The Mercy That Passes Through Us

God consoles the wounded heart so that it may become a place of consolation for others

“Who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction.”

— 2 Corinthians 1:4

There are wounds we would never have chosen.

There are sorrows we would gladly have been spared, losses whose meaning we cannot discover, seasons when prayer itself seems reduced to remaining before God because nothing else is possible.

And yet Saint Paul speaks of something mysterious taking place precisely there.

God comforts us.

Not necessarily by removing the affliction. Not always by explaining it. Not by giving us an answer adequate to the mystery of suffering.

He comes near.

And perhaps this is the first thing suffering teaches us about consolation: true consolation is presence before it is explanation.

The Father of mercies does not stand outside our suffering and offer us an interpretation of it. In Christ, He enters it.

The Word becomes flesh.

He weeps at the tomb of Lazarus.

He knows betrayal and abandonment.

He sweats blood in Gethsemane.

He cries from the Cross.

And therefore Christian consolation is never the reassurance of someone who has remained safely beyond the wound. It comes from One who has entered the deepest places of human sorrow and filled them with His presence.

As we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

The Fathers understood this deeply.

The elder who has suffered becomes gentle.

The one who has discovered his own weakness becomes slow to judge weakness in another.

The one who has cried through the night learns not to offer easy words to someone who is crying.

The one who has been carried by God when he could no longer carry himself learns how to sit quietly beside another who cannot stand.

This may be one of the hidden fruits of suffering.

It enlarges the heart.

Not automatically. Suffering can also make us bitter, frightened, guarded, demanding. Pain alone does not sanctify us.

But suffering surrendered to Christ can become compassion.

The wound becomes an opening.

And through that opening the mercy we ourselves received begins to flow toward others.

This is why the Desert Fathers could sometimes say almost nothing to the person who came to them in anguish. Their authority did not arise primarily from possessing answers. It arose from having stood naked before God themselves.

They knew tears.

They knew temptation.

They knew failure.

They knew loneliness.

They knew the humiliating discovery that we cannot save ourselves.

And therefore they could receive another human being without surprise.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts we can give another person:

not to be surprised by their suffering.

Not to recoil from their weakness.

Not to rush to repair them.

Not to turn their pain into a problem.

Simply to remain.

The modern elders often reveal the same tenderness. Their compassion seems inseparable from their knowledge of human frailty. They do not love an idealized humanity. They love the person who actually stands before them—confused, wounded, frightened, repetitive, sinful, grieving.

Because this is how God has loved them.

And this is precisely Saint Paul’s language:

with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

We do not manufacture Christian consolation.

We receive it.

And then we give away what we have received.

Perhaps this is why certain people become places of rest for us. Something in them no longer needs us to be different before they can love us. They have suffered enough, repented enough, wept enough, and been forgiven enough to know that every human being is standing before an abyss of mercy.

They no longer need to explain everything.

They know how to remain.

There is something profoundly cruciform about this.

Christ receives suffering and gives mercy.

He receives hatred and gives forgiveness.

He receives abandonment and gives Himself.

And when His life begins to take root within us, the same movement slowly becomes possible in our own hearts.

What wounds us need not end with us.

What we suffer can become compassion.

What we lose can become tenderness.

What humbles us can become patience.

What brings us to tears can teach us how to recognize the tears another person is hiding.

Even our helplessness can become a gift, because eventually we discover that the person before us may not need our strength.

They may need our presence.

They may need someone who does not flee.

Someone who does not explain.

Someone who does not judge.

Someone willing to sit beside them in the dark and quietly bear witness:

God is here too.

There is a terrible temptation in the spiritual life to imagine that holiness will somehow make us invulnerable. Yet the saints appear to show us something very different. As the heart draws nearer to Christ, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to the suffering of others.

Saint Silouan could not separate love of God from sorrow for the whole world.

Saint Porphyrios wanted the heart enlarged until everyone could enter it.

Saint Paisios seemed almost unable to encounter another person’s suffering without taking some portion of it upon himself.

This is not sentimentality.

It is participation in Christ.

The heart becomes spacious because Christ has made His dwelling there.

Perhaps, then, we should not ask only:

“Lord, why have I suffered this?”

There may be another prayer:

“Lord, do not let what I have suffered be wasted. Make it mercy.”

Let every place where I have known loneliness teach me to recognize the lonely.

Let every misunderstanding make me slower to judge.

Let every disappointment loosen my demands upon others.

Let every grief make me gentle.

Let every failure deepen humility.

Let every experience of being forgiven make forgiveness rise more quickly within me.

Let every hour in which I have discovered that You alone are enough make me capable of sitting beside someone who has discovered that everything else has failed.

Nothing offered to God need remain barren.

Even sorrow.

Especially sorrow.

For the Cross has changed the meaning of suffering forever.

The wound can become communion.

The place where we once cried alone can become the place where another discovers that he is not alone.

And perhaps this is among the most beautiful transformations grace accomplishes in us:

We come to God asking to be consoled.

He receives us.

He carries us.

He remains with us.

And slowly, almost without our noticing, we become capable of remaining with another.

The consolation has passed through us.

It was never ours to possess.

It came from the Father of mercies.

And having entered the poverty of our own hearts, it begins to flow outward again.

From wound to wound.

From heart to heart.

Until something of the tenderness of Christ becomes present in this suffering world.

And then we understand Saint Paul.

God comforted us because He loved us.

And because He loved the person who would one day need the comfort He had first entrusted to our wounds.