Redemptive Suffering Understanding Suffering, Living with It, Growing Through It

Few book titles, have dared offer such great claims, Understanding Suffering...how many thousands of books have tried and fallen short. Living With It, beyond our comprehension, but through which we painfully stumble. Growing Through It, rising to maturity through pain. and most daringly, to declare we can be redeemed, through hideous experiences we cannot understand What a courageous title! Father O'Malley is not afraid to tackle the big question. The nightmare of human exisstence. He answers, "Suffering can be redemptive." If God, the creator, is also the god of love, why are our daily rounds so filled with anxiety, terror, physical and mental pain? "What Jesus came to offer was redemption, not from "the sin of Adam" but from our unwillingness to respond to God's purpose in creating us, to the challenges of grace: to broader and more profound and nobler depths of living and loving." pg. 125 To young clergy-to-be few books can be more boring than lengthy theological tomes. O'Malley again and again rescues attention with lines such as these. "Optimism bets 'the sun'll come out tomorrow, betchyer bottom dollar.' Hope denies Peggy Lee's plaintive, " Is that all there is? Let's break out the booze and have a ball, if that's all...there is.' There must be something more." pg. 127 A deep, but readable, foray into the great questions and answers of human existence.

O'Malley presents an incredibly clear, straight up presentation of the basic tenets of the Christian faith and how it relates to suffering. He does not shy away from addressing some of the more difficult issues in Christianity such as the teachings on "original sin". This book was an incredibly easy read considering the nature of the subject. As a physician I am often faced with what often seems the unfairness of life. This book will allow me to better serve my patients and provide them with a better sense of the "big picture" of life.