Present in the Pain Podcast

Present in the Pain

June 23, 2022 Eileen Tully
Present in the Pain Podcast
Present in the Pain
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Show Notes Transcript

This is the introductory episode and in it, Eileen shares a little of her own story of child loss and talks about why she chose the name Present in the Pain for her ministry. She knows that the experience of child loss can feel isolating, but if it has happened to you, she hopes to help you to feel understood by unpacking the many ways that it affects our lives so that you to know you're not alone.

You can learn more about Eileen and her ministry for grieving mothers - which includes healing retreats and helpful resources - by visiting her website, EileenTully.com

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Discuss this episode and find support for pregnancy and child loss in the FREE online Present in the Pain Community
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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Present in the Pain podcast, a weekly show that looks at the experience of pregnancy and child loss through the lens of the Catholic faith. I'm your host, Eileen Tully. Hello, and welcome to the first episode of the Present in the Pain podcast. My name is Eileen Tully and since 2020, I've had an apostolate ministry for women who are grieving the loss of a child. My husband and I have had our own experience of child loss with two miscarriages, one stillbirth, and one infant death. And during the time following those losses, I learned so much about myself. I learned about healing from trauma. I learned about grieving with an eternal perspective, which is kind of what happens when the rubber of our faith meets the road of life in this valley of tears, and we experience a serious testing of our faith. But you know, the healing that I've been able to do since then has been so tremendous that I just felt like the Holy Spirit was wanting me to accompany other grieving mothers going through this same thing. Of course my, losses are still painful. And even as I'm recording this, we're just a few days away from, um, my infant daughter's feast day on June 23rd, which was the day that she died at 47 days old. So 11 years later, it's still a painful day for me. It's flooded with memories of my last day with her, um, and holding her after she died. And I still get choked up thinking about it. But my hope is to share with you some of what I've learned since then, and to provide you with some tools for healing from just the crushing weight of grieving the loss of a child. So today I thought we would talk about the name of my ministry, which is Present in the Pain. And it actually has a couple layers of meaning. As I was thinking about what to call it, that came to mind first. And I had one meaning in mind, but as I thought about it more, I was like, oh, there's more to this! There's definitely, more going on with this name than just the first meaning, which is that we need to be present in our pain. And maybe you've heard the expression before that"you need to feel it to heal it." When we, when we have pain, we need to be able to feel our pain, to heal from it. And truly our society is not very good at handling pain. We don't even like discomfort or inconvenience. Um, but emotional pain is something that we have so many tools to escape from. And our lives are full of convenience and relative safety. We have endless entertainment at our fingertips literally and instant gratification, um, by ordering things and having them delivered to us, we sort of forget, or we've lost the ability to cope with suffering pain, patience, tolerance, waiting for things. Um, and if we think about, you know, the opioid epidemic that we have going on in our country right now, it's obvious that people are suffering and maybe not able to cope with it well. But there are also more acceptable ways of numbing or avoiding our pain than taking opioids. And that might include things like drinking alcohol or overeating. Sometimes we overschedule ourselves or even just doom scrolling through social media, which is something I finally just gave up doing recently. Um, but they're, you know, these are more socially acceptable ways, but really a lot of times we're, we're doing the same thing we're running away from, or we're trying not to think about something that's painful because when we finally still ourselves and we're alone with our thoughts, maybe we have some painful experiences that we don't want to do the work of entering back into, um, to do the hard work of healing them. But when we resist the pain that doesn't make it go away. And sometimes, um, sometimes as Christians as Catholics, we might think that if we're considering God's plans for us to be painful, maybe we aren't having enough faith by, you know, by complaining or just saying, this is so hard. Why did you do this? What's going on? Um, so we'll talk about that for sure. in the coming weeks, but the Bible is full of suffering and pain, and the key to surviving it is believing the second meaning of my, the name present in the pain, which is that God is present in our pain with us. Jesus is present in our pain with us. We don't serve a God who is unfamiliar with suffering. We only need to look at a crucifix to see this. Isaiah called Jesus or the suffering servant in the prophecy, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. And even though it might feel like God has turned his face from us to allow us to experience such intense suffering. Um, the, the Psalms tell us in Psalm 34, it tells us that the Lord is near to the broken hearted. He has promised that he would never leave us or foresake us in Romans it, he tells us that he'll work all things together, or Paul tells us that he will work all things together for the good of those who love him. And even this thing, even this experience of child loss, which leads me to the third meaning for the name, which is that one day down the road, maybe years down the road, and as I mentioned before, I'm 11 years into my own experience of loss. One day, we'll be able to look at our experience and see how God did use it to cause growth in us. James, the book of James tells us that we should consider it pure joy whenever we face trials, because the testing of our faith develops perseverance. Well, calling child loss, pure joy may sound like hyperbole, but the reality is that peace and joy are things that are ultimately not dependent on our situation. Second Corinthians reminds us that we are supposed to be fixing our eyes, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Um, it says, what is seen is wasting away, but what is unseen is eternal because, and I love this expression our light and momentary troubles or afflictions(as if we could call this light and momentary, but in light of eternity, they really are light and momentary) our sufferings, even this suffering, is achieving for us an eternal glory that outweighs all of the pain that we have now. So we think about St. Therese of Lisieux, who said"The world's thy ship and not thy home," right? In light of eternity forever with God, this blip of time of, of suffering even intense suffering is light and momentary. So friends, even though the experience of child loss can be a very isolating experience, even though we kind of feel like strangers even to ourselves, as we try to navigate this and figure out what we need to heal, try to figure out who we are on the other side of this experience, I want you to know that you're not alone in the pain of it and that there are other people going through it. Other people who have gone through it. And, my hope is that by sharing some of the things that I have experienced by talking to others through interviews here that I can share with you, I can help you to feel understood and seen in the midst of this pain. I look forward to sharing this place with you each week and I'd love it if you would hit subscribe so that you'll be sure to find out when each new episode is released. So until next time I'm Eileen, and I'm so thankful that you're here.

Speaker 2:

Here.