Tag: suffering

Brief Thoughts (No. 36)

Brief Thoughts

In your suffering, you have turned to God. You have questioned Him and grappled with Him. You have asked many questions about life, and its purpose, and why things are the way they are.

It’s not easy to accept a cross like yours; it can feel impossibly heavy at times. But in choosing to carry it, you have in fact made a choice that reveals something very deep and essential about who you are: namely, that, even when things are hard, your instinct – your choice – is to follow Love.

This fact of your character tells me something very important about you. It tells me that your soul is impressed upon by God, and that, somewhere in the very core of your being, you have hope in the beauty and the goodness of life, even as a thousand pieces of evidence are telling you otherwise. That’s a rare and a beautiful gift; may no one ever take it from you.

Is It Possible?

Journal & Essays

Often, you find yourself trapped in a cycle of belief and disbelief. The position you occupy in this cycle usually depends, in large part, on the circumstances of your life: how you’re feeling, if you’re suffering, whether things are going your way.

That’s not to say that you’ve abandoned God. On the contrary, I know that you’ve sought Him with great perseverance even through long periods of darkness and illness. It’s not wrong to express your anger at God. It’s not wrong to cry to Him in your despondency. He welcomes you in your reality – in the fullness of who you are.

But sometimes, your tendency to be upset with God causes you more unhappiness than you can bear. Sometimes, seeing God as the Person to blame for the sufferings of life adds an additional layer of helplessness to your already heavy despair, and the weight of such a burden leaves you vulnerable to collapse.

So what’s the answer to this conundrum, to this longing to express your anguish in the face of injustice, and your sorrow at feeling abandoned by the One Who is supposed to be Good, without putting yourself perpetually in a place of conflict with God? How do you reconcile the truth of your hurt and frustration (which you have every right to feel) with your desire to have a sturdy friendship with God? You can’t find peace if you’re always at war with the Source of Peace. You can’t trust if you’re always doubting His trustworthiness.

My message isn’t meant to strip away your humanity, or to condemn you for feeling the way you do. I know your sorrow is real and the pain of your confusion is deep. I know your heart is sincere.

But I’m asking you to consider that maybe God is not the Author of your misfortunes. Maybe God is not the One willing your suffering.

Is it possible that, in the midst of your trials, God has been with you in a profoundly important way? Is it possible that God has always been for you, not against you, and weeps with you in your pain? Is it possible that God keeps a light on for you, even as the darkness swirls around, threatening to consume you but never actually penetrating the true, unbreakable center of who you really are?

Is it possible, in other words, that God is, in fact, just as Good as You so were so desperately hoping He’d be?

Quotations

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’

Søren Kierkegaard

Advent of Love

Poems

To announce the fullness of love,
you must first suffer
the pain of being
pried away
from the sweetness of things.
You must dance
with the withholding of desire
and brush shoulders
with the emptiness
of long nights
and lonely beds.

You must,
before giving yourself over
to the delights of love,
forsake the beating
of your own heart
and experience the nakedness
of being alone
in the crack of existence,
estranged even from God.

Before reveling
in the many raptures of love,
you must surrender all hope
for the outcome of your choosing
and allow, instead,
the wild tide of life
to crash over
your days and weeks
and minutes and hours
as it pleases,
chaos and all.

And that’s before
the real trial begins:
the letting-go of expectation –
the expectation
of a love fulfilled,
of a holy and sweet
communion
of compatible souls.

Yes, just before
the love breaks through,
you must sacrifice
your wish for it,
plunging into the darkness
of an uncertain fate
and a resigned,
but heavy,
confrontation
with the disappointing
realities of life.

It is then,
in the surrender
of all things dear,
that the tide turns
and washes over
the pieces of your life
in a furious, urgent sweep –
bringing together
the disparate parts
and carrying them to shore –
safely, intact, whole –
and you along with them –
a victory of resuscitation,
a narrow escape
from the waters in which
you would have drowned.

And now,
in the lightness of air
and on the firmness of ground,
you find yourself
coming alive –
breathing in slowly and shyly
the miracle of what has been
granted to you,
the discovery of
a joy
which ran so deep,
it nearly disappeared –
which, now,
in its quiet ways,
leads you
into the light,
into the sun,
into the place
where the love you sought
waits,
warm and unabashed,
longing to pull you in
with open arms.

Quotations

You write better with all your problems resolved. You write better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the writer. I don’t agree at all.

Gabriel García Márquez

Brief Thoughts (No. 1)

Brief Thoughts

  1. Suffering is useless if it doesn’t make us more compassionate.
  2. Romanticism vs. practicality: can’t they exist together? Who says we need to choose just one? The people who are trying to force a choice out of us are also the ones who can’t imagine holding two contradictory ideas in the mind – and the ones who are always coloring inside the lines.
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