After endless depression, nights without sleep, realization that the life he had entered was calamitous, without hope, he slowly became lucid, even calm. He was able to read and think. The days dawned quietly. I am through it, he thought. Like the survivor of a wreck, he took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed. He was in a period of contentment with daily life, of peace. He looked about himself gratefully. It was still not completely real to him, it was a kind of scenery he watched like someone on a train, some of it vivid, going by, some of it bare.
Light Years
James Salter
Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION
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Joyful persons do not necessarily make jokes, laugh, or even smile. They are not people with an optimistic outlook on life who always relativize the seriousness of a moment or an event. No, joyful persons see with open eyes the hard reality of human existence and at the same time are not imprisoned by it. They have no illusion about the evil powers that roam around, “looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8), but they also know that death has no final power. They suffer with those who suffer, yet they do not hold on to suffering; they point beyond it to an everlasting peace.
—Henri Nouwen -
“Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present.”
— Paul, Midnight in Paris (2011)
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“How will we know whether we are living according to the will of God or not? If you are sad for whatever reason, this means that you have not given yourself over to God, although from the outside it may seem that you have. He who lives according to God’s will has no worries. When he needs something, he simply prays for it. If he does not receive that which he asked for, he is joyful as though he had received it. A soul that has given itself over to God has no fear of anything, not even robbers, sickness, or death. Whatever happens, such a soul always cries, ‘It was the will of God.’”
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica -
Note the events of your life. Everything has deep meaning. You don’t understand them now, but later much will be revealed…
—Venerable Barsanuphius of Optina -
At times you will be forsaken by God, at times troubled by those about you and, what is worse, you will often grow weary of yourself. You cannot escape, you cannot be relieved by any remedy or comfort but must bear with it as long as God wills. For He wishes you to learn to bear trial without consolation, to submit yourself wholly to Him that you may become more humble through suffering. No one understands the passion of Christ so thoroughly or heartily as the man whose lot it is to suffer the like himself.
—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ -
We have seen that creative people are used to solitude, and we have explored some of the reasons for this. Instead of seeking friends in whom to confide, or counsellors to whom to tell their troubles, they use their gifts to come to terms with, and to make sense of, their sufferings. Once a work is completed, it can be shared with others; but the initial response to depression is to turn inward rather than outward.
Solitude, a Return to the Self
Anthony Storr -
If, therefore, sufferings have great rewards, and despair is the most grievous and most painful of all sufferings, imagine what will be the recompense for it! I will not cease chanting this refrain to you, in order to fulfill now what I promised in the beginning: to draw out from despondency itself the considerations that will give birth to consolation from despondency in you.
—Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia
