Rejoice in Suffering? 3 Reasons Christian Mystics Saw Pain as Purification

Rejoice in Suffering? Seriously? A Mystic’s Guide to Finding Meaning in Pain.

Let's just put that on the table right now, shall we? The phrase "rejoice in suffering" sounds, to anyone actually suffering, like a cruel joke.

It’s one of those lines from the Bible that makes you want to throw the book across the room. When you're in the thick of it—when the pain is a physical presence, a hot knot in your chest; when anxiety is the first thing that greets you in the morning and the last thing that tucks you into a restless bed; when your well-ordered life has been detonated and you’re standing in the smoking crater—the very last thing you want is for someone to suggest, however piously, that you should be happy about it.

The human reaction, the sane reaction, is to resist. To fight. To numb. To get on your knees and plead with God, the universe, anyone who will listen, to just make it stop. And when the answer is silence, when the pain persists, a cold dread can set in. A feeling that you’ve been abandoned.

So how on earth did the great mystics—people like St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart—arrive at this bizarre and seemingly offensive conclusion? Were they gluttons for punishment? Were they so disconnected from real life that they welcomed misery?

Not even close. They were, in fact, more deeply connected to reality than anyone.

They weren't rejoicing in the raw, brutal fact of pain itself. They were rejoicing in what they discovered through the pain. They learned a secret that our comfort-obsessed culture has forgotten: that suffering, when met with a courageous and surrendered heart, becomes the most potent and transformative tool in God's arsenal.

They learned that what the terrified ego calls "the end of the world," the soul quietly recognizes as the path home.

So, if you can, take a deep breath. Let’s explore this difficult, sacred ground together. Not to glorify pain, but to try and understand why these spiritual masters saw our deepest wounds not as God’s punishment, but as a severe mercy. A fire that purifies. A pressure that creates diamonds.

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1. It Destroys the Fake Life You Were Protecting.

Let’s be brutally honest. For most of our lives, we aren’t living a real life. We are curating, managing, and desperately protecting a story about our life.

Our ego—that chattering, insecure part of us that we mistake for our true self—is an architect. It spends decades building a very specific, very fragile house of cards. It’s a life built not on the bedrock of reality, but on the shifting sands of its own preferences. What holds this fragile house together?

• Our Roles: We aren't just a person; we are a "Good Mother," a "Successful Employee," a "Devout Christian," a "Healthy Person." These are titles the ego wears like armor.
• Our Control: We cling to the illusion that if we just plan enough, worry enough, work hard enough, and follow the rules, we can manage outcomes and keep the chaos of life at bay.
• Our Comfort: The ego’s primary goal is the avoidance of pain. It arranges our entire existence around staying comfortable, safe, and unchallenged.

Suffering is the holy wrecking ball that demolishes this house of cards without asking for permission.

A sudden diagnosis, a shocking betrayal, a financial collapse, a long dark night of the soul—it doesn't just hurt, it fundamentally shatters the ego’s entire project. The story we told ourselves about who we are and how our life was supposed to go is suddenly, violently, exposed as a complete fiction.

And in that moment, it feels like annihilation. It feels like we are dying. Because in a very real sense, something is dying.

It's not the death of YOU. It's the death of the MASK you mistook for you.

Pain backs you into a corner and holds a mirror up to your face. It strips you of your titles, your plans, and your defenses, and it forces you to ask the most terrifying and important question of your life:

Who am I when I am no longer strong, successful, in control, or “fine”? Who am I when the life I built is gone?

This is where true spirituality ceases to be a comforting idea and becomes a lifeline. It’s where we discover the crucial difference between pain and suffering.

• Pain is the clean, unavoidable reality of the situation. The job is lost. The body is sick. The heart is broken. This is the wound.
• Suffering is the dirty, optional layer of mental and emotional resistance we add on top of the pain. It’s the story our ego tells about the wound.

It’s the voice that screams, "This shouldn't be happening! It’s not fair! I can't bear it! My life is over!" That frantic, panicked resistance is what turns a painful wound into an infected, agonizing ordeal. We exhaust our souls fighting a battle against a reality that has already occurred.

The mystics saw that suffering is the moment we are pushed so far beyond the pathetic limits of our own strength that we are finally, finally given the opportunity to surrender. Not to give up in despair. But to give the whole mess over to the only One strong enough to hold it. It’s a forced relaxation of our white-knuckled grip on life. And in that release, we find a peace that was impossible when we were still trying to be in charge.

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2. It’s a Holy Fire That Burns Your Junk.

We are all emotional hoarders. Every single one of us.

We spend our lives accumulating and clinging to things we believe are essential for our happiness and security. We build our nests out of this stuff, hoping it will keep us safe and warm. But most of it is just flammable junk.

What kind of junk?

• The Approval of Others: The desperate need to be liked, admired, and seen as "good."
• Our Image & Reputation: The carefully curated mask we show the world.
• Our Need to Be Right: Our rigid opinions, our political certainties, our theological boxes.
• Our Idols of Comfort: Our routines, our material possessions, our creature comforts.
• Our Hidden Pride: The secret belief that we're a little bit better, smarter, or more faithful than others.

Suffering is the holy fire that sweeps through the cluttered, dusty house of our lives and ruthlessly burns away everything that is not essential. It doesn’t ask. It just burns.

And while it’s happening, it feels like being destroyed. But its purpose isn't destruction. Its purpose is purification.

In the blistering heat of a true crisis, the things we once obsessed over are revealed for the cheap trinkets they are. The fire melts away the superficial until only the pure, unburnable gold of what truly matters remains.

