Medical Director
Anthony Lazzara, M.D.,
SFO
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You seek for God, beloved soul, and he is everywhere, everything speaks of him, everything offers him to you, he walks beside you, he surrounds you and is within you. He lives with you and yet you try to find him. You seek your own idea of God although you have him in his reality. You seek perfection and you meet it in all that happens to you. All you suffer, all you do, all your inclinations are mysteries under which God gives himself to you while you are vainly straining for high flown fancies. God will never come to dwell with you clothed in these imaginings.
Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ |
The call was urgent. There was a 6 year old child, Floriano by name, who was found in a remote village by missionary priests. Since the age of 4 he had suffered from a tumor
of the right eye which had grown to such a size that it had completely destroyed the eye. He had received only home remedies and was desperately in need of evaluation and treatment. He arrived the following day with a large ulcerating tumor of the right eye that had completely replaced the normal eye structures. His father was a sharecropper and the family survived on what could be grown on a small plot of land. The following day he was taken to the national cancer hospital and was diagnosed as having retinoblastoma, a malignant tumor of the retina, the light-perceiving posterior lining of the eye. Treatment was begun immediately with good response. The tumor was localized to the eye socket and the prognosis for complete recovery is good.
Floriano and the other children pictured on these pages speak to us of God. They speak to us of God who became a helpless child and took on our sufferings and pain. Suffering
seems irrational, especially when it involves a child. To what purpose does a child undergo pain? To what purpose poverty and ignorance which for Floriano resulted in the loss of an eye and near death? A question I, and we, struggle with every day. Only in seeing in the sufferer the image of God who himself suffered does suffering and pain take on any meaning. Our caring for the person afflicted has redemptive affects. It frees us from self-concern and self-centeredness and allows us to serve physically our God since the person administered to is made in His image and Likeness and Participates in His existence. The trinity of Sufferer, God and the person who succors mirrors the Trinity of the Three Divine Persons who exist in an eternal communication of love and elf-giving. Only in this way can suffering take on any semblance of rationality.
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Jesus is the image of one who has been deceive betrayed; he seems a failure. He is fearful, timid, disoriented. Jesus foresaken is darkness, melancholy, contrast. He is the image of all that is strange, undefinable, that has something monstrous about it. Because he is God crying out for help!... He is the lonely person, the derelict... He seems useless, an outcast, in shock... Consequently Chiara Lubich |
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Every family should have a room where Christ is welcome in the person of the hungry and thirsty stranger. St. John Chrysostom As always, our eternal gratitude to you for making it possible for us to serve these children. We love you and wish you God's peace. |
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Click here to see some photographs about these and other cases
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