James Finley says, “In the light of eternity, we’re here for a very short time, really. We’re here for one thing, ultimately: to learn how to love, because God is love. Love is our origin, love is our ground, and love is our destiny. From the reciprocity of love, destiny is fulfilled, and the foundations of suffering are healed. Love and love alone has the authority to name who we are.”
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. However we view suffering and pain, it is necessary to accept them. The more we accept them, the better and more mature we will be.
Testimony of James Finley:
We cannot attain spiritual maturity if we are not able to integrate our pains and sufferings with our spiritual life. We must be even able to integrate the trauma and the abuses that we have experienced in our past.
I was raised in a home with a lot of trauma—physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—and I was very fragmented by all of it. I graduated from high school, ran away from home, joined a monastery, and became a monk.
When I entered the monastery, I thought I had left the trauma behind me. I was in this silent cloister, with Thomas Merton for my spiritual director. I was walking around reading the works of St John of the Cross, and I felt like I had reached my goal, really. And then I was sexually abused by one of the monks, my confessor. It completely shattered me. I never thought it was possible. I didn’t see it coming. I was not able to cope with the stress, and was very much disturbed: I was split in two. Now what was left of me were feelings of fear and confusion over which I didn’t have much control. There was no refuge for me. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I just left. I started a new life as a way to bury all the pain and move on.
Years later, I found myself in therapy and all hell broke loose. But with prayer and gentle pacing, I learned to see, feel, accept, and find my way through the long-term internalized effects of the trauma I had to endure in my childhood and adolescence. It was in this process that I came upon an intimate experience of who I am. By becoming vulnerable, by re-visiting the pain that I endured, I discovered the loving presence of God. The healing that I received by opening the wounds, was simultaneous with the discovery of God’s intimate presence, loving presence. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we unexpectedly come upon within ourselves what Jesus calls the pearl of great price: the invincible preciousness of our self.
In the act of admitting what we are so afraid to admit—especially if admitting means admitting it in our body, where we feel it in painful waves—in that scary moment of feeling and sharing what we thought would destroy us, we unexpectedly discover within ourselves this invincible love that sustains us unexplainably in the midst of the painful situation we are in.
As we learn to trust in this paradoxical way God sustains us in our suffering, we are learning to connect our heart to God, who protects us from nothing. He protects us from nothing, rather exposes us to everything. But at the same time, He unexplainably and mysteriously sustains us in all things. As this process of transformation continues, we find within ourselves the gifts of courage, patience, and tenderness to deal with our hurts, pains, abuses, sufferings, trauma. To deal with them with love. To integrate them into love, so that they too become love. In this way, we can become a gift and miracle to the world with our very presence.
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