Transcript

I'd like to begin with one of my favorite tales of a young man who was too nervous to ask a young pretty lady out.

Finally, he got up enough courage and she agreed to go out.

He was so nervous that he showed up at her house early.

But before he did, he stopped by the drugstore three hours earlier.

He walked in with a really good idea and he said, I'd like to buy four different boxes of chocolate, the one pound, the two pounds.

The three-pound and the four-pound.

Okay, go ahead.

What is it for?

Well, the one-pound box is just to thank the gal for going out with me.

But if she lets me hold her hand as we walk about, I'm going to give her the two-pound box at the end of it all.

The three-pound box is for the love scene in the movie.

I've discovered, I've decided if she lets me put my arm around her, I'm going to give her the three-pound box.

And if, as we say goodnight and Go our separate ways, she lets me give her a goodnight kiss, and it's a really good goodnight kiss.

I'm going to pull out the four-pound box.

Oh, you sly old dog, you have a good time, and he was off.

Well, as I said, he got there a little bit early, and she was there at the door saying, hey, we're just sitting down to dinner, and he blurted out, can I come in and join you?

Well, all right, and he sat down and said, can I say grace?

And they all agreed, and he began to pray.

And he prayed for a couple seconds, he prayed for a half a minute, he prayed for two minutes, he prayed for five minutes, he kept on going.

Finally, 15 minutes later, he said, Amen.

And everybody proceeded to eat a pretty stale and cold dinner.

And on the way out the door, she whispered, you never told me you were so religious.

He whispered right back, and you never told me your dad was the druggist.

You know, I think of that because a lot of times, we're grateful to be Catholics.

We're proud to be Christians.

And we rediscover our faith, and we have a sense of joy.

Perhaps one like we've never known before.

But along the way, something is bound to happen.

Between this afternoon and that moment when God calls you to Himself, I can guarantee one thing, and that is suffering.

And we forget about suffering.

We get caught up in the truth and the beauty and the practicality of the Catholic faith, and then all of a sudden, boom, we confront suffering.

And we instinctively fall back on our own resources, and we usually do then what we've been doing all our lives.

We'll swear, or we'll lie, or we'll steal, or we'll do something in desperation to recover our balance, because God can't want this, because I don't, and I basically want what God wants, right?

And often the answer is a, God is trying to whisper wrong.

I want something for you that you are not going to want for yourself naturally.

What do we do then?

Now, I didn't grow up Catholic, and so I didn't grow up hearing this, but I've now heard it probably my five thousandth time.

What do you tell someone when you see them suffer in pain, they don't like it, and they're tempted to complain, but you know they shouldn't, and so you say, offer it up.

I want to ask you a question.

I'm going to ask this as a convert.

Do you know what the single strangest Catholic idea in all of Catholicism is for Bible Christian, Protestant evangelicals, Do you know what it is?

You might think, oh, it's the Pope.

I mean, you have nothing like him.

The Pope's not that strange.

I mean, if they had Davidic kings, we could adjust to that.

Well, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that really is difficult.

That runs counter to a lot of what we stood for as Bible Christians.

But if you take everything else and put it all together, I don't think It strikes the Protestant, Bible Christian, fundamentalist, charismatic, evangelical, Pentecostal, or whatever you want to call them, nearly as strange as...

Offer it up.

Offer what up?

I stubbed my toe!

I've got a flu!

I broke my arm!

Offer it up.

Fear!

What's God going to do with it?

What do you mean, offer it up?

And, you know, you're like, well, I've come from a conference at St. Michael's, this Holy Family conference, and so I'm pretty serious about my faith, so I know enough to say, well, you are supposed to unite your sufferings with Christ's sufferings, and Christ's sufferings invest your suffering with redemptive value.

You know, and that's the key.

And I hope you know enough to say something as simple but as profound as that.

But if you do know that much and you say that much, don't be surprised if they look and they say, what?

You unite your sufferings to Christ's sufferings?

Why?

