Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. The very hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine a world in which suffering serves as the soil from...

Good. Bad. The cup holds both.

People often ask: If there’s a God, how can He allow so much suffering in the world? Realize all world suffering you perceive is a mirror to your own psychological self-abuse, gender imbalance, prejudice, poverty,...

Everything burned, everyone lied, and no one paid for it but the ones in the muck.

We may not understand why certain things occur in our lives, but we understand who to run to when they do.

No words are adequate for the suffering caused by hunger. To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp. Ever since I stopped having to go hungry, I literally eat life...

It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative...

Compassion doesn’t arise from the belief that the evil in the world is somebody else’s fault or that it is a result of poor choices a suffering person has made.

Suffering occurs when love’s two hands pull your soul in two directions.

That the other suffers has to be learned; and it can never be learned fully.

It was pleasant to think that men still sang, even in the midst of butchery and famine.

It is always so, when we are unhappy we feel more strongly the unhappiness of others; our feeling is not shattered, but becomes concentrated…

Inside, my soul became so cold I hated everything. I even despised the sun, for I knew I would never be able to play in its warm presence.

That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

Suffer” he commanded seductively. “With me…or because of me.

Suffering is like an echo – reflecting it only prolongs it.

To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself–even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering.

If the angels were capable of envy, they would envy us for two things: one is the receiving of Holy Communion, and the other is suffering.

In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.

It is not the outer objects that entangle us. It is the inner clinging that entangles us.” – Tilopa

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and...

We rise up And we fall downOnly to rise again

A GUIDED TOUR OF SUFFERING: To your left, perhaps your right, perhaps even straight ahead, you find a small black room. In it sits a Jew. He is scum. He is starving. He is afraid....

When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel,...

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one’s own suffering

There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don’t yearn to reach out, but because they’ve tried and found no one who cares.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

She is no longer a solitary being. She is a million different parts, each reborn, granted the miracle she prayed for in the months before her death, to be completely healed. Death is the price...

I don’t feel like I can change the world. I don’t even try. I only want to change this small life that I see standing in front of me, which is suffering.

I am grateful to realize that my desires do not entitle me to add to another’s suffering.

We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God’s fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for ‘the bush was not consumed.

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.

Every moment is brand new, but we often fill the new with fear of the future or pain of the past instead of simply enjoying the present.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so – that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we...

[…] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole...

We don’t have a major problem right now in our country, and life is normal. Things like unemployment, which the youth are suffering from, and the rate of inflation – these are chronic conditions and...

It brings spiritual warfare and suffering for the priest as he identifies with those who suffer, and shares the frustrations, anger, and incomprehensibility of that suffering in what it does to those who suffer. The...

Your suffering is here to help you unfold and to awaken into compassion, love and strength.

One day we took the children to see a goldsmith refine gold after the ancient manner of the East. He was sitting beside his little charcoal fire. (“He shall sit as a refiner”; the gold-...

If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to...

While God is not the author of evil and He never prompts or condones sin, nothing occurs without His sovereign oversight. Others may choose to do evil deeds and God’s people may suffer in the...

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a...

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of...

subvert” that brokenness.

Why don’t Jews drink? It interferes with their suffering.

Maybe he’s suffering from a case of jet lag. Is he suggesting that we be reduced to truant officers? It seems to me to be a plan obsessed with power and control.

A Brief for the DefenseSorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise...

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the...