I am here to tell you that Brian Muha did not die in vain. I don’t suppose any one of us will ever know all of the fruits borne from this tragedy, but the ones that I have seen are truly incredible. There are literally thousands of people who have risen to prayer, many perhaps who have not prayed in a long time. So many times people have approached us to tell us that they know a priest who is offering Mass for Brian, or that they know a religious sister whose community is praying for us, or that they have their entire office praying for us. We have received word from people as far away as Slovakia, Spain, and even Rome, telling us that they are praying for us. At a time when we have taken prayer out of our schools and God out of our government, the Lord is raising us up to prayer.

Another fruit of this tragedy is a deeper realization in so many parents of just what a gift their children are. The deep sympathy expressed by so many parents to my mother and father can only come from their putting themselves in my parents’ shoes. A classmate of mine who is married and has a baby daughter approached me with tears in his eyes after the Memorial Mass in Steubenville this past Sunday to offer his condolences. Holding his baby daughter, he shook his head, saying in a broken voice that he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose his baby girl. In an age where children are often regarded as a novelty or a nuisance, an age in which life is ripped from the womb, this is certainly a realization we need on a grand scale.

A third fruit that is immediately apparent to me is the exposure given Franciscan University, as well as the exposure many were given to Franciscan University. A neighbor of ours who came to help search told us how different his past would’ve been if he had had a church like the one we have at the university. One fairly well-known person from Columbus remarked to a friend of ours how touched she was by the students of the university, and how the experience has deepened her own faith.

Yet another fruit is the number of charitable acts that this tragedy has made possible. So many family members, friends, students, and even strangers gave up time and money to help us search for Brian. We came back to Westerville on Sunday to find a yellow ribbon on each mailbox on our court, our yard mowed and mulched, and literally more food than we had room for. One neighbor went so far as to drive all the way to Dayton to have permanently preserved the flowers that Brian had arranged to be delivered to mom that very day he died. Over 1,000 people came to Brian’s wake yesterday, and there are so many of you here today as well.

Although these fruits help to answer the question "Was Brian’s death in vain?" we cannot be satisfied just yet. The reason is that we do not experience suffering in a solely collective manner, and so these fruits cannot provide a complete answer to the question why that is so much a part of human suffering. We also experience suffering as an individual, and so the response to the problem of suffering must also be on the individual level. The more we love, the more we are able to share in the sufferings of others. But our love on this earth is never perfect, and so the suffering of an individual is never perfectly communicated. So many of us experienced this last night, when we could do nothing but say that there simply were no words to express what was on our hearts. The inability to perfectly communicate our suffering is one of the reasons so many despair in their sufferings. We must turn, then, to the One Who knows us completely, who has numbered even the hairs on our heads. Only with God can we perfectly communicate our suffering, and thus suffering provides us with a unique opportunity for conversion. Only then is the question why that distinguishes human suffering sufficiently answered, and only then will we fully realize that Brian’s death and our suffering is not in vain.