The Benediction of Suffering

All punishments of God are gifts—
not in the palatable parlance of pews,
not in the soft, saccharine hymns
of men who mistake mercy
for immunity—
but in the ancient, aching truth
that to exist
is to be ruined beautifully.

To be summoned into breath,
into flesh,
into the ribcage of mortality—
is to be both blessed and bludgeoned
by the architecture of being.

Existence is the holiest affliction.
The soul is not given—
it is excavated
through fracture,
through flame,
through the slow crucible
of feeling everything
far too much.

Pain is not punishment—
it is sacrament.

It is the blood-warm proof
that we are not illusions,
not figments,
not divine misfires
floating untethered
through some indifferent cosmos.

We are vessels—
porous and weeping—
collecting both ecstasy
and devastation
in the same hollow.

God does not arrive
with the hush of absolution.
He comes
in the splintered breath
of childbirth,
in the howl beneath hospital fluorescents,
in the silence after
the world does not end,
but you do.

And still—
there is holiness in the haemorrhage.
There is grace
in the groaning floorboards
of a life fully inhabited.
There is a kind of divinity
in the agony of continuing.

To suffer
is not to be forsaken.
It is to be known
in the most unflinching way—
to be touched
by the unbearable enormity
of being real.

We are not punished
for existing.
We are refined by it.

Love will undo us.
Time will unmake us.
Grief will baptize us again and again
until we remember
that salvation was never the absence of pain—
but the courage to stay soft within it.

So if God wounds,
it is only to make space—
for more feeling,
for more light,
for the unbearable gift
of being here
at all.