If I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of me in high school-oh wait, I do!

One step at a time, over the years, as I sought to plumb the mystery of suffering (which cannot be plumbed), I began to see that there is a sense in which everything is a gift. Even my widowhood.

I can easily quote the saying: Misfortunes never come singly.

It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality.

I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you.

It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.

As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, "Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on.

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

By the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.

But as Rumi said, "Through love all pain will turn to medicine," not most pain, or for other people; and the pain and failures grew me, helped slowly restore me to the person I was born to be. I had to learn that life was not going to be filling if I tried to scrunch myself into somebody else's idea of me, i.e., someone sophisticated enough to prefer dark chocolate. I like milk chocolate, like M&M's: so sue me. But I no longer have to stuff myself to the gills.

They taught me that maturity was the ability to live with unresolved problems.

God isn't there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence