Pain isolates one. It pervades everything; blackens the sky, pushes other humans away, reduces music and poetry and the outside world to dullness; grinds on and on endlessly.

Some say that Christianity is a morbid religion, over-emphasising a Christ tormented on a cross. I can only say that even as a child I could sometimes comfort myself in pain by remembering his suffering… It was Jesus the man, enduring agonising pain in terrible loneliness, who spoke to my condition and brought me sometimes much needed consolation.

Joan Fitch, 1988