The question of suffering has always been something with which people have wrestled. In his 2025 Lent book, Healing Wounds, Erik Varden attempts to offer new reflections on this most challenging of themes.

Reflecting on the cross, on Jesus’ own suffering as well as on our own sufferings, he draws out the ways in which Jesus’ suffering on the cross can turn into sources of healing for ourselves and for others. In this online conversation, Erik Varden and Paula Gooder draw on these and other themes.

Erik Varden is Bishop of Trondheim in Norway and a Cistercian monk.