“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been doing some spiritual reading every day during my afternoon quiet time; I call it my quiet hour.

(First, I listened to Johnny Cash’s “Johnny Cash And The Royal Philharmonic” Album he did with Bob Dylan and his daughter June. It was wonderful.

I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis, Parker Palmer, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Anne Lamott, James Allen, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I love the writings of these people and have learned so much from them. Today, I read an essay called Go Into The Place Of Your Pain by Nouwen from his book The Inner Voice Of Love.

I was touched by Nouwen’s essay on pain, as I’ve spent a good portion of my life, as most people have, figuring out what to do with pain and how to live with it.

Nouwen, a deep and practical spiritual thinker, suggests that we have to live through our pain gradually and thus deprive of its power over us.

I’ve often tried to define pain.

The best I can do is that is the experience of not receiving – or losing – what I most need. It is a place of emptiness, a kind of drowning, shortness of breath, where I sharply feel the absence or loss of love and safety.

It is challenging to revisit pain because I end up face to face with my deepest wounds and my helplessness to make them disappear.

Nouwen suggests trusting that the experience of emptiness is not the final experience; it’s not the last straw. Beyond it are hope and healing and a place where I can be held in love and kindness.

This has been my experience. I see fear and pain as geography, a space to cross.

There is always something brighter and better on the other side. There is always the other side. That is the leap of faith that defines spirituality: hope and trust.

“So you have to go into the place of your pain,” writes Nouwen, “with the knowledge in your heart that you have already found the new place. You have already tasted some of its fruits.”

I need to weep over my past and lost pains so that I can slowly but gradually and steadily become free to live in the new place, the next place, without melancholy or suffering.

I don’t look back. Every day is a day that I do the best I can do. That has to be enough.

There is always a next place, a new place. Every time I find the pain, I also look to see beyond it.

(Photo: The Cambridge Valley Livestock Auction)