Creative Suffering

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Creative Suffering is written by Iulia de Beausobre and published by SLG Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0728304562 (ISBN 10) and 9780728304567 (ISBN 13).

Fairacres Publications 88 In the early days of World War II, a Russian exile in London was asked to talk to Anglican theological students about suffering; this booklet is the text of that talk. Underlying all that Iulia de Beausobre had to say is the assumption that ’something can be made of suffering’, as Patrick Thompson wrote in his Foreword to the original edition. She did not speak from hearsay, having shared personally in the mental and physical suffering of the Russian people in the first half of the twentieth century. She had already described something of that experience in The Woman Who Could Not Die (1938). This was further explored in Constance Babington Smith’s 1983 biography, Iulia de Beausobre, a Russian Christian in the West. It is against the background of terror and cruelty on a huge scale that the author illuminates the way in which the Russian people have always received suffering, and what they have learned to do with it. She is particularly concerned with ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ and cruelty as a symptom of an evil whose roots lie deeper than anything in human experience. It is precisely at its roots that evil has been decisively defeated by Christ in the divine mystery of suffering willingly accepted for the sake of love. The appeal of this deeply thoughtful essay is as strong and its message as cogent now as in the dark days of 1940. It is also the testimony of one who, with many of her compatriots, learned to claim the power of Christ’s victory in face of their persecutors, and so make their suffering ‘creative’ like his.