The Christian today has entered a new era of history characterized by rapid change. The time of a monolithic Church civilization is over. The Christian enclaves of medieval Europe will never return. The ghettoes have broken open and we are exposed to other views and forms of life. Faced as we are by a bewildering number of options, it seems difficult to relate them to our inner life direction in Christ.

In a world of increasing choices, we find ourselves often confused about how to grow to our graced destiny in the Lord. The secular world is dynamic, fascinating, seductive. Beguiled as we sometimes are by its grandiose projects, we begin to grow according to its arbitrary enthusiasms rather than growing as self directed Christians in accordance with divine inspirations. We become so adept at reacting we forget how to respond out of an inner at-oneness with the Lord and his word. We try to adopt new life styles, to be in with what is current. We define ourselves mainly on the basis of our occupations and hobbies or on how our neighbors value us. We become our secular roles to gain the approval of the world and betray the Christian in us who has to penetrate and transfigure these roles. We take on new patterns of living, yet we do not try to harmonize them with our spiritual values. We slide along thoughtlessly, bewitched by the media, beguiled by the sophistication of our secular peers.

Propelled by our need for self emergence, in accordance with the times, we forge ahead often in directions that have no real meaning for us because they are at odds with our inner direction. We lose our concrete sense of self and, the more lost we become, the more desperately we search for substitutes. In our desire to emerge and become what we are called to be, we may rush after every fad that offers a quick solution to the spiritual quest.

While present day secular society is a confusion of paradigms and life styles, it offers at the same time an astonishing variety of incarnational possibilities; it enables Christian spirituality to reveal itself in a richness of forms undreamt of before. Because of this pluralism of life styles, more types of Christians can live out their unique destiny; they can find their peculiar niche in the Father's house where those many rooms promised by Jesus are now becoming manifest. We may have lost security and simplicity, but we have gained creativity and pluriformity. The uniform Christian culture may be dead, but Christianity itself seems more alive than ever.

Since it is no longer sustained by a universal Christian culture, Christianity is like a leaven spreading itself through the dough of a redeemed humanity, transfiguring countless cultural styles and forms with the words and wisdom of Christ, incarnating itself in myriad ways in this world. Creative self unfolding in Christ has become a much more personal endeavor. The secular society offers no guidelines for authentic inner growth; only Christ and the masters of the spiritual life, who lived in his light, tell us what is involved in spiritual emergence in dialogue with the ever changing word where he calls us to be his "little flock."

The purpose of these studies in formative spirituality is to contribute to this dialogue. The publications in this series will direct themselves to various dynamics of the Christian life, illuminated for us in scripture and tradition, that gain in depth of meaning when placed in dialogue with newly emerging insights in literature, human sciences, and the contemporary experience of man. Each study intends to help the Christian find his life form in this unsteady and bewildering age. Each intends to help us answer such basic questions as: How can I find my way as a creative Christian in the new, wide open situation of a diaspora Christianity? How can I live the essential message of the faith in my own style now that there is no longer a uniform cultural code to tell me in detail how to incarnate Christ in my life and my world?

Christian spirituality can be seen as a discipline that guides this search for spiritual identity. The words of scripture, the teaching of the Church and her spiritual masters, illumine this pursuit. They inspire attitudes enabling us to be more open to the call of our true self in Christ. Spirituality explores these attitudes; it examines how we prepare for them, how they transform our daily life. When spirituality is approached in this practical way, it is called formative spirituality.

The focus of the formative approach is on the conditions, structures, and dynamics of Christian unfolding in daily life. It wants to facilitate the graced discovery and unfolding of our destiny in Christ. This new field of study tries to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for our personal-spiritual formation. It examines from this perspective special and personal spiritualities, experiences, devotions and exercises, abstracting in this way the essentials. It attempts to provide the Christian with a lasting foundation for graced living in Christ; it helps him to find his own practical and particular solutions to the life questions he will have to face without betraying the fundamental conditions of a Christian spiritual life.

