The Suffering Servant

Greetings to All...

So I´m here at the Sant Jordi Hostel - Sagrada Familia Apts in Barcelona Spain (if you wanna see our cool hostel, go to http://www.santjordihostels.com/). Everyone else has gone out to do some exploring, but I´ve decided to take a quiet day to myself here to run some errands (mostly laundy) and to do some reflecting via blog :) Then, I´m planning to go out and see the Basilica of La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi´s final masterpiece.

It has certainly been a whirlwind these past couple of weeks. There were many, many times where I found myself overwhelmed, frustrated, stressed, and unappreciative, but luckily, 2 days ago we had a group reflection which really allowed me to just step back and count my blessings. I´d like to share some of these thoughts with you now as I further process my experience on this pilgrimage.

I´m not sure if I mentioned this before, but Madrid11 is my second WYD, with my first having been in Sydney in 2008. In many ways, WYD2008 in Sydney changed my life. It gave me the gift of a renewed spiritual life, confidence in the everlasting love of God, and sureness of my call to a vocation in youth ministry. I am sure that God led me to Australia in 2008 for a very specific reason, and without my experiences there, I wouldn´t be where I am today, having completed a degree in Youth Ministry and on my way to begin 3 years of service with the Cabrini Mission Corps.

My gratefulness for having experienced WYD 2008 is what led me to help organize this Fordham Pilgrimage Team to Madrid in 2011, with the hope that we would all be further transformed in the same ways that I had been changed in Australia. But, of course, we cannot put God in a box, and we cannot assume what graces God will grant us at any given moment. So while I was expecting (mostly hoping) for those same fuzzy feelings that defined my last WYD experience and helped me to climb to great peaks in my spiritual journey, this time around the feelings were less joyful and fluffy. 

¨We plan, and God laughs.¨ A friend of mine found this quote for me once, and it has been on my mind quite a lot over the past couple of weeks. The plans in my mind and in my heart have definitely not coincided with what I have experienced here in Spain, but it does not mean that I have not grown or learned some incredibly important life lessons during my second WYD. In fact, I think that I have been given the grace to better understand one of the most difficult parts of our Catholic faith -- a spirituality of suffering.

Pope Benedict has said that ¨a life without suffering is not a human life,¨ and he has repeated this sentiment several times throughout this WYD. I have spent many years contemplating this idea, and quite frankly, I have not had the best experiences trying to understand it. At the lowest point in my spiritual life, I was pretty much ready to give up on believing in a God who would allow poor and innocent people to suffer, to be persecuted, and to die. ¨Where is God when a child starves to death, when the innocent are murdered, when a natural disaster kills thousands?¨ I could never understand how an all-powerful God could just sit back and watch.

Oh, how very wrong I was...and I truly believe that God was working extra-hard to bring some clarity to my mind and my heart during these past couple of weeks. Many times during both Magis and WYD, I was pushed to my limits, and truly brought to the edges of what I thought I could and could not do. And in those moments of delirium, frustration, stress, overwhelming demoralization, and anger, I found myself closer to God than what I´ve felt in quite some time. To say that I was shocked to find myself feeling this way would be an understatement.

The first moments of realization came during my Magis pilgrimage week between Loyola and Javier. The days were really brutal and I found myself constantly questioning how walking 90 miles through the backwoods of the Basque Country (when there were perfectly functioning automobiles at our disposal) was relevant to my life today. But on the third day, as we were climbing our steepest and most complicated slope, I found myself dwelling solely in the presence of God.....I was no longer thinking about my steps or the pains in my body. I was on autopilot and only the thought that God was carrying me was getting me through. When I finally reached the top after an hour of walking uphill, I just fell to the ground and looking up to the sky, I thanked God because I know I would not have overcome that challenge without Him.

God does not abandon us in our sufferings. Rather, God is there, suffering with us and giving us hope to move forward. The greatest realization of this pilgrimage for me has been to gain a deeper appreciation for the extreme sacrifice that Jesus gave for us during the Way of the Cross. I, by no means, felt the way that Jesus felt during his walk to Calvary. But by feeling my own physical pains and experiencing the weakness of the human will without God, I now more deeply appreciate Jesus´ sacrifice. For Him to have suffered, to have been pushed to his limits, and to ultimately be tortured and murdered for a world of sinners is truly incredible. Jesus knows what it is to truly suffer -- to be humiliated, persecuted, dehumanized, demoralized, and killed -- and so He walks with us in our daily sufferings, even carrying us when we no longer have the strength to do it ourselves.

So although this World Youth Day has been so incredibly taxing for me, both physically and mentally, I cannot thank the Lord enough for giving me this experience and for showing me how truly great we can be, even in the midst of dejection and hardship, if we only have hope and place our trust in Christ. Yes, suffering is part of human life, and life would be incomplete without it. Without knowing suffering, we cannot know the suffering of Christ. And without internalizing the pains of Christ´s suffering, we cannot know, acknowledge, and reach out to those suffering daily in the world around us. And so I pray that we may find grace in our sufferings.....not to rejoice whenever hardships come along, because that´s just stupid and unrealistic. But we need to learn from the tough times in our life, and I believe that God´s challenge to us is to cling to Jesus in our sufferings, He who knows the full spectrum of human pain and sacrifice. And once we overcome those mountains in our life, those really difficult slopes, may we pull up those who are staggering behind us, stand at the mountain-top and together in thanksgiving, scream out:

Glory be to God, now and forever...
Amen.

Roxanne

Jesus´Lonliness during the Scourging at the Pillar
from the front ¨Passion¨ facade at La Basilica de la Sagrda Familia in Barcelona, Spain