Our Journey through
Suffering
To the Heart of Jesus
Dear Friends of the Heart of Christ,
One of the images that I sometimes call to mind during this holy season of Lent is of a statue of Christ I encountered when I was in my twenties, living ‘in the world’ and going to Mass at a nearby college chapel. The chapel was beautifully appointed and in the back of it there was a sorrowful-looking Christ statue, crowned with thorns and wearing a cloak made of purple material. If one dared to peek under the cloak, as I did, a brutal mass of bloody wounds met one’s eyes. The cloak was there to conceal from the faint of heart the awfulness of Christ’s scourging and the tremendous mind-boggling pain that He suffered for us. It was hard to look at that representation of the Lord’s passion because there was no way one could escape the fact of such atrocious suffering or even try to prettify it as some would like to do.
Every year the Church gives us this time of Lent as a reminder of what Christ suffered for us and wants us to recall these sacred mysteries in a special way. Why? One of the best answers to that comes, I think, from the revelations of Saint Faustina. She records in her Diary that Jesus told her that she could please Him best by meditating on His Sorrowful Passion and that by such meditation much light falls upon our souls (Diary 1337 and 267). So when we spend time contemplating the Lord’s passion and sufferings, we are truly pleasing Him and he releases graces (spiritual gifts) upon our souls.
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People who are consumed with what secular culture has to offer or who are anchored in worldly matters are not going to be open to such advice. We can do all sorts of things to ignore or to minimize the Lord’s Passion so that it does not impact upon our lives. Yet, the Catholic Church knows how vital the remembrance of Christ’s suffering is to our spiritual well-being and consequently mandates that every church has a crucifix visually prominent in its sanctuary. (You can’t miss ours as you enter our chapel.)
It’s important then that we take some time during our busy Lenten days to reflect on the meaning of suffering and how it can conform us to the image of Christ and bring us closer to His pierced and loving Heart. Anyone who has begun to read about the life of Saint Margaret Mary, that great disciple of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is going to meet head-on with her aspiration for suffering. Reading her life or letters, we may be puzzled and even repelled by the Saint’s constant insistence on her desire for suffering, humiliation, contempt and her oft-repeated longing to be buried in an eternal oblivion, forgotten by the world. These sentiments truly existed in her mind and heart because she wanted to be like her beloved Lord. Even before becoming a nun, she had been filled with a yearning for conformity to Christ in His sufferings. In her letters, Margaret Mary details some of the real pains she suffered as a religious. There was the pain in her head, given her as a share in what the Lord suffered from the crown of thorns. She writes that this pain was continual and often kept her from resting her head on the pillow at night. Yet, she rejoices in it saying that because of it, she could spend whole nights in converse with Jesus. Our saint also related that she suffered greatly during carnival time preceding Lent. So agonizing were her pains at this time that she says “she did not know herself and there was no consolation or ease for it, and she could neither sleep nor eat and could hardly talk.” After her first great revelation of the Sacred Heart, Margaret Mary had in her side a continual pain, put there by the Lord Himself. Frequent blood-lettings, as were the custom of the day, gave her some relief, but she was never free from this pain. Fever seized her and she heroically bore it in silence. When the doctor finally was summoned, it took about sixty visits before the sickness left her. There were also occasions when God’s Holy Justice asked great sufferings of her for the sake of sinners. And let us not forget the frustration and agony she suffered when the tremendous mystical graces she received were regarded with suspicion by her own religious community and by learned church theologians.
Why would anyone want to welcome so much distress in their lives and be constantly consumed by pain? The answer, Saint Margaret Mary explains, for her hunger for sufferings, humiliations, mortifications and a burning thirst for the cross—was a work of grace! The Heart of Christ, who had shown His love so intensely from the cross, led her by that way of sanctity and she was powerless to resist. So our saint could speak eloquently of “the precious treasure of the cross” and of “the delicious bread of humiliation and contempt.” Instead of loving riches, honor and privilege, and all the things the world and the worldly covet, Margaret Mary loved the exact opposite. All the suffering, contempt and humiliations poured on her, simply brought her closer to the Divine Heart who was her ALL. That is why she could write, “We must try to make ourselves living replicas of our crucified spouse by portraying Him in ourselves in all our actions; nothing so unites us to the Sacred Heart as the cross; we want to be true replicas of Him suffering and dying for love of us.”
