For many years, the well-known Dutch priest and theologian Henri Nouwen pastored the residents and staff of the Daybreak Community in Toronto, Canada. Daybreak is a residential facility for the mentally challenged. The residents face many difficulties: savage inner voices, physical paralysis, epileptic seizures, disordered speech and thinking. The residence is filled with what many of us would conceive as frightening, even repellent, conditions. Nouwen knew about revulsion. But he also came to know something important: those whose illness is visible teach us about our own brokenness. The residents of Daybreak might have been visily limited, but all of us are limited in one way or another. Often limited by invisible disabilities, we are bound by our secrets every bit as firmly as Nouwen's parishioners were bound by obvious weaknesses. "After years of living with people with mental disabilities," he wrote, "I hae become deeply aware of my own sorrow-filled heart."
Suffering can do one of two things: It can cause us to close down, or it can help us to open up. We close down in a vain attempt to protect ourselves from further pain, but it is a useless attempt. The way of human life is not the avoidance of pain. The way of a truly human life is to move through pain into love, to see ourselves in the suffering of others and others in our own suffering. This is one reason we reflect so carefully upon the passion and death of Christ during the season of Lent. As Isaiah's "Suffering Servant," Jesus shows us a truly human path.
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