Communities are shoring up seawalls with old tyres.

I was raised on the beautiful island of Tonga.

When I was a child, my parents and grandparents would come out every morning to look at the horizon. They would look at the clouds and see the patterns to understand what laid before us that day.

Nowadays, things are different.

Children playing and swimming at the beaches see the patterns in the clouds and run back to alert us to a disaster.

This is now becoming a regular occurrence.

After storms, I visit my people and I am always lifted by their resilience and their spirit of helping each other.

But when I delve deeper, they share their real emotions, which are full of pain, heartache and fear.

You see, in the Pacific our people are strong. We are resilient, but even we have our limits. And we have reached our limit.

Nowadays, when I wake up in the morning and look out to sea, I see two clouds. Two dark and looming clouds. One is climate change. This cloud brings rising sea levels, more frequent cyclones and king tides like we have never seen before.

It is joined by another cloud. This one is debt. Increasingly frequent and severe weather means that Pacific Island nations are struggling to rebuild. We feel like we are going backwards.

Vital infrastructure such as homes, bridges, farms and fisheries, take years to rebuild while crops and livestock take a similar period to restore. It is extremely expensive, and it is money we simply don't have.

Last year at the United Nations climate talks, nations agreed on a Loss and Damage fund; a fund created to compensate developing countries impacted by climate change, like my home of Tonga in the Pacific Island nations.

We don't contribute much to climate change. In fact, we contribute less than 0.5 per cent of all global emissions. But we certainly pay for it in our futures, and the futures of our children. We need compensation for this injustice.

The Loss and Damage fund is an important step towards climate justice, but we can't forget that the 2009 pledge to spend $100 billion a year in climate aid has still not been met. In fact, the pledge to spend $100 billion a year is far from achieved.

Right now, the Pacific region needs nearly US $1 billion per year in financing to adapt our infrastructure to climate change. We receive much less than this. Continue reading

• Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi is Bishop of Tonga

It was a great celebration. The angels were in fine voice, and Jesus consented to be a baby again. He lay in Mary's arms while Joseph sat to one side, smiling protectively.

One by one, the Saints advanced, bringing gifts to the young King of Kings.

St Francis came barefooted, carrying a little white dove which he placed at Mary's feet. The angels sighed with pleasure.

Then came St Therese of Lisieux with a bunch of roses. Oo-ooh! went the angels again.

Big Teresa of Avila walked across, carrying all her original manuscripts. The angels were very impressed. Aa-aah! they cried as St Teresa offered her writings.

And so it went on.

Finally, in came St Ignatius of Loyola. As he limped towards the Holy Family, the angels noticed his hands were empty. No gift!. This sent ripples of shock through the angels. They nudged each other. Typical Jesuit! they muttered.

Worse was to come. Ignatius ignored Mary and Jesus. He walked straight past them and stopped on the other side of Joseph. Then he leaned over and said in Joseph's ear, "Have you thought about his education?"

It's a good story, but the reversal lies in the fact it was Jesus who taught Ignatius of Loyola.

A nobleman and soldier, Ignatius was crippled by a cannon ball. With broken bones and ambitions, all he could do was lie in bed, read, think and dream. It was the life of Jesus in the gospels that spiritually mended and reshaped his life.

I can connect with this. I'm made aware of the ways God has sent cannon balls to disable my plans for myself. Some of you will know exactly what I mean.

It can be a literal blow - accident, illness, sudden loss or failure. Whatever, we are made helpless. Some part of ourselves has gone and even prayer seems empty. The phrase "feeling gutted" becomes reality.

Then the resurrection happens. Like Lazarus we stagger out of the tomb, dropping our bandages.

There is new life in us, something bigger than what has been taken away, and given time we may well think that the ‘cannon ball' was the best thing to happen to us.

As for Ignatius? Well, 30 years ago, Br Marty Williams SM showed me around Rome, and the most cherished memory was seeing the room and bed where St Ignatius died.

Both were bare, starkly beautiful in their poverty. I gazed at the little iron bed, knowing that the man who had lain on it, was very different from the man bed-ridden with a shattered leg.

The wounded soldier had been small; the man who had died in Rome was spiritually immense.

I still think about that. I imagine the younger Ignatius unable to walk, in pain and helpless, and Jesus whispering in his ear, "Have you thought about your education?"

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

My brokenness will relate to the brokenness out there.

Some will call that projection. Others will call it empathy.

My own journeys through crucifixions and resurrections will prompt me to help others find the freedom of the empty tomb.

That's how it works.

On the other side of brokenness, we learn that the fruits of pain are wisdom and compassion.

