Journey
Present at Every Place of Sorrow
A Peace and Justice Perspective
Every morning as I begin my prayer, I strike a match, light a candle, and pray aloud these words from Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” The Message translation of Isaiah 42:3 expands the sense of God’s servant as so tender, so gentle, that even the most fragile reed is safe; even a sputtering flame is strengthened: “He won’t brush aside the bruised and the hurt and he won’t disregard the small and insignificant, but he’ll steadily and firmly set things right.”1 With these words prayed back to the Holy One, I hold God to the promise of protecting the vulnerable, especially those who are close to losing hope or giving up in despair. Besides the many in our world for whom this verse is a description of their ongoing suffering, it’s possible the same words might occasionally apply to and include us among the list of the bruised and the wounded.
You already know that this year we celebrated the 180th anniversary of our IHM founding, and you may be wondering along with us: What does it mean now and going forward to make larger, greater, or more intense the extraordinary gift we IHMs have been given by the Holy Spirit? How are we meant to bear witness to divine love and presence in our beautiful yet wounded world in this time and place? As peacemakers giving our lives over in love and service to God’s dream of abundant life for all people—no exceptions—how are we called now to make our charism more noticeable, powerful, or significant in the arena of justice?
I’m reminded of Edith Stein’s counsel to those who desired to be in union with the Crucified Christ. She notes, “If you are serious about this, you will be present, by the power of His Cross… at every place of sorrow.”2 Fully present, at every place of sorrow. To do this, we look to the witness of Jesus, whose preferred company often included the very people the dominant forces of society were trying to banish out of sight and out of mind.
As we reflect, we may be struck by the prepositions used to describe where and how Jesus stood. He associated with those outside: those with limitations of sight, hearing, mobility, education, privilege. Those considered beneath the accepted social norms: people possessed and disruptive, persons called unsightly because of disease, or strangers from another area, speaking a foreign dialect. Jesus walked among those whose backs were broken by the burdens of poverty. He ate dinner with tax collectors and assorted sinners. He hung around and was at home with those who hungered for bread and for meaning. It seems the only time Jesus went away from people was after a full day of being present to crying human need and knowing his own deep longing to be grounded and restored in prayer and stillness. All of these prepositions, when applied to our own unfolding realities, must be our preferred prepositions as well.
Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we have decided to amplify and to stick with love because hatred is too heavy a thing to bear.3 We struggle to respond to acts of cruelty and violence, to language that is meanspirited or that demeans or ostracizes, and not to respond in kind as we speak out against injustice. We hold fast to our refusal to contribute to the social sin that we hate and instead to model living contemplatively as a countercultural presence that radiates and reflects the face of Love.
Oh, yes, and one more preposition. Most of all, in our work for a more just and inclusive world and in our efforts to “steadily and firmly set things right” (Isaiah 42:3), we need to amplify fresh and creative ways to be: present at every place of sorrow, in person or through the reach of prayer and intentionality. I hope and pray that this may be said of us when we celebrate the next 180 years and far, far beyond. May it be so!
1 Eugene H. Peterson, THE MESSAGE, The Bible in Contemporary Language. NavPress, in alliance with Tyndale House Publishers, Colorado Springs, CO, 2005.
2 St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, quoted in “Blessed Among Us,” a daily feature by Robert Ellsberg in Give Us This Day, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, August 9, 2025, p. 97.
3 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where do we go from here?” his speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Convention (SCLC) in Atlanta, GA, August 16, 1967. This speech was pivotal in exploring the future of the Civil Rights Movement after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
