Words from a nun.

I have two Joan Chittister books with me, In Search of Belief and Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope. Yes, both titles sound incredibly cheesy. I've been reading the latter, in the hopes of gaining perspective from an outside voice on what it means to sincerely allow oneself to fully experience and live through trials. To my surprise, this lady has some really valuable words to share about the matter, giving voice to some of my own thoughts.

"There is no one who does not have to choose sometime, someway, between giving up and growing stronger as they go along. And yet if we give up in the midst of struggle, we never find out what the struggle would have given us in the end. If we decide to endure it to the end, we come out of it changed by doing it. It is a risk of mammoth proportions. We dare the development of the self."

"Life itself is the answer. If no one can escape struggle, then it must serve some purpose in life. It is a function of the spirit. It is an organic part of the adventure of development that comes only through the soul-stretching process of struggle. No other dimension of life can possibly offer it because no other process in life requires so much, so deeply of us. Struggle bores down into the deepest part of the human soul like cirrus tendrils, bringing new life, contravening old truisms. The problem is that struggle requires the most of us just when we expect it least."

"There is a difference between sick despair and those shocks of life that sour our laughter and gray our days, that turn the excitement of life into the burden of survival but which, if we understand them, do not, in the end, destroy us."

"The trick is to offer up the pain, accept the pain, and the pain will itself be good for us. But that is not a spirituality of struggle. That is an attempt to fool ourselves into thinking that we never wanted what we lost at all. It is an abject answer to the great losses of life and it never quite satisfies, never honors the past, and, at the same time, never completely becomes something new. Then we turn the process of struggle into a kind of spiritual masochism. If it hurts, we assume, it must be good for us."

"What I did not have that day was the strength of spirit to imagine that whatever the pain of the change, there was something in it that would call more out of me than I ever imagined was there."