Day: September 20, 2026

“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

Jesus meets us as mourners several times in the Scriptures. In every encounter something happens that speaks to human suffering and to human dignity. As today’s Gospel story illustrates, there is something uniquely human in the very act of burying the dead. It means that we are more though not less than our bodies and our experiences; a counter to the various reductionisms of ourselves whether it be to genes or hormones, to culture or history, to cosmic or climate forces real or imagined, to class or economics, to social constructs or political agendas; in short, the problems of the ‘natural sciences’ as transposed and magnified in the ‘human sciences’.

These are all things that happen to us, to be sure, but are we reduced to such things? Or does the pathos, the pathétic, of life in its self-affectivity mean that we are more than these reductive externalities? Suffering has its fullest and deepest expression in death and mourning; in short, in the forms of our self-awareness as living beings. Thus these encounters highlight the gathering of all human suffering into the compassion of Christ, and thus to the redemption and restoration of the dignity of our humanity through suffering.

Jesus encounters a funeral procession on their way to a burial. A young man has died and is being carried out of the city of Nain. He is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,” as Luke poignantly tells us. We feel her loss, as we commonly say, in an effort to comfort both the grieving and ourselves. But what does that really mean?

I have pondered that question in the realization that there is something profoundly and uniquely human about the burying of the dead precisely at the time in our culture when there is a very real danger of losing this sensibility, and thus losing what it means to be human. Reflecting on this requires looking into what Shakespeare calls “the dark backward and abyss of time” (Tempest). historically and in literature itself, one of the greatest witnesses to human culture and so to human suffering and dignity.

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