Many times in my life I have encountered pain,
I could not escape it.
My tears did not wipe it away.
If I could have, I would have done it long ago.
And so I decided to let myself be surrounded by pain
and not to resist.
Something remarkable happened to me.
When I accepted it without impatience,
but let time flow within the pain,
it nurtured me for life, made me wiser.
Eventually, it completely departed.
A lot of time has passed since I last faced pain this way.
Now I still feel,
how pain gripped my body like a vice,
but I look at it with different eyes.
From a distance, as we look at something,
with which we are intimately familiar
and already know how it unfolds.
I even cannot comprehend,
how I could ever confront pain
with crying and sighing.
(text by bl. Tita Brandsma from the internment in Amersfoort, 1942)
