Kate

As well you should. Have a blessed time. I know you will.
Blessings,
~Toni~

I am sooo happy for you! THIS is what’s important…your family! How much they value you is evident by their happily changing vacation plans to be sure you are still a central part of the celebration! Indeed, you are blessed. I know that you KNOW that. Take the time to enjoy this time to the max. I am praying that you will feel strong and healthy during this very special time together with your loved ones.

I’ve taken the liberty to paste a blog from Sister Janet Fearns, of Vatican Radio. Her website is called: http://www.pauseandpray.com It is always a blessing to me to read her blogs. She has such a beautiful way with words, that I can almost see what she sees and feel what she feels. It is a time that brings me ever closer to God. Though this is rather lengthy, it is on the topic of suffering. I hope you find some comfort in this one.

The Vatican Connection
Greetings from Rome with Sister Janet Fearns, FMDM

Sister Janet’s new site! Pause for Prayer

On a personal note… Suffering

In the life of every family, there are moments when there is nothing left but prayer and the love of each family member for each other. There are those awful moments when each individual knows that everything humanly possible has been done and there is nothing more in that awful, sickening helplessness, than to hand everything over to God. In one sense there is a freedom in that. I know in my mind that God is all-powerful and that his love for me and for those I love is immeasurably greater than anything I can possibly imagine, but, as the saying goes, “The longest distance in the world is the journey between the head and the heart”. I might know with my head that God can do all things, but it can sometimes be very hard to make my heart know and understand that same thing. It’s so easy, to quote another saying, “to be in partnership with God but to try to be the senior partner”. It’s so easy to think that I know what I would do if I were God, and yet that’s not necessarily the right thing.

Here at Vatican Radio, I regularly receive prayer requests for critically ill children, children for whom their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents…everybody…must, at some stage have asked God to take on the child’s suffering rather than let that dearly-loved child have even one more second of pain. Yet there are moments when, however much I might beg God to let me take on that child’s sickness, God’s answer is “No” and the torment goes on. We ask why, and there seems to be no present answer, at least, not one that is easy to understand. It’s all too easy to say that God must have a reason, but, deep down, to be angry with God for not taking on my suggestion and making me suffer instead of the child.

Sometimes a sick child has wisdom far beyond its years and I think it cruel that circumstances have forced this sudden growing up on someone who should be young, innocent and carefree. Often a sick child is left trying to comfort its family, whilst, at the same time, the family tries to be strong and strives not to show the depths of their own helplessness and pain. Sometimes that agony is made all the harder because, occasionally, there could be a cure with more money or more resources, but the child is in the wrong place at the wrong time. There used to be a time, when I was a child, when the news would have regular stories about desperate parents who had somehow managed to scrape together enough money, thanks to friends and well-wishers, to travel halfway across the world in search of the latest reported treatment for leukemia. Today, leukemia can often be treated and the child’s life saved, but it’s not so many years since the word was a death sentence. It would be so easy for parents of such children to ask why their child was born then and not now. Why did it have to happen at all? I used to know a doctor who became an atheist because he thought that, if there is a God, he’s a sadist. If there is so much suffering, then, he thought, perhaps there isn’t a God and this world is all that there is.

There are no easy answers. It’s easy to look at the Cross and see a mother who stood beside her Son, dying in agony and shame. Was the Father so unloving, that even his Son wasn’t spared?

The reality is that, wherever there is pain and suffering, that is where the Crucifixion is happening. Wherever a family is in torment because of one of its number is ill, that is where Mary is standing at the foot of her Son’s Cross. Wherever there is anxiety, anguish, despair in a family, it is the Crucifixion and time and eternity merge. At that moment, Jesus on the Cross is not something that happened 2000 years ago. It is the here and now. It is in the present that Jesus is nailed to the Cross alongside my cross. It is in the here and now that Mary stands beside, not only her Son’s Calvary, but mine, too. It is in my own helplessness that Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is in my own utter helplessness that Jesus cries, in the middle of his agony, “Into your hands I commend my spirit”. He hands everything over to his Father. He still dies, but he experiences the joy of the resurrection. Mary still held the body of Jesus, but she also knew the joy of Easter.

I use my bus journey to work as a quiet period of prayer and reflection, so I use an mp3 player to listen to appropriate music. This morning I looked back 40 years or more, to a time when my own sister was very ill and I asked God to take my life instead of hers. He didn’t and both of us are alive and well today. I wondered why, when I made the offer with all my heart, God didn’t accept it. It wasn’t a coincidence, I thought, that I suddenly heard the words of the hymn to which I was listening but not paying much attention. “You are my child and I love you”.

God doesn’t take one life in exchange for another. God loves each and every one of us as an individual. (That, incidentally, is why the Church is against the idea of ‘designer babies’). I can’t love anybody more than God does. I can’t want to hold and comfort someone any more than Mary wants to hold her own child in her arms, giving that child her love, protection and security. I can’t understand why I am at the foot of the Cross, probably any more than Mary could. I have no answers as to why my family is on Calvary, but what I do know is that, in my pain, I am not alone. God and his Mother are there with me, with my family and with my child.

God bless, Sr. Janet

Peace be with you, Heather
Susan

Meg