Lord, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our minds, heal our blindness, and break the self-made chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose repentance, forgiveness, and life.
It is not truly affliction unless an event that grasps a life and uproots it attacks it directly or indirectly in all its parts—social, psychological, physical. The social factor is essential. It is not truly affliction unless we are under some form of social degradation or fear of such degradation.
Those who are persecuted for their faith and who know it, although they suffer, are not afflicted. In the books of the martyrs, those who entered singing into the arena with the beasts were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted. He did not die as a martyr. He died as a common criminal, mixed with thieves.
The grand enigma of human life is not suffering, but affliction. It is not astonishing that innocents should be killed, tortured, flushed from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, imprisoned in camps and cells—since we know there are criminals who commit these acts. Neither is it astonishing that sickness imposes long periods of suffering that paralyze life and make it an image of death—since nature is subject to the blind play of mechanical necessity.
But it is astonishing that God has given affliction the power to take hold of the very souls of innocents and to seize them as their sovereign master. In the best case, the one marked by affliction only keeps half his soul.
Those to whom one of these blows has happened— after which they struggle on the ground like a half-crushed worm—have no words to express what has happened to them. Among the people they meet, even those who have suffered much, those who have never had contact with affliction have no idea what it is. It is something specific, irreducible to any other thing, like sounds we cannot explain at all to a deaf-mute.
Affliction renders God seemingly absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent that the light in a completely dark cell. A sort of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that in this darkness when there is nothing to love, if the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive.
Then one day God comes to manifest Himself to them and reveals the beauty of the world, like God did in the case of Job. But if the soul ceases to love, it falls into something here below that is nearly equivalent to hell."
Simone Weil, The Love of God and Affliction
"God is constantly knocking at the gate of my heart to invite me to go beyond the state I have reached, because my whole
life should be a journey on the way to love. I cannot give a renewed assent to love, nor above all can I give a more intensified assent than hitherto, unless a divine movement comes secretly to my heart to help it ascend higher. I can refuse it. But if I let God act he will raise me further, step by step, to a greater love."
Charles Journet
"The souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God,
no torment shall ever touch them.
In the eyes of the unbelieving they appeared to die,
their going looked like a tragedy,
their leaving us, like a desolation;
but they are at peace. God has put them to the test
and proven them worthy to be with him;
he has tested them like gold in a furnace,
and accepted them as a sacred offering.
They who trust in him will understand the truth,
those who are faithful will live with him forever, in love;
for grace and mercy await those whom he has chosen."
Wisdom 3:1-6, 9
"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness."
Thomas Merton
"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. They will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."
Léon Bloy
"Overcoming fear is a key element in the process of setting man free. Fear springs from threats. We fear suffering; we fear the loss of some goods, the loss of freedom, health or a job. This fear makes us act against our conscience, and it is by means of our conscience that we take the measure of Truth. We overcome fear the moment we agree to lose something for the sake of a higher value.
If Truth becomes a value worth suffering for, worth taking a risk, then we will overcome the fear that keeps us in slavery."
Jerzy Popiełuszko
"Angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone."
George Eliot
"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn to God when everything is going well for us. We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption.
You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
C. S. Lewis
“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist— and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life.”
Léon Bloy
"You do not love yourself better than God loves you. You cannot shrink from pain more than He dislikes your bearing it; and if He puts it on you, it is as you would put it on yourself, if you would be wise, for a greater good afterwards.
God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission -- I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.
Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me -- still He knows what He is about.
Let us feel what we really are--sinners attempting great things. Let us simply obey God's will, whatever may come. He can turn all things to our eternal good. Easter day is preceded by the forty days of Lent, to show us that they only who sow in tears shall reap in joy. The more we do, the more shall we trust in Christ; and that surely is no morose doctrine, that leads us to soothe our selfish restlessness, and forget our fears, in the vision of the Incarnate Son of God."
John Henry Newman
