Our natural inclination is to shrink from suffering, to run away from it and ask to be released from it. What would happen within our souls if, instead, we ran toward it, embraced it, and thanked God for it. Listen to the saints who did just that.
St. Teresa of Calcutta spent most of her life alleviating the sufferings of the poorest of the poor while her own sense of abandonment by God tortured her. She hid it from the world, but obviously spoke from her own experience when she said this: “Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.”
St. Augustine spent years leading a very sinful life. Not only did he immerse himself in lust, but he embraced heresy. How many tears must he have shed over his past sins. You can hear the grief in his lament: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.” That fire made him welcome the sufferings of life seeing in them an opportunity to atone. “Trials and tribulations offer us a chance to make reparation for our past faults and sins. On such occasions the Lord comes to us like a physician to heal the wounds left by our sins. Tribulation is the divine medicine.” Let us drink that medicine and be saved!
St. Teresa of Avila is well known for her down to earth sense of humor. “God save us from gloomy saints,” she once said. She also recognized the great value in suffering saying, “One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying. He is offering up his sufferings to God, and many a time he is praying much, more truly than one who goes away by himself and meditates his head off, and, if he has squeezed out a few tears, thinks that is prayer.”
St. Gemma Galgani, Italian mystic, is called the Daughter of the Passion. She suffered with the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, and died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis. “When I shrink from suffering,” she said, “Jesus reproves me and tells me that He did not refuse to suffer. Then I say ‘Jesus, Your will and not mine’. At last I am convinced that only God can make me happy, and in Him I have placed all my hope…” Let us imitate St. Gemma and place all our hope in the Lord!