To the Band of Brothers: April 18, 2025

My grandparents were married for over 70 years. It was one of those matches made in heaven. They met at Mass in Havana, Cuba and my grandfather said that the moment he saw her, he knew he was going to marry her. I don’t know how true that is; my grandfather was always a bit of a romantic, but the fact is, he did. At the chapel of El Colegio de Belen, his alma mater, he married the love of his life.

They went through a lot together. Nine children, left Cuba with only the clothes on their backs, moved to Spain for nine years, made their way to Miami, and started all over again. It wasn’t easy as you can imagine. They didn’t speak English and knew only a handful of people. But, they had each other, they had their faith, and they had the education they had received… my grandfather from the Jesuits and my grandmother from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

I can tell you a lot of stories about their life and how impactful their marriage was for me, my siblings, and cousins, but there is one particular moment that stands out. My grandmother, already in her late 80s, was declining rapidly in health. She was hospitalized and my grandfather wouldn’t leave her side. My brothers and I went to visit and decided to get him out of the room and get a bite to eat. My little brother placed his arm around him and kindly said, “Don’t worry about abuela, she will get better.” My grandfather paused and looked at him and said, “I pray one day you experience the suffering I am experiencing right now.” Dumbfounded, my brother asked, “Why would you wish that?” To which my grandfather quickly replied, “Because if you experience the suffering I am experiencing right now, it only means you have loved someone as much as I love your grandmother.”

It was a drop-the-mike moment.

Love and suffering, it is a necessary duo. You really can’t have one without the other. Because love means sacrifice, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and thinking of the other more than you think of yourself, it means suffering will inevitably make its way into the equation. When you choose to love, you choose to suffer. I know it may not be the first thing you think about when you make the choice, but when it arrives, you go over your decision to make sure it's worth it. And, if you have ever experienced true love, then you know the choice is worth it.

As a matter of fact, there is no greater expression of love than in the moment of suffering. In the gospel Jesus says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down your life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). To love when times are good, when you are rich and healthy, is one thing, but to love when times are bad, when you are poor and sick, that just takes it to a whole other level. While those moments are not the greatest, they do present the greatest opportunity to love.

That’s what today is all about… Good Friday. It is the day we remember the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. While everything about Jesus was and continues to be an expression of love, it is his passion and death that most perfectly reflect it. His birth in Bethlehem, his quiet life growing up in Nazareth, his miracles in Capernaum, and his sermons in Jerusalem were all filled with love. But it was his death on Calvary that was the culminating moment of his love for us.

You can ask yourself, couldn’t God have chosen another way to save mankind? Couldn’t He have simply snapped his fingers? The answer is a resounding “yes.” God can do anything. But snapping a finger is easy. Suffering, and his willingness to do it for us, knowing the finger-snap option is there, is far and away the more powerful, more definitive expression of a love so unconditional and intense that no sin cannot be forgiven, no life that cannot be transformed.

There is much to be learned from this powerful duo of love and suffering. I encourage you on this day to reflect the words found in Hebrews, “For it was fitting that he, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the leader to their salvation perfect through suffering” (2:10). God’s love made perfect and expressed perfectly in the suffering of His Son.

Auspice Maria,