Catholic Ragemonkey

It always happens virtually in your own back yard.

For those who like to nuke Terry Schiavo and others like her, please take this article to a comfy chair, read it and reflect. Just because you can't speak, you can't act, you can't respond, it doesn't mean that you ARE DEAD YET! To quote my favorite pro-life philosopher, Dr. Theodore Geisel, (link here for other books), "a person's a person no matter how small."

Smallness and weakness are spurned and shunned by a culture that demands big, powerful, and almost necessarily, therefore, impersonal. When we see the weakness of others, we almost never think to share in their suffering. We would happily have empathy, sympathy, or pity but authentic compassion (literally from the Latin, to suffer with another) is awfully hard to come. I should know. I have a hard time coming by it most days. You can only go to the hospital a number of times before the wearying ennui of persistnent pain breaks through.

This is where the Cross comes in. Think through the Stations of the Cross and what do you have? You have the icon of compassion. Jesus willingly suffers every ridiculous element of folly that the human heart can create. He suffers it because all of us will have to suffer it, one way or another. For some, you will walk the Stations dragging a IV cart behind you. For others, you will have your blood circulated out of your body to clean it. For yet others, you will find yourself in a wrecked car with people too stunned or too paralyzed with fear to save you from the wreck. Or you might just walk years of toil, only to lose your memory -- all of your memory.

I would like to believe that those who suffer greatly do great work for the world. Perhaps, they, with weakest hands of all, because they have been conformed to the Passion, and have accepted this conformation, they have held back the justice of God, Abraham begging for Sodom and its residents, for one more day so that you and I may repent. I suspect that in Heaven, we will discover this was the case. And it all happened right under our noses, practically in our own backyards.