Grief Choosing to Love
18th Sunday of the Ordinary Time – Grief Choosing to Love
My brother just began a series of complicated surgeries which requires my Mom and me to be at a Philadelphia hospital before most of the city is awake. Sitting in the waiting room for hours, I can’t help but notice those around me who are waiting for news of their loved ones’ outcomes. Faces lined with worry. Many distracting themselves with mindless scrolling. In one corner, an older woman wipes away stray tears as she runs the beads of a Rosary through her fingers.
It is hard to wait with worry. Hard to carry the emotion of caretaking for someone who is sick and suffering. Grief in all its many forms can take quite a toll.
What strikes me most powerfully about this Gospel — long before we encounter the miracle of the loaves and fishes — is the very fact that Jesus Christ felt the heavy and exhausting weight of grief. Losing his cousin John the Baptist in such a violent way because John was testifying to Christ brought deep sorrow to the Lord’s pure heart.
We can’t overlook the fact that Jesus felt what we ourselves feel when the world around us seems to be crumbling. In his sadness and sorrow, he needed time apart. Time to rest and pray. Time to recharge with his Father.
I need to take a page from Christ here, to be quite frank. I suspect many of us who are caretakers need the reminder as well: parents caring for chronically ill children; spouses caring for a dying partner; all who carry the weight of others’ suffering in all its many forms.
The Spirit through the Word is asking us: are we taking time to heal? Are we finding ways to strengthen our hearts as we walk the difficult road of suffering and sorrow? Are we inviting the Father into our pain and offering it back to Him? When you are hurting, how is God asking to come in to those very places that seem dark and heavy?
Exhaustion and anxiety have a way of blocking out the very graces we need to move forward. But should we be open to receiving the gift of genuine understanding and compassion that comes from the crosses we carry, we will, in fact, become feeders of others who suffer and mourn.
The Christ who grieved the loss of John, but who made time to rest and heal with His Father, was then able to have a heart moved with pity, open to see and heal the suffering he encountered all around him. He used his transformed-grief to willingly and lovingly enter the suffering of others and want to do something about it.
When all is said and done, I truly believe in my heart that the message of our faith and the power of Christ’s Paschal Mystery is this: Suffering transformed in God makes us selfless and compels us to want to move beyond ourselves and use our own journey to love and serve others on theirs.
The Crosses we carry and ask the Lord to use are then the very means He utilizes to feed others in their pain.
One of those waiting in the “family lounge” – such a comfortable word for an uncomfortable place to be — was a young Dad who wheeled in a girl of about 6 or 7. His daughter was completely immobile and non-verbal, needing someone to wipe her mouth every few minutes and to adjust whatever tubes were attached to her body underneath the Disney Princessblanket. Although I could see the exhaustion on his face, I could also see the incredible love: he was so attentive to her, whispering gentle words and smiling at the noises she would make in response.
About an hour later, when the little one was upstairs in surgery – Dad came down and collapsed in a chair, mindlessly flipping through a golf magazine before closing his eyes to rest (or pray … or both). Just then, a wailing cry came from the other side of the room, where a child not much older than the man’s own was waiting in fear and pain. The boy’s mother tried to comfort him to no avail; others sitting around this family simply turned-up the volume on whatever they were watching on their phones.
Not this man, though. Without a moment’s hesitation, I watched this Dad go over to the boy and his mom, introduce himself and then offer words that only they could hear. From his pocket, he pulled-out some sort of trinket and gave it to the boy who smiled as he wiped away tears. Was it a key chain? Something he would have used to entertain his own daughter? Honestly, I don’t know – but whatever it was worked wonders, and the man– after fist-bumping the boy — returned to his seat and closed his eyes.
This Dad, with nothing more than a pocket toy and a gentle word of hope, became one who fed another who needed to know comfort and love in the midst of the storm. And here’s the amazing thing: it took less than 5 minutes. There was no big show. No “hey, look at me.” It was hidden and humble and holy. It was love borne from the carrying of the cross, offered to another who had trouble in that moment carrying their own.
When Jesus disembarked from the boat that day and saw the vast, hungry crowd, he could have ignored their suffering and focused on his own. He didn’t. Instead, he used the love that was within – shaped by the compassion learned from grief and sorrow – and began healing others’ hungers. After all, what is Eucharist Itself but the very presence of the Lord who truly gives Himself to us to feed us in our every need? What happened in this deserted place on the shores of the lake prefigures what Christ would do at the Last Supper and continues to do at every Mass throughout time and throughout the world: love us and come to us in our fears and sorrows, so that we can feed others, too.
As Paul makes powerfully and beautifully clear in his letter to the Romans: absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of Christ – no suffering, no sin, no anxiety nor death – because He never pulls His love away. He keeps stepping ashore time and time again, witnessing our hungers, and saying: “Come to Me. Come to the water of mercy and healing and hope. Come you who are hungry and thirsty for compassion and love. Just come to me.” We don’t have to make ourselves “worthy” to be fed; His Love and His Cross makes us so. He does it – His grace alone. Just come to Him in your fear and with your Cross, and let Him give you everything for which your heart hungers.
But then, don’t stop there. Become one who feeds others because you yourself have been fed. Feed because you have allowed your cross – your suffering – to shape your heart and your love. Although it might seem easier to stay in the boat and sail past the hungry crowd around you, life is certainly more beautiful and complete when you use what you’ve learned to comfort another soul on the journey.
As the Mom of the crying boy left the waiting room Monday morning, she stopped by the father who was still waiting for his daughter to be sent to recovery. She leaned down, hugged him, and said to him: “Your little girl is blessed to call you dad, and you are a good man. Don’t ever forget that.”
Looks as though love just fed in return …