As an example, he noted that self-imposed suffering, such as fasting, can put the teaching that “men cannot live by bread alone” into practice, and a person can “open up space within [himself] that God can fill.”
“[An individual’s] suffering has meaning as part of that corporate whole, the mystical body,” Benson said.
St. Josemaría Escrivá, who founded Opus Dei, emphasized the importance of pain and suffering in many of his writings: “Let us bless pain. Love pain. Sanctify pain… Glorify pain!” he wrote in “The Way.”
“I’m going to tell you which are man’s treasures on earth so you won’t slight them: hunger, thirst, heat, cold, pain, dishonor, poverty, loneliness, betrayal, slander, prison,” Escrivá also wrote in the same work.
Father Robert Gahl, an associate professor of Church management and director of Church management programs at The Catholic University of America, told CNA that Escrivá saying “let us bless pain” is a challenging text but that he is not speaking of this to encourage “some sort of masochism,” but instead, “it really revolves around love and the freedom of love.”
“Suffering is an opportunity to give oneself up to the Beloved” by offering up that sacrifice to Christ, Gahl said.
Gahl added that people can lift up all things by offering them through “an attitude of self-gift to the Father,” which is “a viable path for redemption.” He said that by “uniting our activity and by uniting the world to the holy Eucharist, we can unite them to the sacrifice of Calvary” and “all things can be made holy.”
Although Gahl noted that “suffering is always negative and one can’t eliminate that because it’s always the lack of some good,” it can be elevated to a good when “one turns one’s mind … toward God and toward one’s labor” and “offers this to God … for love directed for the benefit of someone else.”
Self-imposed suffering, such as fasting, Gahl noted, is “very often an opportunity for an act of charity” because one can forgo food and offer it up to another. A person fasting can also offer up a fast to the hungry through prayer “that through the communion of saints … we can send those graces instantaneously across the world.”
The suffering of others in the world also provides people with an avenue to serve Christ. Gahl noted that suffering in others is “a call to us, an invocation so that we might reach out to them, care for them, and find Christ in them and find Christ in the suffering.”
“Suffering is a call to offer oneself as a gift for the others [and to] go beyond oneself and give oneself for others,” Gahl said.
(Story continues below)
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