Suffering alone doesn’t make you holy. A Christian reflection on suffering, community, and healing after abortion.
Telling someone struggling or grieving after abortion not to suffer alone isn’t the same as walking alongside them.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up a quiet, unspoken rule: if your faith is strong, you carry hard things by yourself. You pray about it. You offer it up. You “let go, let God.” You don’t make it someone else’s burden. Nobody handed you that rule directly — it’s just in the water. And there’s a kind of dignity we’ve attached to suffering in silence, like enduring it alone is what makes it count or makes it “real.”
It doesn’t have to be that way. And if you look closely at the story Christianity tells about suffering, isolation was never the point of it.
Even Jesus Didn’t Want to Suffer Alone — But He Could Ask for Help
Look at Gethsemane. Jesus is hours from the cross, and Scripture says His soul was “sorrowful, even to death.” He doesn’t send His friends away so He can suffer more stoically. He says it plainly: “Remain here, and watch with me.” When He comes back and finds them asleep, He doesn’t shrug it off — He asks, almost wounded, whether they couldn’t stay awake with Him even one hour.
Suffering can be redemptive. Scripture and the Church have always taught that uniting our pain to Christ’s carries real meaning, and Pope St. John Paul II built a whole letter on it, Salvifici Doloris, that keeps circling back to the same point: suffering, understood rightly, calls people into solidarity, not private isolation.
Which means the title of this piece is doing double duty. Suffering alone doesn’t make you holy — and suffering, alone, doesn’t either. Suffering joined to love can carry deep meaning. On the other hand, pain by itself is just pain. Love is what can transform the way we carry suffering.
But notice something about Gethsemane specifically. Christ could ask. He had the words, the relationship, the standing to say “stay with me” and expect an answer. Often people carrying grief after abortion may not feel able to ask. Asking can mean explaining something they may have spent years protecting and hiding.
The Man Beside the Road Never Asks
The Good Samaritan from Luke 10:29-37 is the story of a man who is beaten, robbed, and left half dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. A priest walks past him. A Levite walks past him too. Then a Samaritan — someone from a group this man’s people looked down on — stops, bandages his wounds, and pays an innkeeper to keep caring for him until he can return.
That’s where the Good Samaritan earns its place in our conversation here — not as another example of someone being kind, but because of what the wounded man never does.
He never explains what happened to him. He never names his emotions, proves his story is legitimate, or waits until he is composed enough to ask for help. He can’t. He’s half dead on the side of a road. The entire parable turns on the fact that he is simply seen, by someone who required nothing from him first.
Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest and influential spiritual writer, described hospitality as creating a free space where a stranger can enter and become a friend — a space that doesn’t try to change or corner someone or bring them to his side, but instead respects the other person and makes change possible. That’s what’s happening on that road. The Samaritan doesn’t build a relationship first and then decide the man is worth helping. Help is the beginning of the relationship.
There’s a contemporary version of the same idea in Allen Levi’s bestselling novel, Theo of Golden, in which a disarming older gentleman moves through a small town buying up pencil portraits of its residents, then returns each one in person. He asks for the story behind each portrait, but nothing requires anyone to answer — his whole manner is warm, deferential, almost meek, and it earns trust slowly instead of demanding it outright. When someone does open up, what he offers back isn’t advice or doctrine. It’s what he saw in their portrait that made him choose it in the first place. The drawing itself becomes a kind of witness that someone noticed them before they ever explained a thing.
One woman he meets has spent decades carrying a secret — a pregnancy she didn’t carry to term with the man who’s now her husband, after her own father pressured her into giving it up for the sake of her career. She never told anyone else. Theo never brings up faith, never asks her to justify herself. He just promises her words are safe with him, and that’s what finally lets her set the secret down after all those years. Her husband watched from across the fountain the whole time — too far to hear a word of it, close enough to see her cry, and to see something in her finally loosen. He didn’t need to hear what was said to know it mattered. He just kept watching over her, and that quiet presence became part of what made the moment safe enough to happen at all. Later in the book, healed enough to imagine herself as a mother after all, she names her own child after him. He’d come to his own faith the hard way. But with her, he didn’t lead with his own story. He just saw her first, and reflected back what he saw — her own goodness, mirrored to her until she could see it too.
That’s a real gap in a lot of well-meaning healing language, ours included. We tell people: reach out, tell someone, don’t suffer in silence. Good instructions, but they quietly assume the person still has the strength, the words, and the trust necessary to rescue themselves from isolation. After abortion, that assumption asks for something that may be enormous for some people. Naming the grief often means exposing the very thing they’ve spent years keeping hidden: one or more abortions, what happened, someone else’s part in it. It also bumps into a common fear: whether anyone will believe they have a right to grieve or understand their feelings.
So the real question was never just, “Will they eventually find the courage to speak?” It’s also, “Will anyone come close enough to notice what they can’t yet say?”
Loneliness isn’t the absence of people. It’s the absence of a place where the whole truth of your story can be received without changing the way you’re loved. And sometimes it’s one step earlier than that — it’s the absence of anyone willing to notice before there’s anything to tell.
