God sends us suffering because He loves us: we accept suffering because we love Him. Love is the only answer that can be made to suffering; it is the only explanation of suffering save that of the Christian Scientist who denies that suffering really exists. Either it has no real meaning or its meaning is love. One set of pagan philosophers, with very noble ideals and with the desire of lifting human nature above itself, tried to make man impervious to suffering. It taught that suffering was stoically to be borne with, for everything that was disagreeable to man was virtuous. The Epicureans, on the other hand, taught man to escape from suffering, saying that it was degrading and debasing to him, since everything pleasurable was alone worthy of the name of virtue. The Christian alone teaches that suffering is to be embraced. This idea is based upon the fatherhood of God and the story of the Incarnation: for it supposes that the father only allows such suffering to come to each child as shall be for its own good. Naturally God could have prevented it altogether, but in His wise providence He has not done so; consequently we are driven to assert as the ground claim of faith that it can only exist because Wisdom and Love and Power are one. We are really as children whom the world's toys have led astray, and who, when scratched or hurt in our play, run back for comfort to His arms. It is not, therefore, simply as a punishment that we should look on suffering, for such a view of it will add more troubles than it can answer. Suffering is also the very expression of love; almost the only language that adequately describes its feelings.
Love, then, which can alone explain suffering when it comes, can also alone give us the strength to accept it joyfully, for life is only tolerable when it is permeated with love. There are hardships for everyone; do what we will we cannot escape them. Yet it is not the troubles of life, but the way we bear them, that makes life tolerable or not. To repine, complain, cry out, does but dig the point-head deeper into the flesh. It is the fretting against imprisonment which makes imprisonment the terrible torture that it is: the trouble is not that the walls are small, but that the mind is too big, and, in its desires, schemes out beyond the narrow borders of its cell. The anchorite was contented in his tower, but the prisoner essayed night by night to escape: their conditions were the same, but their hopes and desires were different. The whole secret, then, of life is to adapt our desires to our conditions. Love puts into bondage as many victims as hate; but those whom love's chains bind are glad of their lot. It is just so that our whole relation to God leads us to be tranquil in trouble, to be glad even in sufferings. We are told, indeed, that God punishes with suffering all workers of iniquity; but those also whom God loveth He chasteneth; and for ourselves who try, fitfully indeed yet honestly, to love, we can feel sure that it is only the strength of His embrace that we feel. Love, then, alone will help us to understand life and its sorrows. As children in perfect trust and hope, we must rely on Him that even our pain is from Him and will lead us to Him.
Of course, the full realization of this is the attitude of the saints; for they seem to have achieved that same state of soul to which Saint Paul confessed that he had reached: "For which cause I take pleasure in my infirmities." Of one saint we are told that he considered himself neglected by God on any day in which no suffering came to him; it was as though for the moment He had withdrawn His caressing hand: of another that she began to be afraid that she had fallen from His grace whenever her sufferings ceased. Now these "hard sayings" of the heroes of Christ seem too high for us even to attempt to practise: to love suffering and rejoice in it seems more than we dare even ask for. Yet there is this to be considered, that our Blessed Lord Himself found it perfectly compatible to shrink from suffering and yet to be resigned to the will of God. His whole frame sweated blood when faced with the loneliness of sin and of death, yet He could be still in absolute union with His Father: so that the combination of the two is not necessarily impossible. To shrink from suffering and yet to love seems a contradiction, yet it was not only achieved by our Lord but confessed to by the saints. God, then, for us is the Master of Love, and His chosen ones are those who have learnt deepest in His school. Sorrow, then, far from opposing love, is its perfect expression, so that without it love would pine away in silence. It is caused by Love and can be made tolerable only by Love. It is, above all, in the Sacrament of Love which we receive upon our knees and with a Domine non sum dignus in our heart, that we shall obtain the strength and courage to bear life's troubles with a serene heart. For it is the Crucified who alone explains the Crucifixion.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.