I believe this growth process is compulsory for all of us.

I could ask you now, to think back 10 or 20 years and remember a time when you felt so broken you thought your life would never come together again.

You were filled with loss, grief, a sense of non-being.

Remember?

When you had grown past the resentment that floods us at such times, what happened?

You may well think now, that your brokenness was a gift from God.

You came out of it a much larger soul with a wisdom you could not have otherwise gained.

But this belief is often at odds with a pain-avoidance society.

The popular view is to avoid brokenness at all costs.

We project it out there by blaming someone else. We fill life with analgesics to hide the symptoms. Instead of going through the process, we are told we should dodge it.

The truth is, we can't avoid brokenness, but we can become stuck in it.

We can fail to grow.

To use Easter imagery, the stone does not roll away from the tomb.

So how do the brokenhearted, make that journey with Jesus from crucifixion to resurrection?

If we accept the view that all of life is a growth struggle, then we realize that most of us need a companion in our brokenness.

We don't want to be disempowered by a pain-avoidance system.

In the parables of nature that are all around us, we know what happens if we peel the shell away from the hatching chick. If we help the butterfly out of its chrysalis, it too will die.

What do I require of a companion to my brokenness?

First of all, to be there. To be present. To have time for me.

Some resurrections are a while in coming.

The companion needs to understand this is something I must journey through.

It's what I was born for.

Remember when Peter tried to protect Jesus and Jesus replied, "Get behind me, Satan?"

Jesus knew that this particular temptation to pain avoidance was evil.

We too, need to trust the crucifixion/resurrection process.

I need a companion who will not "should" all over me. He or she has been through the same kind of brokenness and understands the three stages of the journey - crucifixion, tomb, resurrection.

My companion will gently remind me that the only way through loss, grief, pain, is to travel through it without bitterness or resentment.

Brokenness, paradoxically, is the way to Wholeness.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.
• Image: Marlborough book festival

According to Robin Ryan, an associate professor of systematic theology at Catholic Theological Union and a Passionist priest, the presence of suffering is the one thing that most challenges our faith. "Suffering isn't an elective course," he says. "It's not optional. Even if a person lives in a mansion and has a great job, suffering touches everybody and affects everybody's faith."

Because suffering is so common and yet so difficult to talk about, Ryan says that it's easy to rely on platitudes like "It's all part of God's plan" or "God never gives you a bigger cross than you can endure." The problem with these, Ryan says, is "they sound like God is busy doling out crosses in people's lives. That can turn people off."

For Ryan, the solution is for Catholics to articulate their personal beliefs about suffering through ongoing conversation with others. As such, his book, God and the Mystery of Human Suffering: A Theological Conversation Across the Ages, offers no definitive answer to the questions of suffering, but instead shares the wisdom of thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Elizabeth Johnson. The goal is for readers to refine and enrich their own personal views on suffering and God's presence in the midst of pain.

You titled your book God and the Mystery of Human Suffering. What's so mysterious about suffering?
There are two mysteries there—the mystery of God and the mystery of human suffering. You can't completely wrap your mind around either one. Even the best rational explanations of why suffering exists and how it fits into the whole order of things fall short. Continue reading

Sources

• U.S. Catholic
• Image: Pastor's Ponderings

In an interview with Buenos Aires favela publication La Carcova News, the Pope said he had asked the Lord to take care of him.

"But if your will is that I die or that they do something to me, I ask you just one favour: that it doesn't hurt because I am a big wimp when it comes to physical pain," the Pope said.

If fanatics want to kill him, it is "God's will", he said. "Life is in God's hands."

Groups that could pose threats to the Pope reportedly include Islamist militants and the Italian mafia.

The interview with La Carcova News came about after the shantytown's parish priest collated inquiries from hundreds of children and young adults and boiled them down to about a dozen questions.

When the priest visited the Pope at his Vatican residence last month, he handed the written questions to Francis, who gave answers on the spot.

One of the questions saw the Pope asked about young people's attraction to "virtual relationships" and how to help them escape "their world of fantasy" and to experience "real relationships".

The Pope said "sometimes virtual relationships are not imaginary, but are concrete" and real.

However, he said, the best thing is for people to have real, physical interaction and contact with each other.

He said the big risk he sees is with people's ability to gather such a huge amount of information that nothing is done with it and it has no impact on changing lives.

He said this process turns young people into a sort of "youth museum".

Having a rich fruitful life is not found in "the accumulation of information or just through virtual communication, but in changing the reality of existence. In the end, it means loving".

Sources

• The Tablet
• Catholic News Service
• Image: CBC