Quotes about Suffering

All creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth. — ROMANS 8:22 I still have many things to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. — JOHN 16:12

A true believer is eating what he or she is afraid to see and afraid to accept: The universe is the Body of God, both in its essence and in its suffering.

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.

If we do not recognize that we ourselves are the problem, we will continue to make God the scapegoat—which is exactly what we did by the killing of the God-Man on the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus—whom we see as the Son of God—was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves. Yet the God-Man suffers our rejection willingly so something bigger can happen.

It's heaven all the way to heaven. And it's hell all the way to hell. Not later, but now.

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

Creation itself, the natural world, already "believes" the Gospel, and lives the pattern of death and resurrection, even if unknowingly. The natural world "believes" in necessary suffering as the very cycle of life: just observe the daily dying of the sun so all things on this planet can live, the total change of the seasons, the plants and trees along with it, the violent world of animal predators and prey.

Jesus revealed how to bear the pain of the world instead of handing on the pain to those around you. When you stop resisting suffering, when you can really do something so foolish as to welcome the pain, it leads you into a broad and spacious place where you live out of the abundance of Divine Love. I can't promise you pain will leave quickly or easily. To forgive is not the same as to forget.

Reality, creation, nature itself, what I call the "the First Body of Christ," has no choice in the matter of necessary suffering. It lives the message without saying yes or no to it. It holds and resolves all the foundational forces, all the elementary principles and particles within itself—willingly it seems.

The Christ, especially when twinned with Jesus, is a clear message about universal love and necessary suffering as the divine pattern—starting with the three persons of the Trinity, where God is said to be both endlessly outpouring and self-emptying.

Any kind of authentic God experience will usually feel like love or suffering, or both. It will connect you to Full Reality at ever-new breadths, and depths "until God will be all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28).

The Universal Christ is trying to communicate at the deepest intuitive level that there is only One Life, One Death, and One Suffering on this earth. We are all invited to ride the one wave, which is the only wave there is. Call it Reality, if you wish. But we are all in this together.