This approach also takes into account the psychological, social and physiological obstacles that may interfere with the discovery of our true life form or life direction in Christ. Similar obstacles may hinder the full permeation of our whole life and personality by grace. The human sciences contain findings and insights regarding such obstacles and suggest effective ways of coping with them. Formative spirituality integrates-and if necessary transforms - such insights along with those found in Church doctrine, scripture, spiritual theology and philosophy into a self consistent approach to the personal-spiritual formation of the Christian.

Formative spirituality is in this way profoundly practical, for it refers to what effects a change in the inner life of the Christian. Change of a superficial nature effects mainly the emotional, psychological or external surface of personal life; profound change effects a lasting inner conversion. Formative spirituality tries, therefore, to discover, describe and apply the principles of the process of a profoundly practical change by grace. In this way it wants to be of help to Christians who go through conversion experiences at various successive stages of a deepening of their life by grace.

Formative spirituality builds on a theory of the development of the human person in relation to the invitation of grace. Contributions from such fields as the biblical and historical study of spirituality, the critical-textual approach to spiritual masters, and the systematic theology of spirituality are taken into account whenever advisable or necessary, but they are not the prime focus of this new field, which is to assist Christians in the discovery and unfolding of a unique life form rooted in their human make-up and in the specific direction grace gives to their lives.

 During fifteen years or more of developing this specialty, the results have been most gratifying. The vast majority of students, after three years of study and preparation in this field, have spontaneously reported on profound changes they experience in their personality and in the people entrusted to their care. The studies presented in this series have been written by men and women who for a prolonged period of time have participated in the unfolding of the new discipline of formative spirituality at the Center for the Study of Spirituality at the Institute of Man at Duquesne University. It is our hope that this series will enable the reader to participate in the fruits of this new field of study and to become a little more aware of the dialogue and deepening to which each Christian is called.

The Editors

 FOREWORD

 It is my pleasure to introduce the first book of this series of studies in formative spirituality. The author, Sr. Louise Hageman, has studied this new field with genuine interest and dedication. For three years, during her stay at the university center of which I am director, she elucidated one aspect of formative spirituality in the light of the methodology developed by this approach to human life. The topic she selected was suffering. She was guided by the faculty to reflect on the nature and meaning of human suffering and to ponder how it could be truly formative if lived creatively. Next her studies focused on the obstacles to creative suffering and the alienations that could emerge due to psychological and cultural factors that would turn us away from the fruitful acceptance of suffering in our lives.

In accordance with the integrative principles of formative spirituality, she was asked to explore what scripture and the spiritual masters have taught us about suffering and to bring their vision in dialogue with her own experience, with that of her contemporaries, and with philosophical and psychological writings by present day authors. All describe this basic human challenge and the many ways in which we can cope with it. After this research, the author was able to plumb the depths of the religious and Christian meaning of suffering.

It is most gratifying that Sr. Louise Hageman took the time and energy to select from her extensive study and its ample documentation those sections that are interesting to an audience not at home in this new discipline but eager to receive some of the experiential and practical insights engendered during her three years of research. The result of her work is this well written, attractive book that may foster reflection in the reader on the inescapable mystery of suffering. This book may also give readers an entrance to this new approach to spirituality. The side of life so well described by Sr. Louise is fundamental for all of us, especially today when we are so inclined to escape suffering or to cover it up with pious platitudes . She tells us instead about the concrete meaning of this experience for our personal and Christian growth and about how to meet this challenge concretely in everyday living.

 Of course, suffering is not the only challenge that comes to meet us, no matter how basic this experience may be. Therefore, readers should look forward to forthcoming books in this series-books based on the same theoretical experiential principles of formative spirituality. Sr. Louise's book, together with others in this series, will help to build a well rounded library that addresses the quest for personal and Christian living in today's world.