Didn't Christ suffer enough?

I mean, did he just expire a little prematurely?

Where do you Catholics get off thinking that Jesus' suffering has need of anything else to be added unto it, like your suffering?

Your stub-toe, your broken arm, or whatever?

Where do you get that?

And you're going to say, from this day on, Colossians 1.24, Aren't you?

Yeah.

Colossians 1.24, and I know some of you are probably sitting there thinking, Colossians 1.24, I heard your tape.

What is Colossians 1.24? Well, if the doctrine of redemptive suffering is the single most strange teaching in the Catholic Church for the average Bible Christian, Colossians 1.24 may well be arguably the biggest surprise For Bible Christians.

I know.

It mugged me.

And it mugged me in graduate school when I was in a doctoral program.

And it didn't just mug me, it mugged Sam, my good friend, my fellow Calvinist, my fellow preacher, my fellow minister, my fellow...

I think I'm an anti-Catholic type guy.

He was taking a doctoral seminar along with me on Colossians and Ephesians And Dr. Stockhausen imposed this text upon Sam and said, I want you to prepare an exegesis paper and present it to the seminar in two weeks.

And I saw Sam in the library and he said, what's your text?

And I said, Colossians 1.15, one of my favorites.

Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

What's yours, Sam?

And he said, I've got a really strange one.

What's that?

Colossians 1.24. It showed to me, now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake.

Okay, I mean, I'm used to that.

So is Sam.

But then the next part really threw us off.

And in my flesh, I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church.

And Sam was like, what do you think that means?

And I was already beginning to look into things that were Catholic at that point in my life, but I didn't know what that meant.

I hadn't really come to grips yet with this notion of redemptive suffering, that we are so united to Christ that His life becomes our life, His sufferings become ours, and the Holy Spirit's main task is to reproduce Christ's life, suffering, death, resurrection, and eternal glory in each and every one of us.

And that is the reason why Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit.

To reproduce in us His life, His suffering, His death, His resurrection and eternal glory in us.

But I was just discovering it at the time, so I wasn't really sure where Colossians 1.24 fit.

And so I said, you're going to have to let me know, Sam, what you discover.

I ran into him another day, two days later.

It was in the evening, in fact.

And he really didn't look good.

And I said, what's up?

And he said, well, I've basically broken the interpretive options down into three categories.

And I said, well, what are they?

He said, the ones who just avoid it altogether.

And he had about 10 commentaries written by top-ranking scholars who just simply run all the way around the verse without even commenting upon it.

Second, he said, there are the people who try to deal with it but end up dodging it or denying the clear force of what it seems to be saying.

And then he said, there's this third group.

I said, what's that category?

He said, that's the Catholic category.

He said, these are the ones who are really honest about what Paul says.

And I said, what do you mean?

And he said, well, Paul says that something is lacking in Christ's afflictions.

And he said, this third group acknowledges the straightforward statement that Paul makes, that in Paul's mind something is lacking in what Christ suffered.

And then he showed me some subdivisions, that these people think that it was lacking because of this, these people think it was lacking because of that.

And I said, what do you think?

And he said, well, I think St. Augustine's right.

that it isn't that Jesus didn't hang there long enough and suffer enough pain, as much as God wanted, or as much as our sin really called for.

It's rather that what is lacking in Christ's sufferings is lacking in the members of his mystical body.

That is to say, Augustine says, that what has happened to the head of the body must happen to each and every member of the body.

And so what is lacking Is Christ's sufferings in us because we shrink back in horror facing the prospect of suffering?

I didn't really follow.

I said, why is that the one you've really fixed upon?

He said, because of what Paul says.

Why else would he say, I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, for in my flesh I complete what is lacking In other words, St. Paul clearly believes that what Christ has done we all must do, and he is doing it, whether or not those Colossians were.

And I remember the presentation that he made in class, and he told me right before he came in and made the presentation that he had hardly slept the night before, because he had begun the long and painful process of thinking through the implications of this teaching.

