Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.

The Wisdom of Life
Arthur Schopenhauer

When life is full of troubles, people get the feeling that the curse and anger of God has come upon them. But when these trials have passed, they’ll see that God’s wonderful providence protected them meticulously in all facets of their existence. Thousands of years of experience, transmitted from generation to generation, tells us that, when God sees faith in the soul of people who are striving for His sake, as He did in the case of Job, He leads them into depths and heights that are inaccessible to others. The more complete and powerful people’s love and trust in God are, the greater will be the measure of their trial and the fulness of their experience, which can reach very great heights. It then becomes apparent that they’ve reached the boundary beyond which a human person cannot pass.

—Saint Sophrony of Essex

“A healthy man is always an earthly, material man…But as soon as he falls ill, and the normal, earthly order of his existence is disturbed, then the possibility of another world makes itself known to him at once; and as the illness worsens, his relationship with this other world becomes ever closer.”

The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Illness often challenges our former, false equilibrium, and leads us to question the very foundations of our existence. It effectively weakens our impassioned attachments to this world. And in so doing, it reveals the vanity of those attachments and leads us to surpass their limits.

The Theology of Illness
Jean-Claude Larchet

Let us remain humble when we speak about someone else’s suffering. Only the one who has truly suffered has the right to speak.

The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
Cardinal Robert Sarah

For example, if a sick man is disposed to bear his illness with a good heart and does so, the enemy knowing that he will thus become well grounded in the virtue of patience, attempts to disrupt this good disposition. For this purpose, he begins to remind him of the many good deeds he could have performed had his position been different, and tries to convince him that, had he been in good health, he would have achieved much in the service of God, bringing much profit to himself and others. He would have been able to go to church, to talk to people, to rend and to write for the instruction of his brethren, and so on. If he notices that such thoughts are accepted, the enemy introduces them into the man’s mind more and more often, multiplies and embellishes them, makes them enter the feelings and incites desires and impulses to such actions by depicting how successful these or other works would have been, and by evoking regret that the man is tied hand and foot by his illness. Little by little, after frequent repetition of such thoughts and inner movements in the soul, regret is gradually transformed into discontent and vexation. Thus the former good-hearted patience is upset and, instead of a medicine sent by God and a field for practising the virtue of patience, the illness presents itself as something hostile to the work of salvation. Thus the desire to be free of it becomes ungovernable, though still with a view to freedom to perform good deeds and to please God in every way. Having led a man thus far, the enemy robs his heart and mind of the good purpose, for which he desires to get well, and leaves only the desire of health for the sake of health, forcing him to look irritably at his illness, not as an obstacle to good but as an evil in itself. As a result impatience, not tempered by good thoughts, takes the upper hand and passes to complainings, thus depriving the sick man of the peace he enjoyed through good-hearted patience. But the enemy rejoices that he has managed to upset him. In exactly the same way, the enemy upsets a poor man who bears his lot with patience, depicting to him the good deeds he could do if he had a fortune.

Unseen Warfare
Lorenzo Scupoli

“As health comes from the bitter medicine, so too does the salvation of souls come from bitter experiences.”

— St. Paisios of Mount Athos, Spiritual Councils IV: Family Life 207