True confession: I’ve always been a little annoyed by Lent. After another endless gray and frigid winter in the upper Midwest (hello, Cleveland!), the last thing I want to do is accept Lent’s invitation of ashes and fasting. When I’m craving abundance and feasting, Lent seems to say, Winter’s been tough, so how about another 40 days in the desert?!

Over the years, I’ve found my ways to enter the meaning of the season. To reframe “fasting” as simplifying, as finding ways to lean more on God. In that spirit, a year ago, winter-weary and sun-hungry, weighed down by family illness at home and an inexorable genocide abroad, I decided to attend the outdoor Stations of the Cross at our local parish on Good Friday. For the first time, I was drawn to the Stations not as a meditation on Jesus’ suffering but as a place to lay my own burden down.

So I was completely surprised to arrive in front of St. Dominic Church to find a crowd of people of all ages, wearing spring pastels, hugging and chatting, with kids swooping around among their parents and grandparents. Despite the solemn occasion, joyfulness was in the air, a din of happy helloing that shook me out of my stupor.

Then someone brought out a huge, life-size wooden cross, and a mass of kids surrounded it, jockeying to hoist it to the first station. All the kids wanted to carry that cross—and a group of four did, with the littlest one tripping along, trying to take on just a portion of that weight on his small shoulder.

I marveled at the sight. Since I was young, I’ve wanted to avoid suffering, even at the cost of greater suffering. Every physical pain would cause me to spiral into anxious worry that it would last forever. Age and experience have taught me patience, but even now pain still invites my mental catastrophizing. 

And here these young ones were holding the very symbol of Jesus’s terrible torture and death, a suffering that is almost impossible to imagine. In April 2020, I saw a documentary clip of Lilianna Lungina, a legendary Russian translator, who said that when we are born, our souls are asleep. But when we suffer, our souls awaken. Knowing that our 17-year-old daughter Adele was struggling with the Covid-19 shutdown, I shared the video with her, hoping it might help her navigate this troubled water. I hoped she might see this moment the way Keats had seen his own life—that the world was not a “vale of tears” but a “Vale of Soul-Making.” But Adele had just seen her senior year of high school (her track season, prom, a long-planned camping trip and even graduation) suddenly detonated by this virus. She was unimpressed: “This seems to be one of those, ‘suffering is good for you’ ideas.”

Painsplaining is the worst. But I didn’t mean it that way. Suffering can blind, numb and even tear us apart. Yet something about this phrase about our soul awakening seemed right to me. When we suffer, we feel our supreme incompleteness, our brokenness, our need. Something in us opens its eyes. And we hope and pray that in that, something else can be born as the pain is borne. That, in the words of Russian poet Ivan Zhdanov, “what outside is a cross, inside is a window.”

At the sixth station, where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus with her veil, a bevy of girls from the parish took their turn with the cross, and got their photos taken by their moms, proud to carry those beams. I thought of Veronica’s courage to help this suffering stranger, and that she exposed her head (something that she would have been judged for by the crowd) to provide Jesus a little relief.

All those kids and the cross. I thought again of William Blake’s poignant lines, “And we are put on earth a little space,/ That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” The beams of love aren’t merely the gracious beams of sunlight on an April spring day in Cleveland, but also the terrible weight of the cross that we come to know in our own lives. I suddenly wondered what sorrows my fellow parishioners were carrying, each of them carrying it in the silence of our walking together. 

One of the reasons that I came to the Stations was that our bright-eyed energetic Adele, a longtime cross-country runner, had been suffering with a series of conditions from long Covid and found herself derailed by chronic fatigue and brain fog. Unable to run, or even walk more than a few thousand steps a day, she found her world had narrowed in ways none of us could have imagined.

At the seventh station, Jesus falls for a second time. The Stations of the Cross moves between moments where Jesus faces his pain alone and moments where someone comes to provide him succor or balm. Isn’t that the way suffering can be—between moments of agonizing isolating loneliness and moments where someone arrives to sit with us, drawing some of the pain away?

As we age, we see that suffering comes whether we like it or not, whether we deserve it or not. And further: that joy and grief often thread together like the warp and weft in the same weave of life. But it seemed so radically unfair that Adele had to bear this suffering at her age, or that people in Gaza were waking without houses or limbs or parents, while I, a 50-something dad, could still blithely go about my day, with health and limbs and home intact.

At the 12th station, I listened to a teenager read the reflection, and the words from the Gospels of Matthew and Mark came back to me, where, in his last moments, Jesus laments to God: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” It filled me with a strange comfort to know that Jesus felt not only human suffering, but also that terrible fear that God had abandoned him.

In my suffering, God’s silence widens. I wonder if God is nearby, or if I’ve been abandoned. Or even that God does not exist. Sometimes the suffering is a noise that consumes my hearing, gobbling up my attention. Sometimes, suffering makes me aware of the silence, just outside the noise. What is there, in that silence? Can I sit with it? What might open in me, if I do? 

At the final outdoor station, which commemorates when Jesus was laid into the tomb, we were called to quiet, bowing our heads. In the silence, I could hear the sounds of cardinals and blue jays and sparrows, calling to each other from the branches of mostly bare trees, calling me back to the strange beauty of life. An existence that sometimes makes no sense, in a world bigger than all our understanding. A life whose warp and weft threads both seemingly unbearable grief and, in moments like this, something like grace. 

Philip Metres is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Dispatches from the Land of Erasure. He is a professor of English at John Carroll University.