"O blessed light,
 O Trinity and
 first Unity!"
 
Blessed Are Those Who
 Mourn
Glenn M. Spencer, Jr

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn "Grief is an experience common to all humanity. It transcends culture and time. It is 'catholic' - that is, 'universal.' Grief is also Catholic. It is a well-charted experience in the Scriptures, in the lives of the saints, as well as in our common life in the Body of Christ ... Our task is to live this universal, or catholic, pattern of grief as Catholics."

In this handbook for those who mourn, Glenn M. Spencer, Jr., looks at the grieving process within the context of the Church and the sacraments. By showing the reader how and why we must grieve all our losses, including but not limited to the death of a loved one, Spencer not only explains how to grow from the grief experience, but how to be a better friend to those who are grieving.

Some of the topics include:

The universality of grief
The necessary steps of grieving and mourning
The grief process experienced by the Church herself
Anger and denial as elements of grief
How to cope with special circumstances like holiday and anniversary grief
How to help children mourn
The role of forgiveness in healing
How to find others who have experienced your type of loss
How to establish a program in your parish to help with grief
How the sacraments and the Church help in healing
About the Author

Glenn M. Spencer, Jr., has served as a chaplain and director of pastoral care in a psychiatric hospital where he has had extensive experience in helping people work through the grief process.


Helping family and friends
find strength in suffering

By Kathy Conway
Special to The Catholic Spirit

Recently, my mother and two friends experienced serious health problems. Serious to the point of making one think, “Is this it?” My first reaction (and to be honest, second and third) is, “No!” No, this is my mother, this is too sudden, this shouldn't be happening. No, these friends are good people, they have so much more life to live, this shouldn't be happening.

At the same time that I am thinking and feeling strongly all these things, there is another quieter voice that keeps trying to get my attention. It is one of those persistent “naggings” or “promptings” that keeps trying to rise to the surface.

I think of a book I read a long time ago, and revisit from time to time, “The Wounded Healer” by Henri Nouwen. I pull it out and review some of my dog-eared pages. There it is, the part that is trying to rise to the surface and grab my attention.

“Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. Therefore ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.”

I know this to be true, deep inside. Suffering is part of life. We usually do not seek out suffering, but it can be so healing for us in deep ways. There is more to life than this life. I believe this.

I remember in college, a friend of mine described how as a young boy, his father was very ill. He had vivid memories of his fathers suffering, and how it affected the family. I naively asked him if he thought there had been any benefits to the suffering — or some question like that — trying to put a different “spin” on it. My friend was very frustrated by the question, and responded with, “You Catholics love to suffer!”

I didn't know how to respond then, but I was very aware I had somehow diminished his experience. I do not want to diminish my mothers experience of suffering, or my friends’ or mine for that matter.

Illness hurts. It is messy. Things are uncertain — sometimes for a long time. It is excruciating to be in pain, and to see someone you love in pain, and not feel able to help. Wounds integral to the human condition.

The thoughts shared by Henri Nouwen help me refocus — and bring me back to a center of peace. Sadness yes, but peace too. I am reminded now of words written some time ago by Father Arnold Weber, former pastor of Holy Name of Jesus in Medina. He was writing of the hope and promise we celebrate at Easter time. After the crucifixion, and prior to the resurrection, all must have seemed lost to the disciples. Jesus was gone and all he had worked for seemed lost.

In his Easter writing, Father Arnold alludes to the belief that “the center will hold.” He wrote that it does us little good to proclaim our belief in the resurrection in church on Sunday, and then be besieged by thoughts that the world — our world — is falling apart. Jesus himself was “struck down” at a time that many of those who loved him did not understand, and would not have chosen. Wounds integral to the human condition: The center will hold. The center being the truth of Jesus, his love for us, and his promise of resurrection. I have an image of this center as being a strong, intact rod that goes right through my inner core. It is the supporting structure for everything else.

