P R A Y I N G W I T H T H E C H U R C H
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INTENTION : |
That our experience of suffering may help us better understand the pain of the many people who are alone, sick, or aged, and stir us to generous help.
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Saint Josefina Bakhita, a young African who was kidnapped and made a slave at the age of 9, who died in 1947 and was canonised in 2000, was asked, when she was a religious in Italy, what she would do if she met the slavers who had kidnapped and tortured her. She replied 'I'd fall on my knees and kiss their hands, because if that had not happened I shouldn't be a Christian and a religious now.' A married couple who lost their four children in a road-accident were able later to thank the Lord, recognising that he had used their intense grief to draw them to the Church and the service of God, changing and improving their lives. They were not thankful for the deaths of their children, but for the goodness of God who transformed their hearts. The parents of little Laurita, spiritually transformed through the sorrowful experience of watching their daughter die of cancer, learned to discover a God full of tenderness who always accompanied them.
There are many stories that we could tell to illustrate how experiences of suffering turn out in the end to be occasions of conversion and spiritual growth. Pain and suffering are never good, nor wanted by God. God did not want the slavery or the innumerable sufferings that Bakhita endured, nor did he cause the accident in which the four young people died, nor send the cancer that killed Laurita¡K But in his love and providence he is able to make use even of evil and of those intense experiences of suffering to bring salvation. From the cross, God makes resurrection burst out. It is the Paschal experience, which is at the heart of Christianity. From death springs life. More precisely, it is from love that life springs. Moreover, the cruel and unjust death of an innocent person is never something desired by God. God the Father was not happy when his Son was being murdered on the cross, an infamy and a crime from every point of view. But, thanks to the love of Jesus, this crime and this injustice were transformed into a proof of how much God loves us, and into the cause of our salvation. It was not the death of Jesus that saved us, but his love, love that transforms everything, as happened in the lives of the people previously mentioned.
With this intention for prayer, the Holy Father invites us to make a personal reflection, beginning with our own experiences of suffering. He helps us to discover in love the key which opens us to others, which breaks the circle of our egoism, which impels us to serve lonely, sick and elderly people. Love makes it possible for a painful experience of suffering to be changed into the cause of our salvation, because it opens us to a new understanding of suffering and gives another meaning to the whole of life.
Let us keep this in mind as each day we make our prayer of offering, which can then give meaning to our apparently 'senseless' or 'useless' sufferings. It is the love and generosity with which we offer our life, in union with Christ's giving of his life, which changes everything.
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