What Christian friendship looks like during crushing grief of 5-year-old's death
My friend’s 5-year-old son, Micah, died on New Year’s Eve. #Mourning #death #suffering #prayer
Source: https://www.christianpost.com/voices/what-christian-friendship-looks-like-during-crushing-grief.html
Just because your #suffering is not as great as someone else's suffering does not render it trivial. Pain hurts.
Quote of the day, 12 January: St. Teresa
If suffering for love’s sake
Can give such wondrous delight?
What joy will gazing on You be?
What will it be beholding
The Majesty eternal
Since Andrew seeing the cross
Was so filled with rejoicing?
Oh, how can it be wanting,
Delight in suffering’s midst!
What joy will gazing on You be?
Love, when it has grown,
Save in laboring cannot live,
Nor the hearty without fighting
Because of love for his Beloved.
By this love is victory won
And the desire to be right in all.
What joy will gazing on You be?
Since all people dread dying,
Why is it sweetness to You?
Oh, I will live
In a loftier way.
By Your death, O my God,
The weakest knows strength.
What joy will gazing on You be?
O cross, wood so precious
Majestic and grand!
Once greatly despised,
Now espoused to God,
With rejoicing I come,
Unworthy to love you.
What joy will gazing on You be?
Saint Teresa of Avila
Poetry 21, To Saint Andrew
Teresa of Avila, St 1985, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Kavanaugh, K & Rodriguez, O (trans.), ICS Publications, Washington DC.
Featured image: Our featured image is a detail from Diego Velasquez’s portrait of Saint Teresa, created in 1630. It is currently held in a private collection. Image credit: Discalced Carmelites (Public domain).
ALPHA DRIVE ONE's Arno To Partially Sit Out Debut Activities After Suffering Fracture #Activities #ALPHA #Arno #Debut #DRIVE #Fracture #Partially #Sit #Suffering
https://kpopnewshub.com/alpha-drive-ones-arno-to-partially-sit-out-debut-activities-after-suffering-fracture/?fsp_sid=3212
RE: https://mastodon.social/@tusk81/115855795445418640
Human beings are acting as if humanity is not in existence anymore!!
Nowadays what happened to our conscience, I ask and will always ask!!!💔💔💔
#crimesAgainstHumanity #mastodon #fyp #fediverse #video #politics #America #usa #death #murder #music #alhamdulillah #suffering #immigration
Where is the line between love and attachment?
And why does trying to help sometimes make things worse?
🎥 Watch →
https://youtu.be/RfBvMua_aeQ
#Zen #Love #Attachment #Compassion #Suffering #Awareness #Clarity
#CreationSpirituality emphasizes the #sacredness of Earth. It encourages #creativity to combat works causing #globalwarming & #climatechange & other expressions of #injustice, while working hard to interfere w/ the #suffering of #MotherEarth & her creatures. bit.ly/3Ql5rsN
#OrderOfTheSacredEarth
Photo: Greenpeace, Berlin
Why shouldn’t it hurt?
We are all finding, all the time, a kind of core. We hope it’s resilient. And if it isn’t resilient – well, equally, I’m always saying to people that strength is an overrated virtue. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I can’t. I really can’t cope with this,’ and turning to whoever or whatever it takes to get through. Although I suppose that resilience and strength are not quite the same. Resilience is being able to get up again, and strength is probably standing there while the rushing brook hurls around you – and there, the point is, you don’t have to get into it. You don’t have to be there. You don’t have to just survive. But I suppose for me – and this is just personal to me, only advice and not a tenet, ‘This is how it should be’ – there is something about that gathering of yourself every day, that regathering, too, which sets you up for the day to come.
Janet Ellis, in conversation with Andrew Copson, in What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by
There is an old Buddhist truism, often quoted and often misattributed, to the effect that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. It can sound unfeeling – smug, almost – to one in the midst of real distress; but I have found, strangely, that it is true in the end. We are frail, impermanent, like all living things. Of course change and decay happen to us, and of course they hurt. The problem arises when we are either gripped by the longing for the pain to stop, or paralysed with fear of the reasons for the pain, of its possible outcome. The answer to this is practice.
Practice? How can that work? Surely we cannot sit calmly in meditation when our hearts are broken, when pain knots our guts, or fear steals our breath. Almost certainly we can’t; probably the best we can do at times like this is remember – and often enough that in itself will be too much. How often do we expect from ourselves things the human frame cannot sustain?
Practice, hour after hour, day after day, when all is well, or when there are only little irritations, little twinges: that is the practice that will stay with us when things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold; when all we had hoped for has failed, and the cliff edge slips from under our feet. It is then that we realise that as Janet Ellis says, “You don’t have to just survive.” That, beyond belief almost, “[t]his is how it should be.” That, weirdly, it’s all right. Why not? Why not me? Why shouldn’t something dreadful happen to me? Who else should it happen to, for goodness’ sake?
What practice does, I think, is allow us to accept. Finally, radically (in the original sense of “at the root”) accept what is, even if what is happens to be terrible. Pain, loss, grief: these are inevitable parts of being alive, as is the fear of them. The “suffering”, in the sense of the old Buddhist saying, comes from thinking they shouldn’t be – from trying to make them stop. One can’t, of course: they stop when it is time for them to stop, and not before. Certainly not to order. And it is this realisation that brings the suffering, the craving for it to be otherwise, to an end. The pain may well be as bad as it ever was; but it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. It is part of what is; what, in some unfathomable way, is “how it should be”. The wind-torn wave is just a part of the river, just water, still flowing.
#AndrewCopson #contemplative #JanetEllis #practice #suffering #surrender
Notes from the Transition
A message in a bottle to whatever comes next—on suffering, consciousness, and what mattered to one primate watching intelligence leave the body.
https://metafunctor.com/post/2026-01-04-notes-from-the-transition/
