The passage below is from Michael D. O'Brien's novel The Father's Tale. In it, the protagonist of the story has been subjected to torture in an unknown foreign prison, and is near death. (Note: Alyosha is a Russian diminutive for Alexander, which is Alex's full name.)
When consciousness returned, he was alone. The bag was gone from his head. There was no noise, no light, but his senses told him he was alive. His flesh was one single wound, with blood running from his nostrils and ears. A floor beneath his body. It was ice, and blood was crystallizing on it. He was naked. He was deathly cold. His body contracted into the fetal position, shaking violently.
His groans slid into weeping, and the weeping slid back into groans until it was all the same. Time was the skewer on which he turned, burning, burning.
Iisus!
He felt that he was dying and that he had only a few moments left in which to pray. He tried to speak to God, but his mind was incapable of thoughts. His lungs breathed the name of Jesus over and over, though at the root of this utterance was no thought, no fervor. The name was in his breath, and his breath was becoming the name. As long as he did not move, the breathing remained. And the name.
Iisus!
Slowly, slowly his heart beat—a drum, a pause, and a drum.
Then his mind rose still further, and he sensed a presence with him. The darkness was total, but it was broken by breathing that was not his own. He now realized that someone was lying close beside him. From time to time low groans came from the other’s throat. Using the dregs of his strength, Alex moved an arm. It screamed in protest. He moved it still farther, and his fingers brushed against something. It was a hand. A hand covered with blood.
It cost everything to roll onto his side. He gasped, cried out, then put his own hand on the arm of the other prisoner.
For a time he rested. It was strange comfort to know that another human being was with him in that place of absolute dark. A flicker of life stirred within him, a moment of pity for the suffering of the other. He felt that he might try to encourage him somehow, to offer solace—the fraternity of the absolutely dispossessed.
The arm of the other man moved. The man’s hand reached for his. The grip that held Alex was mangled flesh, horrible to touch. With his other hand, Alex touched the face of the prisoner. It too was covered with blood. The man’s chin and cheeks were bearded, his nose large, his eyes deep-set, pools of blood collecting in the sockets. His face was lacerated with many small cuts, and his lips were split, dry, parted. Blood ran from the corners of his mouth.
“Who are you?” Alex breathed.
“Alyosha”, the lips whispered in reply.
“We are suffering, Alyosha”, Alex sobbed, placing the palm of his hand on the man’s forehead. “But we are not alone.”
The flesh of the forehead was riddled with holes. “You”, said the prisoner, “are Alyosha.”
“I?” Alex breathed.
The prisoner reached up and took Alex’s right hand in both of his. He drew Alex’s hand downward across his face, over the collarbone, over the chest that was sliced in every direction, the flesh slippery with blood. He pulled Alex’s hand around the side of his chest and pressed the tips of his fingers to a large gash between two ribs.
Alex flinched and tried to draw back, but the other’s hands gently held him.
“My son”, said the prisoner, and drew the fingers deep into the wound beneath his heart.
Then Alex saw a flash of light and fell into oblivion.
Later he has a similar encounter in another cell, with the one he now calls the Muchenik, or martyr. (Note: kingfisher is a name Alex uses figuratively for himself. It refers to the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem As Kingfishers Catch Fire.)
The Muchenik took the kingfisher’s hand and drew it gently to the wound in his side, beneath his heart. And the kingfisher’s heart hammered with horror and worship, and the dissolving of every language save the language of love.
The Muchenik put his fingers into the wounds of the kingfisher—the heart wounds and the mind wounds—though he asked permission before doing so and did not use force. And the kingfisher replied yes, yes, yes . For both acts cleansed the degradation. And the nyet, nyet, nyet that had seized him during the torture withdrew for a time.
As before, he was stretched out on the ice, seeking the tormented one, reaching across the void.
“We are suffering, Muchenik,” he groaned, “but we are not alone.”
He touched the holes in the hands and feet of the prisoner. He lightly touched the face that a rifle butt had shattered. The hands of the prisoner drew his fingers to the wound in his heart, and his heart was a fountain.
I consider these to be some of the finest passages in all of literature, Christian or otherwise. They express the reality that the worse our sufferings are, the more real is the presence of Jesus with us. Alex, at the very limit of human suffering, is even privileged to experience a physical manifestation of that Presence.
Thomas à Kempis has said, "When you suffer tribulation and your heart is filled with sorrow, you are with Jesus on the Cross." This is true literally (not usually physically, of course) because the Crucifixion, like all of Jesus's life on earth, happened both in time and outside of time. Because He is eternally crucified, and because His crucifixion contains all human suffering, Jesus literally suffers with us. This is the beginning of the answer God provides to the mystery of our suffering: He is with us in it.