Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Amen, amen, I say to you,
you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices;
you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.

If you follow the news it might seem that life is filled with grief. There are wars and rumors of war, floods, earthquakes, explosions, assassinations, bombings…. The list is endless. They make news and the news industry knows what we want to see. But if you watch enough of that stuff you will be overwhelmed by it all. Add a little family distress to the mix and human life is one catastrophe after another.

The solution is not to despair but to turn off the electronic media, set aside the newspaper, disconnect the telephone and listen to your own heart.  There you will hear the promise of Jesus, “You will grieve but your grief will become joy.”

This takes both courage and patience. Waiting for grief to become joy requires time, sometimes a great deal of time. Joy doesn’t come just because you want it, and probably won’t arrive when you decide “I’ve had it with grief!”

Joy will be born of faith and hope and, like most newborns, in its own time. Joy won’t arrive because the grieving is over. We’re never really finished with our loss. We don’t get over it; we learn to live with it. In the meanwhile your heart has been stretched to receive life in all its manifold beauty and complexity and challenge.

A lot of people won’t go that far. They drop out, taking the side streets of alcoholism, drug addiction, bitterness, resentment, and so forth. They fill the emptiness of grief with stuff until it too overwhelms. We pray for them; we cannot go with them.

Looking on the cross of Jesus we see his arms outstretched to receive everything there is. He is not so much defenseless as hospitable to all experience, both the joyous and the miserable. His wounds are open gates. They invite us to take up residence in his Sacred Heart, to lie down in his sorrow and rise up in his joy.