September 3 2001

ARTICLE TOOLS

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The false god changes suffering into violence. The True God changes violence into suffering.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

The Christian sufferer need not know why the blow was struck. He wants to discover what God is doing in the face of it.
Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
Isak Dinesen, quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

When we are attempting to comfort one who is suffering, our first priority should be to strengthen his or her faith and not to give pat answers.
Daniel J. Simundson, Faith Under Fire

It is. … not out of order, if extremely hard to say, that God must have been present in the ovens of the death camps and in the mass graves of Eastern Europe. Where else could He have been than there precisely where His beloved sons and daughters were being tortured and slaughtered? The God of the philosophers may have withdrawn. The God of Golgotha—who is no other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—would have had to be there.
Paul M. van Buren, Discerning the Way

Young people are not, in general, very compassionate. Even the nicest of high school students may think that treating a "nerd" as a fellow human being is inconceivably beyond the call of duty—roughly analogous to respecting the rights of cockroaches to hospitable treatment in one's home. … One obvious reason for this character deficiency in the young is that they have not yet suffered enough to identify readily with those who hurt.

Robert C. Roberts, The Christian Century

Affliction is both a medicine if we sin, and ...