Quotes about Suffering

The Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, "The cross Jesus asked you to carry is yourself. It's all the pain inflicted on you in your past and all the pain you've inflicted on others." I believe that's true. My cross suddenly

Before I am asked to show compassion toward my brothers and sisters in their suffering, He asks me to accept His compassion in my own life, to be transformed by it, to become caring and compassionate toward myself in my own suffering and sinfulness, in my own hurt, failure and need. The degree of our compassion for others depends upon our capacity for self-acceptance.

One of life's greatest paradoxes is that it's in the crucible of pain and suffering that we become tender. Not all pain and suffering, certainly. If that were the case, the whole world would be tender, since no one escapes pain and suffering. To these elements must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love and the willingness to remain vulnerable. Together they lead to wisdom and tenderness.

We have so theologized the passion and death of this sacred man that we no longer see the slow unraveling of His tissue, the spread of gangrene, His raging thirst.

It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.

The only cure for suffering is to face it head on, grasp it round the neck and use it.

If we let the Lion of Judah run loose as Lord of our lives, He will not want us to be poor, broken or sad. Yet He may allow it, knowing that in these conditions we are more likely to let Him make us rich, whole and happy.

Humility and fraternal love are spiritual bedfellows. When we befriend our own brokenness and minister to our wounds with tenderness and compassion, the "other" is no longer an intruder but a fellow sufferer.

We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control and success. But when we realize that God has chosen us from all eternity, sent us into the world as the blessed ones, handed us over to suffering, can't we, then, also trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people?

Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.

Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: "Who can take away suffering without entering it?

Every Christian is constantly invited to overcome his neighbor's fear by entering into it with him, and to find in the fellowship of suffering the way to freedom.