The greatest and most protracted spiritual suffering arrives with the withdrawal of grace, as part of the very positive "discipline" of those God is training as his own sons and daughters. Death is God''s justice and is meant to bring us to our senses and repentance. The withdrawal of grace is a death meant to chastise and correct - and is God version of tough love. Archimandrite Zacharius, in his "Christ Our Way And Our Life" lays it out beautifully. Grace makes our pra

Spiritual suffering can be harder to endure than many physical trials, mainly because we have, as a human community found ways of dealing with the latter. God let's us discover one secret after another about the origins of certain diseases, and ways to treat them. We also have discovered ways of "treating" spiritual pain, but only to a certain extent - after which we are expected to keep walking by faith alone - with just barely enough grace to keep us from rebelling. Then

Once I started outlining spiritual suffering in my head, it became very clear that more needs to be said before I tackle that aspect of suffering. To begin, in addition to physical suffering there is a vast catalogue of emotional, psychological, and situational suffering, some of which contains physical ingredients - like depression with a chemical imbalance, anxiety disorder which can have any number of physical causes. Lies can also cause terrible suffering - something p

Some suffering is a mystery, especially where the spiritual life is concerned. But some is clearly explainable. Death may have entered creation with the sin of Adam and Eve in the Genesis account, but we know it was throughout the natural world before there were any human beings on the planet. Birth, a life span, and death all follow the natural laws that God established in the very beginning. We can deny all of this and defend creationism as the fundamentalists do, but th

Many years ago a scientist friend told me it is very important to look at all sides of whatever is being examined. A garage, for example looks different when viewed from the side, or from the back or from above. Of course he was right. Suffering also has multiple sides. I don't know enough to comment on all of them, but I can maybe shed some light on a few. The Church talks about the "mystery of suffering", which suggests that some part of suffering is going to remain