Love and Pain go together, for a time at least. If you would know Love, you must know pain too.

This speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.

If God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate far too often.

To wish to forget the hope because it wasn't realized, to try to cleanse your mind of the beautiful dream because it didn't come true, is to miss out on lie altogether, because life is designed to be lived in an alternation of hours of sunlight and hours of darkness.

If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life's crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder.

God didn't let Job suffer because he lacked love, but because he did love, in order to bring Job to the point of encountering God face to face, which is humanity's supreme happiness. Job's suffering hollowed out a big space in him so that God and joy could fill it.

If there's one thing I'd say to anyone out there, is that if you're in this game, it's a rollercoaster. There's a lot of ups and downs.

The upside of a downward spiral into despair and defeat in young adulthood is that pretty early on, I was forced to face not only the foolish things I had done but also the stark realization that there was likely no end to what I was capable of doing.

That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.

In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

circumstances—not necessarily in holiness and radiant light, but often in confusion among people with deep problems.