The WORD in ADVENT - Living the Reign here and now #12

Learn at the School of Suffering

Second Thursday in Advent: 13th December, 2018

Isaiah 41: 13-20; Matthew 11: 11-15

Living the Reign here and now requires that we learn to suffer with hope! The poor and needy ask for water and there is none, their tongue is parched with thirst. These lines from the first reading today, bring to our minds the pathetic scenes of poverty stricken nations, refugee camps, relief camps, war torn zones... where people are in dire need of food and water, looking up to someone who would come to their aid. Why do they suffer? Merely natural reasons? Justified political reasons? Is it all of their making? Today people suffer so much more due to human made calamities than due to those that are natural. 

The ones who suffer are not merely the greedy and the trespassers, the wrongdoers and the offenders, but majority of them are the innocent, the poor and the vulnerable! There are only sufferers and those who make them suffer today; there are only oppressors and the oppressed today - you are in either of the group! Where exactly am I?

The first possibility is, you stay off from being part of the causes of the problem, that is being  part of the group of exploiters and oppressors! Then you are oppressed, suffering and bearing the brunt of the callousness of the world. 

The second possibility is, you are part of the cause of the problem. You are in a way, however small, a cause of the sufferings of the innocent, the vulnerable! What reward do you expect for yourself? Do you really think this is what your life was made for!

But surprisingly, a majority of us like to be in the third group, calling ourselves 'in the middle'. Beware, nothing of that exists! You are  part of either the first or the second! If you say, I do not actively oppress anyone, see if you passively approve of it. Even if you are comfortably and conveniently silent about the wrongdoers and the wrongs, you are part of the cause of the problem!

It takes true courage to suffer and suffer with hope! To tell the world, that there is something that is incomparable to all these suffering that awaits us: the Reign. In fact, at the school of suffering we learn to live the Reign here and now.