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nancy_dalrymple
Guest
HI Shin, when you speak you remind me of a Moslem, they to think pain is gain, I am not usto this yet. What about the saints who suffered and did not sin to much? They were put to death and were close to God. LOL Nancylol.
I suppose I could think of innocent human beings, in a situation where it was the principle of double effect, but it is hard to contemplate.
Technically, we are born innocent of personal sin, but we are also born not in union with God’s grace – we may suffer because of others’ acts, our parent’s, but that is the power a parent has over his own child. To a degree our parent’s lives determine our sufferings in this life and there’s a great deal to be said about this.
But in the more general sense, books like Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence, and Abandonment to Divine Providence, are good for understanding this all and Providence.
It is perfectly true that all that occurs is God’s will, with the sole exception of sin. Some of it is His direct will, some of it is His permissive will. The latter, because of how He designed the universe and destined all our lives for the best, though so many natural evils occur. And without a doubt, His plan is the best plan for us all. We are in good, absolutely perfectly good hands.
As human beings we sometimes (often even) view physical evils as moral evils, but pain suffering and death are not moral evils in and of themselves.
We suffer because we are separated from God, and born children of wrath, literally born of Adam and Eve, and so sharing that separation and punishment because we are still under their dominion, their children by descent. Under their authority, under their power and jurisdiction. Through baptism we regain grace, and the potential to be united with God, but our will still have to make that journey to perfection in all circumstances, to complete unity.
When we do, all suffering is sweet, and we understand why a baby is lost, a pregnancy that fails, a mother, a child, who dies young, even due to tragic accident or even murder, are all in God’s plan and under His care. Even the sins of men, though God does not cause the sin, He still directs the lives of men around the sins, so that even the moral evils happen as best can be planned for.
We suffer, but we bear our sufferings with Him. And so, the closer with Him we are, the more in obedience to suffering, the sweeter it is. It is when we rebel and see suffering as evil morally, when it is only a natural evil, that it actually becomes most painful.
A woman can lose her child and say, ‘Why? Why?’ like Job, but when she is united with God she in time learns to be comforted, because both she and her child are always in God’s hands – While those without God, or against God, go on crying out saying it is an evil morally that He allows all this to go – and so go too far.
Throughout the Old Testament God demonstrates the effects of sin – When men commit particular sin, He visits them with punishments of further sin, to demonstrate what sin leads to – more sin, and sins against the sinners themselves – For the more separated from God, the more we suffer at the hands of other sinners.
We are all united as mankind, and the sins of others always harm us in a sense because of that union of family, however directly unjust it may see, it is just or natural in a more overall general sense because we are all family, and all a more or less separated family from God whose destiny was always linked for good or evil.
If we wish to live our lives in perfect safety, we live sacred, holy lives, in union with God and realize that in the next life, even a young baby’s teething pains or worse, become a prize in Heaven that gives it a higher place in God’s love for the cost that child bore for sin, in union with Christ.
