August 25, 2002

August 25, 2002

Some things can be fixed.  Some things cannot.

We have often heard “bearing one’s cross” used to mean laboring and suffering in pursuit of – even because of -- one’s mission.  That phrase is surely a euphemism, compared to what followed Jesus’s bearing of his cross: the agony of the crucifixion.  On the other hand, while modesty is most proper in comparing our experience to that of Jesus Christ -- while His unimaginably ghastly suffering on the cross is beyond us – we see clearly and painfully that some human losses cannot be fixed.  The loss of one’s limbs*, the immolation of thousands last September 11, the suffocation of hundreds in containers-become-ovens in the Afghan desert, the starvation of a child anywhere.

Physical losses cannot always be fixed.  But we can always do our best to end the losses, to eliminate their causes, and to comfort those who are suffering.  For the human spirit can always be fixed.



* New London Friends Meeting co-clerk Jean Mitchell had had her second leg amputated August 19, 2002.