Suffering and saints

     The saint is not one who accepts suffering because he likes it, and 

confesses this preference before God and men in order to win a great 

reward.  He is one who may well hate suffering as much as anybody 

else, but who so loves Christ,  whom he does not see, that he will 

allow His love to be proved by any suffering.  And he does this not 

because he thinks it is an achievement, but because the charity of 

Christ in his heart demands that it be done.

      The saint is one so attuned to the spirit and heart of Christ that he 

is compelled to answer the demands of love by a love that matches 

that of Christ.  This is for him a need so deep and so personal and 

so exacting that it becomes his whole destiny.  The more he answers 

the secret action of Christ's love in his own heart, the more he comes 

to know that love's inexorable demands.

     But the life of the Christian soul must always be a thing whole 

and simple and complete and incommunicable.   The saints may seem 

to desire suffering in a universal and abstract way.  Actually, the only 

sufferings anyone can validly desire are those precise, particular 

trials that are demanded of us in the designs of Divine Providence for 

our own lives. 

                                                  Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Who is Thomas Merton?  Merton (January 31, 1915 to December 10, 1968) 

was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, in the U.S. state of 

Kentucky.  Merton wrote many books, essays and reviews on spirituality.  

He was an avid supporter of interfaith understanding and spoke with the 

Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and D.T. Suzuki.