What Is the Mystical Body and Redemptive Suffering?
What’s this about redemptive suffering and the loving wounds of Christ? Many of us struggle with the idea of suffering, pain, death, even little deaths like missing the bus or having a tooth pulled, and reconciling all that, big and small, with God as a loving Father.
Dr. Dawn Eden’s Thesis on Suffering
Recently Dawn Eden defended her PhD thesis on this very topic — carved from her own heart’s experience, entitled “The Mystical Body and Its Loving Wounds.” And she gets to the meat rather quickly:
“As I see it, if suffering has no meaning unless it is “productive,” then the sufferer is at best a useful idiot. Left with no hope to see personal good accrue from his suffering, he or she is simply an instrument at the service of some future common good, a means to an end. Such an attitude is hardly compatible with the social teachings of the Second Vatican Council—teachings that tell us “a man is more precious for what he is than for what he has” (GS 35) and that “the disposition of affairs is to be subordinate to the personal realm and not contrariwise” (GS 26).”
It is now on our official “to read” list. Congratulations, Dr. Dawn.
Read Dawn Eden’s own account of her thesis defense.
Further Reading
Dawn’s Postscript: If the observations she made in her defense presentation about Pope Francis are of interest, you can read them in a popularized form in her book Remembering God’s Mercy: Redeem the Past and Free Yourself from Painful Memories.
Photo courtesy of Michael D. O’Brien | studiobrien.com