SAINT STANISLAUS KOSTKA CHURCH

Dear Parishioners and Friends!

 

In the month of February we ask God twice, in a communal way, to heal our sick and protect the healthy ones from falling ill. On the feast of St. Blaise we participate in the beautiful tradition of having our throats blessed. Then, on the occasion of the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic Church celebrates the World Day of Prayer for the Sick. In our church it is one of the two days in the year when we offer the sacrament of the sick (anointing of the sick) in a communal setting. As someone who is praying daily for my mother, who is fighting cancer as we speak, I know how much we wish there was no such thing as illness, or pain, or suffering in this God-created world. We cannot help but ask “Why does God allow it to happen?” It is a very valid and fundamental question that every human being will have to struggle with, for no one escapes life without some pain. Just as the experience of suffering is universal, so the question of why people suffer is also nearly universal. David Hume, the famous philosophical skeptic, put it in a way that’s been cited and quoted and re-quoted and regurgitated in many different forms, but it appeared first of all in his Concerning Natural Religion: “If God is willing to prevent evil, is He willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

 

Different philosophies and religions have tried to battle this question in their own ways; yet the question of why people suffer remains. The Bible is not silent on the issue. Of course, one needs to remember that the Bible tells us what we need to know, not what we want to know. More importantly, the prayerful reading of the Gospels makes us aware that the answer must be someone, not just something.  For the problem (suffering) is about someone (God: why does God allow?) rather than just something. To question God's goodness is not just an intellectual experiment. This is not merely the philosophers' "Why?"  It is a rebellion of tears. It is a little child with tears in it’s eyes looking up at daddy and weeping, "Why?" Not only does it add the emotion of tears, but also it is asked in the context of relationship. It is a question put to the Father, not a question in a vacuum.

 

The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. God did not simply varnish over out sin and our suffering but came into it, like a dentist or a surgeon, to get it all out. In fact, God became our garbage man; God touched and took away our garbage. The incarnation was the biggest shock in history. Even God’s own people, having been prepared for two thousand years, could not digest it. It was the unthinkable. . . that the eternal God should have a beginning in time, that the maker of Mary's womb should be made in Mary's womb; that the first one became second, the independent one became dependent as a little baby. God came, entered space and time and suffering. God came, like a lover; and love seeks above all intimacy, presence, togetherness - not happiness. "Better unhappy with her than happy without her" - that is the word of a lover. God came. Biblical Job was satisfied even though the God who came gave him absolutely no answers at all to his thousand tortured questions. God did the most important thing and gave the most important gift:  God-self. It is a lover's gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, God came, all the way, right into that cry. In coming into our world God came also into our suffering.  God sits beside us in the stalled car in the snow bank. Sometimes God starts the car for us, but even when he doesn't, He is there. That is the only thing that matters. Who cares about cars and success and miracles and long life when you have God sitting beside you? 

 

As baptized believers, we are immersed in Jesus’ pain and death, but we also participate in His resurrection. After our resurrection, when all our tears are over, we will, incredibly, look back at them and laugh, not in derision but in joy. We do a little of that even now, you know. After a great worry is lifted, a great problem solved, a great sickness healed, a great pain relieved, it all looks very different as past, to the eyes of retrospection, than it looked as future, as prospect, or as present, as experience.  Remember St. Teresa's bold saying that from heaven the most miserable earthly life will look like one bad night in an inconvenient hotel!

 

Fr. Marek
Pastor