The evening of March 28 was a beautiful and significant event in the life of our small Tampa Bay community. Our Second Annual Encounter, Tampa Bay was held at a local Catholic high school for an audience of about 100 people. Bishop Gregory Parkes was our gracious host, giving his support again for our initiative, which included promoting the event in the weekly diocesan newsletter. He introduced the event and welcomed the members of the panel, which was anchored by our dear friend Cardinal Christophe Pierre. The event, entitled “Hope in the Midst of Suffering,” proposed Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete’s book Cry of the Heart as the basis for a conversation about the experience, meaning, and mystery of suffering.



Cardinal Pierre’s mere presence was for us a sign of the regard of the Church for our charism, and our community in particular, as this is the third time in 18 months that we have had an evening together with him. His remarks reflected another layer of his affection: he had dutifully studied the proposed text. He offered a summary of its significant themes, contrasting our typical temptation to simply “give answers” to those who suffer with the challenge to embrace the mystery and to co-suffer instead. Recalling our event last year, focused on The Risk of Education, he compared this approach to suffering to Giussani’s insistence on the primacy of experience over ideas, and the importance of accompanying someone through sharing his doubts and questions.

Following the Cardinal’s remarks, three witnesses shared their experience. Enrico is a nurse who cares for the dying. He considers these circumstances a privilege because he is allowed to be present and trusted in vulnerable and humiliating moments of patients’ lives. For him to witness another’s suffering has a certain attraction, and he echoed Albacete who states that in these experiences “Someone very great visits us.”

Leo’s story is one most of us cannot imagine: he was wrongfully convicted of the murder of his wife and spent 36 years in prison. We had become familiar with his story through the Bone Valley podcast and wondered how he had lived that trial without succumbing to despair. We endeavored to meet him (his parole arrangement put him in a half-way house in Tampa) and found that he and his wife Crissie were living a great peace and an ardent desire to communicate God’s love. At this event, where Leo was still recovering from a life-threatening motorcycle accident, Leo said that he learned that the question to ask in front of his suffering is not “Why me?” but rather “Why not me?”, recognizing the mystery of participation in Christ’s passion here and now.

Kathryn had told her story in the CL newsletter a few months earlier. She wrote about questioning God’s goodness in the face of losing a child in miscarriage. That evening she shared the details of that struggle, actively “seeking His face in the pit” of her misery by staying in front of reality, and asking her friends to help her by studying Cry of the Heart together.

The evening was beautiful. Many of the audience members expressed overwhelming gratitude—for the relevance of the topic in daily life and the panelists’ compelling witness to a living Hope. Additionally, this was a true encounter, a mutual sense of having met something and someone exceptional. In a brief 24-hour visit, Kathryn became our dear friend, intimately connected now to our community. At the end of the evening Leo was concerned that we hadn’t yet all traded phone numbers in order to stay together. This desire of his as well as the immediate familiarity with Kathryn was very significant for us in the communal experience, both in preparing the event and witnessing the evening unfold. We are grateful that our new friends show us it is possible to live reality well; the event was truly an encounter and a provocation to ask not how to live our trials, but with Whom.

Joe, Tampa, FL