Adrian van Kaam

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I dedicate this book in gratitude and love to my religious community, the Sisters of St. Dominic, Great Bend, Kansas. I am particularly grateful to Sister Jeanette Sulzman, Sister Celine Benoit and Judy Menke who helped refine the manuscript and continually encouraged me and to my faithful typist, Sister Jane Marie McCoy.

I wish also to express my sincere appreciation to the faculty of the Institute of Man, particularly to Father Adrian van Kaam and Doctor Susan Muto, for their interest and assistance at the time of my study in Duquesne.

Finally, I am grateful to my family and friends without whose inspiration and love this work could not have been accomplished.

Sr. Louise Hageman, OP 

INTRODUCTION 

Four years ago at the Center for the Study of Spirituality of the Institute of Man, Duquesne University, I completed a thesis on suffering. In the process of writing I discovered that, although I began this study thinking I had never really suffered, I had had suffering experience. Both of my loved parents had died; loneliness had been a rather constant companion and suicidal thoughts, which in their very clarity made me break into a cold sweat, stalked my life.

Mostly though, I denied all these and many other suffering realities. I lived my life in anxiety. This anxiety was both unrecognized and unnamed.

Writing, studying, and reflecting about suffering confronted me with the fact that I had never really lived my sufferings. In the three years that I spent researching the topic and trying to explore my own experience, I changed. I could not mouth words I did not live and at the same time experience any sort of wholeness.

I realized that I was alienated, out of touch with myself. I was caught in the consumeristic, competitive, materialistic milieu in which I lived. The divine spark within was dying. I had become so embedded in emptiness that I believed "that is all there is." In fact, I was too empty to really suffer.

To some degree, I still am. I keep waiting to write this book because I feel it is so incomplete; nonetheless, I have come to realize that all things human take time and that though my search will always be unfinished, I need to write.

What happened was, that though fearful of the unknown, I was forced to look for a harbor, a shelter from nothingness, and in the process I was partially released from my prison. The will to live was born by subjectively passing through death. As I entered my self alienation, my emptiness, my nothingness and named my questions, life grew free and in this freedom my creative, alive self was discovered.

Before me hangs a poster with a quote from Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull which reads, "We're free to go where we wish and to be what we are." Is freedom related to alienation? Are we free? Can we be free? Most of us want to be free. But perhaps when we first experience our freedom we are like the bison in the film, Bless the Beasts and Children and we don't go very far i.e. we do not actualize our potential, because like the bison, we do not yet know how to use our freedom. We may be our own greatest enemy.

We get caught in the need to be liked so we become people pleasers, or the need to get ahead and we penny pinch, or the need for attention and we sit on our pity pots. But we are made to be free to go where we wish and to be what we are or, as someone said so simply with tears in her eyes, to smell the grass. Why then, do we so often go where we would not and be what we are not? True, Christ told Peter, that he would be led where he would not wish to go but the paradox is that in going there, Peter, was given back to hirnself. Here, we speak of going not because He calls but because we are so absent from the truth of our life, that we are manipulated into what we would not.

Unfortunately most of us are unaware that we are living in an alienated fashion. Can we change this pattern? Do we want to change it? If we never realize our imprisonment, we are not free to change because we do not know that we are only half living. One trend, that predominates in our society and that futurologists predict will increase, is self alienation. Look with me, and see if there is truth in what I say. Are we not bored, living the sameness of life in a stale and lifeless way? By lifeless, I don't mean quiet. I mean lifeless. Quiet is often filled with life. In fact my proposition is that we have so little life because we have so little real quiet . . . real inner calm in which we dare to look at truth. As long as we keep running, we need not listen. I believe that if I am to be my creative real self, I must grow in authentic inwardness.

Creative living springs from an inner unique force, from something deep within that makes me most myself. To live creatively is to discover my inward person. It means entering deeply into my inner well and freeing what is there, what is me and, yet, more than me. Living creatively means finding my own deepest truth and since it is truth, it means touching the truth of all, the ground of all reality, the Ground of Being.

