Struggle & Hope

Whether up against physical illness, sadness, injury, disability, on going pain or stress, financial disaster, menopause, sorrow or another giant we cannot seem to defeat, we all struggle.

Here are excerpts from Joan Chittister's book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, from the chapter The Struggle of Vulnerability.

In the end, the United States' clash with terrorism wounded us as much or more psychologically than it cost us either in people or in places. It became a struggle of major proportions that struck at our sense of self, our stature in the world, our unassailable aplomb. Worst of all, it was a case of Gulliver finding himself at the mercy of the Lilliputians, little people nowhere equal to the foe they had chosen. But in control, nonetheless. And therein lies the pain. The burden of humanity is the knowledge that at any time any one of us, all of us, may be brought down to size, defeated and left to bear it. The message of struggle is clear: No one, nothing, is totally invulnerable. Inside, all of us wage war with a sense of self that resists destructibility, defenselessness and fragility with might and main.

. . To go on going on, in the face of repeated failures, despite being clearly damaged, in full view of a world that sees us to have been wounded, is to discover what it really means to be human. It is also the moment in which we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to become the rest of what we are able to be.

. . . To be less than perfect in a culture and an era that expects perfection rankles our sense of self. It puts in to jeopardy all the unassailability we worked so hard to imply. I have heard men who have come hoe to a burgled house say that the shock of it was worse than the loss of what had been taken. Pressed, one man said, "Now I know something about how a woman must feel when she's been raped." It compares, in other words, to a violent encroachment on the private and pallid self. It is the awful proof that we are not as secure as we like to pretend we are, not as strong as we purport to be. It is the living sign that no matter how impressive I see myself, there is always the possibility that I, too, may be vulnerable to forces I cannot see and do not know and cannot vanquish.

. . . . Vulnerability is the call to self-acceptance. It is the great liberating moment on the human journey.

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