Healing depends on wanting to be well. I may not forget the blows I have suffered in life, but I must choose not to live under their power forever. Most of all, I must not choose to imprison myself in my own pain. Whatever has mutilated us—the betrayal, the dishonesty, the mockery, the broken promises—there is more to life than that.

The first step of healing, then, is to find new joy for myself to tide me through the terror of the abandonment. It is time to get a life instead of mourning one. When the beating is over, there is nothing to do but to get up and go on, in a different direction to be sure, but on, definitely on.

The second step in healing is to find new ideas in which to live. Whatever we needed before the breakpoint came—security, love, connectedness, certainty, identity—we must now find someplace else. We must put our hope in risk and find it challenging, in self and find it strong, in newness and find it enough.

The third step of healing is to trust ourselves to someone else just when we think we cannot trust anyone or anything at all. Just when we are not sure who the enemy really is, we must risk confidence in someone again. It is a false and hollow cure that ends with a sterile handshake. Healing comes for both the beaten and the intellectually bound when they step across the lines in their minds and hope that this time, in this person, in this situation, they will find the acceptance, the enlightenment, needed to join the human community one more time.

Healing comes when I have been able to desensitize myself to the indignity of hurt by telling it to death until I have bored even myself with the story. For this I need the Samaritans, the healers, who, by taking me into the arms of the heart to let my cry transcend their own small lives and learn about the human condition what they themselves would never have come to, perhaps, without me. We need the Samaritan who listens and understands. It is not the wounding that kills; it is the lack of understanding that paralyzes the soul. It is, after all, understanding that every soul on earth is seeking.

The final step of healing is a matter of time itself. To honor the fact that there is “a time for healing” means surely that we come to peace with the notion that healing does not come before its time, that healing takes time, that time itself is a healer who comes slowly, bringing new life and new wisdom in its wake.

"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground,” Oscar Wilde teaches. It is in the healing process that we come to a new appreciation of life. What the human being survives is the mark of the mettle of humanity. What we manage to transcend is what we have triumphed over. What we have wrestled with and won is what measures in us the quality of our lives.

—from For Everything A Season, by Joan Chittister (Orbis)