Short Quote on suffering from Henry Nouwen
I came across this while reading my old blog posts, it is from Henry Nouwen's book, "The Wounded Healer". “Every Christian is constantly invited to overcome his neighbors fear by entering into it with him and to find in the fellowship of suffering the way to freedom.” Freedom comes from suffering, but only if we walk together. When we enter our neighbors fear, when we embrace the whole humanity and divinity of our neighbor in love, we discover freedom. This of course reminded me of the Star Wars quote from Yoda, "Fear is the path of the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." This is when we choose to not help our neighbors, or when we choose not to accept another hand offered in help to ourselves. This kind of suffering, bound up in hate and fear is when we choose to see our suffering as the most important suffering we know, as the worse suffering that is out there. Isolationism is what causes this kind of suffer