Your Pain for the World

"I feel very powerless.  I want to do something.  I have to do something.... I have to act in any way possible to alleviate the pain I see.  But there is an even harder task: to carry my own cross, the cross of loneliness and isolation, the cross of the rejections I experience, the cross of my depression and inner anguish.  As long as I agonize over the pain of others far away but cannot carry the pain that is uniquely mine, I may become an activist, even a defender of humanity, but not a follower of Jesus.  Somehow my bond with those who suffer oppression is made real through my willingness to suffer my loneliness.  It is a burden I try to avoid, sometimes, by worrying about others.  But Jesus says: "Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest" (Mt 11:28).  I might think that there is an unbridgeable gap between myself and the Guatemalan wood carrier.  But Jesus carried his cross for both of us.  We belong together.  We must each take up our own cross and follow him, and so discover that we are truly brothers who learn from him who is humble and gentle of heart."

These words of Henri Nouwen, set under the heading "Willing to Suffer My Loneliness," which I copied down months ago, speak so powerfully to how I feel now as I think of the world around me.  There are the incomprehensible sufferings of all those losing homes and loved ones in natural disasters and genocides.  There are friends close to my heart struggling with loneliness and broken relationships.  So much pain.  So much heartache.

Then there is the pain in my own heart.  No matter how beautifully things fall into place, no matter how many meaningful conversations I have, no matter how much I accomplish, still it is there: the pain of separation.

For we are made for more than this.  In the words of Chesterton's Poet in The Surprise: "This is good, but something is better."

That longing for something better—that longing for union—pulls at our hearts.  Often we experience it as a deep chasm of loneliness.  We try in so many ways to fill that chasm.  We even go so far as to disguise our need to assuage our loneliness as love for others.  Yet God knows our hearts.  He knows—as do we, when we are honest with ourselves—whether we reach out to make ourselves feel better or to bring love—to bring Christ—to others.

Sometimes there is nothing we can do.  That is when the pain is greatest.

In those moments, perhaps then it is enough simply to embrace the cross that is so much ourselves and our own loneliness, our own powerlessness.  There in the bearing of that cross we can do more for the world than  could any humanitarian aid group or charitable organization, for we can unite our sufferings with Christ's passion.

As we are taught in math: what is greater than infinity?  Nothing.

God Himself is infinite.  If we unite ourselves with Him, then we are greater than anything we could sum up of our own selves.

Whatever it is then that you must suffer today, may you have the strength to bear it as your own particular cross.  For in the carrying of that cross, you can come to a mystical union with Christ and with His body, the Church spread throughout the world....