What can't be helped must be endured.

We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

This, I thought, is what is meant by "thy will be done" in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.

What can't be helped must be endured.

People lead lives of quiet desperation.

The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more your suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things start to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness.

Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining.

She owed no one an explanation; if she had made mistakes she had been duly punished by giving up her family, suffering in the hold of the ship, losing her baby, and facing a future of total uncertainty.

Too much happens ... Man performs, engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite.