Overheard at a dinner party:
"I'm upset with the Lord. How could he make my mother suffer so, when she's been such a strong Catholic all her life?" said the practicing Catholic.
"The Lord had nothing to do with that!", the non-practicing Catholic said ardently. "You can't blame the Lord for things like that or you'll be blaming Him every day."
Suffering is, of course, a mystery. When I was a child, I wanted to be close to God but not too close since I saw how He treated his friends. (Mostly his son, but also, to my 10yr-old mind, the Irish famine and the Jewish Holocaust.)
The most persuasive answers for me are three:
1) Rock-hard acceptance of the reality of the Fall and original sin, which altered everything in some unfathomable way. Whether creation was somehow physically altered is problematic, but I'd like to think so. Regardless, the Fall teaches that the default condition for man is gracelessness and woe.
2) Purgatory. Purgatory makes earthly suffering worthwhile (see quote in post below). Fr. Groeschel once said that he couldn't believe people didn't believe in Purgatory. "What do you think this earth is -- Club Med!? This is the beginning of our Purgatory!" said the good friar.
3) Trust in God. Pain is felt under the dentist's drill and yet good comes out of it.
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