Wonderful Complication

God didn't stay distant. Neither should we.

This past weekend, my Jesuit community sat together with Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium. We prayed. We shared honestly. We were preparing for Holy Week, and we were already carrying something heavy.

Sheridan Gorman, one of my students at Loyola University Chicago, was recently shot and killed while walking with friends. This happened near the beach where I film many of these videos. It is a beautiful place. It is also now a place of grief.

Francis warns against the temptation to “keep the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length” and seek shelter “from the maelstrom of human misfortune.”

This week, we remember how God did not keep our wounds at arm’s length. God entered all the way in — into darkness, into death, into grief-stricken communities stumbling through spring.

Francis wrote that when we stop seeking shelter and instead “enter into the reality of other people’s lives,” then our lives become “wonderfully complicated.” God is found there. It’s wonderful. But it’s also complicated.

Holy Week asks us not to look away. We come this week because we need a God who is no stranger to pain. And that God is here — in the complication, in the mess, in the love that does not keep its distance.