Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • “Don’t say why me? Say why not me?“

    —Fr. Benjamin Girgis

  • “I’m the last thing tethering you to reality, yet your only way of escaping it.”

    I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me

  • “A sick man only wants one thing, a healthy man wants 10,000 things.”

    —Confucius

  • “Our circumstances don’t change, but we change.

    The Lord said we *will* have tribulation and that we *may* have peace.”

    —Fr. Daniel Fanous

  • Let us then follow whithersoever He bids us, and let us not too carefully consider whether He commands us to go by a smooth and easy path or by a difficult and rugged one, as in the case of this paralytic.

    Saint John Chrysostom
    On the Two Paralytics in the Gospels
    Homilies on Profitable Subjects

  • In the case of physical illness, even if doctors tell us it is beyond hope, we do all we can to save the body. But on the other hand, when it comes to the spirit and its maladies, for which recovery is never beyond reach, we plunge into despair as if there is nothing we can do. Focusing on your spirit more than your body will save both; focusing on just the body will cause you to lose both.

    ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM ON REPENTANCE &
    DEFEATING DESPAIR
    Letters to Theodore

  • Just as when you hear a physician explaining various diseases, you understand the misery of the human frame by learning the number and the kind of sufferings it is liable to, so when you peruse the laws and read there the strange variety of crimes in marriage to which their penalties are attached, you will have a pretty accurate idea of its properties; for the law does not provide remedies for evils which do not exist, any more than a physician has a treatment for diseases which are never known.

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 3

  • Sickness, in my experience, is often unbearably boring. Days full of so much nothing that they all blur together, weeks spent in bed, bad TV shows you don’t remember, stretches of strange, stretchy time that feel like months and minutes at once, staring at the ceiling and listening to your upstairs neighbors fuck, quiet betrayals, unanswered texts, meetings missed with little fanfare, closing your eyes and waiting for a real punishment that never seems to arrive. A year defined by things you forgot to do. No conflict, just lowered expectations.

    cruel optimism new year
    rayne fisher-quann

  • And you, therefore, if you stay in your house, if you are held fast in your bed, do not think that you are living an unproductive life.

    For you are enduring something more grievous than what you have suffered at the hands of public torturers, by whom you have been dragged, savagely attacked, stretched to the utmost-and that is this extreme infirmity of yours, which is like having a public torturer continually residing in your house. But do not therefore either desire your end or neglect your health; for that is not safe. Therefore Paul heartily advises Timothy to take the greatest care of himself. But about your illness—it’s enough to say these things.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • Do not, therefore, imagine that the struggle now set before you is small; for dealing with bodily illness is more exalted a contest than all the things that you have endured, as I have said.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia