A few years ago, I heard a story about how bison on the Great Plains react to storms.  Unlike cattle who tend to turn away from the storm in hopes of avoiding it, bison turn into the storm and face it head on, literally.  The claim is that by doing so, they minimize the impact the storm will have on them and they get through it faster.  For those animals that turn away from a storm in hoping to avoid it, the storm often catches up to them and they spend more time in the storm.  I do not really have a way of verifying this as a fact, though I have heard it in different presentations, but even if it cannot be proven as fact, the principle applies and it provides a helpful lesson for how we face storms in our lives as Christians.  

In the next paragraph of Spe salvi, Pope Benedict reflects on how tempting it is for us to run from suffering when it comes, to do everything that we can do avoid it in our lives.  By doing so, however, we find ourselves often worse off than if we had not turned into the suffering.  The Holy Father explains:

It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater. (SS 37)

Instead, like bison about to encounter a storm, we should not flee in fear, but turn into the suffering:

It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love. (ibid.)

As a way of demonstrating this, the pope quotes a rather lengthy account from the Vietnamese martyr Paul Le-Bao-Tinh († 1857) who suffered imprisonment and torture in a condition the martyr described as “a true image of everlasting Hell.” It is well worth going to this paragraph and reading it to see the remarkable effect of turning into suffering with faith in Jesus Christ.

I will quote what Pope Benedict writes as he reflects on this inspiring quote, words which I find extremely fruitful for our reflection when faced with suffering:

This is indeed a letter from Hell, but it also reveals the truth of the Psalm text: “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I sink to the nether world, you are present there … If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall hide me, and night shall be my light’ —for you darkness itself is not dark, and night shines as the day; darkness and light are the same” (Ps 139 [138]:8-12; cf. also Ps 23 [22]:4). Christ descended into “Hell” and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. (ibid.)

By God’s Providence, I was recently praying with Psalm 139 and was struck by that same line, alternately translated as: “even darkness is not dark for you and the night is as clear as the day.” (Ps. 139:12) This is one of the great gifts of the Psalms, as they provide ready responses to pretty much every human emotion that we face.  Therefore, when we are confronted with the storm of suffering in our lives, we can turn toward it, and call upon the Lord, reciting those words, and asking Him to be our light to guide us through the darkness and pass safely to the other side with the gracious assistance of His protecting grace.

I find it difficult to choose one of the Psalms as a “favorite” – mostly because I have found so many of them to be undeniably powerful and meaningful at different times in my life. If I did have to choose, however, one that would be very near the top of my list is Psalm 45 – a song about the marriage of the King. I love it because of its bold and tender imagery. The first half of the Psalm is bold in its description of a very powerful king, who, if he is not God himself, is at least very God-like. The second half, on the other hand, tenderly describes how the young maiden chosen to be the spouse of the king prepares herself to “enter the palace of the king” (15).

Unsurprisingly, as St. Augustine interprets this marriage-themed Psalm, he reads it in light of the marriage that God desires to have with humanity. All through the Old Testament are hints, prophecies, and outright statements of the nearly unbelievable truth that God desires such a close and intimate relationship with his people that we would call it a “marriage.” For example, we read in Isaiah, “As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you” (62:4-5). This prophecy is fulfilled most completely in Jesus, who comes to make us one with him. The Church becomes his body and we can be said, mystically, to have a “one-flesh” union with him: He is our head, we are his members.

In the tender second half of Psalm 45, the young woman is told that the King desires her beauty. St. Augustine comments on this verse: 

“For the king has desired your beauty. … But who is this king? He is your God. See now how right it is for you to abandon that other father, and that other nation that was yours, and come to this King who is your God. He is your God and your King, your King and your Bridegroom. The King you are marrying is God; he provides you with your portion, by him you are adorned, by him redeemed, by him healed. Whatever you have in you that can please him, you have as his gift” (Expositions of the Psalms, 44.26. Translated by Maria Boulding).

So, in a very beautiful way, for St. Augustine and for so many Christians who read and pray this Psalm in a Christian light, the King is God – Jesus Christ our Lord. And you and I as members of the body of Christ are the bride, because the Church is the bride of Christ. Jesus desires your beauty, and that beauty is what he has created in you by redeeming you and washing you clean from your sins. Your clean soul is a beautiful soul, a fitting place for God to dwell. 

I would highly encourage you to pray Psalm 45 with this reality in mind. Although the original human author would not have been thinking of Jesus as the King, the Holy Spirit certainly had our Lord in mind when he inspired this Psalm. Similarly, the human author of the Psalm would not have known the bride to be the Church, but the Holy Spirit knew. We can, therefore, recognize that the King in the Psalm can be read as Christ himself and the bride is the Church. You are the beloved one of God, you are beautifully clothed in gold when you are sacramentally washed by his blood. When you reach heaven, you will enter his palace to live with him forever.

