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Suffering teaches
us compassion

At 34, people told me I was too young to lose my mother. The previous five years, she had suffered from complications of kidney failure. I spent many months by her hospital bed as she fought off infections. I watched her body shrinking as dialysis leached the calcium away from the bones. Time after time, she learned to walk again after her weakened bones had been broken in a fall. At the same time, her enlarged kidneys bloated her belly, attached to an increasingly skeletal body. She gradually lost strength and mobility and finally faded to her deathbed. I felt she was too young, and I was too young.

Since her death, I have been startled at how many of my friends and students have had serious losses, often at much younger ages. Obviously other peoples' challenges had not changed, but my experiences helped their sufferings become real for me. Before my mother's illness, I felt ill at ease in hospitals and among sick people. After years of my mother's repeated hospitalizations, I no longer felt a stranger among those suffering. Because my mother loved me so much, I responded to her love and became sensitive to her distress. The months and years of her pain gradually opened up my heart to others, making it more natural to listen and feel in ways that I never would have before.

Often when we suffer or watch those we love suffer, we struggle to find meaning in the experience. Why do we have to go through this? Or worse, why do they have to go through this? We often don't have answers to these questions, but one thing can emerge from these seemingly meaningless experiences: In our suffering, we can develop compassion toward others that otherwise would never be possible.

Developing the capacity to care for others, even to suffer for their sufferings, is truly a divine gift. While the image of a suffering God seemed ludicrous in the Greco-Roman world, the message of Christ's suffering is that he suffered with us. The meaning of his Passion, according to the Old Testament Prophet Isaiah, is that "he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows." St. Peter writes of God's awareness of our suffering, telling us, "(Cast) all your care upon him, for he cares for you."

For many us, maybe most of the time, it is through the care and compassion of those around us that we feel God's care. St. Paul described how God "comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God."

Through our sufferings and loss, we can grow in our ability to comfort others. As we feel and express compassion for others, our own suffering can be sanctified to us.

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