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_{29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 22, 2006}  

          A woman named Ruth was walking out of church one Sunday morning.  She spotted an old man named Gus struggling to put on his coat.  She walked over, smiled, and gave him a hand.  Sometime later she saw him again.  His time they struck up a conversation.  She learned that she passed by the old man's apartment on her way home, so she gave him a ride.  That began a weekly routine that lasted two years. 

          Then one Sunday Gus didn't show up at church.  Ruth went to his one-room apartment and found him deathly sick.  He entered the hospital the next day.  A few days later Ruth got a call from a nurse at the hospital.  Gus was dying.  He had only a day or so to live.  "Have you informed his relatives?" Ruth asked. 

          "He has no relatives," the nurse replied.  "You are the only person he told us to notify in case of emergency."  Ruth was shocked.  "Was Gus really that alone?'  She hurried to the hospital.  When she arrived at his bedside, Gus was breathing hard and unable to speak.  He did, however, seem to recognize her.  And his eyes did seem to respond to her words of love and comfort.  A few minutes later Gus died. 

          That story dramatizes in a moving way the two themes of today’s Scripture readings, especially the gospel reading.  Those themes are suffering and service.  Suffering and service are like the two rails of a train track.  Where you find one, you will find the other.  The two go hand in hand.  They do this for three reasons.

           First, service always entails suffering.  You can't help another without making some sacrifice on your part.  We see this in the story of Ruth and Gus.  For two years Ruth sacrificed for Gus.  Granted it wasn’t a great sacrifice; still it was a sacrifice!

           A second reason that suffering and service go together is that God always invites those who suffer to put their suffering at the service of others.  God always invites them to use their suffering in a spiritual way.  God always invites them to unite their suffering to the suffering of Jesus.

Gus did that in the story.  He suffered from old age and loneliness.  But he didn't let that suffering go to waste.  He continued to pray to God.  He continued to unite his suffering to the suffering of Jesus.  In doing this, he served the Body of Christ in a spiritual way, even though the other members of the body were unaware of it. 

          Finally, there is a third reason that service and suffering go together.  It is so obvious that we tend to overlook it.  They go together because one of the simplest ways we can help others is to try to lighten the load of their suffering. 

          But we tend to forget this.  We forget that the simplest and easiest way to serve others is to try to lighten the load of their suffering.  This is the way that Ruth served Gus.  It is also the way that Jesus served his suffering brothers and sisters.  So let’s take a closer look at how we can serve those around us…especially members of our own families and this parish family…by trying to lighten the load of their suffering. 

          Perhaps our biggest obstacle to doing this is our insensitivity to suffering people around us.  An illustration will help.  Helen Keller was blind, deaf, and dumb.  When someone asked her what caused her the greatest suffering…not being able to see, not being able to hear, or not being able to speak…she replied without hesitation, "Not hearing!"

           She explained that when you are deaf, your biggest door to the everyday world closes on you.  You can't communicate with people around you.  You can't hear their simplest statements.  You can't understand their simplest questions.  You feel left out and abandoned.  You feel like Gus did in the story.  But there is an even sadder side to it.

           When you're blind, you carry a white cane or have a lead dog.  People know that you are blind and treat you with special concern.  On the other hand, when you're deaf, there is not sign that you carry.  And so people don't treat you in a special way.  Often they treat you worse than usual because you don't respond to them.  They think you are ignoring them.  And so you suffer even more.  It's this kind of suffering that is especially hard to bear.  It's this kind of suffering that we need to become more aware of.  It's this kind of suffering that Gus endured.  Nobody was aware of how alone he was.

          There are two ways we can cultivate a keener awareness of this kind of suffering.  One way is to begin making a conscious effort to focus on the needs of others rather than our own problems and needs. 

          In the Great Depression of the 1930's government agents used to travel through the poorest areas making on-the-spot appraisals of the needs of impoverished families.  And they would give them on-the-spot money to buy food, make repairs on their home, or to pay necessary bills, such as rent and utilities.  One agent found an old woman in a broken down cabin way out in the country.  Her home had a dirt floor and almost every window in it was broken.  He said to her, "If I gave you a government check for $200.00, how would you use the money?"  She thought for a moment and said, "I reckon I’d give it to the poor people who live just down the road."

          That old woman had developed the art of focusing on the needs of others rather than on her own needs and problems!

 A second way we can cultivate an awareness of the suffering of others is through prayer.  Prayer has a remarkable way of making us sensitive to suffering as no other exercise does.  Try it for just one month, and you'll discover this firsthand.  Try praying just one prayer daily for the gift of sensitivity to others and you'll see what I mean. 

An ideal daily prayer to pray is the prayer of St. Francis: 

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred let me sow love; 

Where there is injury, pardon;  Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;  And where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;  To be loved as to love;

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born into eternal life."