Here is an excerpt from a television interview conducted in 1978 by William F. Buckley, Jr., with the great English Christian leader Malcolm Muggeridge, who looks back on the role of suffering in his walk with Christ.
[The cross] worked for centuries and centuries, bringing out all the creativity in people, all the love and disinterestedness in people, this symbol of suffering; and I think that’s the heart of the thing. Of course, it’s what been lost and why the faith is languishing; because it cannot take in that truth that we can learn nothing—and you know, as an old man, Bill, looking back on one’s life, it’s one of the things that strikes you most forcibly—that the only that that’s taught one anything is suffering, not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that rally teaches one what life’s about—the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what it really signifies—is suffering, is affliction.
Vintage Muggeridge, ed. Jeffrey Barlow (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans 1985), 114-15.
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