Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • “I spent these past two months no better than dead—yea, even worse than dead. I was surviving just enough to perceive the terrible things encircling me everywhere. All was night to me—the day, the dawn, the height of noonday—and I spent the whole time nailed to my bed.”

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • In order that you may learn, from another angle, what the gain of sufferings is, even if one does not suffer for God—and no one would consider this to be an exaggeration—if one suffers and bears it nobly, and with meekness glorifies God for everything, he will be rewarded. Even Job did not know that he suffered those things for God—and indeed, this is why he was crowned, because he endured them nobly, not knowing the reason for his sufferings.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • So then, expect great rewards for such torture-many prizes; recompense beyond description; brilliant, abundantly blossoming crowns for such agony. For it is not only for the good one does, but also for the evil one suffers, that one obtains many rewards and great prizes.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • For even the sun and the air seem to be oppressive to those who are suffering from these things, and midday seems to be as darkest night.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • When I was twenty-eight, I had thyroid cancer. It was cured. But for the rest of my life, that sense of invulnerability was gone.”

    —Susan Cain, Bittersweet

  • Many are the tribulations that ended good. Live them in hope and faith in the good that is about to come and not in the distress that is already here.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. IV

  • No one may use illness as an excuse for resting from the labor of spiritual living. “Perhaps some might think that illness and bodily weakness hinder the work of perfection since the works and accomplishments of one’s hands cannot continue. But it is not a hindrance” (St. Ambrose, Jacob and the Happy Life).  

    …

    “You are stricken by this sickness,” the Holy Fathers say, “so that you will not depart barren to God. If you can endure, and give thanks to God, this sickness will be accounted to you as a spiritual work” (Sts. Barsanouphius and John, Philokalia).

  • The more debasing the experience, the more desperately we reach for shreds of meaning

    …

    To think that you ought to understand something just because you lived it — that you are owed an explanation for your feelings just because you happen to be the one who felt them — strikes me as a supremely naive kind of power play


    against narrative
    a love story, or an essay about love stories, or the opposite of both
    rayne fisher-quann

  • We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job . . .

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • In each difficulty that he faces and for each problem, he has hope that God will save him. No matter how hard it is and how late God will be, this person has hope that God will come, even in the last hours of the night. Therefore, he does not ever lose hope.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. III