Reaching out through suffering

The apparent connotations of suffering tend to present the latter in a rather negative light. Suffering is a hard experience to undergo. Having said that, suffering presents a sterling opportunity for reaching out to others.

The first person to greatly benefit from this reaching out is precisely the suffering person. The amazing witness of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago, attests how much this is true.

Being himself a cancer patient, Cardinal Bernardin let himself be stripped of the prestige his position of a cardinal in the Church might have endowed him with. In his illness he realised he had a mission to fulfil: becoming one with his fellow cancer patients by spending time with them. In his book The Gift of Peace, Cardinal Bernardin wrote: "In the light of my cancer ministry, I began to recognise the unique and special nature of another community to which I now belong: the community of those who suffer from cancer and other serious illnesses. Those in the community see things differently. Life takes on new meaning and suddenly it becomes easier to separate the essential and the peripheral".

By slowly integrating her/his own suffering, and have the courage to look beyond it, the suffering person can then reach out to others. The superb example which spontaneously comes to my mind is that of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Although he was stripped of his garments and royalty as the much awaited Messiah, he managed to reach out to the various people who were close to him during his passion, namely to his afflicted mother, the weeping women of Jerusalem, the repentant thief, the beloved disciple and, ultimately, his Father.

This reaching out to oneself and others is only possible if one is intensely united with God, the fountain and summit of every peace and comfort. In the aforementioned book, Cardinal Bernardin confessed that "suffering and pain make little sense to me without God".

Only God can transform human sufferings into redemptive forces so that evil is overcome by good in the world. The secret for this radical change lies in an ardent faith in the God of the forsaken. It is God who guarantees that evil and death will not have the last word and that Christ's suffering is redemptive and life-giving; it is in fact "the [very] life of the world" (Jn 6,51).