The Princess and the Pea

I never liked peas. They taste horrible, and they are ugly.

I am quite aware that at this very moment, while I am writing this, there are people and animals in the world who are suffering. Suffering is something that no creature on earth can escape. It happens to all of us at various times in our lives.

Sometimes when I complain, another person will tell me that I should feel lucky because there is someone else in the world who is worse off than I am and I should count my blessings. But when I start thinking of that, then I feel even worse than before!

Sometimes it can be overwhelming for me to think about the amount of suffering in the world. Sometimes I wonder how I can even lay my head on the pillow in peace at night when I know at that very moment, someone is dying, someone is terrified of something, someone is being raped, a child is being abused or aborted, someone is being killed in a war, an animal is being hurt, or someone is committing suicide. These are the strange thoughts I have sometimes. These thoughts call me to pray.

Do you know the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea"? Sometimes I feel like the princess in the story who was so super sensitive to a little tiny pea at the bottom of a pile of mattresses that she just couldn't sleep.

What are we to do with the problem of suffering? This is a good question to think about during the Lenten season. When I was in school we talked about the difference between redemptive suffering and senseless suffering. Redemptive suffering was described to me as that which in some way had the capacity to bring us closer to Christ, and made us a bit more holy. In that way, the suffering was not meaningless. When in pain we can unite our suffering with the passion of Christ and thereby make it redemptive. My close friend Diane, did that a few years ago, when she was dying of cancer. It gave her peace to know that her suffering was not in vain.

We have some control over senseless suffering because we can stop some of it - we can break up a fight, we can be a peace maker, we can call 911 for someone, we can stand up for someone else, we can rescue an animal, we can pray in front of an abortion mill. Sometimes people bring suffering upon themselves by the choices they make. Suffering can be senseless especially when nothing is done to stop it.

Perhaps one purpose of suffering, at least it seems to me at this point in my life, is that it should jolt us to our feet and make us act, and in acting, especially when we do it in the name of the Lord, makes us a bit more holy and brings God's peace into another's life.

Look, the devil is out to cause as much grief on this planet as he can get away with. As my pastor once said, "evil will get in where it can", so we have to be vigilant and get as many peas out from under the mattresses as we can.

I guess in short, I want to say that we should not let ourselves become too complacent because every day we can make a difference. We can pray. We can stand up for others. We can stop suffering to some extent.

Jesus said, what we do to others, to the least, we do to Him. Many of us would think, that if we lived back at the time when Jesus walked the earth, and He was about to be crucified, that we would scream and yell and try to stop it from happening !

We say that we wouldn't run away like his disciples did on holy Thursday night in the garden, and we wouldn't deny that we knew him like Peter did. But, don't we still do that today sometimes? We see injustice and evil, and we run the other way. We deny that it exists. It may be a pea the size of Manhattan, but we pretend not to see it. "What we do to the least" we do to Jesus......yet we walk by....

We have to be sensitive to the peas under our mattresses. By being sensitve and attentive to the suffering around us we show the world that we are truly princesses (and princes) of the King of Kings.

Maybe I'm off base here. I don't know, but that is what I'm thinking about today.