Suffering doesn’t add a new virtue to your life. It reveals the unshakeable treasure that was buried under all the junk you used to value.

You finally find out what your foundation is really made of. When the flimsy props of your job title, your social standing, and your self-reliance are kicked out from under you, you are forced to find what will actually hold your weight.

This is the agonizing, beautiful process that moves our faith from a transaction to a relationship. Many of us, if we’re honest, treat God like a cosmic vending machine. If I put in enough prayers and good behavior, then you will give me blessings and a comfortable life. Suffering smashes the vending machine to pieces. It destroys our transactional faith and invites us into a relational one, a faith that says, "I don't need you to fix this. I just need you to be with me in the fire."

This is the cry we hear in the Psalms. It is the discovery made by Job. It is the truth found by every soul who has walked through the fire and found that the only thing that doesn’t burn away is the love of God. The pain we feel is the scream of our ego as its cherished idols are being pried from its grasping hands. But it is a rescue. A severe, but loving, mercy.

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3. It’s the Crack That Lets the Light In.

The ego wants to be a fortress. Sealed, defended, impenetrable. It believes that vulnerability is a fatal weakness and that an open heart is a target. It would rather live in a small, dark, and heavily fortified prison of its own making than risk the wild, unpredictable, and sometimes painful beauty of an open-hearted life.

But here’s a secret of the spiritual path: You cannot be filled with grace if you are a sealed box.

Suffering is the event that cracks the fortress open.

It is not the same as being broken. A broken thing is often ruined, its purpose lost. A cracked-open thing is how the light finally gets in, and how your own light finally gets out. This sacred opening brings three profound, life-altering gifts.

First, it forces you into the raw reality of the present moment. The anxious mind is a phantom, living everywhere but here and now. It is constantly haunting the past or colonizing the future. But intense pain—physical or emotional—can be a brutal form of grace. It acts as a powerful, if involuntary, shortcut to the Now. The pain can be so total, so immediate, that it momentarily silences the chattering mind. All the abstract worries about tomorrow and all the looping regrets about yesterday can dissolve in the face of the raw, undeniable reality of this hurts, right now. While terrible, this breaks the spell of mental illusion and grounds you in what is real, which is the only place God can ever be found.

Second, it gives you the non-negotiable gift of compassion. You simply cannot understand the landscape of another person's pain from a safe distance. You can have sympathy. You can have pity. But you cannot have true compassion until your own heart has been broken. Suffering is the great equalizer. It demolishes our silly, invisible hierarchies of who is better or more blessed than whom. It baptizes us into the shared, sacred reality of the human condition. It’s what allows us, as Henri Nouwen said, to become "wounded healers." Our wounds stop being sources of shame and isolation, and they become our credentials. They become the bridges that connect our heart to another's, allowing us to say, with utter authenticity, "I know. Me too."

Finally, it reveals God's strength in the very place of your weakness. This is the great paradox of the Christian faith. The ego equates vulnerability with failure. It spends its life hiding weakness and pretending to be strong. Suffering obliterates that pretense. It lays our weakness, our fragility, our desperate need for help bare for all to see. And yet, it is precisely there, at the absolute end of our own resources, that we become open enough to receive a strength that is not our own. St. Paul pleaded with God to remove his "thorn in the flesh," his source of suffering. God's reply changed the world: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." This isn't just a nice quote for a coffee mug. It is the secret code of the kingdom. It is at the bottom, when we have nothing left, when we are utterly spent, that we discover we are being held by Everything.

The Choice You Have in the Fire

Let's circle back. That call to "rejoice" is still a high bar. For most of us, it’s not the place to start.

Perhaps the first step is simpler. It's to shift our perspective. To muster the courage to believe that our hardship is not a random, meaningless curse, but a potential catalyst. A sacred invitation.

When pain comes, we don't get to choose whether or not it hurts. But we do have a choice about what we do with the hurt.

We can see it through the eyes of the terrified ego, which sees only threat, loss, and destruction. This path leads to bitterness, resentment, and a closed-off heart.

Or, we can ask for the grace to see it through the eyes of the soul. To see the possibility of purification. The invitation to surrender. The chance for renewal.

This doesn't make the pain go away. But it infuses it with meaning. It transforms our suffering—our mental and emotional war against the pain—into a path. It turns a destructive blaze into a refining one. It makes it possible to whisper, even through tears, "I don't understand this, God, but I trust you. Show me what you want me to see in this."

It’s about finding the unshakeable Light, not in a life without darkness, but right in the very heart of it.

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FAQ: The Hard Questions 

Q: Does "rejoicing in suffering" mean I should pretend to be happy when I'm hurting?
A: God, no. It’s not about faking emotions. It’s a perspective shift—recognizing that even within real hardship, God is at work, refining you. The "joy" is in trusting that loving process, not in the pain itself.

Q: If suffering is purification, does that mean God caused my pain?
A: That’s a deep mystery. The focus here is less on the origin of suffering and more on God’s redemptive power within it. He can use any experience, regardless of its source, for your spiritual growth if you surrender it to Him.

Q: How can I possibly "rejoice" when I'm in intense pain?
A: You don’t start with rejoicing; you start with acceptance. Simply acknowledge the pain without adding the mental story that "it’s unbearable." The rejoicing is a quiet trust that can only emerge much later, once you see the strength you gained in the fire.

Q: Isn’t focusing on suffering just negative and morbid?
A: Only if you see it as a dead end. When you understand it as a potential catalyst for burning away the ego and finding what’s real, it becomes a path to authentic joy—a joy that isn’t afraid of life’s hard realities.