In Christian spirituality, we follow a Suffering Servant, one acquainted with all our sorrows, who wants to meet us in ours!

What spiritually mature people all have in common is how they experienced their suffering as a place of meeting and being transformed by God. All were broken, but their unique brokenness became a place of meeting, being loved, and loving from. Their personal healing, became a place for others to heal.
It is never escaping suffering, but meeting God in it, and sharing from it. It’s St Paul’s, “I’m not perfected yet, but i press on and into…”
This way of meeting in our pain, necessitates humility and perforce creates the fruits of the spirit in us.
Like John the Baptist, “We must decrease that He may increase!” This is one of the ways of spiritual maturity!
Each elder has unique highlights of God! But they have this in common: they found Him in and through their sufferings, and then ministered from that meeting place, to others in and from His Love.
All the wise people i know, have used their wildernesses as places of revelation, and then given from that place of knowing they are loved in their unique pains.
Also, no mature person is bitter angry or not in Love. And they tend to have fallen in Love with things God is in Love with, rather than just their own preferences.
Trees are known by their fruit. Wanting to serve from your own suffering is one.
Some emphasize, being in the beloved. Acceptance and belonging.
Others, being on a long journey of discipleship and pilgrimage.
Others still, how when we reverse the world’s equation, we see that God actually really desires to know and be with us, and our meaning comes from saying yes. This alone, aligns us with what is Real.
If we want to know what is Real, turn and align with Him, and we will find our own names. Identity is paradoxically in losing our own names into His Name, to find our true names.
Regardless, all the saints understood how to meet God, the Ultimate Real, through their personal sufferings! How to meet The Suffering Servant, through their own sufferings. That’s a universal requirement for spiritual maturity. And a shared trait of spiritual masters.