Joy is a piercing desire, a mystical longing both painful and sweet: a kind of homesick-ness for a home we scarcely remember.
~ Deborah Smith Douglas, in Weavings, XV:4
An experience of collective pain does not deliver us from grief or sadness; it is a ministry of presence. These moments remind us that we are not alone in our darkness and that our broken heart is connected to every heart that has known pain since the beginning of time.