"In Can You Drink the Cup? [Henri] Nouwen writes of 'the Cup of Sorrow.' Famine, epidemics, child prostitution, in his global travels Nouwen had grieved over all of them. He lived daily with the sorrows of the mentally handicapped. And he had his own times of depression and doubt.
"'There was a time,' he wrote, 'when I said, "Next year I will finally have it together," or "When I grow more mature these moments of inner darkness will go."'
"Christian maturity -- this was the very subject I'd hoped to ask him about! I too was always waiting for unwanted traits to fall away. Someday I wouldn't have these cyclic depressions. Someday I'd be more outgoing. Someday I'd get my desk cleaned up.
"'But now I know,' Nouwen continued, 'that my sorrows are mine and will not leave me.'
"I read the words with dismay. Here was a modern-day saint who to the very end of his life could not eliminate the negatives in his personality. 'The adolescent struggle to find someone to love me...unfulfilled needs for affirmation...sorrow that I have not become who I wanted to be. They are very old and very deep sorrows and no amount of optimism will make them less.'
"But there's a surprise about this Cup, Nouwen went on. 'The cup of sorrow, inconceivable as it seems, is also a cup of joy.' He could not explain the mystery; he could only experience it. 'In the midst of the sorrows is consolation, in the midst of the darkness is light, in the midst of the despair is hope'
"In the midst...simultaneously...in the very worst moment. I thoguht of John in the ICU. Thought of the darkest times in my own life, and saw myself in such moments turning to God, gaining compassion, growing.
"And if I refuse the Cup? If I will not make peace with the flawed person I am -- what then?
"Maybe, I think, carrying on in my head the conversation I never had with Henri Nouwen, it's not my flaws that stand between me and heaven. Maybe it's that ideal image of myself. That serene, loving, well-organized creature-that-never-was. The effot to be perfect, Nouwen's insight suggests, may be hell's biggest temptation.
"My friend Lucia Ballantine gave me a verse by Leonard Cohen that I've taped tot he side of my still heaped-up desk.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That is how the light gets in."
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