The Discipline of Suffering

by Dr. Katherine Thompson

Reviewed by Eileen Quinn Knight, Ph.D. Profiles in Catholicism

Several backup contacts years ago when I was walking home, I was hit by a car that left me in need of major help. I had 3 surgeries and PT for over a year, I didn’t know if I would walk. With God’s grace, the prayers of many including our Cardinal and all the priests I recovered in the midst of great suffering. My spiritual recovery needed a great deal of attention and pleading God to assist me. I begged and pleaded with God for my recovery. When the pain was alleviated through medication I spoke to my loving God and listened to His direction in my life. I didn’t get angry as I was glad to be alive and realizing the goodness of the doctors, nurses, staff, food workers and all people who came to assist. This book made sense to me.

The author, Katherine Thompson shows how suffering can be a spiritual discipline, fostering growth, healing and a deeper faith in God. This book provides a safe space to explore the difficult questions raised by suffering while encouraging us to confront personal challenges rather than avoid them. There are practical strategies, real-life stories and useful skills to help reconstruct broken lives, equipping readers to navigate through difficult times.

According to the author: ”The biggest challenges we face when we try to make sense of our experiences and who God is in the midst of our suffering is the paradox posed by our circumstances. Suffering can make us better people and it can take us close to God. But the deep, confusing pain can also take us further away from our faith. So, the challenge of suffering becomes one of finding a way to God through the darkness of our pain. When we step out and do this, at times we will feel like we are going around in circles making no progress, or that we are groping along the ground not seeing clearly where our next step is meant to be. : We might think that it would be great if someone would give us a candle, a match, or perhaps a glow-worm-anything to help us see the way forward to a solution. We find it hard to understand when God seems silent and unresponsive, nor appearing to answer our requests for assistance.

Being a child of postmodernism, the author understands the dark loneliness of this process to be one of deconstruction, where we question everything we believe to try and resolve the inconsistencies between our understanding and experience, to find a new meaning that makes sense within both the story of our life and the greater story of who God is. Faith in this context of suffering should not simply react against our experience in anger and disillusionment. It needs to push through our despair and doubt. We need to reach beyond these stumbling blocks and find a way to grow, learn and change despite them.

For followers of Jesus, then, the challenges when we are suffering is to match our intellectual understanding our faith to the way we live and experience life. A gap or contradiction between these two things is not sustainable. It causes cognitive dissonance not to mention its emotional fall out. So, if who we see and understand God is undermined by our life experience, we need to do some soul searching to reconnect these two things back together? Either how we understand God needs to change, or who we are and what we are doing needs to change. More often than not the two processes need to happen in unison.

We do not need to be fearful of this process of deconstruction. This is because faith in God challenges the nihilism and apathy of postmodernism by offering us hope and a purposeful way forward out of doubt and despair. It embraces the process of picking our situation apart and spurs us on as we move through reconstruction to the other side, healing and making sense of who we are and who God is. It is about going deeper. I believe that successfully reconstructing our life in the face of suffering transforms us; we grow in our faith and become more Christ like. The good news of Jesus Christ invites us to persevere in our pain, reconnect to ourselves and God, reconstruct our faith and find hope.

In Christian mystic tradition, the pathways to God was thought to come through love or suffering. Both ways involve giving up control of our life – either by choice or because everything of value has been forcefully taken from us through our circumstances. Whichever way this happens, we end up rethinking our life and what we are living for. In a postmodern context, it means pulling our story about our life apart and then trying to rewrite it God’s way. In the process, we find a new knowledge and understanding that brings hope and freedom amidst the struggle.

The author then presents several models of how this spiritual journey can be carried out. She presents stories of people’s experiences for us to meditate and reconstruct our reality. She also gives us many experiences people had with the onset and ongoing impact of suffering. It is a book that will give a sense of purpose, and guide to redeeming your story and finding meaning amidst all sorts of adversity. It is a book to use again and again.