“My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love You; I ask pardon of You for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope, and do not love You.” (Prayer given to the children of Fatima from the Angel of Peace)
Have you ever been confronted with something so painful that you didn’t know how to process it? The thing strikes you to your core and for a moment time stops. I have had several such experiences recently. In response to my love, I was rebuffed. Although I was aware of the lack of affection, it is always shocking to me when love is not returned for love.
Processing the situations with my husband, he comforted me with the reality of 1) the characters of the players and 2) his undying love for me. Still I have had to sit with the discomfort for a while. One quiet Sunday I took a long nap with that pit in my stomach. When I awoke I had the thought, “How interesting it is to be so profoundly unloved. But perhaps I could offer this to console the adorable Sacred Heart, who is so unloved by so many.”
And so I offered it to the Sacred Heart.
In that moment the sting of the scorn was replaced with 1) a curiosity about identifying in a small way with the Lord and 2) an immense love for Him.
I’m definitely not one of those mind-over-matter people. I don’t believe you can power-of-positive-think your way out of suffering. That’s just repackaged prosperity gospel and you can miss me with that. However, there is something to be said for embracing suffering as a partner of our joy. It certainly does not erase the pain. But it transforms it into something infinitely more beautiful.
When I was teaching childbirth classes I remember telling women on repeat to not say “labor pains” but to use words like powerful sensations, increasing intensity, movement, life-force. Of course that doesn’t make the contractions go away, but it helps point you to the fact that the very thing you may be fighting is in fact the path to your delight. And isn’t that just like life? In order to love Jesus fully we have to identify with his suffering. After all he didn’t come to remove suffering from our lives, but to show us how to endure–how to suffer well.
I regret the time and energy I’ve wasted feeling sorry for myself, lamented my ill treatment, or worried about being the villain in someone else’s story. All those negative things are the things that have carved into my heart a greater capacity to love. O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem.
“For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” (St. Augustine)
Just last week I held the hand of my dear niece who was in our home just a few short months and as we cried together I told her that God was writing a good story and no matter how this chapter looks, it can be part of an even more beautiful outcome than if this chapter didn’t exist at all. It can be hard to believe that when you are in the middle of the mess, but our God who called order out of chaos and made something out of nothing will not find it difficult to take all our mistakes, all the evil we have done and has been done to us, and all the pain and weave them into such a tale of redemption that it will bring more glory to God than if we had held it together with bareknuckled grit.
Because I know that to be absolutely true–both by the faithful witness of all the saints and my own 47 years of life–I trust that I can enter into the Sacred Heart, passing through the thorns. I can console Christ in the garden, as it were, keeping faithful watch over my heart and embracing the suffering to participate in His. This is perhaps what Christ meant when he said, “My yoke is easy. My burden light.”
“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Philippians 3:10-11
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and other say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
(Kahlil Gibran)
reconciling things 