work, in the misery of work, to make the work bearable and even pleasant. Such talk ranged all the way from a kind of sensuous realism to utter fantasy, but because the bounds of possibility were almost always ignored I would say that the impetus was always that of fantasy. I have heard crowds of men, weary and hungry and hot near the end of a day's work, construct long elaborate conversations on the subject of what would be good to eat and drink, dwelling at length and with subtlety on the taste and the hotness or the coldness of various dishes and beverages, and on combinations of dishes and beverages, the menu lengthening far beyond the capacity of any living stomach. I knew one man who every year got himself through the ordeal of the tobacco harvest by elaborating from one day to the next the fantasy of an epical picnic and celebration which was always to occur except, richly, marvelously, in the minds of his listeners.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.44.

GOD'S POWER MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS

'Where on earth does the glory of God dwell in power? It is in people that are needy and at their end - people that have given up on believing that they can be the hero of their story or that their dreams of a designer life will deliver. So God abides - his power to strengthen sits over, rests upon, and meets with people in the lowly place of acknowledged weakness and need.'

Ste Casey, I prayed and nothing changed: What God is up to in the silence, p.114.

PASSING ON THE COMFORT

'Some of our afflictions perhaps befall us for the sake of our people, that we may be reminded and enabled to speak their feelings, by what we feel ourselves. In this way the tongue of the learned is acquired and skill to speak a word in season to the weary.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.237.

JESUS' PASTORAL CARE

'...with the eye, and the ear, and the heart of a friend, he attends to their sorrows; he counts their sighs, puts their tears in his bottle; and when our spirits are overwhelmed within us, he knows our path, and adjusts the time, the measures of our trials, and every thing that is necessary for our present support and reasonable deliverance, with the same unerring wisdom and accuracy as he weighted the mountains in scales and hills in a balance, and meted out the heavens with a span.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p,.202.

HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

PAIN & SUFFERING ARE TRULY INDIVIDUAL

'Our brokenness is always lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique. I am deeply convinced that each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. No doubt, we can make comparisons; we can talk about more or less suffering, but, in the final analysis, your pain and my pain are so deeply personal that comparing them can bring scarcely any consolation or comfort . In fact, I am more grateful for a person who can acknowledge that I am very alone in my pain than for someone who tries to tell me that there are many others who have a similar or a worse pain.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.52.

WHAT A CHILDHOOD OF SUFFERING GIVES YOU

'For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it - could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever can came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.281.

THE REALISM OF CHRISTIANITY

'Christianity does not merely offer a new way of beholding our world, but an enhanced capacity to live within that world and cope with its uncertainty and complexity, as well as our own frailty and failings. It enables us to confront glib and shallow accounts of our situation, such as the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment or the facile optimism of an ideology of 'positive thinking', which seeks to exorcise any recognition of the darker and more disturbing aspects of human nature or creation. Reality is complex and ambivalent; wisdom demands that we recognise this, rather than crudely forcing it to be uniformly simple and positive. Intellectual violence is unable to suppress this darker truth about our world, which Christianity has afformed and confronted, rather than implausibly denied.'

Alister McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.207.

THE PROBLEM OF GOODNESS

'Perhaps goodness is invisible because we expect it to be there. We expect the world to be good and our lives to be rewarding. It is only when something interferes with the goodness that we are startled into noticing. Evil is an intrusion into the normal. When something intrudes, we want to know why. When nothing intrudes, we do not ask questions about why things are the way they are,. It is not until the normal is disturbed that we begin looking for explanations.

The expectation that things will be good makes it easy for us to forget that we ought to seek an account for the existence of goodness as well as evil.'

Gregory E Canssle, Our Deepest Desires: How the Christian Story Fulfills Human Aspirations, p.54.

GOD'S SOVERIGNTY OVER SUFFERING

'...he told how he had never known his real father or mother and had been brought up sternly by the fisherman. And then he told the story of his escape and how they were chased by lions and forced to swim for their lives; and of all their dangers in Tashbaan and about his night among the tombs and how the beasts howled at him out of the desert. And he told about the heat and thirst of their desert journey and how they were almost at their goal whenever lion chased them and wounded Aravis. And also, how very long it was since he had had anything to eat.

"I do not call you unfortunate," said the Large Voice.

"Don't you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?"

"There was only one lion," said the Voice.

"What on earth do you mean? I've just told you there were at least two the first night, and -"

"There was only one: but he was swift of foot."

"How do you know?"

"I was the lion." And as Shasta gasped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. "I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.'"

CS Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, p.129.

PASTORAL SILENCE

'There are moments when one must not attempt to console, when the word must not be uttered to parents of murdered children. When one should keep one's mouth shut. "In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning., Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not."'

Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature, p.440.

THE COMFORTING ARMS OF OUR PARENTAL GOD

'...what a safe place the saints have to retreat to when they suffer the scorn, reproaches, scandals and misrepresentations of the world. When a child is bullied and hurt in the street by strangers, he quickly runs home to the love and protection of his father. There he tells everything and is comforted. In all the hard words and slanders which the saints meet with in the streets of the world, they may come home to their Father and tell him all their troubles and sorrows and be comforted. 'As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you,' says the Lord (Isa.66.13).'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.40.