Why do so many saints pray for suffering?

There is a moment that comes to almost everyone who reads deeply into the lives of the saints. You’re moving along, inspired by their charity, their wisdom, their courage—and then you stumble across something that stops you cold. A line in a letter. A confession in a diary. A prayer offered at the altar.

“Lord, let me suffer more.”

You read it again, certain you’ve misunderstood. But no. There it is, in the words of Teresa of Ávila: “Lord, either to suffer or to die.” There it is in the writings of John of the Cross, who begged for the grace “to suffer and to be despised for You.” There it is in Thérèse of Lisieux, who as a young Carmelite asked Jesus for the gift of being forgotten, misunderstood, and afflicted. Padre Pio, Catherine of Siena, Faustina Kowalska—the list runs long, and the pattern is unmistakable.

For most of us, this seems not just strange but slightly unhinged.

We spend our lives trying to avoid suffering.

We take aspirin for headaches, change jobs to escape difficult bosses, end relationships when they grow painful, and rightly so in many cases. The instinct to avoid pain is woven into our very biology. So what could possibly have possessed these otherwise sane, brilliant, beautiful souls to ask God for the one thing the rest of us spend our lives trying to dodge?

The answer, when we finally see it, will not make us comfortable. But it might just set us free.

 

The Scandal of the Cross

To begin to understand the saints’ prayer for suffering, we must first reckon with a scandal at the very heart of Christian faith—a scandal so familiar that we have stopped noticing it.

The God we worship was tortured to death.

And he did not merely permit this; he chose it. He set his face toward Jerusalem. He told his friends, again and again, that this was the very purpose of his coming.

When Peter, with the best of human instincts, tried to talk him out of it, Jesus responded with shocking severity: ”Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Matthew 16:23). To want to spare Christ his suffering was, in his own words, satanic. Not because suffering is good in itself, but because the avoidance of it had become, in that moment, the obstacle to the world’s salvation.

And then Jesus turned to his disciples and said something that the modern ear cannot quite absorb: ”If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

Notice that he did not say, “If a cross happens to fall upon you, bear it bravely.” He said take it up. This is the language of choice, of embrace, of active reception. The Greek verb here, arátō, is an aorist imperative—a decisive, complete action. Pick it up. Carry it. Walk.

The saints were not masochists. They did not love pain for pain’s sake. What they understood, with a clarity most of us never achieve, was that the cross was not an unfortunate detour on the road to glory. The cross was the road.

And anyone who wanted to follow Christ all the way home would have to learn to walk it with him.

 

Suffering as the Currency of Love

There is a moment in the Gospel of Luke when a sinful woman comes to Jesus at the house of a Pharisee. She weeps over his feet, dries them with her hair, anoints them with costly perfume. The Pharisee is scandalized. Jesus turns to him and says, ”Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little” (Luke 7:47).

This is one of the great keys to the saints’ strange prayer. Love is measured by what it is willing to give, and what it is willing to endure. A love that costs nothing is worth nothing. A love that has never been tested by sacrifice is, at best, sentiment.

Watch any mother with a sick child. Watch any father working two jobs so his children can eat. Watch any spouse caring for a partner with dementia. The depth of love is revealed not in the easy moments but in the costly ones. We all know this, intuitively, when we see it in human relationships.

The saints simply applied this same logic to their relationship with God. If they truly loved him, they wanted to prove it. And the most concrete way to prove love, in this fallen world where suffering is everywhere, was to embrace suffering for his sake. Not because God delights in their pain—he does not. But because their willingness to endure pain for him was the surest sign that their love was real.

St. Paul understood this. ”I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10). For Paul, knowing Christ and sharing his sufferings were not two different things. They were one and the same.

 

The Mystery of Co-Redemption

But there is more here, something even more mysterious. The saints understood that their sufferings were not just personal proofs of love. They believed their sufferings could actually be united with the sufferings of Christ for the salvation of souls.

This is one of the most astonishing claims in all of Christian theology, and it is laid out plainly in Paul’s letter to the Colossians: ”I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).

What can this possibly mean? Was something lacking in Christ’s suffering?