Sometimes it’s that small. A woman shared that one day her mother was in her wheelchair shifting side to side, her face tight with pain: “I asked if I could help by adjusting her pillows. She said no. She brushed it off, the way you do when you’ve already decided to just push through it. She kept shifting anyway. So I stopped asking. “Let me rephrase,” I said. “I’m getting you a pillow for your feet.” Not a question this time. She didn’t need permission to say yes. She needed someone to stop making her the one who had to ask.”
A woman called our After Abortion Line once from a locked bathroom on Easter Sunday. She had started her abortion that morning. Her family was gathered just outside the door, celebrating, cheerful, and completely unaware that anything was wrong beyond the food poisoning she’d told them she had. She talked to us instead, quietly, while people who loved her stood a few feet away, completely unaware. She wasn’t missing people. The house was full of them. What she didn’t have was a door she could open.
That’s as true for the man who’s never told a soul he was there that day with his partner as it is for the woman who’s carried this ever since. It’s as true for the grandmother who found out after the fact and has nowhere to put her own grief, or the friend who’s been quietly carrying someone else’s secret for years unable to share how deeply it has affected her.
C.S. Lewis noticed the same pattern from the other side of it. Writing after his wife’s death in A Grief Observed, he described how people who’d known him for years started avoiding him, because they couldn’t decide whether to bring it up or leave it alone. He said the bereaved might as well be isolated in a leper colony, because grief that has nowhere polite to go makes everyone around it go quiet too. That can happen when a community hasn’t made room for grief people may not know how to respond to.
A Safe Place Gets Built Before Anyone Walks In
Here’s something a lot of Christian communities get backwards without meaning to: we wait to become trustworthy until someone actually discloses something. In reality, people decide whether a place is safe long before they ever test it. Our webinar on the science of compassion covered the research behind exactly this. Before anyone consciously decides to trust you, their nervous system has already asked the question underneath every first conversation: is this person safe enough for my secret? They notice how a room talks about strangers. Whether grief gets rushed. Whether a complicated story would be met with care and respect or a verdict.
This is where one fear we often hear from providers comes from — the worry that sitting with someone in pain without leading with Scripture is somehow a failure of faith, or worse, a dishonor to God. Fr. Shawn Monahan, a board member here at Support After Abortion, addressed this directly in a webinar on faith in secular healing spaces where he said that our role isn’t always to lead with Jesus or with prayer. Sometimes it’s simply to be a merciful presence, and to trust that this is enough for today.
Pope Benedict XVI made the same point in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. He named the Good Samaritan as the pattern for Christian charity, then wrote plainly that this kind of love can never be used as a means of proselytizing — that a Christian has to know when it’s time to speak of God and when it’s better to let love alone speak. He also used a phrase worth sitting with: those who serve people in need require a “formation of the heart.” Readers see something similar in Theo of Golden, through meeting a stranger with pencil portraits.
Go back to the parable again: the Samaritan doesn’t pause to correct the wounded man’s beliefs, or wait for a shared vocabulary, before binding his wounds. And Jesus does something easy to miss at the very end. Jesus told this story in response to a lawyer who had asked, “Who is my neighbor?” It was a boundary question, trying to define who qualifies in the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus never actually answers that question. He asks a different one back: “Which of these three men [the priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan], do you think, proved to be a neighbor?”
That’s a ”formation of the heart” question — a much slower one to answer than a theology or communication question: Have I become someone people can trust to tell the truth to?
For someone to share their story, they need a space that feels safe, a person they trust, and the freedom to speak when they’re ready. Sometimes that trust builds over more than one conversation or with more than one person. It may take years before someone feels able to share what they’ve been carrying. Becoming the trusted person who can receive that story with care takes more than knowing the right verse. Sometimes your role is simply to listen, stay present, and let the person set the pace. You can leave room for grace to work from there.
No One Carries it Alone — Including the Ones Caring for Others
The Samaritan doesn’t try to be the man’s only source of healing, either. He binds the wounds, but then he brings the man to an inn, pays the innkeeper, and asks him to keep caring for him until he returns. The burden moves. Nobody in that story carries the whole weight alone — not the Samaritan, not the innkeeper.
That matters for the people doing after abortion healing work — providers, mentors, priests, counselors — who spend their hours holding other people’s worst days and are often the least likely to mention their own. You were never meant to be the Samaritan forever. Some days you’re the one binding the wound. Other days you’re the innkeeper, just continuing care someone else started. Either way, you’re allowed to hand some of it off, and you’re allowed to need an innkeeper of your own. Christian community was never supposed to be one strong person carrying everyone. It’s a place where the weight keeps changing shoulders.
