The world is more like a poem than a syllogism.
··· Tags pointing to: suffering ···
“Where is God when I sin?” I asked a spiritual director. “Suffering with you on the Cross,” he said. And I began to understand Christianity.
A Little Motivation
Pain doesn’t tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue, you will change. Don’t let it stop you from being who you can be. Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop. You only reach your limit when you can go no further.
Three Rules of Work:
out of clutter find simplicity;
from discord find harmony;
in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Transform, Not Bypass
…some people live in such a way that it is impossible to have any kind of happiness in their home, but then they go to church and sing songs and pray ‘in the spirit,’ hoping that God will somehow give them an infusion of joy to make it through the day. They are looking for some kind of heavenly transfusion that will bypass the misery of their daily lives and give them joy. But God’s desire is to transform their misery, not to bypass it.
Unembarrassed Joy
Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don’t have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.
I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better—and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. …
Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
We cannot have compassion without acknowledging the suffering of others.
Do I Seek Relief of My Suffering or My Sin?
The way the world works is that the coin of the realm is relief of suffering: if someone does something that prevents me from suffering, even as minor as letting me in their lane of traffic, I am grateful. I feel the love. But if relief of suffering is the only thing I see as of value, then how can I truly celebrate Christ’s love, He who relieves our sins and not our sufferings? Until I truly see sin, and not suffering, as the supreme evil, can I be truly grateful to Christ?
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.
For Whatever Reason
For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.