Turn My Mourning into Dancing: Finding Hope in Hard Times

by Henri J.M. Nouwen

I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes, all of creation. In so doing, we become participants in the great battle against the powers of darkness. Our little lives participate in something larger.

Living gratefully requires practice. It takes sustained effort to reclaim my whole past as the concrete way God has led me to this moment. For in doing so I must face not only today’s hurts, but the past’s experiences of rejection or abandonment or failure or fear.

God invites us to experience our not being in control as an invitation to faith.

The Word, the One through whom all is created, now becomes a victim of his creation. That is what his death meant—being out of control, for our sakes, from great love.

we come to expect too much from others. We become demanding, clingy, even violent. Relationships bend under a heavy weight because we lay exaggerated seriousness on them. We load our fellow human beings with immortal powers. In our worst moments, we make them objects to meet our expectations.

As long as we keep running around, anxiously trying to affirm ourselves or be affirmed by others, we remain blind to One who has loved us first, dwells in our heart, and has formed our truest self.

When we pray we admit that we don’t know what God is going to do, but remember that we will never find out if we are not open to risks.

As we find freedom to cry out in our anguish or protest someone’s suffering, we discover ourselves slowly led into a new place. We become conditioned to wait for what we in our own strength cannot create or orchestrate.

love, as it works in us, ultimately offers us a way out of self-righteousness and oppression. It rescues us from the illusion that makes the rich think they know what is best for the poor, men think they know what is best for women, or whites think they know what is best for blacks. It saves us from the illusion of power that leads us to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, or Jonestown.

Perhaps part of our fear comes from the fact that an empty place means that something may happen to us that we cannot predict, that is new, that leads us to a place we might not want to go. I might not want to hear what God has to say.

The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search. . . . We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.

A person of faith learns to trust so much that the outcome of the trust is given into the hands of the One in whom the trust is placed. We let God work out some details that we feel tempted to know or control but ultimately cannot.

We begin to see history not as a collection of events interrupting what we “must” get done. We see time in light of faith in the God of history. We see how the events of this year are not just a series of incidents and accidents, happy or unhappy, but the molding hands of God, who wants us to grow and mature.

Hope makes you see God’s guiding hand not only in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness.

There is an old expression that says, “As long as there is life there is hope.” As Christians we also say, “As long as there is hope there is life.”

To live with compassion means to enter others’ dark moments. It is to walk into places of pain, not to flinch or look away when another agonizes. It means to stay where people suffer. Compassion holds us back from quick, eager explanations when tragedy meets someone we know or love.

what we do to help and serve and minister does not create in the absence of God, but respond to what God is already bringing into being.

Real ministry starts taking place when we bring others in touch with more than we ourselves are—the center of being, the reality of the unseen—the Father who is the source of life and healing.

We can serve people only when we do not make our total sense of self dependent on their response.

Solitude means that our aloneness sometimes does not come as a sad fact needing healing but rather offers a place where God comes to bring communion.

He has no patience with the one who insists that he jump from the temple to show his power or turn stones into bread to prove his ministry credentials. He has heard God speak of his belovedness as God’s Son. That forms the basis of what he does and knows himself called to do. He will not be distracted by merely doing superficial good. He bears the very presence of God.

In Christ we live as God’s beloved before we were born and after we have died; all the circumstances in between will not negate that.

We must constantly learn to offer compassion in such situations because we have a heart that desires things that are complete, and we live—always—in situations that can seem only incomplete. We walk with (or bump into) people who always live and love imperfectly.

When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us. They are partial reflections of the great love of God, but reflections nevertheless. We see that gift precisely and only once we give up requiring that person to be everything, to be God. We see him or her as a limited expression of an unlimited love.

When our love grows from God’s love we no longer divide people into those who deserve it and those who don’t. It is this love that allows us to see the enemy as someone loved with the same love with which we are loved.

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. This kind of comfort comes most fully and powerfully visible in the Incarnation, wherein God comes into our midst—into our lives—to remind us, “I am with you at all times and in all places.”

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1) Jesus’ cry in his hour of death reminds us how we can pray this psalm, for all its poignancy, believing that God will live up to God’s promises and be with us even in the midst of our anguish.

Out of his utter pain and for-sakenness comes an intimate prayer: “My God, my God.” The God the psalmist fears has turned his gaze away is still a God he can address. And will address. The One who seems far from our plea is the One to whom we still turn.