And after the presentation, it was masterful.

He convinced, I think, each and every person in the seminar of this interpretation, really because it's as plain as the nose in your face once you see it.

Afterwards, we walked over to the Student Union Building.

And I hadn't told him yet about what I was already beginning to plan.

And that is my entrance into the Catholic Church.

And I said, Sam, what does this mean for your ministry?

What does this mean for your preaching?

And he said, you know what?

He said, were I to preach this in the Christian Reformed Church, I would be run out on a rail.

We don't have the doctoral categories to fit this into.

And I said, what are you going to do?

He goes, I don't know, but my wife has asked me to bury it.

And it was his last semester, and I've never heard back from Sam.

Pray for my brother.

I've looked his name up a few times, and I never tracked him down.

But I remember seeing on his face, etched into his forehead, an interior struggle that was more than intellectual.

It was more than just marital.

It was more than just a matter of doctrine.

It was a personal struggle, a crisis because he realized not only was this theological system not big enough to accommodate this clear teaching of Paul, but it also didn't fit neatly into what he and I both envisioned as the normal Christian life.

Because suffering for us is something that is inescapable, but inasmuch as you can avoid it, you should avoid it.

Whereas St. Paul was challenging us to think about this Now, if you only had one text, Sam said in his presentation, you might be able to say that we can't put much interpretive weight upon the conclusions that I have reached.

But he showed us other texts that day.

For instance, he had us turn to Philippians 3. St. Paul says, and actually going back a ways, he said, And in that presentation, Sam concluded by saying that this study has forced me to rethink what the Holy Spirit is trying to do in our lives.

And I've already given to you the statement that he made.

He said the primary purpose of the Holy Spirit is to reproduce in us Christ's life, but also Christ's suffering, Christ's death, and then Christ's resurrection and eternal glory, provided we accept it.

And I remember that statement.

He only made it one time, but I must have played it back 50 times in the next several days.

Because if you really think that way, you will suffer in a different way than everyone else who thinks in the same old ordinary fashion of the world.

I remember talking to Sam's good friend Terry.

We went out to a bar that night, and we were just sitting around talking about the project we were working on, And Terry said to Sam, you know, Sam, why are your papers so difficult?

He said, because in our society today, we hardly have any room for moral evil or sin.

We agree.

And Terry said, you know what I would suggest?

I would suggest to you that the only real evil that everyone in our society can generally agree on is suffering.

Those words also stuck out in my mind.

What do you think about that?

You look around.

Why do people take drugs?

To escape pain.

Why do people contracept?

To escape sacrifice, the burden of additional children, the risks that accompany it.

Why do people get abortions?

Because they want to avoid the suffering of childbirth and rearing another child.

Why do they fall into affairs because they don't want to accept the suffering involved in fidelity?

In not following your passions and your emotions, but in keeping your word.

Even though you know there's another path that would be more pleasurable.

Whereas the path of fidelity is sometimes just downright painful.

I don't think that in any other century except our own, Would we have allowed Jack Kevorkian to live another day, except we have been deluded by the same principle that he operates by, namely, suffering is the only real evil.

And we should be tolerant of all other evils if they will minimize or eradicate suffering.

And if Calvary never happened, that would probably be right.

But Calvary did happen.

Jesus did suffer and die.

Jesus did transform our sufferings into a redemptive counter-force that Almighty God can use in harnessing our suffering.

United to Christ, He can use that as a counter-force, a spiritual power, To bring down the kingdom of Satan.

And by looking closely at Mary and Jesus at the cross, I think we can make sense out of suffering.

We can make sense out of Paul's teaching in Colossians 1.24, Philippians 3.10-11. We can make sense out of the teachings of the church in the New Catechism, Article 15.21, where we read, Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning.

it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.

What do you mean?

What does the Catechism mean when it says it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus?

Are you ready for the objection that will be raised by a Bible Christian who will say, are you implying that Jesus' death was not sufficient?

