by Mark and LaRee Pickup
What is it? A 3-part interactive seminar for suffering people and their loved-ones/caregivers.
When? 2:00-4:30pm, April 24th 2010.
Where? St. Vital Catholic Parish, 4905-50 Street (rue), Beaumont, Alberta. (The big church in the center of town at the top of the hill).
Why?: To develop a Christian understanding of what God can teach suffering souls (and those who care about /for them) about finding purpose, meaning and ultimately divine love in suffering.
Who would benefit? People who are open to Christian persectives and have terminal/chronic illnesses, disabilities, as well as their families or caregivers, pastors, health care professionals.
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Some of my most profound and dearest moments with Christ have come late at night when I went into the darkened church and communed with Him through prayer before the Bless
ed Sacrament, praying the rosary and laying my broken heart before Jesus -- uniting my suffering with His suffering. I rarely turned on the lights in the sanctuary, preferring instead to to move quietly in the shadows through the Stations of the Cross, letting the Holy Spirit permeate my broken body, mind and spirit. The only sound was my electric wheelchair and the occasional creaking of the old walls and ancient timbers beneath the 100 year old church.*It was out of those blessed occasions that a spark of an idea started to develop -- something for other suffering people, as well as those who love and serve them.
I went back to Pope John Paul II's 1984 Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris which spoke about redemptive suffering and (helped me make sense of my pain). Many cynics and and critics of Christianity scoffed at the Pope's assertion there is a redeeming quality to suffering. When the Pope's Apostolic Letter first appeared, some people said that it was easy for John Paul II to write about meaning in suffering when he was not suffering. [To such people, the legitimate response to suffering is suicide. And why not! If there is no God then there is no purpose to human suffering.]** To people of faith however -- people who have actually met the living Christ -- we believe there must be meaning and purpose to suffering.
It's now evident, and plain historical record, that many years after writing Salvifici Doloris Pope John Paul II would live the reality of his words. Parkinson's disease ravaged his body, but His Holiness endured to the end, giving poignant witness to the Gospel of Suffering and calling people of the world to encounter the risen and living Christ Jesus, even in the midst of their pain and sorrow..
I developed aggressive multiple sclerosis (MS) the same year that Pope John Paul II wrote Salvifici Doloris. Throughout more than 25 years with this terrible disease I have come to understand the truth of that great document. The cynics were wrong: John Paul II was right.
Suicide is not the proper answer to pain.
Back in 1996, I wrote to Pope John Paul II about my experience with suffering and my fears of North America accepting assisted suicide. The Pope's assessor responded to me saying, in part, that the Pope would remember me in his prayers. Initially I didn't give it much thought thinking it w
as merely a nice but perfunctory letter of acknowledgement. Apparently not. Within five months I found myself in Washington, D.C., speaking to an international conference sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. (And I wasn't even Catholic at that time!) For the next decade I was called to speak across America and Canada to legislators, hospital staffs, universities, community groups, denominational leaders and churches and about the perils of accepting assisted suicide and euthanasia.Then in October 2006, exactly 10 years after Pope John Paul II's powerful prayers for me, and 19 months after his death, and Terri Schiavo's judicial murder in Florida, my speaking odyssey stopped with an address to fund raising banquet for Mother Teresa House for the terminally ill in Lansing, Michigan. The calls simply stopped coming and I entered a period of calm reflection and meditation.
New sorrows came with new physical degenerations and losses but they were overshadowed by divine Joy. It seemed the foundation for a new calling was being laid for something else. I felt led to go back to Salvifici Dororis and bear personal witness to its truth. In 2009 at the request of Edmonton's Archbishop Richard Smith, my wife LaRee and I develop an interactive seminar we called SEARCHING FOR THE MEANING OF SUFFERING: A Christian Perspective, for a day retreat for the staff of the Archdioces' Pastoral Centre Staff. A comment by the Director
The seminar will be presented in my community on April 24th 2010, 2:00 - 4:30 pm, at St. Vital Parish in Beaumont Alberta. It's being sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. Everyone is welcome to attend.
For groups outside the Edmonton, Alberta area that would the seminar, contact Mark Pickup by email at mpickup@shaw.ca , or by telephone: (780) 929-9230.
MP
* A few years ago, the Parish Council of St. Vital Catholic Parish decided to develop dirt space under the church into a useable basement . The ancient wood beams that held up the church a hundred years were replaced with steel beams. A parishioner took one of those beams and started making crucifixes: One sits above my bed at home.
** The latest in the long line of atheists to sneer at any possible value to be found in suffering is Susan Jacoby. In a superficial editorial for the 25 February 2010 edition of the Washington Post, entitled, "Atheism and the myth of redemptive suffering" she drips with contempt against Christianity. She did not plumb any depths of study about the concept. It was merely a vicious platform for her rail against God and the human search for meaning in suffering. She would not or could not or incapable of comment about Pope John Paul II's Salvifici Doloris.
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LaRee and Mark Pickup will be delivering the keynote address to the 2010 U.S. National Right to Life Prayer Breakfast in Pittsburgh, PA., June 25th 2010. For tickets go to http://www.nrlc.org/convention/convo2010.pdf
