Quotes about Suffering

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.

Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ.

What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it?

But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.

Behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul.

PRAYER and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

You pray and suffer and hang on and give things up and hope and sweat, and the varying contours of the struggle work out the shape of your liberty. When it ends, and when you have a good habit to work with, do not forget the moments of the battle when you were wounded and disarmed and helpless. Do not forget that, for all your efforts, you only won because of God, Who did the fighting in you.

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

I suspect that exorcism still has a place in our lives. Who has not felt the sudden lifting of what had seemed an unbearable burden, the removal of what for too long had been an un-surmountable obstacle? Who does not have something deep within that they would not wish to exorcise, so that it no longer casts a shadow on their capacity to receive and give love?

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say My tooth is aching" than to say My heart is broken.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.