The woman had come to the end.  She had barely escaped from her country with her life, and was reeling from the profound rejection of her people.  Miraculously, she and her husband had made their way to Canada, but he compounded the rejection through constant infidelities.  With his PTSD, he couldn’t work, and there was almost no work during the Depression anyway, so a priest friend gave the woman bus fare to New York City to find a way to support her husband and child.  The poverty was biting:  for shelter, she rented a room with five other women who had shift work in a laundry.  Ravaging hunger was constant, so she sought waitressing work instead, hoping for food, but the sexual harassment there was unendurable.  That’s when she reached the end and found herself on the Brooklyn Bridge, peering into the water and poised to jump.  

The woman was Catherine Doherty, who eventually became a pioneer in the Lay Movement in the Church, and who founded the Madonna House Apostolate.  She had fled the Bolshevik revolution after many of her family and upper class had been killed.  But life as a refugee was painful.   

“There is no greater loneliness than being in a crowd of people you don’t know” she wrote. “I was a foreigner, a nobody. This poverty of being a non-person was a kind of poverty that I had never expected to face – it is very, very hard to take.”   

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Having once been condemned to death by starvation in the Russian revolution, her present hunger was searing: “That ghost of starvation lived somewhere in me.  I don’t know exactly where it lived, but whenever I was hungry, it rose to the surface.  It rose up and seemed to laugh.”  

With black despair swirling around her, Catherine looked into the inky waters of her hell hole, and she saw the Face of her Lord.   No words were exchanged, no miracles were promised.  But He was there with her when she came to the end, and that was enough.  That was the key to hope: God is Light; in Him there is no darkness at all.   

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Catherine used this insight as a way to regain hope:  “When you feel hopeless, lift your face up (or in her case, down!) and a strange thing will happen to you: You might meet the eyes of God.  If you meet the eyes of God, in faith, you will know what hope is like, and that nothing on earth will ever allow this hope to die. “

This vision of the Face of Christ in the murky waters of despair can be a key for all refugees, those who are persecuted, imprisoned or tortured, all of us in the darkness of our wounds, fears, temptations.  If we try and face the darkness alone, we might drown.  If we somehow unite our sufferings to the Passion that Christ freely embraced for us, we allow Him to draw us into Resurrection life and hope.  We become one.   As the anonymous author in the Holy Saturday Office of Readings writes so beautifully, “You are in Me and I am in you.  Together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.”

My own “Brooklyn Bridge” moment came at the nadir of my mid-life crisis.  After many years of joy in my calling, I suddenly hit a wall and could no longer carry on.  Vocational doubts arose.  Scripture was as ashes in the mouth. God seemed long gone, so prayer was impossible. Finally on a 30-day retreat, I reached the end of my faith.  I turned away.  Suddenly I “heard” Jesus say, “Will you also leave?”  And I wept.  He was with me.  He wanted me with him.  He knew how hard life and faith were for me, and how seemingly impossible the path he had chosen for me.  That’s all I needed.  I could endure anything. 

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Christ came into the world to be with us, to go through everything we do except sin.  In his humanity on the Cross he cried out, “Father, why have you abandoned me?”, yet what seemed to be utter disaster and failure became the gateway to life. 

There is no place He cannot penetrate, no corner of our heart that is too dark, too broken, too shameful. If we can muster the faith to stand in our place of need or seeming defeat, and call for help, we may catch a glimpse of his face or hear a whisper of forgiving love.  That is enough.