"Come to Me, All Who Labor" >>>
Sadly, a famine ravages our world, exhausting many individuals, breaking down the human family and threatening the collapse of entire nations. In the midst of our own wealth, people languish for lack of authentic love.
Many are in grave danger because they are unable to receive love or to offer it to others in a meaningful way. For these souls, every tear carries a world of sorrow, every heartache confesses a wordless story of hopes dissolved, of dreams unfulfilled. At some point in life, each of us suffers a genuine crisis of love. Feeling ill-used at the very least, we may grow to doubt the purpose of our existence. The great sorrow of our age is the disintegration of our youth, many of whom carry a brutal burden upon their shoulders.
Incredibly, many young people think they were created without the capacity to offer or to receive virtuous love, that virtuous love is not essential to one's character or humanity, and if construed as something more than utility, love is simultaneously futile and fatal. Not knowing what love is, or how to recognize it as genuine, they surrender to numbing confusion, ruinous conduct and poisonous self-reproach.
As creatures who long for meaning, our egoistic appetites may become so powerful, that we fabricate reality even where none exists. Man will accept even the grossest substitutes for love, even to the point of doing violence to the natural law written in his heart.
It is a mystery how human beings recoil from truth and commitment in the face of growing interior poverty, but when given the chance they will pounce on any fiction that rationalizes their clearly inferior values and destructive behaviors.
This is why we empathize with people who, bowed down emotionally and spiritually, are weary of life itself. We see our own human frailty mirrored in the faces of the scorned and betrayed, and we beseech Jesus: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” [Jn 6:68] Jesus answers, saying:
COME TO me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. [Mt 11:28-30] I have learned that genuine sorrow begets a sublime beauty, a poetry of grief which brings us quite beyond our consciousness to the awe or fear of God. In our most vulnerable moment, we bow before a mystery greater than our comprehension of it.
Curiously, “falling into the hands of the living God” [Heb 10:31] is not a cause for servile fear. We may be powerless to end our suffering. Yet, we have the means at hand to lay down our dread of life and what lies beyond tomorrow. We discover that God graciously blesses “the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. [Mt 5:3]
The very fact of human misery disposes our loving and sympathetic God to be deeply moved when even a single human being suffers. I understand that the world would crush me if not for Christ, an “eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions”. [Deu 32:11]
In the midst of my suffering, the Father of All entices my soul to abandon the fixed and familiar so that I might soar in the height and depth of his merciful love.