You might know a version of that quiet from the inside, like this woman who shared with us: There have been long stretches, during hard seasons of caregiving for my own parents, where I simply stopped calling friends back — not because I didn’t want them, but because I didn’t have much to bring to a conversation that wasn’t a hospital or a decision. I finally said “yes” to lunch after months of “no.” Everyone at the table had a wedding, an adventure, a fun experience, a promotion to talk about. Then someone asked, gently, how my mother was doing, and I felt like the wet blanket at my own table. That’s not a complaint about my friends. It’s just what happens when your season doesn’t match anyone else’s, and nobody quite knows how to ask about it without the whole table going quiet.
There’s another Bible story that speaks to the needs of those who pour themselves out serving others. After a high-stakes, dramatic moment on Mount Carmel in his ministry to the people of Israel, the Old Testament prophet Elijah collapsed under a broom tree in the wilderness and asked God to let him die. God’s first response was practical care — not a lecture, not even a conversation. An angel simply lets him sleep, then wakes him to eat, then lets him sleep again, then feeds him a second time, “because the journey is too great for you.” Only after that does God say anything to him at all. If you’ve given everything you have to someone else’s crisis this week, that order is worth noticing. Rest and food came before any conversation about what Elijah was supposed to do next. Care for the caregiver isn’t a detour from ministry. Sometimes it’s the first and most literal form it takes.
A colleague in after abortion healing work put a modern version of the same idea on social media recently: “’Never go to bed angry’ has it backwards. Sometimes you should go to bed angry, because a good share of what feels like anger is really just exhaustion, and sleep will do more for it than another hour of trying to resolve it.” She’s not wrong. Elijah didn’t get a theology lesson under that tree. He got sleep, food, and time to recover.
What this Means If You’re Grieving After Abortion Alone
If you’re grieving after abortion, you don’t have to grieve in a certain way — to find the right words, have your faith or feelings sorted out, or wait until you can explain it well. Fr. Shawn made a related point in a webinar on emotional and spiritual healing: healing can begin with where you are right now, including whatever questions, uncertainty, or anger you have. If questions about God’s love are part of what you’re struggling with, our Does God Still Love Me After Abortion? blog offers a compassionate response. You can come to God as you are. A prayer as simple as, “I’m hurting, and I want You. Help me,” can be enough.
Grieving alone can be especially heavy when the people around you don’t know what you’re carrying. You may be surrounded by people who love you and still feel deeply alone because this part of your story feels difficult to talk about or you’re worried about how others will respond. That kind of loneliness after abortion can begin to ease when you find even one person or place where you can speak honestly and be met with compassion.
Suffering Alone Doesn’t Make You Holy
Some people of faith may feel that carrying pain quietly is more virtuous—that asking for help somehow lessens the spiritual significance of what they’re enduring. Christian tradition does recognize meaning in suffering— and Scripture also shows the value of having others beside us. Christ asked for company in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his death. A stranger, the Good Samaritan, crossed toward a wounded man who couldn’t help himself. Both stories recognize the human need for someone to be there with us when the burden is heavy.
Another example can be found in St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who experienced deeply personal suffering and kept much of it private, yet she still shared parts of what she was carrying with people close to her. Privacy and support can exist together.
Suffering can be holy—and receiving care can be part of how we carry it. The wounded man in the Good Samaritan story was met with compassion right where he was. Healing after abortion can begin in much the same way—with space to be honest about what you’re carrying and someone willing to stay beside you as you work through it.
Somewhere to Start This Week in Your After Abortion Healing
If abortion has affected you and you’re carrying grief: What feels heaviest right now? What kind of support would feel manageable at this point? Is there one small step you could take this week—spending some time in prayer, writing down what you’re feeling, using a self-guided resource, talking anonymously with someone, or reaching out to someone you trust? If you do want to talk with someone, what is one honest sentence you’d want them to hear?
If you want to be there for someone who may be hurting: Is there someone in your life who seems to be carrying something heavy? What could you do this week to make a little more room for connection—a check-in, an invitation, practical help, or simply spending time together? If they choose to open up, how can you give them space to speak at their own pace? The Good Samaritan began by moving toward someone who was hurting and responding with care. What might that look like in your own life this week?
A Short Prayer
If you’re carrying this: God, You see me and know what I’m carrying. Meet me where I am today. Guide me toward what I need for the next step, whether that’s rest, prayer, time, or support from someone I can trust. Stay close as I find my way forward. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.
If you’re walking with someone: God, help me notice people who are hurting. Help me to listen without rushing them, respect what they share, and respond with compassion and care. Help me offer the kind of presence that makes room for healing. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.
If You’d Like Support for Healing After Abortion
If you’ve been carrying grief or other emotions after abortion and haven’t had a place where you feel comfortable talking about them, we’re here for you. Our After Abortion Line is a free, anonymous place to begin. You can talk with someone who will listen and help you find support that fits your needs and preferences. Options include religious or secular support; virtual or in-person; one-on-one, group, or self-guided; and clinical or peer support. You can call or text 844-289-HOPE (4673) or connect by email.
Whatever starting point feels right for you, there is room to begin where you are.
We always welcome your feedback! If something in this blog struck a chord — or left you thinking — feel free to share your thoughts anonymously here or send us an email.