O Jesus, beloved of my soul, draw me close to you. You desire my beauty – make me beautiful by freeing me from my sins! Amen.

Closely tied to learning hope though action is learning it through suffering, reflects Pope Benedict in the next paragraph of Spe Salvi.  Suffering is an inevitable part of our human condition, and if we are certain to face it, we can trust that God desires to teach us some important lessons from our experience of enduring suffering.  It is this topic which will occupy our reflections for the next few weeks.

The Holy Father comments on how it is important for us as Christians to engage in actions directed toward reducing suffering in the world:

Certainly we must do whatever we can to reduce suffering: to avoid as far as possible the suffering of the innocent; to soothe pain; to give assistance in overcoming mental suffering. These are obligations both in justice and in love, and they are included among the fundamental requirements of the Christian life and every truly human life. (SS 36)

Though we do all that we can to reduce suffering around us, the pope reminds us that eliminating it altogether is something that is outside of our power:

This is simply because we are unable to shake off our finitude and because none of us is capable of eliminating the power of evil, of sin which, as we plainly see, is a constant source of suffering. Only God is able to do this: only a God who personally enters history by making himself man and suffering within history. (ibid.)

With the Incarnation, the seemingly hopeless situation of suffering has a new light to shine on it, giving new hope that there is an answer to the problem of suffering.  But the Holy Father cautions us that this is hope, not yet fulfillment.  The very presence of this hope, however dim it may seem at times, gives us the courage to persevere in doing good and trusting that the Lord continues to work toward bringing fulfillment to that hope in the fulness of time.

With the growth of various forms of social media over the past several decades, the world has become more aware of the various forms of suffering that exist in the world around us.  It can be incredibly disheartening to see these things, and not a few people have questioned their faith in God, wondering: “How can a good and loving God permit such atrocities?”  In fact, many have come to the conclusion that since suffering only seems to increase, the only logical explanation is that God must not be real, or that He simply does not care.  

Instead of turning away from God in the face of the mystery of suffering, our faith invites us to turn toward God, knowing that even if a “reason” is not provided, the only satisfactory (and true) answer is to be found by turning to God.  As Pope St. John Paul II wrote so beautifully in his document on suffering:

Love is also the fullest source of the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This answer has been given by God to man in the Cross of Jesus Christ. (Salvifici Doloris, 13)

This is one of the reasons why I find it helpful to have a crucifix nearby at all times, so that when we feel the weight of suffering, personally or in humanity, we can look to that image with faith and “see” the answer, even as we struggle to understand the mystery.

As St. Augustine comments on the Psalms, he will often bring up connected scripture passages and explain them as well. Because of this, though the sermons are called “Expositions of the Psalms,” they could also be seen as great commentaries on a wide swath of scripture outside of the Psalms. He speaks to the meaning of the words in the Psalms, but so often uses his sermon as a means to teach whatever else happens to be on his mind. 

We would call this a tangent nowadays, but for St. Augustine it was an effective rhetorical teaching device. People expected him to preach for a long time, and so filling that time by teaching on more than just the “assigned” psalm gave him a lot of leeway to flesh out the deeper meanings of the lines in the psalms and their connection to the rest of scripture. 

In his commentary on Psalm 37, he engages in this sort of “tangent” to speak of St. Paul’s famous injunction, “Pray without ceasing.” St. Augustine recognizes that we can’t constantly be saying and thinking words to God. He recognized that people sang psalms while they worked and tried to pray often, but “without ceasing” seemed to be (and is!) humanly impossible – if, that is, you are thinking of prayer simply as speaking words to God. 

But St. Augustine would have agreed with St. John Damascene who defined prayer as “the raising of one’s mind and heart to God.” (CCC 2559). St. Augustine focused on the desire of the heart in addition to the words spoken. Yes, we need to speak words to God – we need to make a sacrifice of time to pray with words. But, we can’t do that without ceasing. What we can do without ceasing is to desire God and his peace. 

St. Augustine writes:

“Let your desire too be before [God], and there your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. This very desire is your prayer, and if your desire is continuous, your prayer is continuous. The apostle meant what he said, Pray without ceasing (1 Thes 5:17).” 

For Augustine, this “desire” is nearly synonymous with “charity.” We desire what we love and vice versa. While charity may spring forth in holy activity, it comes out of a desire of the heart. 

He thus continues, “The chilling of charity is the silence of the heart; the blazing of charity is the heart’s clamor. If your charity abides all the time, you are crying out all the time; if you are crying out all the time, you are desiring all the time; and if you are desiring, you are remembering rest” (Expositions of the Psalms, 37.14. Translated by Maria Boulding).

