Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • If you fall under discipline, know for sure that this is a great profit, for God chastises the soul that has forgotten its weakness and has been puffed up by its talents and success. This is carried on until it realizes its weakness, especially when God does not provide in tribulation a way of escape. He besieges the soul from all sides and embitters it with inward and outward humiliation, whether by sin or by scandal, until it abhors itself, curses its own intelligence, and disowns its counsel. Finally, it surrenders itself to God, feeling crushed and lowly. At such a time, it becomes easy for man to hate himself. He even wishes it to be hated by everybody. This is the way of true humility. It leads to total surrender to divine plan. It ends up with freeing one’s soul from the tyranny of the ego, with its deception, its stubbornness, and its vanity.

    —Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

  • “…and it was said that Rossetti never got over his wife’s death, because he thought he had not been perfectly kind to her during the last years of her life, and that she might have lived longer if he had been more kindly. His friends repudiate that, and say it is not true; but if it was not true of Rossetti, it is true of many people.

    The sin of neglect, the sin of inattention, the sin of absorption in self, these have wrought a great sorrow in the lives of some, and they never rise out of the dust after.”

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • 130. Such a man knows with certainty that those who detach themselves from worldly things must endure some slight hardship in this present life, but after death they receive from God eternal blessedness and peace.

    —St Anthony the Great
    On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life
    One Hundred and Seventy Texts

  • 58. Any circumstance in which a man finds himself unwillingly is a prison and a punishment for him. So be content with whatever circumstances you may now be in, lest by being ungrateful you punish yourself unwittingly. This contentment can be achieved in but one way: through detachment from worldly things.

    —St Anthony the Great
    On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life
    One Hundred and Seventy Texts

  • Love is the Kingdom, whereof the Lord mystically promised His disciples to eat in His Kingdom. For when we hear Him say, ‘Ye shall eat and drink at the table of My Kingdom’ what do we suppose we shall eat, if not love? Love is sufficient to nourish a man instead of food and drink. This is the wine ‘which maketh glad the heart of man’. Blessed is he who partakes of this wine! Licentious men have drunk this wine and felt
    shame; sinners have drunk it and have forgotten the pathways of stumbling; drunkards have drunk this wine and become fasters; the rich have drunk it and desired poverty; the poor have drunk it and been enriched with hope; the sick have drunk it and become strong; the unlearned have taken it and been made wise.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • “Hurt people hurt people, but hurt people heal people, too.”

    —Fr. Paul Girguis

  • Saint Luke associated sorrows with the personal Cross which we have to shoulder in our life and which distinguishes the way of Christ from other ways of living. He says, typically, in one of his sermons: ‘Our life, the life of each person, is sorrow and pain. All these sorrows in our social and family life are our Cross. A failed marriage, an unfortunate choice of profession, don’t they bring us pain and sorrow? Shouldn’t people who’ve suffered these calamities have to bear them bravely? Serious illnesses, contempt, dishonour, loss of personal wealth, jealousy between spouses, slander and, in general, all the wickedness that people do to us, aren’t they all our Cross? That’s exactly what our Cross is, the Cross of the vast majority of people. These are the sorrows that afflict people and we have to bear them, even though most people don’t want to. But even people who hate Christ and refuse to follow His way, they, too, have to shoulder their own Cross of pain. What’s the difference between them and Christians? The difference is that Christians shoulder the Cross with patience and don’t complain against God. Humbly, with eyes cast down, they bear it to the end of their lives, following the Lord Jesus Christ. They do it for Christ and His Gospel, they do it for fervent love of Him, but the whole of their thought is caught up in the Gospel teaching.

    —St. Luke the Surgeon

  • Why do we keep hiding our deepest feelings from each other? We suffer much, but we also have great gifts of healing for each other. The mystery is that by hiding our pain we also hide our ability to heal. . . . We are called to confess to each other and forgive each other, and thus to discover the abundant mercy of God. But at the same time, we are so terribly afraid of being hurt more than we already are. This fear keeps us prisoners, even when the prison has no walls! I see better every day how radical Jesus’ message of love really is.

    —Henri Nouwen

  • He arranges for the afflictions which make a man think of giving up the world. Then He teaches him that there is an inward renunciation to be made, as well as the outward. “And when thou deemest thyself to have done all by renouncing, the Lord taketh account with thee. ‘Why dost thou boast? Did not I create thy body and thy soul? Did not I make the gold and silver? What hast thou done?’ The soul begins to make confession, and to beseech the Lord and say, ‘All things are Thine. The house I am in is Thine. My clothes are Thine. From Thee is my food, and of Thee am I supplied for every need.’

    Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Saint Macarius the Egyptian
    Introduction
    A.J. MASON, D.D.

  • “Believe me, if God discloses the calamities we were exposed to and those He cast away from us, if He uncovers these, our whole life will not be enough to thank Him.”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III