The biblical teaching rings true, "the Kingdom of God is within." Only by coming in touch with my deepest self can I go through and beyond myself to the Self that sustains us all.

How do I grow in inwardness? Mostly, I find it hard just to be with my self unless some experience moves me to inwardness. One such experience can be the experience of suffering. In this book I am going to share some of my research and reflections on suffering. Most of these reflections are presented in dialogue with philosophical, psychological, sociological, and literary works. Correlations, commonalities and implications are demonstrated.

It is true that I can discover only some of suffering's kernel, just as I can only playfully glimpse what creative living means. I may make dogmatic statements but they are far from dogma. It is only in a leisurely search into reality that truth emerges. By listening and dialoguing with what is written here, truths deep within yourself may be discovered that move beyond what is recorded.

Hence, rather than try to develop a line, I will spiral into my subject, touching again and again the same bases and hopefully, with each spiral facilitate a deeper penetration into truth. The three bases or aspects around which these reflections revolve are inwardness, limitation and attitude. The inwardness we experience in suffering discloses our limitations and in this inner reflective stance we determine our attitude.

In conclusion, the following journal reflection highlights how Scripture parallels the personal experience described in this introduction.

 "Have not joy and gladness vanished from the house of our God." Joel 1:16

"But now, now-it is Yahweh who speaks-come back to me with all your heart." Joel 2:12

DARK ROOMS

My heart is lonely.

Many dark rooms are within,

Life holds little promise

It's all been done before.

Offices, places to go, things to do,

Even hours with friends, turn

empty, shallow, repetitive, lifeless.

Why? Why do I, who usually feel that

all of creation is full of promise,

find myself scared, scared of my own aloneness,

my deathlike inner world?

Is this a call, a call to go deeper

into the rooms, the passageways

dark, dark?

But then the darkness becomes familiar,

life even lingers here, I think.

Is that you, Yahweh?

Am I asked to suffer my existence

To discover richer, truer, more

Honest Life?

Then fearfully, not too energetically,

but really, I hope, I live "Yes".

PART I

SUFFERING A SOURCE OF INWARDNESS

 
"In the midst of winter . . . "

CHAPTER 1

 CREATIVE SUFFERING

She is dead. Often I had feared this moment. I knew she saw the doctor weekly. Once in the middle of the night I heard the priest with her. The following morning I kept silent waiting to learn if any of the family whose mumbling voices I recognized the night before would tell me about the anointing. They did not. I decided that I would have to investigate for myself to find out what I really did not want to know. When she took her daily nap on a couch in the back room, I would creep to the door, open it a crack to check if she were still breathing. After I had seen her chest rising and falling rhythmically I could run and play, knowing I would have her a while longer.

But now she is dead. I am without a mother. In one way, it is a relief. The long waiting is over. My life becomes a rather serious one. I spend hours sitting in the corner of the garage or walking alone and lonely. Yet, I want to be by myself. I have to think, to find direction for my life. I don't want to be lonely, but there is no one to whom I care to tell everything. I shared so much of my life with my mother. Now I am learning what it is to be without her.

Her absence throws me back on myself and I turn within. I realize that no one can replace her. I will have to stand on my own. My life can never be the same. In a sobering fashion I know that I myself am responsible for me. I cannot depend on outside guidance because no one cares for me in the same way. Her death is something that has happened, and I cannot change it. I feel that I can never be totally happy because separation from those I love will always be a possibility. I am limited. Furthermore, I too, will die. I cannot avoid pain and death, but I can choose to live this one life, my life, in the best way.

