How can we offer comfort to others who are suffering?

Some people think that to be strong and manly you must be tough...perhaps "to toughen someone else up who is struggling with a trial that they don't know how to handle themselves." 

 They cannot possibly offer a kind and loving, empathetic word to someone who just needs to hear a comfortable word of encouragement. That's too bad ...because they are missing a chance to help someone else to see what they can't see on their own, and through their own pain: 

 
...Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.....

Oh!  and YES, of course we should turn to our Lord in times of trial, trouble, and grieving because, YES!!---He is the only one to help in times like this.  But those who we love, and love us, or those who just know us can offer comfort and encouragement and loving kindness instead of more heartache and sadness.


 

Meditation--Not Our Talents

Let us ever bear in mind...that we in this place are only then really strong when we are more than we seem to be.  It is not our attainments or our talents, it is not philosophy or science, letters or arts which will make us dear to God.  It is not secular favor, or civil position, which can make us worthy of the attention and the interest of the true Christian.  A great university is a great power, and can do great things; but unless it be something more than human, it is but foolishness and vanity in the sight and in comparison of the little ones of Christ.  It is really dead, though it seems to live, unless it be grafted upon the True Vine, and is partaker of the secret supernatural life which circulates through the undecaying branches.

"Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Psalm 127:1

Idle is our labor, worthless is our toil, ashes is our fruit, corruption is our reward, unless we begin the foundation of this great undertaking in faith and in prayer, and sanctify it by purity of life.

John Henry Newman

Meditation~Carrying Our Cross

Christ intends no man ever to carry the cross alone.  We cannot remind ourselves too often that our life in the Risen Christ is an interchange between us of his love.  In the power of his love in ourselves, we give to him in our neighbor.

There is nothing Christ asked for more urgently in his earthly life than sympathy, nothing he asks for more often and receives less often in those in whom his Passion is lived today in its deepest humiliations and derelictions.

There are too many "commonsense Christians" afraid to spend themselves on anyone from whom they do not get visible results.  They are ready with hard work for reform, they pour out good advice, they are proud to be realists who repudiate everything that seems to them to be impractical, including the poetry of Christ, but they have no use for those baffling human creatures who won't--or can't--play the game by their rules.  These "realists" refuse to see that there are problems which cannot be solved, griefs which cannot be healed, conditions which cannot be cured.  They are impatient with the suffering they cannot end; unable to accept its reality, they wash their hands of it, because they cannot, so they think, do anything about it.

But we cannot make an end of Christ's suffering, for as long as the world goes on, the Passion of Christ will go on in his members; and he will ask, not for his suffering to be mitigated, but for sympathy.  In Gethsemane Christ tried to awaken his Apostles, not because they could take away his agony, but because they could give him their compassion.

Meditation~Poverty

Poverty is born from the discovery that I belong to Another; I exist because I am loved in an individual way by Another:  My being is from first to last totally relative to Him, though not without the mystery of my freedom.

If I am the work of Another, nothing is mine, because everything is given to me by Him.  At the same time, however--here is the paradox--everything is mine because I have been given to know the purpose for which it exists, a purpose which Jesus revealed at the end of his life:

....That they might know you, Oh Father, and him whom you have sent (John 17:3)

It has been given to me, then, to know the great reason why God made the world.  But I have been also asked to live out every relationship and use everything while keeping this reason in mind.  This apparent paradox is the locus of the thrilling and fascinating secret of poverty.

Everything has been put into my hands for a positive purpose.  To live in the awareness of this fact means to live poverty.  Poverty, then, is not something that grinds man down, but something that lifts him up.  His relations with things acquire a lightness and a freedom that are otherwise unimaginable.  Poverty is the beginning of those "new heavens and new earth" of which Saint Peter speaks ( 2 Peter 3:13), the beginning of a truly human world.

Poverty cannot exist unless it is fed by hope, that is to say, by the certainty that we have been given what really counts in life and that no one can take it away from us.  Everything else is accessory and functional: whether you have a hundred books or one book, a hundred pieces of furniture or one, is not what is important.  The decisive thing is what we need in order to participate in the kingdom of God and to spread it in the world.  The point is not that everything else is no longer valuable.  It is just that its usefulness is measured in function of this goal.

So you see that poverty is freedom from things, the awareness that it is God who fulfills our desires. If I place the hope of my fulfillment in possessing a certain thing, I am no longer hoping in Christ, but in that thing.  If however, I hope in Christ who gives me that thing, then I am free of it.
~Bishop Massimo Camisasca, Diocese of Reggio Emilia-Guastalla, Italy.  Fra. Saint Charles Borromeo.