October 24, 2024 is the 10th anniversary of Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete’s death. In thanksgiving for the truth he witnessed to us, we share here an excerpt from Cry of the Heart (published by Slant Books). In this book, Msgr. Albacete looks at what the experience of suffering reveals to each of us.

I would never attempt to offer an answer to the problem that suffering poses to believers. Suffering is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.

As a striving towards transcendence, creative suffering […] opens us to others who are also suffering, thus creating a solidarity among those who suffer. To suffer together means to walk together towards transcendence. This solidarity is the proper human response to suffering. This doesn’t mean that we “share the pain” of those who suffer. While this phrase is used quite often, I don’t think this is possible. Nothing is more intimately personal than the pain of suffering. It is, after all, a wound in our personal identity, and personal identity cannot be shared. Each person is unique and unrepeatable. What we share is the questioning—and thus we suffer with the one who suffers. We co-suffer with that person.

Authentic suffering […] is a dialogue, not only with God but also among humans. To co-suffer is to share the question why, to be a companion, and to walk together towards transcendence.

Human nature is not the origin of evil and suffering. Evil is something totally alien to the way we are made, to our identity as persons. The myth of original man and woman in paradise reveals far more of how we are made than the evil and suffering that has been inseparable from history as we know it. The fact that the “man and woman of prehistory” lacked knowledge of good and evil does not make them less human than us — it makes them more human. It is because evil is so alien to how we are made that suffering and death are so repulsive. We cannot imagine history without the struggle that brings about suffering, but deep within our hearts we hear a distant echo of what could have been, of how human life was really meant to be.

Suffering, we said, puts us in the presence of, in Mounier’s words, “Someone very great.” But if this is so, if this “Someone very great” is not to be the origin of the horrors experienced, then this Someone must be one who can descend into the hell we have encountered. This Someone must be able and willing to enter into a relationship with us that will prevent us from sinking into the absolute loneliness that is hell. This Someone must be capable of love even in hell, for hell is not to love anymore.

The redemption of suffering and the mystery of love are inseparable. The response to suffering is not to stop caring — that, in fact, is hell — but to experience a caring that sustains us in our humanity as it was meant to be. This is the redemption that the heart seeks.