When we are confronted with suffering, we don't like it. We want to get out of it in any way we can. We want to alienate the pain from ourselves. Maybe if we get busy enough, or find some jolly good persons, or simply go to sleep, the remembrance of the suffering will go away. At some point, however, all is quiet, and the skeleton of denied reality peeps out. Perhaps we pretend that the anxiety is not there. But pretense leaves us with an unsettled, restless, rotten feeling. All is not right but we dare not look. We say and live that which is not ourselves. We will not admit that we are aliens to ourselves because as long as we ignore the truth, we need not assume the responsibility to change. However, if suffering gets painful enough we may be forced to remain with it. We may for the first time really be honest about life or we may be cynical, bitter and/or indifferent.

Suffering is an evil. In the sense, though, that suffering moves me toward inwardness, toward truth, toward reintegration of selfhood and thus refines and deepens me, suffering is gift.

Let's suppose that you-I-become gravely ill. I see the doctor and from his conclusion I realize that things are bad. I can't believe it. This kind of thing only happens to other people. Not to me. What am I to do? At first people write or call or take time to visit but with time it seems that my illness becomes a matter of indifference for most people, maybe because they, too, are scared of death. After awhile, even my friends seem bored when I tell them about my pain. I am left alone with it, with myself; but I am scared to be alone. I go to my room and lie down, I get up, there is nothing I can do to change this painful reality. The days pass and the pain increases and I alone know of it and all those about me don't understand or don't want to understand, and they go about as if everything in the world is as it was before. I reflect. "I shall be no more, so what will there be when I am no more? Is this death? No, I don't want to die."

So, we are terrified about being alone and yet we feel that anything is better than death. What makes this aloneness so hard to bear is our inability to face who we really are, what our lives are all about. We have lived so long away from our real selves that we are not aware that we live a lie. When we can quit defending ourselves and let go of self righteousness, when we can be with ourselves and enter deeply, courageously into our inner world, then we move toward truth-the truth of who we are. And it is this very truth that sets us free. Through it we transcend a past that has not been all that it should be. Maybe for the first time, we may bring together all our real values and experience a sense of wholeness. We may find the courage to ask forgiveness and to sincerely care for others, all others. Death loses its terror and though physically we may be dying, in a deeper sense we are reborn and know a oneness with reality that brings real joy.

Must we wait until faced with our own or another's death before we know such oneness with reality, such freedom? Can we be free to actualize the full potential of ourselves long before we face the immediate reality of death? How? It is in the inwardness, the awful aloneness of suffering, that we face truth. Can we take this journey inward without suffering?

Dag Hammarskjold has an entry in his diary Markings which reads:

 The longest journey

Is the journey inward

Of him who has chosen his destiny

Who has started his quest

For the source of his being.

 The journey inward is a long one. To enter deeply into the inner well, to have some kind of inner life, to be in solitude is initially foreign. We are restless. What, after all, can come of this? It seems that we are doing nothing. Certainly, we have produced nothing concrete in solitude. Doesn't the American way demand that we have something to show for ourselves, that we be practical, and forget interiority?

Such may be our critique of a solitary life style. If we continue to listen to our remarks, we discover that similarly we are saying, "Why don't you talk with her/him, I never seem to really come across like I want to. I get defensive, etc. ... Or, we may supposedly get along well with all kinds of people and yet experience ourselves as restless. Is this because we do not know ourselves?

Hammarskjold says if we choose to know this "I", to know our destiny, our truth, if we are in quest of the Source of our being, we must go within. We must take this painful inner journey to truth.

Each of us must discover our own unique way of entering this inner world of ourselves. Today, some are finding that the intensive journal of Ira Progoff facilitates such presence to one's self. A journal certainly can be a means of seeing deeply into truth and such reflective insight is indeed a form of contemplation. There are multiple ways we may experience inwardness. Sometimes it may be in nature, in music, in relationships, and all of these can be some form of contemplation.

To contemplate is to be in communion with. It is to wonder in order to discover the ultimate root of reality. When we thus commune, we are no longer cut off or alienated from life. According to Douglas Steere, contemplation is described as the power to look steadily, calmly, and searchingly at something. Or, as Aquinas says, contemplation is a simple unimpeded penetrating gaze on truth. Experientially I know that lovingly giving myself to life creates a closeness of heart to everything.

