Quotes about Suffering

The Crucified One is God's standing solidarity with the suffering, the tragedy, and the disaster of all time, and God's promise that it will not have the final word. The Risen One is God's final word about the universe and what God plans to do with all suffering.

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If

Everything you have ever seen with your eyes is the self-emptying of God into multitudinous physical and visible forms. In other words, Infinity is forever limiting itself into finite expressions, and this could even be called the "suffering" of God. The Christ learned this self-emptying, or kenosis , 183 from his eternal life in the Trinity. It is not just Jesus who suffers, but the cross is the visible symbol of what is always going on inside of God!

If I can recognize that all suffering and crucifixion (divine, planetary, human, animal) is "one body" and will one day be transmuted into the "one body" of cosmic resurrection (Philippians 3:21), I can at least live without going crazy or being permanently depressed.

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

All creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth. — ROMANS 8:22 I still have many things to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. — JOHN 16:12

A true believer is eating what he or she is afraid to see and afraid to accept: The universe is the Body of God, both in its essence and in its suffering.

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.

If we do not recognize that we ourselves are the problem, we will continue to make God the scapegoat—which is exactly what we did by the killing of the God-Man on the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus—whom we see as the Son of God—was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves. Yet the God-Man suffers our rejection willingly so something bigger can happen.

It's heaven all the way to heaven. And it's hell all the way to hell. Not later, but now.