Healing

Time doesn't heal psychological wounds. Perspective does. Days passed don't guarantee insight gained. Seeing last year's disappointments through an old lens is more upsetting than viewing yesterday's setbacks from a new angle. Time creates distance. Reflection offers wisdom.

“My belief is that the two universal paths are great love and great suffering,” he told me. For much of his life, Rohr has used suffering as a spiritual tool to help him learn to be humble. “I pray for one humiliation a day,” he told me. “It doesn’t have to be major.”

In my mind, pity isn’t even analogous to compassion. Pity is just the paternalistic cousin of contempt. It allows us to see others as “those less fortunate than ourselves” (a term I loathe). Pity keeps the other person at a distance and me in a rarified state of satisfaction.... Compassion, on the other hand, draws us close.

“I’m trying to encapsulate that feeling, a sort of ode to that feeling when Emma Thompson stands there and cries when she’s holding the CD in Love Actually . The lyrics are about the confirmation that my relationship was dead, and it’s the only song I’ve ever cried during the vocal take which has never happened before.”

The great Borges thought it best to look upon our broken inner state as one of life’s great opportunities—to prove ourselves deserving of the blood pulsing through our veins. “Everything that happens,” he wrote, “including humiliations, misfortunes, embarrassments, all is given like clay,” so that we may “make from the miserable circumstances of ou... See more

Whenever my parents, siblings, and I went to the village, we prayed the Rosary in Igbo every morning with the extended family but outside that, I could converse only in English, which my grandfather did not speak. One afternoon, I had been worried about something that needed to be tabled before God. While my mind went on its internal monologue in E... See more

I might be terrified, but I’ll still be obedient to what I’m supposed to do.