That Jesus Did not suffer enough.

That we need to suffer in order to complete what Jesus did for our redemption.

And I would say, no, Jesus' suffering was enough.

But enough for what?

When Jesus said, it is finished, it was finished.

He had done enough, but enough for what?

That's the real question you have to answer.

Suppose Kimberly wanted me to marry her, and I was a little bit reluctant, which I wasn't. You can see why now.

But suppose I was reluctant.

And finally, after being dragged, kicking and screaming to the altar, I said, I do.

And then I went off to the reception, then another bachelor party that was extended out over a week or two.

And she got frantic.

She couldn't find me.

Suppose she called me I found me down at some bar and she came down and she said, what are you doing?

And I said, hey, you got what you wanted.

I said, I do.

Isn't that enough?

What would she say?

Yeah, it's enough.

Enough to start a married life together.

See, enough isn't understood properly.

If you take it in this minimalistic way and say, Jesus suffered so I don't have to.

No, Jesus' suffering was enough to transform my suffering into redemptive power.

It's enough, but enough for what?

Jesus' suffering was enough to make my pain something that I can unite to His and make it useful for God.

And of all the things that I've said today, I really believe this one weird teaching, this one strange idea, this one notion that is harder for non-Catholics to understand than all the others may prove to be the most useful of all.

You know why?

Because when all is said and done, everything we've said and done is either going to be eternally significant or eternally insignificant.

And everything we do is preparation for the last thing we do, which is to die.

If we die at the age of 101, what feels like a long life will all of a sudden vanish into a speck in the face of eternity.

And then we will understand why the avoidance of suffering is not the path to take.

It is the acceptance of suffering.

It is lowering your shoulders and bearing the burdens that God sends your way to make you into a sacrificial lover like himself.

Of all the ideas that have practical value, this notion of redemptive suffering, while it may not be new to anybody here, It's something that we need to renew every day.

I don't believe we can hear it too much.

I believe it really is the greatest challenge.

And I also believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the only way to go.

The only way that Jesus went, and the only way that we can go.

Just a year ago, I was on the Via Dolorosa.

How many of you here have ever taken a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and traveled down the Via Dolorosa?

Wow, good number.

I would suggest that all of you ask the Lord for that grace at some point.

But whether you do it or not, I think you can relate to this.

Because when we did the 14 Stations of the Cross in the Via Dolorosa in the streets of Jerusalem, it was the second time I did it.

And I knew what to expect, and so I prepared myself, but I found myself even more frustrated than the first time I had done it a couple years before.

You see, most of the Via Dolorosa, most of the 14 stations are done in very narrow alleyways that are also very noisy.

You will pass through the Arab section where there are traders, where there are peddlers, where there are babies screaming, where there are kids running around, where there are shopkeepers trying to sell you their wares, where there are people trying to pick your pocket.

And in the middle of this, you're trying to pray.

You know, you're looking at Jesus falling a second time, and some guy brushes up against you like you checked for your wallet, you know?

And you just want to stop and say, do you mind?

You know, I'm just following the path that the second person of the eternal God had trod when he died for our sins.

Can you just keep it down?

And I talked to my fellow pilgrims later on, and all of us were fighting the same Irritation, the same problem.

This narrow, noisy, winding path, which was probably a year ago, just like it was 2,000 years ago.

At some point along the way, it happens to many, maybe even most of the pilgrims who do the Stations of the Cross.

All of a sudden, God transforms the anger, the irritation, and the frustration into a spiritual moment.

Because what you're doing is eternally significant, but the world just doesn't really care.

And all the noise and all the confusion and all the hubbub then was probably just what Jesus had all around Him back when He offered Himself up as the Lamb without blemish.

The world just kept on going.

There was no half-minute of silence.

There was no flag at half-,ast.

There was no national day of prayer and mourning.

They didn't ask the televisions all to carry the story.

Nobody carried it.

Nobody cared.

But that didn't diminish the weight, the value, the significance of what Christ was doing.

