The Wound That Becomes a Window

In the writings of Teresa of Avila, the soul journeys through interior rooms toward union with God. But what she describes in the sixth mansion surprises us — the closer we draw to the Divine Center, the more intense the suffering becomes. Not less. More. This is the paradox Paul names in Romans 5:3-5: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope.

John of the Cross called it the dark night — that season when every consolation is stripped away, when prayer feels like speaking into stone. Yet he insisted this darkness was not punishment but purification. God was not absent. God was closer than ever, burning away everything that was not love.

Consider the practice of centering prayer. We sit in silence, and the mind rebels. Distractions arise — anxieties, griefs, old wounds. The temptation is to flee the chair, to fill the silence with noise. But the contemplative path teaches us to remain. To let the suffering surface. To release each thought like an open hand releasing a bird, trusting that beneath the agitation lies a stillness that holds us.

This is how hope is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Not by escaping the wound, but by sitting with it long enough to discover it has become a window — an opening through which the light of God streams in, unearned and unrelenting.