Recently, in reading, I came across the phrase “the solidarity of the shaken.” It was used by a 20th-century philosopher to describe our communal experience in times when a solid firmament seems to be threatened or lost. For me, it conjured up a sense of what Jesus was alluding to in the Beatitudes, when he referred to the poor in spirit, the sorrowing, the lowly, those who hunger and thirst for holiness, the persecuted, the insulted, the slandered.

Bishop Joel M. Konzen, SM

A successful life, in our time, might be thought to be one that is lived far away from the pains and the problems of the sort that Jesus heard in the pleas of those who came to him. His words and actions, though, were trained squarely on sinners and on those whom the greater society had failed to serve and certainly would fail to redeem. When he quoted the prophet Hosea (Mt 9:13) in saying, “Go and learn the meaning of ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’” he might have been speaking to us in the present moment. He was clearly throwing his time and ministry in with the forgotten, the lost sheep, reminding us that strength is not the witness he most prized but rather a heart for those who seek to come up, to be elevated in their spirit and in their freedom to live fully in God’s great liberty and dignity.

Exercising solidarity with the shaken is to understand how they have been persecuted or let down or taken advantage of, to where they might have become disillusioned, cast aside because they have neither power nor riches to represent them. Our Church has always sought to minister hope and mercy to those in need, be that spiritual or temporal need. Thus, an appropriate examination of conscience, whether we are engaged in religious ministry or the lay apostolate, might be, “How have I strived to bring hope today to those who need to see and feel it?”

When we bear the sufferings of another, in our prayer, in our charity, in our time spent bearing hope to them, we enter into their reality and we are in solidarity with the downtrodden, the refugee, and the sinner, but also with God. To imagine that we do not share somehow in that person’s pain, that we have safely distanced ourselves from it, is to engage in a fantasy that we can be unburdened, unscathed by the sufferings of others. As the poet John Donne wrote, “Every man’s death [read also ‘suffering’] diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.”

The word “empathy” might have lost some of its force through overuse. But the nature of our person and our society—certainly our Church—does depend on our ability to see ourselves as part of the struggles of those who seek greater experience of freedom from persecution, from want, and from harm. We cannot champion our own liberty without also wanting it for those who are deprived of it and legitimately seek to know its reassurance.

The ways in which people have become shaken are many. We seek to restore their hope and trust, but, if we cannot do that for any reason, we want, in any case, to pray with them, to accompany them in their distress, and to offer whatever aid is in our wherewithal to provide. In the archdiocese, we owe a debt of gratitude to Catholic Charities Atlanta, to the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and to the Pregnancy Aid Clinic for doing so much of this work on behalf of us who recognize the solidarity of the shaken and admit we belong to that fellowship of awareness and action.