In the United States, someone called Pat Robertson is upsetting people by calling the present sufferings of the people of Haiti, God’s punishment for their voodoo religion.

The media are labelling his remarks as “shocking”, “stupid”, “backward” etc.

Yet don’t these same media call so-called “global warming” Mother Nature’s way of making us suffer for our addiction to fossil fuels?

* * *

Mother Mary MacKillop knew about suffering. It surrounded her in the rough, poverty-stricken Australia of the 1800s. And she herself, for years, suffered painful illness and, later, paralysis following a stroke.

Blessed Mary made it her life’s purpose, to relieve suffering: educating the uneducated, sheltering the homeless.

She helped the suffering, also, by showing them a reason for their suffering — that there is a God who loves us, despite appearances.

She offered them the example of Christ, who “humbled himself and suffered for us . . . let us be glad to show him we are willing to suffer whatever he deigns to ask of us.”

She taught the Sisters how “sorrow or trial lovingly submitted to does not prevent our being happy — it rather purifies the happiness”.

* * *

Jesus Christ was once asked, regarding a blind man, “Who has sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?”

 He answered, “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents. He was born blind so that the works of God might be revealed in him.”  

Jesus then proceeded, not only to heal the man’s physical eyes, but also to open his spiritual eyes.

 He then asked him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

 “Who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him?”

 “You have both seen him, and he it is who is speaking with you now.”

 The man answered, “Lord, I believe.” 

 And falling down, he worshipped him.

* * *

Ultimately that is all the answer we are going to get: do what Jesus did, respond to suffering by healing and by helping those who suffer.

Learn something, too, from that blind man: learn that our response to suffering must be to accept whatever comes from the hands of a loving God — and to fall down before him and worship him.