So, what can I make of all this? I still do not like suffering. I still do not embrace it, for me, for those I love and care about, for those I encounter in my daily life. It is hard to offer clichés of comfort to those who are in pain. And yet, our strength is in our brokenness, and in being able to be present for each other and share the uncertain, painful times. I do know this to be true. I do. And I have to admit that part of my pain and discomfort is feeling that I can not help these people I love.


I now remember and seek out another book of Henri Nouwen’s, “Out of Solitude.” Yes. I remember this passage and have embraced it in the past.

“Still, when we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares.”

Yes, I know this is true, also.

Lord, I know my first and second, and unfortunately my third response to suffering will still most likely be “No!” Help my fourth response, or at least eventual response, be that of the father described in Mark’s Gospel, who sought you out because of his ill little son, “Lord, I believe . . . help my unbelief.” Help me to live my belief that the center will hold. Help me be the kind of daughter, friend, wife and mother who can be this different type of healer — wounded, broken at times, and able to sit with pain in the moment. I seek your grace. Amen.

Kathy Conway is a member of St. Therese in Deephaven and a nurse-practitioner at the University of Minnesota’s Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Anomalies Clinic.

Who do we blame for the worlds suffering?
God?

Why Does God Allow Suffering?
 By Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

Condensed  from the Catholic Digest
To Order the Digest you can call  1-800-312-0411
    

"Try looking at pain as something that transforms. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness."

Julian of Norwich asked Jesus why there was so much suffering in the world and why God allowed it. "I allowed the worst thing possible to happen," Jesus told her. "I let humanity kill God--and I made it the best thing….There  isn’t anything that I cannot transform into good."

That explains the old axiom, Crux probat omnia, "the
Cross proves everything." That is, the Cross (pain, suffering) is what transforms us. And yet most people do not know how to handle pain. Fear, anxiety, and negativity bang around inside them until they can't stand it, and so they look for ways to eliminate it. One quick way to diminish pain is to seek blame: "Whose fault is it?"

That's when the process of scapegoating begins--as evidenced, in our secular culture, by the high number of lawsuits. Where you do not have healthy spirituality, pain is always someone else's fault.

The roots of this unhealthy thinking go deep, to the age-old notions of good and bad, worthy and unworthy. In such thinking, God and salvation are always found only in the pure, only in the good, only in the worthy. In such a dualistic world, there are always bad people to blame.

The revelation of Jesus, though, is that God is found in both the so-called good and the so-called bad. Most Christians worldwide haven't gotten this message yet. It is too shocking. It is too disappointing. In the Incarnation, in the entering of human flesh, Jesus reveals that God is found in the actual--not in the idealized, the "pure, good, worthy."

Pretend for a moment that all the good people are in your Church and all the bad people are "out there". Your Church is saved and theirs is lost. How nice for you. How very convenient.

Everybody--all Churches--think this way, because it's easy. It demands no transformation. You are saved because someone else is going to hell; you are smart because someone else is stupid.

Well, here's another shocking truth: Jesus is not upset at sinners. The tax collectors and the prostitutes are getting into the kingdom of God before you (Mt 21:31), and Jesus said so to the people in the synagogue. Isn't it obvious, now, why they killed Him? He broke down the distinctions that made their lives so clear and clean and nice.

The fact is, Jesus is only upset at people who do not think they are sinners. If I were to say that in half the churches in this country, I would have things thrown at me. And it is a disappointing statement. It says, No one else is your problem--not abortionists or homosexuals or your wife or the pope. You are your own problem. So many of us put all our energy into changing others, making them into Catholics, for example, but true spirituality is about keeping your feet to the fire. So you grow up. You become changed.

A large percentage of Christians, as I know them, don’t understand the distinction between theism and Christianity. A theist is one who asks, Is there a God? Of course, the answer is yes. Everybody wants a God, and in most of Western culture, the available god figure has been Jesus. In theism, God exists to solve problems, and if you are good and you honor God, God will oblige.

Christianity has a very different message. It says God does not really solve our problems. God reveals them, leads us to the solution, leads us through the solution, and--here is the mystery of the Body of Christ--includes us in the solution. And so we are transformed. In Christianity, sin and salvation are two sides of the same mystery. Salvation is sin overcome and used for better purposes. The question becomes, How do we use evil for good?

