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1 " George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, " The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his. "
2 " To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance. "
― Susan Sontag , Regarding the Pain of Others
3 " ...the best way to forgive someone is to enter into their sufferings ... "
4 " Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit - that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us - that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains. When we dare to fully trust in the power of God's Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur. "
― Henri J.M. Nouwen , Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith
5 " This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency? The ugliness of American decoration, American entertainment, American literature - is not this the visible expression of the impoverishment of the European masses, a manifestation of all the backwardness, deprivation, and want that arrived here in boatloads from Europe? The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof. The European traveler, viewing with distaste a movie palace or a Motorola, is only looking into the terrible concavity of his continent of hunger inverted startlingly into the convex. Our civilization, deformed as it is outwardly, is still an accomplishment; all this had to come to light. "
― Mary McCarthy , A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays
