The 2023 New York Encounter featured a wonderful panel on Lorenzo Albacete’s latest book Cry of the Heart. Titled “You Cannot Love What Shocks You” (from a line in a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story), the panel featured writer Heather King, physician Anthony Lechich, and tech consultant Dan Bushman. Introduced by moderator Camil Martinez, the three panelists spoke movingly about the book, their memories of Lorenzo Albacete, and of their own experiences facing suffering.
Heather King began the panel by interweaving quotes from Cry of the Heart with reflections on how those insights were forged by Lorenzo Albacete’s struggles to care for his mother and younger brother, as relayed in the biographical essay that concludes the book. Even in her one, brief interaction with Lorenzo Albacete, King said that she was moved by her sense of “a total self-offering of his person, his gaze, his gestures, his presence, that only deepens with Cry of the Heart…”
Dr. Anthony Lechich first met Lorenzo Albacete when the priest came to him for treatment. A deeper friendship formed when Dr. Lechich was faced with his own medical crisis. “I must accompany you,” Monsignor Albacete told him over the phone. Dr. Lechich then reflected upon Albacete’s insights on co-suffering through his own experiences trying to care for severely ill patients, seeking “moments of connection” with those facing the “loss (of) function, cognition, agency, aspirations, and so much more.”
Finally, Dan Bushman spoke to the standing-room-only crowd about his memorable friendship with Albacete that began when Bushman moved to New York City as a college student. The first time he went to confession with Albacete, part of Bushman’s penance was to fetch him some “food from a street cart outside.” Bushman shared his own experiences as a leukemia patient and how he saw his diagnosis in a different light when the pandemic suddenly struck. “I was intrigued by this book,” he continued, “talking about how, while we all share in suffering, there is this universal suffering, it is the situation of man that each suffering is both common and universal, but also entirely and completely unique.”