At this point in life’s journey, I’m pretty sure I’ve not heard enough good sermons about suffering.  In fact, it’s only been in the last couple of months that I can really say that I’ve heard suffering spoken of appropriately and practically from the pulpit (particularly in light of the sufferings of Jesus).  On some level, suffering is a silver thread through Merton’s No Man is an Island.  He spends one chapter on the topic particularly, though.  Here are some of his thoughts.

Useless and hateful in itself, suffering without faith is a curse.

A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed.  It does not understand that all evil is not necessarily to be avoided.  Nor is suffering the only evil, as our world thinks.

Especially so, today, the more comfortable and affluent parts of our lives are about eliminating (or even ignoring) suffering.

. . . But the grace of Christ is constantly working miracles to turn all useless suffering into something fruitful after all.  How?  By suddenly staunching the wound of sin.  As soon as our life stops bleeding out of us in sin, suffering begins to have creative possibilities.  But until we turn our wills to God, suffering leads nowhere except our own destruction.

We must face the fact that it is much harder to stand the long monotony of slight suffering than a passing onslaught of intense pain.  In either case what is hard is our own poverty, and the spectacle of our own selves reduced more and more to nothing, wasting away in our own estimation and in that of our friends.

Suffering transformed into something else, something better, truly is a work of grace.  How odd to name sin so close to the wounds we too often hold dear and precious.