August 02, 2026

Give Suffering A Use

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.

Weil wrote this in one of her letters to Father Perrin, composed while she worked factory jobs and later served the Free French in London during the war, always insisting on living out the very afflictions she wrote about. She was not asking God or anyone else to remove her migraines, her exhaustion, or her sense of exile; she was asking what those things could be turned toward. For her, meaning was never the absence of hardship but the direction one gave it. It is a hard, practical idea for anyone who assumes a meaningful life is a comfortable one.