“The souls by nature pitch’d too high,
By suffering plung’d too low”
“Every day, saline was pumped through his body to clean out his pleura and scar tissue. A chest tube was connected to a drainage system, producing a trickle of water. The pain was enormous.
Bergoglio didn’t care for the usual platitudes that people kept telling him, things like “This will pass” or “Won’t it be nice when you’re back home?” But one visitor broke away from the clichés and truly comforted him.
It was a nun whom he had remembered ever since she had prepared him to receive his First Communion, Sister Dolores. “She said something that truly stuck with me and made me feel at peace. ‘You are imitating Christ,’” he recalled.”
Source: Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio: His Life in His Own Words
“God did not keep bad things from happening to God himself.”
Source: Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
“The selective outrage follows longstanding patterns of neglect and normalizes anti-Blackness as the weather, as
Christina Sharpe notes, whereas non-Black suffering is treated as a disaster.”
Source: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
“Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars. - (from 'East Coker')”
Source: Four Quartets
“People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and most reluctantly lie. But one must know how to read, and that isn't easy. Out of a hundred book-readers ninety-nine have no idea what they are reading about. It is a common belief, for example, that any writer who sings of suffering must be ready at all times to open his arms to the weary and heavy-laden. This is what his readers feel when they read his books. Then when they approach him with their woes, and find that he runs away without looking back at them, they are filled with indignation and talk of the discrepancy between word and deed. Whereas the fact is, the singer has more than enough woes of his own, and he sings them because he can't get rid of them. L'uccello canto, nella gabbia, non di gioia ma di rabbia, says the Italian proverb: "The bird sings in the cage, not from joy but from rage." It is impossible to love sufferers, particularly hopeless sufferers, and whoever says otherwise is a deliberate liar.”
Source: All Things are Possible
“To walk through suffering as a Christian - to share in Christ's sufferings - we have to face the darkness. We have to feel the things we hate to feel - sadness, loss, loneliness. We have to drink the bitter cup we've been given. No shortcuts. No free passes. But this is the strange way of true comfort. It's the only way to discover soothing that is substantial enough to bare the weight of our souls.”
Source: Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep
“Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it's true.”
Source: The Office of Historical Corrections
“This I resolved, should be a lesson I would not forget: that we are all team mates in suffering.”
Source: Ascent of Rum Doodle
“God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but this doesn't preclude a cross. God's love is refracted through the cross, which often makes it hard to see or recognize. But if we are to learn to trust - to place the weight of our lives on the love of God - we can only learn this through the cross.
We come to know and trust God's love more deeply through our own crosses, the things that make us feel we cannot go on, the things that make us tired - the job loss, the break up, the sickness, the loneliness, the long struggle with sin, the estrangement from a friend, the disappointment, the deaths of those we love, our own death.
I wish there were some easier way, some way to learn to trust God that was paved with luxury and endless ease, but per crucem ad lucem: the way to the light runs smack dab through darkness - or more accurately, we discover the light speeding toward us these very dark places.”
Source: Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep