Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

Ultimately mourning means facing what wounds us in the presence of One who can heal.

It seems paradoxical, but healing and dancing begin with looking squarely at what causes us pain.

I am less likely to deny my suffering when I learn how God uses it to mold me and draw me closer to him. I will be less likely to see my pains as interruptions to my plans and more able to see them as the means for God to make me ready to receive him. I let Christ live near my hurts and distractions.

If God is found in our hard times, then all of life, no matter how apparently insignificant or difficult, can open us to God’s work among us.

Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life’s hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.

Loving someone means allowing the other person to respond in ways you have no control over. Every time you engage yourself in an intimate, loving way with someone else you become at least partly subject to the exhilaration of hearing another person’s yes or the disappointment in his or her no. The more people you love, the more pain you may experience. For the great mystery of love is that while it can be received, it can also be rejected. Every time you love you enter into the risk of love.

When we mourn, we die to something that gives us a sense of who we are. In this sense suffering always has much to do with the spiritual life. We surrender our striving denial of our limitations. We release our hold on a piece of our identity as a spouse, a parent, as a member of church, as a resident of a community or nation. We may even suffer for our faith. Jesus’ first followers were handed over to persecution and death. And so we admit, not without many tears, that we sometimes must let go of what we hold very dear.

when our response to the world is driven by a drive to control and hold, we will never be satisfied.

Pain suffered alone feels very different from pain suffered alongside another. Even when the pain stays, we know how great the difference if another draws close, if another shares with us in it.

Our life span, whether thirty years or ninety, gives us opportunities to say yes to a hidden gift from God, to a reality that, while difficult, provides a place for divine encounter and deep growth.

Why do we not prepare ourselves for death when we live so close to it?

If death does not become a part of our present it never will be our exodus to the future.