Of course not, in terms of merit. Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary was infinite, complete, sufficient for the salvation of every soul that has ever existed or ever will.

But Paul’s point is something different. What is “lacking” is our participation. Christ left room in his redemptive work for us to join him. He did not need our help, but in his love he chose to make us partners rather than spectators.

This is what the saints understood. When they suffered—a sleepless night offered up, a humiliation borne in silence, an illness embraced without complaint—they believed that suffering could become, through union with Christ, a real participation in his saving work.

Their pain could bear fruit in the conversion of sinners, the consolation of the dying, the rescue of souls they would never meet on this side of eternity.

Not because their suffering was their own, but because united to Christ, all suffering participates in His.

We are the body of Christ, and Christ's body endured suffering. And He promised us that we—who are His body still on earth—would suffer still more. But because His suffering is not for naught, but accomplishes the salvation of the world, when we do not "cling" to our suffering and cry, "woe is me," but give it over the Christ, we encounter the mystery of redemption, we participate in it.

Thérèse of Lisieux, dying of tuberculosis at twenty-four, wrote to her sister that she wanted to spend her heaven doing good on earth. She believed her sufferings, joined to Christ’s, were already doing this. Every cough, every fever, every dark night of doubt was being woven by God into the salvation of the world.

When you grasp this, the saints’ prayer for suffering becomes intelligible. They were asking for more opportunities to love, more chances to participate in the rescue of souls, more material to offer at the altar of divine love.

 

The Purification of the Heart

There is one more layer to this mystery, perhaps the most personal of all. The saints knew, from hard experience, that the human heart is deeply disordered.

We love the wrong things, or we love the right things in the wrong way. We cling to comforts that cannot save us. We mistake created goods for the Creator. We build little kingdoms of self where God alone should reign.

And the only fire hot enough to burn away these disorders is the fire of suffering rightly received.

John of the Cross wrote at length about this in The Dark Night of the Soul. He understood that God uses suffering as a kind of divine surgery, cutting away the diseased tissue of our attachments so that the healthy tissue of pure love can grow. It hurts terribly. It feels, at times, like dying. But the soul that submits to this surgery emerges transformed, capable of a love and a freedom that the unpurified soul cannot even imagine.

The saints prayed for suffering, in part, because they wanted to be saints. They knew themselves well enough to know that without the cross they would remain spiritually mediocre forever. They would always have one eye on heaven and one eye on earth, never fully given, never fully free. Only suffering, embraced in love, could finish the work that grace had begun in them.

 

What This Means for Us

Now, a word of caution and a word of comfort.

The word of caution is this: do not rush to pray for suffering.

The saints who prayed such prayers had already traveled a long road of intimacy with God. They had developed the spiritual muscles necessary to bear what they asked for. To pray for suffering before you are ready is like asking to run a marathon before you have learned to walk. You will only injure yourself and become discouraged.

The word of comfort is this: you do not need to pray for suffering.

Life will bring you plenty of it, all on its own. The question is not whether you will suffer, but what you will do with the suffering that comes.

Here, then, is the practical wisdom the saints offer us. The next time you face a real suffering—an illness, a disappointment, a betrayal, a humiliation, a loss—try this. Before you reach for distraction, before you complain, before you ask God to take it away, pause. Hold the suffering in your hands like a small, fragile gift. And then offer it to God. Say something like this: “Lord, I do not understand this pain. I do not want it. But since it has come, I give it to you. Unite it with your own suffering on the cross. Make it yours. For in You, no suffering is spent without infinite greater victories. Let it bear fruit in some soul who needs your mercy.”

You will be surprised what happens. The pain does not necessarily go away. But it changes. It becomes meaningful. It becomes prayer. It becomes love.

And in this small, daily practice you will discover what the saints discovered: that the cross, embraced rather than fled, is not the enemy of joy but the gateway to it. The crucified Christ is also the risen Christ. And those who walk with him through the valley of the shadow find, at the end of the road, a joy that no suffering can ever take away.

This is why the saints prayed for suffering. Not because they loved pain, but because they loved Love. And they knew that Love, in this world, always wears a crown of thorns before it wears a crown of glory.