“Blessed are those that mourn, for they will be comforted”
Who can hear these words much less believe them wholeheartedly? Suffering is a mystery not easily solved. Over the years as a family we have experienced times of suffering. Friends have lost children or had them grievously injured. If I am honest it is difficult to answer the age old question of the mocking skeptic “How can a loving God permit so much pain and tragedy in this world”.
Who has been convinced much less consoled by the variety of answers, smooth, fragile as eggs in a box that have been given? In the end it is difficult to understand and explain the central role of suffering in our lives. We can only enter as Jesus did into the human condition where
suffering abides.
We cannot successfully flee pain. We cannot turn our eyes from it without running the risk of what we must inevitably endure if we are to grasp the meaning of life itself. Only suffering breaks us open. Only suffering whether it is in the midst of love or tragedy shatters the stone walls of our self concern.
We cannot understand it, we are pledged to eliminate it and yet we are humanized by suffering. When we can accept the pain that is part of any worthwhile human activity we come more fully alive. We are different afterwards; suffering opens something in our souls to deepen us as human beings.
The Holy Spirit hovers and is active over the waters churned by our reaching out toward the broken-hearted and the abandoned. Suffering breaks us open so that the waters of life can wash through us make us fresh and alive.
We are blessed when we say “Yes Lord “to our continuing inheritance of pain because this frees us from the prison of ourselves and we can lay hold of Joy and Hope in Jesus’ words “In this world you will have trouble, but rejoice I have overcome”.