Our Lady of Sorrows

Yesterday, at Ignitum Today, I published some thoughts from the women’s conference I attended over the weeked. It just so happened to be the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. How fitting.

“To be certain, there have been times of tremendous joy. There always are. But they are, inevitably, just breaks. As Kimberly Hahn said in her talk at the conference, “If you aren’t in the midst of suffering, it’s a lull.”

She was so right. I had forgotten, you see. After we lost our first baby, it took us 14 months to conceive again. During the first year or so of our daughter’s life, I had let myself believe that I was “normal”. That things would be looking up from here on out. Surely we would all be healthy, happy, and the babies would flow freely? I mean, truly, hadn’t I met the quota for one lifetime’s worth of suffering?

But that’s not how it works, even when we beg, wish, and pray that it would. The truth is, we will never be able to understand suffering, and we will never fully escape it. Why people suffer, how they suffer, why some seem to suffer so much more than others. These are mysteries which, sadly for us, live up to their name.

We may never understand why we suffer in the ways we do, and in those moments, to paraphrase a friend much wiser than I, we beat the heads of our humanity against the wall of God’s divinity. As nearly every married woman around me announces pregnancy, after pregnancy, after pregnancy, some not even happy to be expecting, while I weep over cycles come and gone, I bang the head of my humanity against the wall of God’s divinity….”

To read the whole thing, go here.