Mary offers an example at Calvary. She does not try to pull Jesus off the Cross or try to sue somebody, saying, "This should not happen! This is unjust!" Of course it is unjust. But what does it mean? What is the message of the Crucifixion? Christ offers a similar example. He hangs on the horns of the human dilemma and does not eliminate it. He just hangs there in a reality of pain and contradictions.

That is how transformation happens: by holding the tension instead of expelling it, holding it until it changes us.

Through the Cross, Jesus says you can love it all, even the enemy. There is no scapegoating. Everything, everyone belongs. There is only the broken and suffering Body of Christ eternally crucified, eternally resurrected: the human eternally crucified, eternally resurrected. What faith and surrender and courage it takes to hold the Cross and the Resurrection simultaneously, to let both simultaneously be true in you, in your body, in your marriage, in your children, in your neighborhood, in the Church.

Stop looking for some perfect institution or perfect religion. Stop looking for the perfect friend or partner, because you will be disappointed. He is not Mr. Universe. She is not Miss America. He or she is an ordinary person with faults and wonderful gifts at the same time. It is so hard--but so rewarding--to hold the gifts and the faults together!

There are those who insist that reality be consistent and logical, and those who insist that life is only chaos. Those are the two poles--perfect consistency or chaos. In fact, what Jesus did in the revelation of the Cross was tell us that life is neither of those poles. The pattern of reality is neither perfectly consistent nor perfectly chaos--it is cruciform. There is order and structure, but it is filled with contradictions. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness. You hang in the middle with Christ, on the Cross, which bears the mystery of reality--at once fully human and fully divine.

Meister Eckhart, the wonderful Dominican mystic, said that however great one's suffering, God has suffered from it first. There is only one Cross, one Resurrection, captured in that microcosmic moment and person we call Jesus. We see it there; we understand it there. All the wars, the struggles, all resurrection and rebirth is about God. We are merely fragments in this huge flame of divine action.

Mystics and sinners understand this because, unlike the rest of us, they are not trying to create a universe they can understand and explain. They've let go, surrendered to a new identity.

Basically, there are two patterns of transformation into the mystery of God--the pattern of pain and the pattern of prayer. However, because most people do not surrender to real prayer until they suffer pain, you can say there is only one pattern. The fact is, normally we aren’t willing to give up ego control until we must, until pain forces us to do so. Nobody walks gracefully into the mystery of Crucifixion.

That is why the mystery of suffering is so central to transformation. The mystic lets go of the need to prove anything, protect anything, defend anything, be superior to anything, be anything. I am who I am who I am. I am who God is in me.

At that point in spiritual development, you are so grounded that you do not have to worry about your reputation anymore--you don't have to worry about seeking blame or using other people to make yourself feel good or competing or winning. You are basically invulnerable.

The Franciscan word for this is poverty. The Carmelites call it nothingness; the Buddhists, emptiness. It says, I am naked underneath my clothes.

This experience feels like dying. If you do not have good spiritual wisdom while it's happening, you will do everything you can to get back up. Yet, transformation is all about going down--into the pain, into the ordinary, into the physical, into the bloody, into the concrete. It's about descent not ascent, not heightened states of consciousness. In other words, until we can see God where we did not want to see God, the world remains a secular, dualistic world.

After we are transformed, we can look back and see that we were guided through this process by Another who is choosing us, desiring us, and is infinitely wise and compassionate. That means you do not have to figure out all the patterns ahead of time. You do not have to be that smart, that good. You just have to surrender. Good spirituality is not about being good. It is about God being good. When you keep your eyes on the reality of God's goodness, then God rubs off into you. You start being good almost in spite of yourself, but you do not even care about it anymore. You are not checking whether you are better than the next person. You have got something so much more wonderful to be excited about.

This is a difficult concept, and a long process. Most people do not get to this understanding until their 60s and 70s. I meet a lot of old nuns in motherhouses and infirmaries. All they keep saying--over and over--is that God is so good, God is so good.  ....end