At a certain point in our lives, we realize that we are not kids anymore: we get hurt and we feel pain but nobody comes to comfort us and blow away at the wound. We cry and the world does not stop—it just continues without breaking stride.

We can fight this loss and remain indignant— remain a brat and act as if the world owes us something. Or we can embrace the bare facts of life: that pain is part of life, just as joy is part of it; that the world can be unfair, but there is good in the world; that friends can hurt you but it doesn’t mean you’re enemies for life; that we are responsible for what we do no matter how we feel; that love can remain long after the feeling is gone; that it is ok to make mistakes. Mistakes are made without our meaning to— whoever wanted to be a mistake-maker— but the fact remains, mistakes are made. We try to minimize them, but they are made. No mistake is so great that we could not live it down. And no real success in the world happened without some kind of failure before that.

To remain in that mode of the victim: “He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,” is to lose sight of the realities of life. To be in victim mode is to see life as a litany of shoulds and musts not just for you but for other people as well. The world becomes a world of black and white and good vs. evil.

Easier said than done. But there is no other way to go about it. We know this to be true in our heads. We just get trapped and get bitten by temporary amnesia when we get victimized.

Later on, with the benefit of hindsight, and with the eyes of faith perhaps, you realize that the “bad” things that happened to you may have limited you, but they also made you who you are. And the bad experience itself may have put focus in your life. So what we thought as black was not really black. Black had a shade of gray.

Gerald Manley Hopkins said that the world is dappled. Skies are couple-coloured as a brindled cow. Trouts that swim are rose-moled. Men and women have good sides and bad sides to themselves.

Of course, we want the world to be white. But it is simply not. And to stay in a white world is not just to be naïve, it is to have this sports-team mentality where the world is divided into us and them; where us is better than them. Where what I hold as true is THE TRUTH. It is this sports-team mentality that has hindered real dialogue among religions and among peoples. It is this sports-team mentality that has led to wars and killings in the name of religion and in the name of “what I believe in.”
Maybe it is not about good vs. evil and good conquering evil. Maybe, just maybe, it is about good taking evil and transforming it to good. And this is our experience. “Bad” things that happened to us have made us stronger. Our weaknesses have become strengths. Great enemies have become our closest friends (isn’t it funny how you become even closer to a person after a fight?). We still find strength to continue long after we say we have given up. “Bad” experiences have made us better persons. That is why weakness is strength. That is why death brings life.

And maybe in the end, that is why the Cross is salvation!