The Power of Love
“Don’t you get tired being around sick and sad people all the time?”
The question came from the back of the auditorium where middle school students at a local Wilmington Catholic school gathered to participate in a discussion on vocations this past Thursday.
Now I must admit, I get asked a lot of questions about priesthood, many of them predictable: “Why can’t you get married?” and “Do you miss having a family of your own?” Younger students often ask if I have to dress in my clerics all the time. Once, a high school freshman blurted out: “Do you ever have any fun? It all just seems very boring to me.”
Anything but, my friend. I myself may be boring, but the vocation certainly isn’t.
The question, though, about walking with the sick and suffering all the time really gave me pause. It was a profound question, and one that really isn’t just meant for priests and religious to reflect on. All of us at one time or another are asked to bear the burden of another’s cross.
Parents of a sick child. Children of aging parents. A spouse whose beloved is suffering with dementia or cancer or other end-of-life challenges.
We often face such Job-like heartache, and we don’t get much say in the matter, do we? Like him, we too mutter the same words of pain and exhaustion, fear and loneliness when we are faced with suffering, in whatever way it comes: “Is not life a drudgery? I have been assigned months of misery and troubled nights.”
We get Job. Some of us really get him. Jesus did, too.
I’m deeply moved by the ways in which the evangelist Mark portrays what seems to be an ordinary day in the life of our Lord. On one level, this Sunday’s Gospel all just seems very basic to the Jesus story: he heals; people seek him out in great numbers; demons attempt to box-him in; he goes off to pray and then moves on. It’s the “Jesus M.O.”
But after having been asked the vocation question: “Don’t you get tired of being around sick people all the time?” I reevaluated Jesus’ response to the constant suffering that was all around him. He didn’t float through it as if it didn’t faze him, nor did he walk around Galilee as if he were a magical Tylenol that made it all go away.
That’s not how God walks with us. Instead, Jesus showed us how to carry the cross of others’ illnesses with both dignity and grace.
First, he made it personal. There’s something so very beautiful and moving about the Lord going to the bedside of Peter’s mother-in-law and taking her hand. It was an embrace of compassion that reminds the one who suffers that she is loved; that she is not alone; that her cross is now seen and supported by another.
Every time we take the hand or honor the heart of one who is in pain, we are allowing the Christ who moves in us to meet the Christ who suffers in another. Please don’t discount those simple moments of sitting at the bedside of a loved one or patiently listening to the nonsensical tales and ramblings of the aged and exhausted. Every time we do, we are meeting another’s Calvary with courage and humility. It isn’t easy, but such love is possible when we aren’t afraid to enter into the heart of suffering, knowing God gives us the words, the wisdom, and the strength to be present.
Jesus also shows us that we can’t live our faith in a bubble of safety and security. Godly-Love that dwells within must be shared with those who may be unknown to us – and make no mistake, if the Spirit dwells within, others will seek Him at work through you.
A kind word heals. Taking the time to listen lessens another’s drudgery. Running an errand or making an unexpected call or visit will often be the way God asks us to drive away the demons of isolation and self-pity, anger and fear.
Christ-like love often challenges us to go to these difficult places where the many demand our time and our presence – places we’d sometimes rather not go. But how can we not? Doesn’t discipleship demand this of us?
We know the answer if we aren’t afraid to really embrace the cost of following Christ. When love is authentic, it self-empties. When love is of God, it gives without counting the cost. Often, that loves brings us to new places (“the nearby villages”) where others need our compassion and mercy.
And yet, this warning – and I love how Mark shows us how to live this outpouring of love well: Jesus did not just keep going and going without stopping. Everything that came from him – every healing, every act of love and service, every word – came from a relationship of prayer and rest with his Father.
To do what he did, and to give how he gave, Jesus found his strength through going to a deserted place to be one with God.
And if Christ must do so, how can we not?
The challenge, then, especially for caretakers and those who walk with others in their suffering: take the time to recharge through prayer. Find your place, your moment to lay down the burdens you carry, especially when you are doing so on behalf of others. Doing so is a beautiful act of humility and awareness, one that says: I need not be the Savior.
That bears repeating, and I say it to myself, too: we already know the One who carried the Cross for all of us. He still does – but asks from time-to-time that we lovingly share the burden of another, as much as we are able. If we don’t pray and don’t take the time to rest in God, then the crosses we help others carry – not to mention our own – will crush us under their weight. That’s not the self-emptying that Christian discipleship demands of us.
So, to answer the question asked of me at the vocations’ discernment day – “Don’t you get tired being around the sick and suffering all the time?” my answer is one that speaks for all who journey as caretakers and disciples:
Yes, the journey is tiring – sometimes downright exhausting. Love asks much of us, and dying-to-self for others who suffer costs a great deal. To walk with the Jobs who come into our lives brings us to places we’d rather not go. And yet, through prayer and moments of grace-filled rest … through the power of the Word and Sacrament … we never walk Calvary alone. He’s already there. He’s already looking for us:
“For this purpose have I come.”