This is high sanctity! You may be thinking—too high for me! Well, we may not be asked to bear the same sufferings as our saint, but there is no getting around the fact that we will all suffer in this life in one way or another. In his many letters to and consultations with the laity, Saint Francis de Sales often had to advise his penitents and spiritual children to accept the crosses in their lives. To a very privileged and prominent lady he wrote, “I know your spiritual state so well that it seems always to be clear before my eyes, with all its little inclinations to despondency and shrinking and anxiety that tend to continual disturbance, because your will is not yet fixed firmly enough in love of the Cross and of humiliation. My very dear daughter, a heart which holds real love and devotion for Jesus Christ Crucified loves His death, His suffering, His torment…, and when a chance appears of any little share in all this, it grasps at it eagerly and is full of rejoicing.” Remember, he is speaking to a woman who lives in the world and is surrounded with its cares and concerns. De Sales concludes with this sage advice to her, “When we meet again remind me to talk about this shrinking and apprehensiveness of yours, for you need above all else to correct it if you are to have any peace and really to give yourself to the consideration of eternity. He whose thoughts are often turned in that direction will not trouble himself greatly about the happenings of our three or four moments of mortal life.”
Our society, so built on self-indulgence and self-fulfillment in this world, thinks that this message is totally absurd. We are constantly bombarded by the media’s conceptions of how to live our modern life correctly. And as you well know, Catholic values are anathema to today’s social and educational systems. For example, a society that considers suicide a legitimate option to suffering, deprives the sufferers of an opportunity of emulating Christ and implicitly shuns the power of love to overcome and transform suffering. A provocative illustration of this is the life of Alison Davis, a woman with spina bifida, hydrocephalus and an array of other disabilities. These have permanently confined Davis to a wheelchair and cause her immense suffering. Regular doses of morphine, she relates, only lessen the pain somewhat. She says, “I think it is important for us to know that some pain can’t be relieved. That’s the case for me. When the pain is at its worse, I can’t think, I can’t speak. And the doctors told me it will definitely get worse.” There were times in her life, Davis admits, that she developed a death-wish, even attempting suicide several times. However, after a 1995 trip to India where she met disabled children whom she had sponsored, she regained her desire to live and to love them “overwhelmingly and fiercely.” “Had euthanasia or assisted suicide been legal then, and I’d been killed,” Davis confides, “I would have missed what actually have been the best years of my life and nobody would ever have known.” Davis candidly points out that in her experience, when the pain is really bad, she doesn’t need to be told she’d be better off dead, but what she needs is to be surrounded by people who tell her that her life and suffering have value. “They can’t take the pain away,” she declares, “but sometimes it’s not the pain that hurts the most, it’s the fear of being abandoned.”
Davis’ caretaker Colin Hart firmly believes that love really can and does make suffering bearable. He quotes the Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, who said that, amid his suffering he grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: “The salvation of men and women is through love and in love… In a position of utter desolation, when a person cannot express himself in positive action, when his or her only achievement may consist in enduring suffering in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position, a person can through contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”
Frankl, of course, was speaking in general terms, but his experience showed him that suffering, when one fixed his gaze on his beloved, was possible and even meaningful. There is no doubt that suffering does have a purpose in the spiritual life. Through the message of Christ’s cross, suffering is salvific and is the pathway to eternal salvation and union with the Heart of Christ. Christ did not suffer so that we would be spared suffering. He endured His cross to give meaning to our suffering. We can reject our crosses and get angry about them, but this only gives Satan a foothold to build on. Then he can work on our feelings of despondency and despair to draw us away from God. That is why the principal effect of the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick is an increase in hope. Hope is the virtue exactly opposite to the sin of despair. As Christians, we place our hope in the Lord Jesus, whose sufferings led to new life.
There is another benefit of suffering. St. Peter tells us in his epistle (5:10): “After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.” In other words, suffering is God’s way of maturing us spiritually. God is pleased when we patiently endure the crosses that come our way. They are part of His plan to prepare us for eternal glory. Now, there have been times in my life, as I am sure there have been times in your lives, when pain overwhelms us, numbs us, disorients us, frightens us. Christians though we are, dedicated laity though we are, religious though we are, yet our weak human natures long to be well and productive men and women. The Lord knows us through and through. As Padre Pio, expresses so well, “Suffering is necessary for our souls.” Let us then look to the Lord this Lent—to His pierced and loving Heart—for strength and courage in our sufferings and trials and remember the words of Jesus to Saint Faustina, “When it seems to you that your suffering exceeds your strength, contemplate My wounds.” †