In 1998, I interviewed a cancer survivor prior to the taping of my national television show, "Life Choices with Erie Chapman." One question I asked her was whether she resented her diagnosis and the subsequent horrors of chemotherapy.

   Her answer startled me. "Cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me," she said. "It has been such a wonderful teacher.

   Pain is always an expensive teacher. Why is it so hard for the rest of us to listen to what our agonies illuminate for us?

   "Beauty is not all brightness," John O'Donohue writes. "In the shadow lands of pain and despair we find slow, dark beauty."

   So long as we maintain a shallow notion of beauty as all flowers, smiles and light, it will be difficult to understand what both O'Donohue and the cancer patient understand. Illness is ugly. And yet illness can illuminate gorgeous gifts that lie beneath pain.

   O'Donohue invites us to rethink our notion of wounds as only situations where skin is torn and the sensitive tissue within is exposed. What if, he suggests, we think of a wound as "the place where much of the hidden pain of the body surfaces."

   In illuminating "dark beauty," this great poet and essayist references the harrowing journey every artist travels in order to mine great gold from the cave of great pain. "The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling…a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged equal to the hunger and desperation at its heart."

   The more we are willing, as caregivers, to face into our own pain, the more likely we are able to heal as caregivers. The more we turn away, the greater the danger that we will become hardened to the needs of others.

   Twenty-three years ago, I didn't immediately understand how a cancer patient could describe her illness as a gift. The subsequent agonies of my own life have taught me she was right.

   Every one of us has suffered. What if we choose to remember our pain as something we may study as if to prepare us for our next test – a time of pain that will surely come?

   Perhaps, as we reflect, we will see for the first time, the "slow, dark beauty" that hides in the shadows of our pain.

-Erie Chapman

Note: To pass on the Journal to other caregivers, we would be grateful if you might post our link on your Facebook page or in other ways you find appropriate. The link is www.journalofsacredwork.typepad.com . Thank you so much.

Photograph Erie Chapman 2011