On Buechner's 'stewardship of pain'

We can "do something redemptive" with our pain.

Around the time of the book release of Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding healing and hope in sharing our sadness, grief, trauma, and pain, the author was interviewed.

Here:

"If readers are looking for the phrase “the stewardship of pain,” I found it in an essay titled Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain in the book The Clown in the Belfry. [Frederick] Buechner looks at the parable of the ‘talents’ in Matthew 25 in which Jesus tells about a man going on a journey who gives pieces of his property to be managed by his servants. Usually, in all the sermons I’ve heard about this passage, it’s about how we should manage our resources, our money and property, a pretty literal reading of the parable. But Frederick Buechner totally flips the parable around by asking: What if pain is the thing we’re given in life—and our temptation is to bury that pain and hold it inside of ourselves. The reality is that burying pain doesn’t work. Anything we bury like pain won’t stay buried. So what could it mean if we tried to do something redemptive with that pain?"
— Jeffrey Munroe, interviewed by David Crumm in Read the Spirit, January 2024

Elsewhere, Munroe wrote:

"The stewardship of pain so resonates with me that I collect stories of people who are good stewards of their pain, people who, whether or not they are even familiar with Buechner, make the shift to seeing their pain as something entrusted to them for the sake of others."
— Jeffrey Munroe, The Stewardship of Pain (Part II): TELLING OUR STORIES, frederickbuechner.com, November 2023