There is authority and wisdom in bearing pain and suffering. Jesus and Mary modeled such “staying power”: Jesus on the cross and Mary standing near him are powerful witnesses to transformative spirituality. Returning no hostility, hatred, accusations, or malice directed at them. They held the suffering until it became resurrection.
That is the core mystery of Christianity, and it often takes our whole lives to comprehend it. We instinctively try to fix pain, control it, or even foolishly attempt to understand it, as the ego insists.
Jesus praised this quality over love and called it faith. The ability to withstand until we are moved by grace to a deeper level and a much larger space. Our private pain does not take center stage, but is a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. The normal mind cannot deal with pain and suffering, that’s why mature religion teaches some form of contemplation—to break our fixation to this egoic, disconnected thinking.
In the hurt and sorrow is where the answer, the wisdom is. The transformation is there, the rebirth is there. The pain of birth is excruciating, but our loving mother bore the pain until we made it through.
Healing always comes, and we emerge, shaped in the merciful womb of pain, of the fiercest love.
2 Corinthians 4:17 “For our present troubles… won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!”
