Taking our thirst to the cross

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lunch included with profound way possible, it proves Jesus is right there, with us, in our suffering, thirsting with us. And he’s not going anywhere.

A woman approaches me after a retreat I’ve been leading. She begins to tell me her story.

After nearly 10 years of solid sobriety from drugs and alcohol, she relapsed, during which time, and in some part due to her drug-induced negligence, her teenage daughter was kidnapped and trafficked. In an extraordinary turn of events, some months later, the authorities got the woman’s daughter back and brought her home. The woman’s daughter now lives in an institution where she fights for her life and her sanity, the horrors of her experience so torturous, it’s unclear whether she will ever be able to live outside of an institution again.

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Another woman on another retreat tells me that her husband died not too long ago of a merciless, progressive, degenerative illness. Caring for him, watching him suffer this way for years, she said, nearly killed her. And now, it turns out the disease is genetic and has been passed on to her eldest son. He is now dying by this same merciless method, and he is angry, bitter, thrashing at the world around him, including at his mother, for this cruel fate. As she sits with me, I see she is a slight thing, maybe a hundred pounds, perhaps less, like a little sack of frail bones. And so weary. She says, “I don’t know if I can do this again,” and I believe her.

Once more, there it is, so faint you’ll miss it if you do not pay attention: I thirst.

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To hear Jesus say from the cross ‘I thirst’ may not help to end our suffering, but it crushes into dust the lie that we are isolated from the Lord in it. In the most profound way possible, it proves Jesus is right there, with us, in our suffering, thirsting with us. And he’s not going anywhere.

The woman has been freed of her addictions once again and is battling like a mighty lioness, doing everything she can for this daughter who was miraculously returned to her. Still, the grief, the regret, she wears like a heavy coat three sizes too big. There are no easy amends here. She says to me: “How can I ever forgive myself?”

BISHOP ANDREW COZZENS

BERNARD HEBDA

Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis

Another soul, I learn on another retreat, has recently lost her very young grandchildren and daughter-in-law to murder-suicide. No one saw it coming. There was no history of mental illness. No one even knew there was a gun in the house. How can God be God?, she is wondering earnestly. No bitterness has yet made its way into her heart, only the agony of the impossibility that this tragedy will ever make sense. I listen to her, hard and long, as she explains she will never be whole again. From this, she will never recover, she says, staring off into the distance, “not on this side of heaven.”

I strain my ears to hear it, so low, so faint, but here too, Jesus whispers, “I thirst.”

In this Lenten season, may we bring our thirst to the foot of the cross, as great and as overwhelming as it may be, and find the courage to look upon our crucified Lord, and to remember his promise: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Lord, show us how to draw the thirstiest among us to your eternal, healing well. Amen.