Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • People don’t really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible.

    Submission: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • ‘Ah, the Saved… what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water!

    The Great Divorce
    C.S. Lewis

  • The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities.

    The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.

    The lover who never risks loving mocks romance.

    The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself.

    And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.

    attributed to Carl Jung

  • If life is good, why wish for a different life? And if life is not good, why hope for another life? You might say, we are hoping for a better life than what we have now, but why do we insist on life? Those who hope for death, are hoping for something better and not for an end.

    The Lord’s Prayer
    Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • The greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are not those who belong to the “more perfect state,” but those who love and suffer most. This is why they can move ahead of so many others whose lives, apparently, were more successful.

    VIRGINITY
    A Positive Approach to Celibacy for the Sake of the Kingdom of Heaven
    Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap

  • 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

  • “The most suitable language for tragedy is silence. The most silent suffering is the most vocal suffering at the same time.”

    —St. Nikolai of Serbia

  • “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