Purified through suffering

For my father

and for the newly

 departed servant of God, Crystal

"We went to the ward. Father was in bed...And when I saw him, I knew at once there was no hope of his living much longer...He looked at me and put forth his hand... and I realized that he could no longer even speak. But at the same time, you could see he knew us, and knew what was going on, and that his mind was clear, and that he understood everything...Of all of us, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. And I do not doubt that he had very much of it, and that behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul. It was a great soul, large, full of natural charity. He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding. And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the tomb, was not destroying him after all.

Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. And my father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great...and his struggle was authentic, and not wasted or lost or thrown away." -from Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain