John Donne, a 17th century poet, experienced great pain. Because he married the daughter of a disapproving lord, he was fired from his job, as assistant to the Lord Chancellor, yanked from his wife, and locked in a dungeon. Later, he endured a long illness which sapped his strength almost to the point of death. In the midst of this illness, Donne wrote a series of devotions on suffering, which rank among the most poignant meditations on the subject. In one of these, he considers a parallel: The sickness which keeps him in bed forces him to think about his spiritual condition. Suffering gets our attention; it forces us to look to God, when otherwise we would just as well ignore Him.