In listening to the story and pleading of Elias Syriani’s children, it was hard not to be overwhelmed with compassion for them and their cause.  A part of me was in the present, attentive to their stories.  A part of me was already experiencing fear for what awaited them knowing that their cry for mercy would fall on deaf ears. There was little hope for a stay of execution.  Were the children prepared for the new suffering that awaited them?  Would the recent joy of reconciliation and memories of reunion with their father be enough to sustain them through the sorrow that would come?

Then and now, a part of me lingers in the past, in my years with Rwandan refugees, remembering their experience of suffering and its more sinister cousin, affliction. The raw experience of the moment is now infused with the years of life as a professed Franciscan friar. A life that provides a point of reference which is basically optimistic and infused with the incarnational belief that ranges from St. Paul’s description of Christ is cosmic terms:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.16 For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him.17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.18 He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself might be preeminent.19 For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell,20 and through him to reconcile all things for him, making peace by the blood of his cross (through him), whether those on earth or those in heaven. (Col 1:15-20)

to St. Francis’ Canticle of Creation which describes a world infused with the presence of God, its Creator, in all things. It is a perspective that says all in creation, even those things or persons who seem the most evil, are the vestiges or images of Christ – thus all are deserving of a dignity on that basis alone.

In my time as a Franciscan it seems that ministry forever engages suffering and affliction.  This has been true of ministry in Kenya with the Rwandans.  It was true of ministry at Bethesda Naval Hospital, invited into the lives of the young marines horribly wounded in Iraq.  It is true in parishes, among the adults who encounter suffering and affliction in all manner of ways and circumstances. It is true among people whose stories I do not yet know.

What do I, as minister, have to say to these people? How can I be present to these people? I know from my own experience in Kenya that the nature of ministry is one of pietas (right relationship) which brings one close enough that suffering and affliction, even if not one’s own, will seep into the life of the minister, an osmotic transfer through all the membranes and barriers of a separate life.

A Swiss aid worker once told me that it is all a balance.  If you, as minister, become too close you will be sucked into their despair and then you become a burden to an already burdened people.  If, as minister, you are too remote, then you are just another functionary in a system that burdens and grinds down their lives in a different manner.