bible and theology on Anguish

The mind in all its intricate beauty can be a place of great anguish. Thoughts can both grip us for the good and plague us for that which is not. In Dickens’ Christmas novella, The Chimes, he describe...

I am spellbound by the intensity of Jesus’ emotions: Not a twinge of pity, but heartbroken compassion; not a passing irritation, but terrifying anger; not a silent tear, but groans of anguish; not a w...

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with...

Darkness. If you’ve experienced it, you know what I’m talking about. Darkness sets in long before we’re old enough to recognize it. It begins with anguish. We’ve been hurt, sometimes tragically, and w...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

[Christ] gives the analogy of bitter labor and says: “A woman when she bears a child has anguish and sorrow” (John 16:21) and He applies all of this to His suffering, in which He so hard and bitterly ...

The cross of Jesus is the world’s supreme example of anguish, suffering and injustice, but it has nothing to do with tragedy as we experience it in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare—trag...

In this excerpt, the French monastic leader Frere Pierre Marie, shares an interpretation of Jesus as the true prodigal son—bringing all of us home with him: He, who is born not from human stock, or ...

This liturgical reading could begin or close your Palm Sunday processions. While written for one reader, there is the option of adding congregational responses, such as giving the shouts of Hosann...

Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land.

Every Holy Saturday, the Church waits as it were beside the tomb, meditating on Christ's death while awaiting the announcement of his resurrection. Like John, we can take Mary into our homes and p...

Commenting on Ephesians 1:3-6, M. Robert Mulholland describes just how powerful it can be personally, when we recognize that we were chosen by God, especially for children who are the result of an unp...

At least as important as the things we wait for is the work God wants to do in us as we wait… Picture a blazing hot forge and a piece of gold thrust into it to be heated until all that is impure and ...

But hope is hard to come by. I should know. I remember the time when I was once busy dying. It wasn’t long after I had broken my neck in a diving accident that I spent one particularly hopeless week i...

In the deeply moving novel Silence by Shusaku Endo, the protagonist, a young Jesuit priest named Sebastião Rodrigues describes in horror what it is like to watch two of his disciples, Japanese nationa...

Sometimes moments of forgiveness and friendship come from unexpected places. In 2018, the comedian Pete Davidson appeared on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live (SNL). Davidson made a ...

I fear that much of the Christianity that surrounds us assumes our task is to save appearances by protecting God from Job-like anguish. But if God is the God of Jesus Christ, then God does not need ou...

They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Historical Clue The superscript of Psalm 51 gives us a historical clue about the composition of this Psalm, “A Psalm of David. When Nathan the prophe...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...

The Lord’s Prayer, like all prayer, is part work and part rest, Perhaps the only work we do is getting ourselves there. Once we’ve gotten ourselves there—to prayer—whatever mains of productivity is Go...

The first language of the church in a deeply broken world is not strategy, but prayer. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in a call to see and encounter the rupture of this world so truthfully ...

Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguished gift of yourself, a love that forgives seven times seven, that keeps no score of wro...

So pain endures for a time. Its role is to purge us, to make us to know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord to plead for mercy.

Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven.

Live to the point of tears.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion ...

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.

There’s no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.