But the one thing that happened a year ago that didn't happen the first time is all of a sudden the Holy Spirit gave me this grace where I felt that Mary was with me.

And especially at that one station where my best friend Jeff and I began to carry the cross.

When we were the ones carrying the cross, all of a sudden a couple of times I looked and I thought I saw someone and I didn't. And it wasn't an apparition, but it was this vivid sense that Mary is accompanying us.

Later on, I went to prayer and I reflected upon this, and I thought to myself, what was Mary doing that day?

What was she feeling?

What was she thinking?

What was she saying?

And a bunch of thoughts came to mind, and I jotted them down.

I asked the question, what would I have done if I had been Mary?

And I wrote down, I would have looked at my fellow Jews And I would have said, how can you do this to him, your kinsman, after all that he's done for you?

Who do you think you are to kill your redeemer and king?

And yet she was silent.

And then as she turns and sees these Roman soldiers scourging him, preparing the gibbet to execute him by crucifixion, she's seeing these foreigners who don't even know the covenant traditions of her fellow Jews.

And if I had been Mary, I would have said, who do you think you are?

Someday you're going to discover just what you've done.

And oh, you're going to be sorry then.

But it will be too late.

And then if I had been Mary, I would have looked at his fellow disciples.

You know, John finally comes to the foot of the cross.

I would have named him Johnny-come-lately.

Where are all the other ones?

Some friends, you turned out to be to my son, my only son.

Oh, and Peter, what did you say you'd do?

Yeah, right, James and John, you said you'd drink the cup.

Had I forgot about that.

If you were Mary, how would you have fought the irritation?

at the total absence of all the disciples except for John.

Would that have been hard for you?

It was hard for me later that day.

But you know the hardest moment of all would have been putting myself in Mary's position.

I would have looked to Jesus and I would have been tempted to say, how can you put your mother through this?

In fact, if I had been Jesus, I would have said, Mary, Mom, do you mind?

I have been spat upon, I have been beaten, I have been stripped bare.

Could you save me the additional humiliation and shame and pain by quietly excusing yourself from this horrifying scene?

What favor do you think you're doing for me, watching me adding one more set of eyes to this humiliating gaze?

But Jesus knew she had to be there.

And she knew she had to be there.

And she knew her response was not, how can you put your mother through this?

Want her to do something!

You know why she didn't say that?

Because she knew in her heart that he was doing something.

Something immense.

Something infinitely great.

Something immeasurably greater than if he had zapped every centurion on the spot, if he had Pop those spikes out if he had released the two on either side, if he had sprung free and all of a sudden said, hey, look, you're wrong, I'm God, and you're sorry now, aren't you?

I mean, if he had flexed his divinity just a little bit, he wouldn't have done as much as he was doing by suffering, bleeding, gasping, and dying.

Why don't you do something?

She wouldn't have said that, because she knew that he was doing something that would redeem the world.

And that something was suffering.

That something was suffering embraced voluntarily from a heart filled with love.

Because that's what love does.

Love gives.

A little love gives a little.

A lot of love gives a lot.

Total love gives totally.

It gives self.

The real test of love is sacrifice.

Even our English word passion has that double meaning.

When you hear the word passion, you immediately think of our Lord's suffering.

But we also use the same word with reference to what?

with the feeling that lovers have.

They're passionate.

And it's the heat of passion.

Because the two, whether we know it or not, belong together.

Because a lover wants to sacrifice himself or herself for the beloved.

And while it might be painful to give yourself to God, to Jesus, to Mary, to your family, If you're really in love, it will hurt you more not to give yourself and not to sacrifice.

The pain that Jesus experienced on the cross was indescribable.

But for Jesus to have said no to the Father would have been more painful.

For Jesus to have offended his Father, whom he loved above all, would have been immeasurably greater pain.

You see, the reason why Jesus didn't say, Mom, how can you just stand there and make it worse?

Why don't you leave?

