“We should live through difficulties and tragedies and see them all as opportunities for prayer, for approaching God. That’s the secret: how the man of God will transform everything into prayer. St. Paul means this when he says, ‘I rejoice in my sufferings,’ in all the tribulations he encountered. This is how sanctification takes place. May God grant this to us. I ask for this fervently in my prayer.”

Elder Porphyrios

Recent events of tragedy and suffering in the lives of those close to my heart have affected me deeply. These words are not specifically intended for them, but they are felt as a general and loving response to the inevitable question, “Why?” I believe it takes a certain understanding of the development of our contemporary social climate in order to answer this question.

I do not believe my generation is interested much in suffering. The generations that have given rise to modern and post-modern societies have had a different aim in mind: material security and ease of life. And thus one of the greatest tragedies of the individual experience of tragedy in the post-modern society is that many of us today are completely unprepared to suffer even to the smallest degree.

It has been twenty years since my last living grandparent passed away. I believe they lived in a time prior to the combustible engine, electrical power grids, penicillin and indoor plumbing. My father’s parents were children whose older relatives fought in the American Civil War and my mother’s parents lived under the Turkish occupation of the Balkan states. They all lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. These and other experiences of my grandparent’s lives lead me to believe that they probably were not na