God Himself, through Suffering, Transforms the Darkness

As part of my Lenten reading, I have been devouring Pope Benedict’s book Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection. This passage on the atonement appears on page 232:

Again and again people say: It must be a cruel God who demands infinite atonement. Is this not a notion unworthy of God? …[I]t becomes evident that the real forgiveness accomplished on the Cross functions in exactly the opposite direction. The reality of evil and injustice that disfigures the world and at the same time distorts the image of God – this reality exists, through our sin. It cannot simply be ignored; it must be addressed.

But here is not a case of a cruel God demanding the infinite. It is exactly the opposite: God himself becomes the locus of reconciliation, and in the person of his Son takes the suffering upon himself. God himself grants his infinite purity to the world. God himself “drinks the cup” of every horror to the dregs and thereby restores justice through the greatness of his love, which, through suffering, transforms the darkness.

This particular passage just sort of clicked for me. I have myself been in a terrible place of darkness these past days, triggered by the death of a beloved pet. No doubt I will see this in time as a necessary part of a natural grieving process, but right now I feel his loss constantly, and I see his name everywhere.

Abiu’s death hit me much harder than I’d expected, and perhaps much harder than it ought to have.

Abiu Miu died just before noon on Sunday, aged 15. He went peacefully, and I held him as he passed.

Abiu was the smartest and coolest cat I’ve known. He was my buddy.

When we brought Abiu and Kemiu home, they were frightened kittens, newly weaned and terrified of their strange surroundings. As Kemiu shivered into a little ball, Abiu stood over him, shielding him with his body against the unknown.

He was like that.

There are several eyewitnesses to his ability to teleport, sometimes distances of over a mile just as fast as you could drive it.

He and his brother once herded a deer through my backyard. They were a fearsome squirrel-hunting team.

Abiu was proud, he was smart, and he was certainly contemptuous and dismissive of anybody he considered a fool.

Abiu in his later days had retired, rather like an old soldier back from the Raj who had settled into his Oxfordshire estate.

He never really recovered from the injury to his ear, and these last few weeks saw his inexorable decline.

I loved that cat, and I miss him terribly. I am sure this darkness that hangs over me will lift. Indeed, today is better than yesterday. God himself condescended to feel this suffering too: nothing near so drastic as his Passion, yet somehow subsumed into it. Saint Paul said that his own sufferings helped to perfect the sufferings of Christ; I don’t think I ever emotionally understood how that was possible until this week. I have often blithely “offered up” my little sufferings to God, but until now I don’t think I really fathomed that he took those sufferings upon himself upon the Cross.

Do cats also go to heaven, to live forever in the Divine Light? Aquinas thought not, but as for me, I will trust to the Mercy of God.

Godspeed, Abiu.