How do you tolerate suffering? How is it that God brings Holiness out of it?
By relying on His grace by consistently abandoning oneself to His will. One of the good effects is that it purifies our love for God.
Let’s face it, I don’t think we really love God and Jesus and Mary all that much. Most of us have so many other aspects of Catholicism that we probably love more than Him, and we love worldly things even more.
I don’t think we see suffering as a gift because we see everything good around us as something we’re entitled to. Okay, maybe most of us don’t crave things that require a great deal of money or effort to procure. But the little things? Like being comfortable and free of any sort of pressure and stress or having everything go our way at least the majority of the time? Things like being free to pursue our dreams and have good friends and being liked and respected and at least partially influential in our own little world?
Those are the things that the world says are the “bottom line” of bare necessity, and when we’re somehow separated from them, we have little fits. We can’t even be delayed by 15 minutes in traffic without blaming God and all of creation for such an abhorrent failure of justice.
So I think the key is to realize that a great deal of our suffering is simply a reaction we have to being separated from something that we viscerally crave. Granted, there’s a great deal of circumstances that require heroic virtue to not be crushed by.
But God is always there, and He’s constantly wanting us to rely on Him more. But we have to want to do that, rather than giving into temptations to despair or to become bitter or to cling to resentment.
We have to want to truly love Him above all things, and learn to practice detachment by attaching ourselves only to Him.