Jesus knew that It wasn't just his consent to death that he needed to offer.

What was also needed was Mary's consent.

Mary's consent was an essential part of Jesus' redemptive sacrifice.

This is the unanimous teaching of the Church from the Fathers to the Doctors down to Vatican II. Mary's consent represents the Church in offering the Son unto the Father In fact, one theologian made this point in a lecture so forcefully that he said that if the Roman centurions would have refused to pound those nails through his hands and feet, Mary would have picked up the hammer and said, I'll do it instead.

So great was her consent.

Now, I appreciated this professor's point that the consent was complete, but I did not appreciate the way he made the point.

Because no matter what you say, it would have contradicted maternal love to pound nails into your son's hands and feet.

To give consent is not the same thing as to actually cause the pain.

There is no way a mother would have been called upon to drive nails through her little baby, through her son, through her Lord and Savior.

But I would suggest to you, that what Mary gave consent to involved every bit as much suffering for her as hanging on the cross brought to Jesus.

Now, I can't speak for every woman here, but I can speak for Kimberly, because she's told me as much.

Were Kimberly to be standing on Golgotha, and to behold any one of our five kids upon that cross, it would be far less painful and far easier for her to say as a mother, get them down and put me up instead.

Maternal love is so naturally self-sacrificing that it would be inclined to accept that suffering, which is what I've seen Kimberly undergo, practically speaking, five different times in getting a cesarean section.

She is laid out cruciform, stripped and humiliated, in indescribable pain, and her side is opened up, and from it comes forth new life.

You know, that is what a woman does almost naturally.

That is why she wasn't supposed to do it supernaturally.

Because the one thing harder for a woman to do than to allow herself to be laid out cruciform to give new life is to give consent to that new life being laid out cruciform and giving up its life to bring redemption.

What Mary did as a mother represents the greatest sacrifice possible.

But just as Jesus calls us through St. Paul to rejoice in our sufferings and to recognize how the Holy Spirit is working to reproduce Christ's sufferings, Christ's death, You know, I remember talking to a Catholic shortly before I came into the church, and they were bragging about how the Catholic Church has Mary, not just Jesus.

And this guy went on to say that, you know, you've got Jesus, but we've got the merciful mother who left us in the back door.

And maybe I shouldn't have, but I reacted.

I said, Mary is only what Jesus has made her, and if there's a back door, it's because Jesus made it.

But you've got to remember what Mary did when Jesus went to the cross.

She didn't try to talk him out of it.

she accompanied him all the way to encourage him to the end.

And so if she does that with her only beloved son by nature, the son whom she has loved since conception, the son she adores as God, Creator and Redeemer, what do you think she's going to do with us?

Do you think, do you suppose for a minute she's going to say, hey look, Jesus needed to die on the cross.

But you all don't. He was sinless.

We are sinful.

Hebrews 5 verse 7 puts it very strongly.

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his godly fear.

Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

Although he was a son, perfect, sinless, son of God, he learned obedience through what he suffered, and that's how he was made perfect and became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.

And what does it mean to obey him?

He says, if any man would follow me, he must take up his cross daily.

And so for us, redemptive suffering is not an option for the super saints, the Mother Teresa's, the John Paul II's, redemptive suffering, offering it up, carrying the cross represents the nuts and bolts of Christian living, the ABCs of Catholic morality, the sine qua non, that without which there is no heaven, that without which there can be no perfection for us.

Now, in conclusion, what does this mean for us practically?

How do we do it?

I suspect that very few of us here will ever be nailed to a cross.

Very few of us here will ever be tortured, much less executed for our faith.

So how do we do it?

The hardest part of suffering for me might be the hardest part for you, I don't know.

But you know what the hardest part of suffering is for me?

Giving up control.

I like to be in control.

My father-in-law likes to be in control.

I guess that's just part of what it means to be a father-in-law.

But he is one of the godliest men I've ever known.

And it gives me great comfort to see him struggle with getting sick because he prays more than I do.

