Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Bonnie ThurstonJuly 30, 2007
You live in unremitting darkness,
surrounded by an unbearable silence
with which your friends cannot cope.
They fill the air with worthless words,
ugly flies buzzing around your sores.
Your howl of pain, moans in the night,
attempt to shatter the stillness
of divine and distant implacability.
Your cries are sacred songs,
humanitys common lament.

With no more reasonableness
than the cause of your agony,
the eyelids of the morning blink,
give a transitory glimmer
of the wildness behind all suffering.
You glimpse One whose ways are not ours,
Who, blasted by our whys, changes the subject.
For all this unearned, unredeemable pain,
your recompense is only the Is-ness of God,
barely enough, but light to wrestle on.

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

Pope Leo said that if the teen “had come all the way to Rome, then (the pope) could come all the way to the hospital to see him.”
A Reflection for Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, by Molly Cahill
Molly CahillAugust 04, 2025
As emergency workers searched for survivors and tried to recuperate the bodies of the dead, Pope Leo XIV offered his prayers for people impacted by the latest shipwreck of a migrant boat off the coast of Yemen.
Catholic News ServiceAugust 04, 2025
The Archdiocese of Miami celebrated the first Mass for detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Trump administration’s controversial immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades.