" Before sickness took me, I tended to assume this was because in a world with less everyday pain, the experience of suffering felt more outrageous, more unjust, than it did in a world where pain was too ubiquitous to be concealed or filtered out of everyday experience. And I still think there’s something to this idea, since entering a permanent-seeming sickness did seem like an impossible outrage to my modern self at first—like some sort of ridiculous bureaucratic mistake. But what I learned from my illness is that chronic suffering can make belief in a providential God, if you have such a thing going in, feel essential to your survival, no "

― Ross Douthat , The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery