Our Catechism teaches that “faith is often lived in darkness and can be put to the test. The world we live in often seems very far from the one promised us by faith. Our experiences of evil and suffering, injustice and death, seem to contradict the Good News; they can shake our faith and become a temptation against it.” [CCC, 164] All of us have experienced suffering in our lives, and we know that it can challenge our faith. As Vincentians, we also are called to confront the suffering of the neighbor, for whom it is often incomprehensible. “How,” they must wonder, “can a loving God allow this?”

Our first duty of action on our home visits must be to do all that we can to alleviate the neighbor’s suffering: to alleviate anxiety by helping with bill payments, to alleviate hunger with food, and to alleviate illness with prescriptions – “No work of charity if foreign to the Society.” [Rule, Part I, 1.3] This is our first duty of action, but it is neither our motive nor our purpose for our actions.

For many, if not most of those we help, the crisis we help to avert will return again one day. Others have material needs greater than we can meet with the resources that we have. These are not failures of service, but reminders that the Society, like the Church, needing “human resources to carry out its mission, is not set up to seek earthly glory, but to proclaim, even by its own example, humility and self- sacrifice.” And again, like the Church, the Society “encompasses with love all who are afflicted with human suffering and in the poor and afflicted sees the image of its poor and suffering Founder. It does all it can to relieve their need and in them it strives to serve Christ.” [LG, 8]

Our primary purpose, our growth in holiness, is not something we take from the poor, but something they freely give us by virtue of allowing us to serve Christ in their persons. In return, Frédéric said, “We should give our poor brothers something more than meager alms.” [1457, to the Assembly, 1834]

Suffering is inescapable on this exile earth. [CCC, 385] It is for this reason that God sent His son to share in our suffering, and that the Son, in turn, sends us to share in each other’s suffering. We must always try to relieve the neighbor’s material needs, but whether we can or not, we must always seek to be a light in the darkness of the despair to which suffering can lead; to show to them the loving face of Christ through our presence, our gentleness, our friendship, and our prayers.

Because hope is not found in a loaf of bread, it cannot be destroyed by a lack of bread. True hope is found in the light that shines through works of love, offering reassurance that even in our darkest hours, God does not abandon us. As Frédéric reminds us, “the condition for progress is suffering and… friendship sweetens the sorrows we cannot avoid.” [53, to Falconnet, 1833]

Contemplate

Do I allow the neighbor’s suffering to overwhelm the hope that I try to share?

By Timothy Williams,
Senior Director of Formation & Leadership Development
Society of St. Vincent de Paul USA.