Quotes About Suffering

Love and belonging are irreducible needs of men, women, and children. In the absence of love and belonging, there is always suffering.

The surest thing I took away from my BSW, MSW, and Ph.D. in social work is this: Connection is why we're here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering. I wanted to develop research that explained the anatomy of connection.

Secret, smug believers! God never gives you more than you can bear, they like to say, as if the strong should be punished for their strength: We can bear it. So we got it. But what about my baby? How weak does a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens?

The true self is always in motion - like music, a river of life, changing, moving, failing, suffering, learning, shining.

The wounded are instruments, singing pain.

We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as were meant to be. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache … The absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

When we're suffering, may of us are better at causing pain than feeling it. We spread hurt rather than let it inside.

What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.

The unwounded life bears no resemblance to the Rabbi.

Suffering, failure, loneliness, sorrow, discouragement, and death will be part of your journey, but the Kingdom of God will conquer all these horrors. No evil can resist grace forever. If you reject the ragamuffin gospel and turn your back on Christianity, do so because you find the answers of Jesus incredible, blasphemous, or hopelessly hopeful.

Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded.

Richard Rohr said, "If we don't learn to transform the pain, we'll transfer it.

One of life's greatest paradoxes is that it's in the crucible of pain and suffering that we become tender.

The Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, "The cross Jesus asked you to carry is yourself. It's all the pain inflicted on you in your past and all the pain you've inflicted on others." I believe that's true. My cross suddenly

Before I am asked to show compassion toward my brothers and sisters in their suffering, He asks me to accept His compassion in my own life, to be transformed by it, to become caring and compassionate toward myself in my own suffering and sinfulness, in my own hurt, failure and need. The degree of our compassion for others depends upon our capacity for self-acceptance.

One of life's greatest paradoxes is that it's in the crucible of pain and suffering that we become tender. Not all pain and suffering, certainly. If that were the case, the whole world would be tender, since no one escapes pain and suffering. To these elements must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love and the willingness to remain vulnerable. Together they lead to wisdom and tenderness.

Trappist monk Thomas Keating once said, "The cross Jesus asked you to carry is yourself. It's all the pain inflicted on you in your past and all the pain you've inflicted on others.

We have so theologized the passion and death of this sacred man that we no longer see the slow unraveling of His tissue, the spread of gangrene, His raging thirst.

It is through such failure and weeping that the Abba of Jesus conforms us to the image of His Son. Yet if our faith is not alive and dynamically operative, suffering is absurd, pointless.

the old Russian proverb, "Those who have the disease called Jesus will never be cured.

The only cure for suffering is to face it head on, grasp it round the neck and use it.

No one, it seems to me, who has fully grasped the Crucifixion can ever again take seriously any expression or instrument of worldly power, however venerable, glittering, or seemingly formidable. MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

In his landmark work The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann says, "We have made the bitterness of the Cross tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a theological necessity for the process of salvation."3 Of course, theological necessities do not sweat blood in the night.

If we let the Lion of Judah run loose as Lord of our lives, He will not want us to be poor, broken or sad. Yet He may allow it, knowing that in these conditions we are more likely to let Him make us rich, whole and happy.