Open the Roof

To share in the life of Christ is to learn to carry the weakness of another toward Him

“They opened the roof and lowered him down to the feet of Christ.”

— St. Augustine, On Pastors

There is a severity in Augustine’s words because there is a severity in love.

“You have failed to strengthen the weak.”

The accusation is directed toward shepherds, and rightly so. Those entrusted with the care of souls cannot feed upon the flock while remaining indifferent to its wounds. The shepherd belongs to the sheep because he first belongs to Christ.

But the mystery Augustine describes reaches farther than ordained ministry.

For through Baptism every Christian has been drawn into the life of Christ. We have been joined to His death and resurrection, made members of His Body, and given a share in that life which is forever being poured out for the world.

There is only one Priest.

There is only one offering.

There is only one altar upon which humanity is reconciled to God.

Christ Himself.

And yet, because we belong to Him, His priestly life begins to take shape within us.

His compassion becomes our compassion.

His wounds teach us how to approach the wounded.

His patience becomes the measure of our patience.

His desire that none should perish slowly becomes our own.

This is why Christianity can never finally become a private pursuit of holiness.

The deeper we enter into Christ, the more deeply we find ourselves bound to those whom He loves.

And He loves the weak.

Augustine makes an important distinction. Weakness is not necessarily unwillingness. There are souls who desire God sincerely, who want what is good, who perhaps even begin eagerly, but when suffering comes they discover that they do not yet possess the strength they imagined.

Temptation exposes them.

Loss unsettles them.

Disappointment exhausts them.

Fear overwhelms them.

They knew how to walk when the road was smooth. They do not yet know how to walk beneath the Cross.

The temptation of the strong is to judge them.

Christ does something else.

He strengthens them.

The Fathers understood this well. The true elder was not someone who stood above the struggling brother and reminded him how badly he was walking. He descended into the weakness of the other and helped him stand.

Sometimes he spoke.

Sometimes he remained silent.

Sometimes he gave a word.

Sometimes he simply received the brother’s tears.

The purpose was always the same:

to bring the person nearer to Christ.

This is why Augustine’s image of the paralytic is so beautiful.

The man cannot reach Jesus.

So others carry him.

And when the ordinary way into the house is blocked, they do something extraordinary.

They open the roof.

There is almost a holy recklessness in their love.

They will not accept that there is no way to Christ.

If the door cannot be entered, they will climb.

If the crowd cannot be crossed, they will dig.

If the man cannot walk, they will carry him.

And then they lower him into the presence of Jesus.

Perhaps this is one of the purest images of spiritual fatherhood—and, indeed, of Christian love itself.

We cannot heal another soul.

We cannot command another person’s wounds to disappear.

We cannot manufacture faith in someone whose faith has grown weak.

We cannot force repentance.

We cannot save anyone.

But we can carry.

We can open the roof.

We can refuse to abandon another person simply because he has become spiritually heavy.

And we can place him before Christ.

This is priestly.

Not because it usurps the ministry given through ordination, but because it participates in the deeper mystery from which every Christian ministry flows: the self-offering of Christ for the life of the world.

A mother keeping vigil beside a suffering child participates in it.

A person caring quietly for an aging parent participates in it.

The friend who remains beside another when explanations have failed participates in it.

The person who receives another’s confession of sorrow without judgment participates in it.

The one who prays through the night for someone who has forgotten how to pray participates in it.

Perhaps especially the one who whispers the Name of Jesus for someone who cannot yet whisper it for himself.

These things are hidden.

But much of the priesthood of Christ is hidden.

Nazareth was hidden.

Gethsemane was hidden.

The Cross itself appeared to the world not as power but as failure.

Yet there the great offering was being made.

The modern elders teach us something equally important: we carry another person most truly when we do not try to possess him.

Love does not manipulate.

It does not force.

It does not demand that another soul follow the timetable we have devised for its healing.

We carry the person only as far as the feet of Christ.

Then we let go.

That may be the hardest part.

We want to heal.

We want to solve.

We want to remove suffering.

We want to know what will happen.

But we are not the Physician.

Christ is.

Our task is to open the roof.

There is also another mystery here.

Eventually every person who carries others discovers that he too is the paralytic.

There are sufferings that bring us beyond our own strength. There are losses that silence us. There are seasons when prayer becomes little more than remaining before God. There are moments when everything upon which we relied seems to disappear beneath our feet.

Then we discover how blessed it is to be carried.

Someone remembers us before God.

Someone speaks our name in prayer.

Someone remains near without demanding anything.

Someone believes when we cannot see.

And perhaps this is why God sometimes permits those who care for souls to experience their own profound weakness.

Not to destroy them.

To make them gentle.

The person who has never needed to be carried may carry others harshly.

But the one who remembers the mat beneath his own body will handle another person’s weakness differently.

He knows.

The Desert Fathers became fathers precisely in this way. Their authority arose not merely from knowledge but from repentance, tears, temptation, endurance, and mercy. They had encountered their own poverty before God.

Therefore they could recognize the poverty of another without contempt.

This is what suffering can accomplish when it is surrendered to Christ.

The wound becomes compassion.

The temptation becomes understanding.

The failure becomes humility.

The grief becomes tenderness.

And what once seemed merely to diminish us becomes, mysteriously, a place from which another human being can be loved.

Augustine ends with consolation:

“God is faithful.”

This is the foundation beneath everything.

We carry one another, but God carries us all.

We bind wounds, but Christ is the Physician.

We strengthen the weak, yet the strength itself comes from Him.

We open the roof, but below us stands Christ.

Waiting.

Perhaps this is enough to understand our vocation.

There will always be someone who cannot walk.

At another hour, it will be us.

So we carry one another.

Quietly.

Without judgment.

Without possessing.

Without imagining ourselves indispensable.

We bear one another through temptation and grief. We speak the Name when another cannot speak it. We make an opening where there seems to be none.

And then, with great tenderness, we lower one another into the only place where any of us can finally be healed:

at the feet of Christ.