July 30, Ordinary 17A (Romans 8:26–39; Matthew 13:31–33, 44–52)
We can be joined by our suffering, not just separated.
Suffering separates us. This is its most diabolical work. It draws a circle around us and slowly shrinks our space—separating peoples, then families, working all the way down to the individual body. There it finds its perfect work in isolating a person from others and, finally, even splitting mind from body, soul from beating heart.
This is why a creature’s suffering often becomes the playground for the demonic, where those who have made themselves agents of death find ways to manipulate others in their suffering in order to serve their own interests and fulfill their own ends. We live always in the temptation to yield to suffering’s seductive power to separate us, because we live with modern society’s wounds: racism, patriarchy, nationalism.
Such wounds mark us as peoples eager to see separate worlds instead of a world—to construct a present based on a future in which each people must go it alone. Seeing the world in this way might not be counterfactual, but it is tragic.
