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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

10A

What helps you to cope and to keep going when things are difficult?

How can the example of Jesus’s suffering inspire us in our own struggles?

What happens to your prayer life when you suffer? Have you ever been able to turn your suffering into a prayer?

What other ideas or questions strike you from this part of the film?

 

10B

Have you learnt anything from past experiences of suffering? Have they changed you or changed the way you see others or see God?

Have you any experiences of God bringing good out of evil, or new life out of suffering?

Do you find it easy to trust God or not? How do you keep the virtue of hope alive and avoid despair?

What other ideas or questions strike you from this part of the film?

 

KEY IDEAS FROM THE FILM

I want to share one way of praying that has really helped me over the years, which is to offer up your sufferings to God. It’s simple to explain. When you meet some unavoidable suffering or disappointment, big or small, you turn to God and say, “I offer this up to you”.  It’s an inner prayer, a movement of the heart, rather than a formula; but the words can help. I use a simple phrase: “Father, I accept and offer this to you, through Christ our Lord”.

This doesn’t mean we should just ignore suffering. The first rule of suffering is that, all things being equal, we should try to avoid it or overcome it. Christians are not masochists. If someone is hurting, we should try to help them. If something is going wrong, we should try to put it right. In the face of suffering and injustice, we are called to act.

When can we make this offering? With absolutely any suffering or difficulty or inconvenience. With small things: a bus that is late, a disappointing meal, losing your keys. With medium things: a screaming child, an argument with a friend, a difficult project at work. With large things: a family crisis, an illness, a lost job, a bereavement.

We can offer up our temptations, moods, insecurities, distractions; problems in our family, in our relationships, at work; loneliness, stress, misunderstanding, failure, hurt, disappointment, anxiety, shattered dreams. We can offer up a difficult situation, a confusion, something we can’t control. We can especially offer up our worries and fears, and the difficulties we encounter when we are trying to follow our conscience or live our Christian faith. And we can offer up the heartache that we feel when those we love are suffering.

Why do we do this? What’s the point? What does it mean? First of all, it turns our daily suffering into a prayer, a penance, and unites us with Jesus Christ in his sacrifice on the Cross. We recognise that for some reason God has allowed this suffering, this cross, and we pray that he will lead us through it to new life. We remember the words of Psalm 34, which apply to Jesus and to us: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous one, but the Lord delivers him out of them all”. And when we start to accept and offer up our unavoidable sufferings, it has a profound effect on our faith and on our spiritual lives. There are two main effects.

First, it deepens our faith and helps us to trust God more. Every day we pray these words in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done”. To accept our unavoidable sufferings is a way of accepting God’s will, of trusting him, even if we don’t fully understand why something is happening. All the time, we are growing in trust. We can say, in the words of Psalm 116, “I trusted, even when I said, I am sorely afflicted, and when I said in my alarm, No one can be trusted”. We know that God can bring good out of evil, that he can make the desert bloom (Isaiah 35:2), that the stone has been rolled away from the door of the tomb. We know, as St Paul says, that “for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28).

The second effect of this practice is to turn our sufferings into a prayer of intercession. When I offer up my own sufferings to God as a sacrifice, I am united with all those who suffer, because of our unity in Christ. So I can pray for all people. I can offer up my sufferings for a personal intention, if I have something that I want to pray for. And in a special way I can pray for those who are suffering in similar ways to me.

St Paul explains this so well. He says that God the Father “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Cor 1:4-5). So when we unite our sufferings with Jesus, big or small, he gives us his help and consolation, and that allows us to give help and consolation to others in turn.