Kindness and Love

Personal suffering isn't often associated with being "kind", but it can be a sign that God loves us.

Kindness is a very great thing and has an important place in our relationships. Kindness is evidenced by goodness and charitable behavior, a pleasantness, tenderness and concern for others. According to Aristotle, kindness is an emotion manifesting itself by the desire to help somebody in need, without expecting anything in return.

Kindness is an aspect of love, but it is necessarily distinct from love. For is sometimes happens that love, which wills what is best for the other, may deem it best not to remove all suffering. A father, in fact may impose punishment on a child out of love.

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Spiritual Truths

Monsignor Pope blogs about spiritual truths that will set us free (ultimately from suffering):
 
1. That life is short (Job 14:5).
2. The path leading to eternal life constricted (Mt. 7:14) 
3. That the just one scarcely saved (1 Pet. 4:18) 
4. The things of the world vain and deceitful (Eccles. 1:2)
5. That all comes to an end and fails like falling water (2 Sam. 14:14)
6. And that the time is uncertain. 
7. The accounting strict.
8. Perdition very easy.
9. And salvation very difficult.

Read the rest

Interior Life

God calls us to develop an interior, spiritual relationship with Him. 

The saints have traditionally labeled spiritual growth as the Purgative, Illuminative and Unitive Ways.

The principle characteristic of the Unitive Way is a simple and constant awareness of God’s presence, a near constant state of communion with Him, and obvious and habitual conformity to His will.

Here we find deep and abiding joy, a unassailable love for God and others, profound humility, freedom from the fear of suffering often accompanied by a strong desire to suffer for God and his people, and apostolic fruitfulness. 

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Confession - Well Worth It!

Confession of sin removes our suffering and brings us peace.

Recently a non-Catholic Christian was praising the benefits of the Catholic Sacrament of Confession. 
This prelate understands the difficulty, yet necessity if unburdening oneself from sin.

“It is enormously powerful and hideously painful when it’s done properly … it’s really horrible when you go to see your confessor – I doubt you wake up in the morning and think, this is going to be a bunch of laughs.

“It’s really uncomfortable. But through it God releases forgiveness and absolution and a sense of cleansing.”

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Humility and Prayer

During suffering it is important to humbly pray as Christ did in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

There is an old teaching that basically goes: Many think of prayer as trying to get God to do your will. But true prayer is trying to understand what God’s will is and do it. I heard and African American preacher put it this way:

 

You got a lot of people that talk about naming and claiming, and calling and hauling…But there’s just something about saying, “THY will be done!” that we’ve forgot.

 

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Why must we suffer?

Good article on Christian suffering from Deacon Mike:

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God Has a Plan For You

God has a plan for your life.  While it may involve suffering, God ultimately wants you to live in peace and joy. 

There is an everyday temptation to "to flee from God," and sometimes a sinner, someone who is "distant" may be able to hear "the voice of God," to let "God write his lifestory", while a Christian may want to "flee" to "write " for their own lifestory themselves.

Read here

God Heals

The Pope said what he said. There's no reason to spin it. Clearly, he was stating, as did Jesus, to the Pharisees, that "he without sin should cast the first stone," and in his remarks on abortion, homosexuality, and contraception, was warning that too often we focus on the letter of the law while violating its spirit (which is love). We become harsh. We become, he said, obsessive. It is easy to see why: these are sins that are upsetting. The behaviors of homosexuality have not and can not be accepted by the Church; to review the actual practices in this realm is chilling. But we all transgress in different ways and homosexuals as well as those who have fallen into the horrid trap of abortion should be welcomed and won over, instructed on the Gospel. The Church was founded, the Pope reminded us, as a place to heal transgressors. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars," Francis said. "You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.” To constantly declare a sin without extending a healing hand has proven ineffective. Christ stated that sinners were the reason He came into the world and He mingled with them (Matthew 9: 10-13), which many did not like. Francis said we must find a "new balance." Let us wait and see what else this startling Pope says. No one can deny the tremendous gravity of killing a baby, nor what the Bible itself says about the sin of sodomy. Some go so far as to fret about an "anti-pope," or prophecies of two popes in last times. Is it that, or simply opening the arms of the Church to a poor world? We will watch and listen. It is interesting to note that while the Blessed Mother indicates the seriousness of abortion, this sin has never been specifically mentioned in formal messages at sanctioned sites such as Fatima, Kibeho, and Betania, where sinners find comfort and are converted and so often repent en route to deliverance. At the remarkable Church-approved site of Laus in France, the Blessed Mother came to create a place -- specifically for sinners -- of reconciliation and refuge, and reportedly indicated the sins of immorality, abortion, "unjust wealth" (another theme of Francis's) and the "perverse." She is firm, but welcoming. It is how Mary seems to work, too, at Medjugorje, where none of the official monthly messages since 1984 specifically mentions abortion and yet where seers have spoken loudly about both that and homosexual marriage and where we recall the account of a lawyer whose girlfriend or wife had an abortion and who confessed it at the apparition site and then if we recall correctly went to a back pew of the church to say his penance when a mysterious woman suddenly stood next to him holding a newborn, which she allegedly handed to him; he stroked the infant; he could feel the child's flesh and hair and warmth. He was told to name the baby, which he did, before the Woman took the baby back into her arms and disappeared, when he looked away, leaving him no doubt about the nature of his sin and also no doubt about how God forgives.

Purgatory

Purgatory is often associated with suffering.  But it is more profound than that. 

 

In the “Divine Comedy,” as Dante makes his way through purgatory, the souls he encounters suffer, but unlike the souls he met in hell, they suffer willingly and gladly, with no self-pity and always eager to return to their sufferings when Dante’s questions cease.

In their eagerness, those fictional souls testify to the enduring Catholic teaching that purgatory isn’t the outermost room of hell, but rather the anteroom of heaven. Every soul in purgatory is bound for glory.

 

Their fate has been sealed, and ultimately it’s a blessed fate. Therefore, the time they spend in purgatory, whether short or long, is a time marked not only by suffering, but also by joy.

 

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Paganism

Paganism causes undue suffering.  In other words man is left to his own design, while leaving God out of the picture.  We need God's help to overcome.

The new paganism is the virtual divinization of man, the religion of man as the new God. One of its popular slogans, repeated often by Christians, is “the infinite value of the human person.” Its aim is building a heaven on earth, a secular salvation. Another word for the new paganism is humanism, the religion that will not lift up its head to the heavens but stuffs the heavens into its head.

Our true home is heaven and we need God to get us there.

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