He shares his life with more people than I do.

He loves more generously than I do.

He's also my best brother, friend in Christ, practically speaking.

God has blessed me with a father-in-law that I have never known anybody to have.

But I see in me and I see in him the same intense struggle.

When you get sick, you have to give up control.

Control your schedule.

Control your body.

Control where you go, what you do, and when you do it.

And so I always wonder, God, what do you hope to accomplish by having me stay in bed for the second day or the third day?

I mean, are you asleep at the wheel?

Can't you kind of pull me back to health?

But I am convinced from life experience now and from the Scriptures and from the Church's teaching that God accomplishes more of redemptive value in me when I give up control than when I'm in control.

I want to close by sharing one of my all-time favorite stories, and it's a true story.

It appeared recently in the Focus on the Family magazine, but it happened several years ago, shortly after World War II. bear with me, take close attention, it will prove to be worth it.

Marcel Sternberger is the one who writes this story.

He was a very methodical man of nearly 50, bushy white hair, gauntlet brown eyes, and he was a native Hungarian who had survived World War II. And he was living in New York City after the war, and he always took the 909, the Long Island train, from a suburban home down to Long Island.

On the morning of January 10, 1948, Sternberger boarded the 909 as usual.

Suddenly, en route, he remembered he had to visit Laszlo Viktor, a Hungarian friend who lived in Brooklyn and was taken ill, and he wasn't sure he'd live long enough to visit him if it wasn't today.

So dutifully, but unexpectedly, at Ozone Park, he changed the subway for Brooklyn, went to his friend's house, and stayed until mid-afternoon.

He then boarded a Manhattan-bound subway for his Fifth Avenue office for the first and only time in his life that he was to ride that train, and here's his story.

When I got on the car, it was crowded.

There wasn't any chance of a seat.

But just as I entered, a man sitting right by the door suddenly jumped up to leave, so I slipped into his empty place.

Now, I've been living in New York long enough not to start conversations with strangers, but being a photographer, I have a peculiar habit of analyzing people's faces, and I was struck by the features of the passenger's face on my left.

He was probably in his late 30s, I thought, and when he glanced up, his eyes seemed to have pain, a hurt expression.

He was reading a Hungarian language newspaper, and so something prompted me to say in Hungarian, I hope you don't mind if I glance at your paper.

The man seemed surprised to be addressed in his native language, but he answered politely, You may read on.

I'll have time later.

During the half-hour ride to town, we struck up a conversation.

He said his name was Bela Paskin.

Bela was a law student when World War II broke out.

He had been put into a German labor battalion and sent to the Ukraine.

Later, he was captured by the Russians and put to work burying the German dead.

After the war, he covered hundreds of miles upon foot until he reached his home in Debrecen, a large city in eastern Hungary.

I myself knew Debrecen well, and we talked about it for a while.

And then he told me the rest of the story.

For when he reached his apartment, the one once occupied by his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, it was now occupied by total strangers.

He then went upstairs to the apartment that he and his wife once shared.

It was also occupied by total strangers.

None of them had ever even heard of his family.

He began to leave filled with sadness.

When all of a sudden he heard a sound, he turned around and a boy was running after him, calling, "'Paskin!

Paskin!'

He was calling out, "'Uncle Paskin!'

The child was the son of some of the neighbors of his, and he went over to the boy's home and talked to his parents, who told him, "'Your whole family is dead.

The Nazis took them and your wife to Auschwitz.'"

Auschwitz, of course, is one of the worst of the Nazi concentration camps, and on that day, Paskin gave up all hope.

Heart sick to remain in Hungary any longer, he set out again on foot, stealing across border after border until finally he reached Paris.

He managed to immigrate to the United States in October 1947, just three short months before I met him.

All the time he was talking, however, I kept thinking that somehow his story sounded familiar.

A young woman whom I had met recently at the home of friends had also been from Debrecen.

She had been sent to Auschwitz, and from there she was transferred to work in a German munitions factory.

