Are We Addicted to Suffering?

I’m as gobsmacked by these recent years of quiet and contentment as I was by decades of steady difficulty. Bruce and I are both healthy. We get along. We are quiet with each other. We have found a synchrony that Ruth and Peco Gaskovski say happens with old married couples. In their essay with Inkwell, Marriage Coded: they say:

“When you put two pendulum clocks on the same surface, they eventually start swinging in synchrony. Something similar happens in close relationships: people synchronize. They learn how to turn-take in conversation and often know just what to say because they spend so much time paying attention to each other.”¹

This ability to be content is a great and good gift and decades in coming. My mother used to quote: “There were two prisoners, one saw the bars the other the stars.” I saw the bars. After my folks and brother died, with difficult in laws, and a grinding hard job, my prayer became “Lord I don’t want to be a bitter old woman.” I kept walking even though I was angry and hurt. My blessed friends listened to hours of venting, affirming my pain. I wrote and rewrote my novel, along with several others seeing and seeing again until the pain eased into peace. I learned to bless people who hurt me. I am still practicing this to this day. It’s a grand way to give your mind positive thoughts if they take up residence in your head. This was a very long walk over several decades.

And the Lord answered that prayer. He answered the promise “weeping lasts for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”² I’ve experienced the truth of Psalm 34: 8 – 10:

“Oh taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh fear the lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.”³

These good gifts have worked on my fear of God’s love, my just plain fear of love⁴. They have been like a father delighting in giving presents to his daughter. (I had one like that.)

Lately I’ve read writers who say to be wary of contentment. Just this week I read the following from Stephen Freeman:

“And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ.”⁵

But doesn’t Paul in Philippians say,

“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am in to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”⁶

Isn’t it a work to learn contentment in all circumstances? Aren’t we denying our discontent, our complaint by learning contentment in everything, even abundance? I say abundance because there are cultural whispers guilt tripping us to feel sorry for comfort. Might it be a bit of pride to reject the gifts when they are given? Are we as Christians addicted to suffering? Have we made the cross an idol? Wasn’t Jesus, dead and gone to Sheol, taken down from the cross, grabbing the keys to death and hades, but not staying there? Isn’t he now sitting at God’s right hand? Aren’t we also, covered in glory like Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration only we don’t see it?

Eugene Terkhin in The Dangerous Safety of Perfect Protection: The Soul Encounters Light Only Through Cracks says,

“The worst thing that can happen to a human being in this imperfect world is to be perfectly protected. Perfect protection renders the soul prayerless. A praying soul instinctively seeks vulnerability, because it knows that the experience of light is the best protection from evil.”⁷

Except that my soul isn’t prayer less, even though my life is quiet and happy. In fact I’ve been learning the mundane, day to day, work of praying, both centering and intercessory prayer. Aren’t monastics the most protected in their cloisters with a regular routine and abbots watching over them? (I am aware the fun often begins, as a person wrestles with their inner demons in their cell.)

Can we be so captured by the virtue of suffering that in the midst of trial, we wonder when the crying stops and a little happiness rises, shouldn’t we still be crying? This happened often as I grieved my parents’ deaths. I often wondered why I wasn’t crying more, when I got home, after I’d wept in church. Grief moves in waves, where the tears come and then they ease. Joy can rise in those moments.

Pressure release is how you train a horse. Release can be as educational as pressure because the animal knows this is the behavior the rider is looking for. When the tension increases, the horse knows that’s not the way to go. When I was in poetry school, I learned the most when Miller Williams marked the lines that worked. I leaned into those lines and wrote good, uncluttered poems.

For years I have wondered when do we get to the resurrection, the new creation? And once we are there how do we behave?

If we get a break, can’t we be grateful? Even that dreadful Psalm that begins with My God, my God why have you forsaken me includes:

“Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our fathers trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame.”⁸

I know this is Lent, when the church is focused on Jesus’ walk towards the cross. This is the season of self-denial. But I wonder if one thing we might want to deny is suffering, beating ourselves up because it appears godly, well, because Jesus and the cross.

Sure there have been losses for me in this season, blooming grief, grinding loneliness during these years of quiet, but the pain is nothing compared to my working years.

And yes I am filled with dread because at 70 Bruce and I are on the downhill run, with decrease in our future—downsizing our home, minimizing our stuff, saying goodbye to beloved friends. One of us is likely to precede the other in death. There’s no telling how our bodies will fail. A physical therapist told me our bodies will age, aches and pains are normal, deal with it. But that’s why I’m there, to stave off the ache in my legs, how it hurts to climb the stairs. Why not avoid a walker by doing some exercises? We can take comfort in Jesus who thought not equality to be grasped but became in the likeness of a servant. Our savior has walked that road ahead. But I feel as vulnerable as Job, knowing disaster will come. But if life is good right now, why not relish the release, why not shout for joy and simply be grateful for the simple, good things that come to us daily?

References

1. Marriage Coded. Ruth and Peco Gaskovski and Inkwell. https://open.substack.com/pub/inkwellct/p/marriage-coded?r=2jx39&utm_medium=ios

2. Psalm 30:5

3. Psalm 34: 8 – 10

4. Here’s a poem I wrote that describes this:

THIS TERROR

This terror before my husband is the terror

in a thunderstorm when there is nothing

protecting me and my house but the luck

of the lightning stroke. I taste it.

My horses in the barn would have no chance

against straw in flame and locked fear.

I sit the farthest inside my house. The windows

are silver with rain so hard I can’t see

the cedars, willow, lilac a few yards off.

I sit with a Bible open to First John

where it says God is love and perfect love

casts off fear. But God is so raw in the sudden thunder,

I must sit in terror until the storm moves east.

With my husband I freeze as the child I was

and kiss with fear scuddling along my teeth.

God is raw when we come to love a man

who could die quick as lightning. But sun

does break up the storm, horses still stand

in the barn, waiting for pasture. One apple

tree down that my parents left to be an arbor

for bittersweet I picked for centerpieces.

5. Thomas Hopko, Cross of Christ. Glory to God for All things. Stephen Freeman https://glory2godforallthings.com/2026/03/13/hopko-on-the-cross-of-christ-3/

6. Philippians 4: 10 - 13

7. Eugene Terekhin

The Dangerous Safety of Perfect Protection: the Soul Encounters Light Only Through Its Cracks

8. Psalm 22: 3 - 5