St. Peter makes a pretty audacious claim in this Sunday's second reading: "[Suffering} is grace before God" (1 Pt 2:20). Because we know God is all-loving, we can reach a logical conclusion that all life experiences are grace before God, for God is present in all things. While we may be tempted to take the grace of suffering for granted during smoother times, the lived experience moves us to grapple with how to understand God's grace in its midst. Fr. Richard Rohr,  OFM offers one way to make the connection between grace and suffering. Fr. Rohr defines suffering as “any time we feel we are not in control.” Indeed, all suffering – that of pain, loss, trial, opposition, anxiety, and so on – stems from something we want to control but cannot. By this definition, the grace of suffering lies in the awareness that true discipleship is a life borne out of a surrender of control. As disciples, we gradually learn to yield any sense of or pretense toward control to the wisdom, providence, and love of God – as St. Paul bluntly put it, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Eventually, we realize that any perceived sense of control was only illusion and then we are truly free to abandon ourselves totally to God. The intentional surrender of contemplative practice is an embrace of this freedom from the need to control.
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