Outside of Scripture, the Christian tradition speaks of affliction broadly, but perhaps none speaks so clearly in the contemporary era as Simone Weil, the 20th century French philosopher and mystic, who gives the following insightful description of affliction:

“In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific and irreducible…it takes possession of the soul and marks it… Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death…. Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time. … What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. … If the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell. That is why those who plunge men into affliction before they are prepared to receive it kill their souls. … Help given to souls is effective only if it goes far enough really to prepare them for affliction. That is no small thing.” (Waiting for God; New York : Harper & Row, 1951 | pp. 117, 120-121).

For Weil, affliction is something beyond suffering and grief.  When first reading this passage from Weil I was stunned.  She captured the deepest experience and implication of what it meant to be a refugee in East Africa. This is not to say affliction is the sole province of refugees, but in situations such as the refugees, it is not a single member of the community who experiences affliction, it is not only the community as a whole, but it is every member of the community individually and communally. It is the intensity and breadth of affliction which is more deadly. The experience here in the U.S. seems more constrained to individuals and immediate family, but affliction is not rendered less deadly.