Chances are that any helpful two-year-old will break some eggs. We are often not very good at things when we are new. But there may be an important choice to make at such moments. Do we support and protect the innate wish to be of help to others in our children, or do we protect the eggs? Hard as it seems, the greater mother wisdom may lie in a willingness to clean up broken eggs or replace a mitten and a box of crayons.

Mystery has great power. In the many years I have worked with people with cancer, I have seen Mystery comfort people when nothing else can comfort them and offer hope when nothing else offers hope. I have seen Mystery heal fear that is otherwise unhealable. For years I have watched people in their confrontation with the unknown recover awe, wonder, joy, and aliveness. They have remembered that life is holy, and they have reminded me as well. In losing our sense of Mystery, we have become a nation of burned-out people. People who wonder do not burn out.

Ours is not a culture that respects the sick, the old or the vulnerable. We strive for independence, competence, and mastery. In embracing such 'frontier' values, we may become intolerant of human wholeness, contemptuous of anything in ourselves, and in others, that has needs or is capable of suffering. The denial of a vulnerability is the ultimate barrier to compassion.

What we do to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live.

Illiness could be considered a Western form of meditation.

The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.