SAT, FEB 18, 2023
12:45 PM ET | FLOOR 2

‘You cannot love what shocks you’
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Testimonies to the mystery of suffering and its relief and redemption in light of the life and writings of Lorenzo Albacete, with Dan Bushman, computer scientist, Anthony Lechich, medical director of the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center, and Heather King, writer, moderated by Camil Martinez, logistics engineer

"Suffering is the consciousness of pain, the kind of knowing that generates the question “why.” This urge to ask why is in itself provocative. The Book of Job is one of our most dramatic examples of someone who needs to know why he is suffering and why all the explanations given to him are insufficient. If we ask why, it means that we have some idea of how it should be and something has occurred that doesn’t fit that worldview. We ask why, therefore, in the light of an inexplicable imperfection that cannot be accounted for. Thus suffering makes us go beyond our preconceived worldview towards something more, and that’s the first challenge—to try to find an answer in something more.

“The question is a demand, a plea, that the perceived fault or imperfection of the self and the world be accessible to reason and rectified or at least answered. Actually, without this experience of imperfection, the notion of reason does not exist. Without suffering, we would never ask ourselves why. All would be immediately self-explanatory or evident."

- From the book Cry of the Heart by Lorenzo Albacete coming in February 2023

Speakers will reflect upon the mystery of suffering and its relief and redemption in light of the life and writings of Lorenzo Albacete.