Embrace Your Suffering
This has been an exhausting year full of suffering for so many. Our world is as divisive as ever. There are so many things to capture our attention and upset our peace. And in the time between writing and posting this, the world has been flipped upside down with war in Ukraine.
Winter brings its own host of issues with cold weather, short days, and illness. Lots of illness this year. And regardless of what is going on in the world around us, our own lives carry on as usual, with all of its demands and stresses. It can feel overwhelming.
For our family, illness has been rampant this winter, one virus followed by another which was followed by another which was then topped off with a round of stomach flu with the occasional cold sprinkled in. At times it has felt isolating and endless. It can feel lonesome, like no one else in the world knows this pain or perhaps it just feels like people are standing back, grateful it’s not them.
Embrace the Suffering
Whatever your suffering has been this winter, whether it be illness, marital struggles, miscarriage, depression, grief, cancer, work stress, loneliness, and for some the reality of war – I must ask. Have you embraced this gift of suffering? How have you kissed this cross you have struggled with so deeply?
I can tell you my reality when we were facing illness after illness. I was cursing this cross. Frustrated by it all and feeling depleted. Longing for warmer weather to get together with friends outside. Certain I was going to go crazy before winter ends.
But then I read these words in my Magnificat devotional:
“The finer approach is to perceive in the inevitability of suffering a mark of divine love. It is to welcome the prospect of further offerings as means of union with a beloved who hung on a cross. The thought of suffering does not frighten…
We must see suffering in a graced light. Our true powerlessness rises up in the face of suffering… God’s purpose is unknown; he is more hidden. Precisely then must faith be exercised. God is inviting us to himself long before our last breath, and we must come to realize this. Our profound surrender to him is his desire, so different from mere resignation to his will. This deeper surrender is what God wants for us always; it is why he allows pain.”
Father Donald Haggerty
The Marks of Divine Love
I was not perceiving in my suffering the marks of divine love. I was most definitely afraid of greater suffering and unwilling to accept my own powerlessness. Yet this suffering, these circumstances, these times, are for us and for our own sanctification. And if I sit all day, rejecting this suffering, angry at it, wishing it away, I miss the grace that can be found within it. I kept saying, “When it rains it pours” because we kept getting sick. And in some sense, God was raining grace after grace upon my head within these sufferings. But being that I was too scared to see it as grace, I put up my umbrella. The grace-filled rain didn’t soak me, it bounced off my umbrella and fell to the ground unused.
It dawned on me one day that to grow and change from these experiences, I must put away my umbrella and receive the gifts that lie within the suffering. In a sense, I must let the rain soak me through to the very bone, maybe even until I’m cold and shivering. I must learn to receive it in deep faith, trusting that through these very circumstances “God is inviting [me] to himself… long before [my] last breath.”
Mary Knows Suffering
All of this made me contemplate the scene in “The Passion of the Christ” when Mary kneels at the foot of Jesus’ cross, kissing his feet, her lips covered in his blood. She embraced the cross and the sufferings that had been prepared for her. Mary had perfect faith in God’s will, so despite the intense suffering both she and her son had endured, she knew her path of suffering was the path to salvation, and she saw the “marks of divine love” along the way, always pondering them in her heart. She received the sufferings and continued living her initial “fiat” to its heart-rending conclusion – complete union with her bloodied, suffering, dying God-made-human son, Jesus.
But it’s important that I don’t leave it here. Yes, it’s true that when we are unified with him and we embrace our crosses, we may become bloodied and bruised. When we have given ourselves to him and pressed ourselves into his wounds, we must take heart. We reach a more intimate union with him. And not only this, but new life. I’ve quoted it before and I’ll quote it again, “The cross comes before the crown”(C.S. Lewis). The glory of suffering lies in its proper conclusion: Resurrection.
The Resurrection is also our lot when we lean into our own powerlessness. Suffering is not the final reality. Not only will it lead us to union with God here and now, but the glory of that perfect union with him in heaven.
For prayer and reflection:
- What are your biggest sufferings right now?
- How have you received or rejected these sufferings?
- How do you desire to experience great union with God here and now?
- Talk to him. Let him speak to your heart. Let him love you.
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