“Shiela Cassidy writes, “Some people are called — don’t ask me why — to undergo the most unspeakable suffering. They are overtaken by natural disaster, ravaged by disease, or, quite simply brutalised by their fellows. We catch glimpses of them on television or in our newspapers, their eyes wide with terror as they face death and we meet them head on in hospital wards or reports of commissions investigating war crimes. These are the suffering servants of Yahweh, men and women stripped to the bone, without beauty, without majesty, too terrible to look upon, figures to make us screen our faces lest we howl or throw up in public.
Jesus of Nazareth was one such person, for not only did his captors torture him but, before he died, they nailed him to a cross. This ultimate act of gratuitous violence symbolises, for me, all the terrible last straws which befall or are inflicted upon suffering people before they die. It is the prising out of the last gold filling before a man goes to the gas chamber, or Anna McKenzie sees as God turning his victims upside-Down extract their last hidden coins.”
Over 20 years ago I met Anna McKenzie whilst working as Head of St Loye’s College. She shared with me how she had been involved in an horrific car accident caused by another senseless driver that had left her paralysed and unable to speak and had to face a long road to recovery. She confessed as she lay in the wreckage of her car that she “she felt like a crumpled tissue from someone else’s gold!”
She later wrote
“We did not want it easy God,
But we did not contemplate
That it would be quite this hard,
This long, this lonely.
So if we are to be turned inside out
And upside down,
With even our pockets shaken
Just to check what’s rattling
And left behind…..”
Sheila Cassidy adds a question that each of us needs to answer, “What are we, the bystanders, to do with this suffering?
Jesus answers this with the all too familiar parable, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. ...”
Well might we ask in the face of current suffering of the Ukrainian people, “What would Jesus do?”
At the conclusion of this chapter, Shiela Cassidy prays….
Lord our God, forgive us:
we do not understand your ways.
How is it Lord, you can permit
the scandalous, terrible, devastating things
that happen to your people? . ,
Where were you, Lord,
when the volcano erupted
on a village of people having their dinner?
Had you gone out walking, unplugged the phone?
Where are you, Lord, when the mugger strikes,
splitting an old woman’s head .
wide open like a breakfast egg?
Did you not hear her call your name,
Beg for mercy
Where were you.Lord?
Where were you?
Maybe the answer is also in the words of Anna Mc Kenzie
“We pray that you will keep faith with us
And we with you
Holding our hands as we weep,
Giving trend the to continue,
And showing us beacons along the way
To becoming new.”
