“The art of consolation”

Dear Friend,
A month ago, I attended a lecture called “The Art of Consolation”. A professor from a Swedish university was the lecturer and she started with a statement saying that it is impossible for us to comfort another person; but, we can help a person find his/her own comfort. She had interviewed old people and asked if they could give an example of when they had found consolation. Some told about when they had suffered loss and been through crises and had gotten comfort in various ways and many of them described the comfort as a feeling of “coming home”.

This professor had also done research among patients suffering from dementia and she said; “the best thing you can do to your children is to give them love and security so when they get old and are affected by dementia they can “go home to mom”. The reason is that home is the place where they usually return to in their minds when they lose contact with reality -- separated from this world because of dementia.

In this research about comfort they had also interviewed people who had been devoted Christians their whole lives. When asked if they could give an example of a situation when they had experienced consolation, not one of them could tell about such a moment because they said they “lived in comfort” all the time. Some could tell about situations when they had felt “out of comfort” but overall through life they had experienced what they described as living in comfort.

Looking through a Concordance, I found some verses from the Bible about comfort.

Jesus promise in Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are those who morn for they will be comforted”.

Apostle Paul says in the Acts and in the letter of Romans that the Holy Spirit and the Scripture gives comfort and hope.

Especially in the first chapter in second letter to the Corinthians, Paul says
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patience, endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.”..."

... to be continued