Consider a small seashell. As I hold it in my hand and gaze upon it, I see more than just the mere seashell. I really see the seashell ... the very fine lines that are marked upon it ... I can feel the hardness of it ... I can marvel at the creation of something so unique. There is not another in the whole world exactly like it; no other has served as the habitation of exactly the same specimen of life. I can ponder the God who allows such reality to be. I see the purple hue fade into the delicate ivory white on the edges, delicate lines still so present even now in this abandoned shell. For me, this shell becomes like no other shell.

I am present to its reality in much the same way that John Moffitt describes presence in this poem:

 

TO LOOK AT ANYTHING

To look at anything,

If you would know that thing,

You must look at it long;

To look at this green and say

'I have seen spring in these woods!' will not do-you must

Be the thing you see,

You must be the dark snakes of stems

And ferny plumes of leaves,

You must enter in

The discussion of our religious nature is presented here in order to provide a basis for our remarks about suffering and its relation to us as religious persons.

At some time in our lives we experience the call of that which speaks of more than mere materiality. Perhaps we know it when we are surprised by the sunburst at dawn or look into the innocent, shining eyes of a baby. Or, like William Wordsworth, we may be moved to exclaim, "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."1

Again, it may be that we recognize our spirit nature when we question. We may wonder about time and our inability to capture it or space and its immensity. With William Blake we may have questioned the source of the power, beauty and grandeur of life. 

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?2

 

Most of all we come in touch with that which is beyond and within ourselves when we experience selfhood in communion with others. No individual left to his own devices can cross the threshold that separates him from another. Nevertheless, there are times when a light breaks through and we discover another consciousness like ourselves. Even though we fear being unable to communicate with such a kindred spirit, our very fear may indicate that we are already close to meaningful presence.

In all of these experiences, the thrill of nature, questioning, human presence, there is an element of mystery. When we fail to see this mystery, we treat life as a problem. We do not reflect on life's deeper dimensions. Then we have only "business relations" and we use persons and things merely to serve our own ends.

A religious person respects life and its mystery. However, according to the Christian existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, contemporary man is no longer rooted in mystery.³ Frequently, in present day culture the human person is regarded as but one object among the rest and is presented merely as a problem to be solved by technical methods alone. Marcel does not deny the value of the scientific and pragmatic intelligence, for there is a definite sense in which man is rightly included with the other things that are subject to technical control and measurement. However, this is not the only way in which man and other beings ought to be treated.

Man is both a thing and more than a thing, for he can undertake an evaluation of his own life. Such evaluation raises the question: who is it that asks about the meaning of his being and of the world? Who is it that calls this life into question? As we inquire, about being we are ourselves an affirmation of being because only human beings can question.

The distinction between problem and mystery implies a distinction between scientific and philosophical knowledge. A problem is that which can be inventoried, characterized and manipulated and is thus open to solution by the application of special techniques. Existential acts and the attitudes of persons cannot be handled as problems. These are of the nature of mystery.

Marcel defines a mystery as a problem that is constantly encroaching upon its own data and hence going beyond the condition of a problem. In the face of a problem, the investigator retains his superiority and distance. When this data is threatened by the direction of the study, then the threshold of mystery is crossed. Mystery designates the zone where the intellect acts in a new way in search of being. Mystery is constituted when we recognize man's participation in being as a creatively received gift from God.

It is through reflection that we know the divine source of the personal self. To enter into ourselves is to find the gift of being as it comes fresh from God's hands. It is to discover that we are not our own.

