We stare into the abyss. As people of faith, this is our response to the contemporary plight of modern man, a man characterized by a perpetual wandering through a wasteland. Yet our faith gives us a certain strength—we have the freedom to long, the freedom to thirst—in short, the freedom to suffer meaningfully—in view of the deep chasm of human pain and confusion brought on by sin.

We are not the only ones who experience suffering. This has been the single constant throughout the entire history of fallen man: in all places and all times, the human person has had to suffer. This is universally true. What makes our vocation unique is that, given our life of faith, we have the ability to help transform that suffering. What we once knew as death throes, we now know as birth pangs.

It is my deep conviction that such suffering is not a morose or sordid affair at all. Human perspective wonders at the apparent contradiction concerning the joy-bringing quality of suffering. Perhaps we do well to understand suffering, not as a bewildering trauma that makes one’s world to crumble (though we do not preclude this), but as the longing and thirst of the human soul for the love of Christ. Faith, in itself, is a blessed form of suffering. Through faith, all forms of human suffering come to a transformation toward the longing for Christ, and the soul cannot love so much if Divine love has not already touched it. From the perspective of faith, such suffering does not merely give way to joy, nor does such suffering simply prepare its way, but substantially and radically, such suffering is joy.

As we continue our pilgrimage through this barren wilderness, we must allow ourselves to be transformed by such a realization—“realization” not only referring to cognition, but a more literal “making real” the truth of which we speak. It is only in this manner that the Church’s vocation as the light of the world, the “Pillar of Fire” can find its fulfillment. With each step, both in our own lives and also in the life of the Church, perhaps we can “real—ize” that the Church is the Rock which when struck with the Wood of the Cross pours out water in the desert.