In this vein, the charity that dwells in our heart by grace, and overflows into actions of love of God and neighbor, is a real desire for the life of God. As we desire that heavenly life, and journey toward it in Christian discipleship, we are interiorly praying with a prayer of desire. This interior desire sets aflame the words of prayer that we pray and makes our acts of charity be in accord with God’s holy will. 

Father, send us your Holy Spirit. Draw us close to your Son. Give light to our minds and lead us in your paths. Help us desire what you desire, and above all, to desire you. Come, Holy Spirit, set us on fire with your love – set us on fire with desire for God!

The next setting for learning hope that Pope Benedict proposes is action.  He explains how we strive endlessly (implying action) to realize our lesser and greater hopes in life.  We have something that we want to achieve, such as training for a race.  In order to realize our hope of participating in and completing that event, we put in the necessary practice to reach that goal.  Those who have the hope of becoming doctors one day need to put in a lot of work studying, which though daunting at times, is sustained by the hope of completing the requirements to become a doctor.

As good as those various hopes for this life are, we can never lose sight of the great hope of eternal life, which is ultimately the object of the Christian virtue of hope.  By keeping that hope always before us, we will not be discouraged when we encounter failures or setbacks in achieving our earthly hopes.  How sad it is when somebody puts all their hope in some earthly achievement or goal, and when they do not accomplish it, they say in despair: “My life is over!” But when we are rooted in that hope which does not disappoint, no earthly disappointment can stop our forward progress or rob us of meaning in our lives.

Beyond our own personal hopes, we can also get caught up in hope for better circumstances in which we live more broadly, such as those promised by political leaders or other voices which promise something better than what we currently have.  On this point, the Holy Father writes:

If we cannot hope for more than is effectively attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope. It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere. (SS 35)

He then notes that as we continue to persevere in our actions of doing good, we often fail to see any tangible difference being made in the world around us.  Nevertheless, hope helps us to believe that by opening ourselves to God through these actions, we are making a contribution to the salvation of the world that is not insignificant.  Such was the attitude of the saints, and such should be our attitude as well.

In this regard, I like to think about the story of the multiplication of loaves in John’s Gospel.  When confronted with the seemingly impossible task of feeding the large crowd, St. Andrew said the following to Jesus: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?” (John 6:9) Using normal calculations, he was correct.  But by adding God to the equation, what seemed so little and insufficient was multiplied so that the entire crowd was fed.  The next time we consider a small, good deed and wonder: “what good is this for such a big problem?”, present it to the Lord in faith that He will apply His multiplying grace to do far more than we ask or imagine, serving to strengthen our hope and that of those around us.

When you imagine Heaven – something nearly impossible to rightly imagine – I would wager that what trips you up most and possibly leads you to think that Heaven is boring is the fact that “forever” seems like way too long to do anything, even the best of things. I mean, at some point, won’t forever just get boring?

Well, if time works the same way in Heaven that it does on Earth, the answer to that question would be “Yes.” But God exists in eternity without getting bored and Heaven will not get boring, ever. The problem with our imagination of Heaven lies in our absolute inability to imagine time working in any different way than it does now. We have no context for “eternity” – God’s “eternity.”

In the scriptures, we hear the timelessness of God expressed in different ways – “eternal,” “years and years,” a “day,” etc. We have to use these human time categories to describe it, and that is ok. We don’t have words or concepts for anything else.

St. Augustine speaks about this in his commentary on Psalm 60. He reflects on the use of “day” to refer to God’s time in eternity – God’s “day.” 

St. Augustine explains, “The word today indicates a single day; but this is not the kind of day which is squeezed between yesterday and tomorrow; it does not begin where yesterday ended, nor does it end when tomorrow dawns. After all, God’s time is also referred to as “years” in another psalm…. So years, and days, and a single day, all mean the same thing. You can use whichever phrase you like about eternity. And the reason why you can choose freely which way to express it is that whatever you say will fall short of the reality. Yet you must say something, to give yourself a basis on which to think about what cannot be put into words” (Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 51–72, Translated by Maria Boulding, 199).

In other words, we have to use our human concepts of time to speak about eternity. At the same time, we have to recognize that our human words fall short, and the reality is and will be so much greater and better. We will never get bored because we will be in the eternal now of God’s day. “Long” and “short” may not even make sense in heaven, but we’ll have to wait until then to find out!

Until that day, we experience a small foretaste of that heavenly now in our prayer, at the Mass, and in beautiful experiences of love. These moments can feel timeless, peaceful, and heavenly. May the Lord teach us through our earthly experiences of eternity to never stop desiring the rest he has in store for us. As St. Augustine also would say, our hearts will be restless until they rest in God. Peace!