Mystery or the realm of being includes all things in the world so we do not need to escape from the senses in order to know being. Rather, to gain some understanding of being, we need a closer fidelity to these components of experience. The being studied in metaphysics is not a revealed mystery but a natural one. Through natural reflection on experience in the Marcelian sense, we withdraw from the world in order to attach ourselves to the creative source of the world. We thus ally ourselves with the world from a divine perspective. We do not regard the world solely as an object of knowledge and control. As a participator in being, we are more intimately attached to the world than we would be if we took a purely problematic approach to it. Let us consider here how this might occur in our personal expe

Experience of Being

I am alone. The sun is hot but I have moved to the shade of a tree that hides the dirt road a half mile away and leaves only the tall grass, a lake and the trees beyond in my line of vision. Next to me a ladybug is scaling the tall blades of grass. The intricate pattern formed by the tips of a nearby weed attracts my attention. I look at it so long that it loses its identity and its silhouette seems detached from all else. The glistening water ripples slightly. Lazily lying back, I gaze only at the sky and the slowly moving clouds. Except for the buzz of industrious insects about me, the day is quiet. I came here when the sun was rising and now it is almost directly overhead.

Within I am quiet, too. There is no planning, no deciding where I must be next, or what I want to get done. All seems as it ought to be, so in place. I, too, seem to blend and to be a part of nature. I feel at home.

 

Perhaps that is the freedom about which Marcel speaks. The freedom that allows me to choose the place that is already mine. Weeds, field flowers and the insects live in their place and each radiates a unique and special beauty.

I, free to choose to be what I am, frequently choose to be what I am not. Then, I experience myself as out of touch, as off center, as a foreigner to reality. Physically, I am sometime hyperactive and pushy and often tired. Mentally, I am anxious, demanding, controlling. I will to make my world. I do not respect the things about me for their own individual witness to being but rather handle them carelessly and unseeingly.

In the realm of things, consider, for example, a simple object like the pencil in my hand. What is it to me? Can it speak to me of more than materiality? A pencil, hard like my heart is so much of the time, hard like the firm support of a friend, useful because it serves as it is intended, useful but yet content to be laid aside for days, even years, waiting to be in the service of poetry or forgery, unable to resist because it lacks the freedom that is mine:a pencil is such a simple thing and yet I am so oblivious to the truth that it could teach me.

Consider again the wisdom that can be gained by contemplating the flower at my side. Alfred Tennyson reminds me of the truths it holds in these lines:

 Little flower, but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.4

 Or, again from "Auguries of Innocence" by William Blake, the same truth is reiterated: 

To see the world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.5

 
Persons, even more than the things of nature, deserve my respect. Sometimes sharing with others has been a source of inspiration. At other times I have found such talk empty and dissipating. Perhaps this is true because I am not attentive to the other in a reverent way. Regardless of what another says, even should one speak of the weather, this word is in one sense inspirited. One's truth and the particular way of expressing it is uniquely filled with life. Being inattentive, I may fail to treat another with dignity.

Each of us is inspirited. We do not belong to ourselves alone. The originality which is ours is in one way greater than us. Our awareness of this truth may be a path to the divine source of our personal selves. For such revelation, we can only wait in an attitude of gratitude, openness, spontaneity and reverence. Such creative waiting will enable us to live our lives remembering and appreciating the mystery that is life. In thus respecting the mystery of all, we also respect the reality of suffering; we do not view suffering as a mere depreciation of self.

Rather, we allow suffering to gently beckon us home. We accept the reality of our finiteness and frailty which pain makes evident, thus surrendering to the infinite mystery that is us. We discover that there are infinite depths which we have only begun to sound and we realize that the immensity of all that is will never be known in its totality by us. By searching within, we come to experience Someone beyond. This Someone speaks to us through the everyday people, events and things in our lives, through our questioning. How is it that we are able to question? Why is it that we are constantly seeking? Why must we suffer? What within makes us search? Why is there anything at all? Why are we not like a stone, a tree, a dog? What is this mystery? What can we know about it? Perhaps that is a large part of the mystery:the fact that we cannot know in any sort of rational way. Even if we understand it, we cannot verbalize it. We can, however, live it. The mystery will permeate who we are and make us alive to all that is. 6