A Personal And Cosmic Way Of The Cross
I share this reflection in the context of three excruciating experiences of suffering over the last few weeks. All of them forced me to engage God in order to find a way to live the three events in a positive way without giving in to despair and utter rebellion. I grow evermore convinced that engaging God in human dramas as Job, several psalms, many saints and numberless human beings did and still do is at the core of an incarnated faith which does not provide prefabricated and ready-made answers to issues of suffering and grief. The Holy Spirit leads us to positive answers only when suffering and the challenges of life bite our flesh and we let ourselves be challenged and enter into a Jacob-and-Job like fight with God. Mount Sinai, the mount of revelation, is to be climbed, in 40 days; with its winding and steep path drawing out sweat from the climber’s body. Engaging God is the inescapable journey before one finds a personal answer shared by God and by people or the community concerned. We will never find a “good-for-all” and “for-everywhere” answer to the questions: Why Haiti? Why the tsunami of Christmas 2005? Why that fatal accident… or why that grave sickness? God’s answer is never theoretical and abstract, but different from person to person, like suffering is utterly personal and each human being interprets and reacts to suffering in his/her way. Theological reflection on suffering is by all means useful, such as for example Salvifici Doloris on the redeeming value of suffering by John Paul II in the Holy Year of Redemption and extraordinary jubilee of the Church in 1983-84. But over and above a document, there is a process, led by the Holy Spirit, which is utterly personal and unrepeatable such as a grief that one undergoes. Multifaceted Suffering Now a few words on the three difficult experiences mentioned above. The first is at cosmic and world level: Haiti, with its more than 230,000 victims, is the latest natural disaster of unprecedented magnitude. Every year, the list grows with more destructions and victims because, every year, there are and there will be calamities of this kind. They are part and parcel of our cosmic history and of our ecosystem. Gradually, we come to better terms with them through forecasting and tentative measures of preventions such as, for example, having anti-seismic buildings; but the process is slow; science and technology are not born out of the blue and human beings are not infallible. God told us: “Grow and multiply and take care of the world.” The journey is far from being accomplished. The mission entrusted to us in Genesis 1 to take care and exert a certain domain on the cosmos (Cf. Gn 1:26-28) in the ongoing process of creation is far from been accomplished; it is still an open-ended pursuit. Every day stars die and others are born in the midst of unimaginable apocalypses. Nothing is static! Our earth, as part of a
