On the Hardness of Life

Lessons from Dorothy Day and the Desert Fathers

One does not have to live long on this earth to come to the following conclusion.

Life is hard.

One way or another, we all come to understand this.

Try as we might, the hardness of life catches us. For some, it will drag us into its reality while we're kicking and screaming. Our refusal to submit intense. For others, we’re born into it. From our earliest days outside the womb, life's difficulties have been pressed upon us.

Life is hard. And this reality cannot be escaped.

But there is a particular grace that can be found in the hardness of life. So long as we don't buck against it— but surrender to it.

Trials and tribulations (what the Bible means by hard things), have a pruning aspect. That is to say, they produce something in us that we wouldn't possess otherwise.

This is why James says to "count it joy when you undergo trials of various kinds," and Paul says that "we glory in our sufferings."

These difficulties mold us in ways that a life of ease simply cannot. Far from making us dead, these difficulties make us more alive and more beautiful.

This is something the desert fathers understood.

For them a life of ease was more terrifying than facing an army. That is why they shared that “a monk ought to hate above all…an easy life.”

Centuries later, Dorothy Day understood this as well.

Writing to a friend, she had this to say.

"This morning the only gleam of consolation I had was that when God sends all these troubles and sufferings to the families, he is sending just what they need, to prune them down, so that they may bear fruit. If I didn't believe that, I'd be unhappy indeed. How he must love you to be so intent on sending what you need, spiritually. If all were going well and smoothly, it would be really dangerous."

The lesson in this is simple.

When the storm of life are tossing us to and fro, we must heed the wisdom of the Bible and the lived experiences of saints who have gone before us.

We must, as Charles Spurgeon admonished sufferers of depression, learn to kiss the waves that throw us against the Rock of Ages.