All of her relatives had been killed in the gas chambers, and later she was liberated by the Americans and was brought here in the first boatload of displaced persons in 1946. Her story, in fact, had moved me so much that I'd asked her for her address and phone number, hoping sometime to invite her to meet my family, to help her by relieving a terrible emptiness in her life.

Well, it seemed to me, upon reflection, it seemed impossible that there could be any connection between these two people.

But as I neared my station, I fumbled anxiously in my address book.

I asked in what I hoped would sound like a casual voice, Your wife, was her name Maria?

Suddenly turned, he looked totally pale.

Yes, he answered.

How did you know?

He looked as if he were about to faint.

I said, let's get off the train.

I took him by the arm at the next station and led him to a phone booth.

He stood there like a man in a trance while I dialed her phone number.

It seemed like hours before Maria answered.

Later I learned her room was alongside the telephone, but she was in the habit of never answering it because she had no friends and all the calls were for others.

But this time, with no one else at home, after letting it ring for a long time, she finally responded.

When I heard her voice, I told her who I was And I asked her to describe her husband.

She seemed surprised at the question, but gave me a description.

Then I asked her where she had lived in Debrecen, and she told me the address.

Asking her to hold the line, I turned to Paskin and said, Did you and your wife live on such and such a street?

He could barely utter the words.

Yes, his lips were trembling, white as a sheet.

Try to be calm, I urged him.

Something miraculous is about to happen.

Take the telephone.

He nodded in mute bewilderment, his eyes filled with tears.

He took the receiver, listened for a moment to his wife's voice, and then suddenly cried out in Hungarian, And he began to mumble hysterically.

Seeing that the poor fellow was so excited, he couldn't talk coherently.

I took the receiver from his shaking hand.

I told him, I'm sending your husband to you.

We'll be there in a few minutes.

The whole time Bella was crying like a baby, saying over and over again, it's my wife, I go to my wife.

At first I thought I'd better accompany Paskin lest the man faint from excitement, but I decided that this was a moment in which no stranger should intrude.

I put him in a taxi, I gave the driver her address, paid the fare and said goodbye.

I heard later on that Bella Paskin's reunion with his wife was a moment so poignant, so electric, with suddenly released emotion.

that afterward neither he nor Maria could find the words to describe it.

I remember only that when I left the phone, she said, I walked to a mirror like in a dream to see if maybe my hair had turned gray, she said later.

The next thing I know a taxi stops in front of my house and my husband, who I thought was dead, is coming toward me.

Details I can't remember, only this I know, that it was the first time God had brought happiness back into my life in many years.

Even now it's difficult to believe that it happened.

We have both suffered so much.

I have almost lost the ability to not be afraid.

Each time my husband goes from the house, I say to myself, will anything happen to take him from me again?

But her husband is confident no horrible misfortune will ever befall them again.

Now you might be sitting there thinking, what a coincidence.

And I suppose there will always be skeptics.

When I look back at my own life experience, at the conversations that have made the difference in people's lives and in my own, what I have found is it's when I accept the cross, it's when suffering comes my way, it's when the unpredictable is imposed upon me, and then I let go and let God take control, that God's work in me really begins.

This is true for us Individually, it's also true for our marriages.

It's true for our children.

Mary and Jesus from the cross are saying to us, let go.

Let God.

And He will.

Let's ask Him in prayer.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we worship You.

We give You thanks and praise for the love that You are.

and the love that you've shown in generating your Son from all eternity, in pouring your life out.

And Jesus, we thank you for imaging the Father, for pouring your life back out.

And that life for us is the Holy Spirit.

We thank you, O Lord, for calling us now to pour our life out, and for giving us the Holy Spirit to empower us to do that.

Help us, O Lord, between now and the day that we die, to accept the contradictions of each day, To embrace the sufferings, and when you call us to, to let go and to let you control our lives.

And hear us now as we pray the family prayer that our oldest brother taught us, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.