Hope in the Anguish

The Pillar waxes eloquent about sorrow in reporting priestly abuse in a way that also reveals something important about mercy and consequently Lent:

Reporting on abuse and misconduct in the life of the Church is important because it helps to bring to the fore issues in need of healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation — in need of justice, to be clear. It also helps to catalyze ecclesial reform - I hope - or at least to identify the areas in Church life in which serious reform is needed.

We do that kind of reporting because we believe those things matter, and they help the Church to better pursue her sacred mission, and to allow for faith, grace, and the charisms of the Holy Spirit to better animate the lives of Christians, for the salvation of souls and the glory of God.

But these kinds of stories are often a visit to the sorrow of fellow Christians – to the painful experiences they’ve had, which have often been a stumbling block to their faith, and to their hope.

I think there’s value for us to see that sorrow, to enter it, even just for a moment, in a kind of solidarity with the grief or anguish that a fellow believer is experiencing. We can use that solidarity to pray for a suffering person, of course, and we can often detect in their lives a witness of extraordinary grace at the foot of Calvary.

But solidarity with people who are suffering requires, I think, that we learn how to find the Lord in the sorrow, find hope in the anguish — that we trust in God’s providential goodness, and that when we witness suffering, we let it bring us closer to the Cross, and to the Crucified One, instead of allowing it to draw us further away.

Christians plunge into suffering, we don’t run away from it, because we know that the Lord hung on a cross, and thus every depth of human anguish is a place where Christ can be found. We also know that he, in the profound mystery of the Cross, redeems our suffering — that from the Cross, he is resurrected and glorified, and from the Cross, he makes saints.

If we don’t know those things, or if we lose sight of them, entering the sorrow of other people, or even acknowledging our own, is a path of danger, in which we might find ourselves grasping at all the wrong things, to make the sorrow go away.

That’s often sin, right? — grasping for something that takes us out of the Christian meaning of a moment’s reality. Grasping for something easier, more pleasurable, more subject to our control.

But if we bring that sorrow to the Cross, instead, God sometimes gives a glimpse of the profundity of his love, and the depth of his enduring mercy.

That highlighted portion in yellow speaks to the insights I have been having in my parish ministry and my own vocational discernment. That's not the sort of thing you normally encounter in journalism. 

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