Suffering plays a key role in the contemplative life. We all experience fundamental needs for safety and security, belonging and acceptance, and control. One way to think of suffering is as a state in which one must trust God alone for safety and security, for belonging and acceptance — in which one or more of these needs is going unmet in any other sense, no matter how superficial — and one realizes that any sense of control was only ever an illusion. Though we can come to this state through pain, loss, challenge, heartache, or any number of avenues, at its core, suffering is a stripping away of the substitutes or intermediaries (even the very good intermediaries that have purpose and place and meaning in our spiritual journeys) until there is nothing left but God. We come to depend on these substitutes and “middlemen” to such a degree that to lose them can seem like a setback, even devastating, but if we can welcome and embrace the suffering when it comes, it becomes spiritually advantageous, placing us in prime position for a real, direct, unfiltered, intimate, “naked” encounter with the Divine. In this sense, contemplative practice can be viewed as a “chosen suffering” that willingly relinquishes safety, security, belonging, acceptance, and control for the sake of Divine encounter.