Embracing the Cross

Even as a lifelong Catholic, I've had trouble grasping the concept of "offering up" my pains and sorrows.

It's hard to offer up sufferings, even annoyances, when you're in the throes of them. Pain and irritability can be overwhelming and consuming, and it can be difficult to reason in such a state. During those times, I have to just skip logic and go straight to faith, trusting that God is in control and somehow can use my pain, as much as I dislike it, to help others.

For me, the Catholic understanding of suffering -- and the offering of my personal pains --  is best established ahead of time, when I'm not suffering. By praying a morning offering, I've already given God whatever I will face that day. And during Lent particularly, praying the Stations of the Cross has helped me understand why Jesus had to suffer -- and why we have to.

The late Caryll Houselander, a Catholic artist and writer, teaches us in her version of the Stations, "The Way of the Cross," that when Jesus receives His cross, we, too, are invited to accept it.

"For Christ receives our cross that we may receive His.

"Receiving this cross, the cross of the whole world made His, we receive Him. He gives us His hands to take hold of, His power to make it a redeeming thing, a blessed thing, His life to cause it to flower, His heart to enable us to rejoice in accepting our own and one another's burdens."

Houselander prays: "Let me realize that because You have made my suffering Yours and given it the power of Your love, it can reach everyone, everywhere -- those in my own home, those who seem to be out of my reach -- it can reach them all with Your healing and Your love.

"Let me always remember that those sufferings known only to myself, which seem to be without purpose and without meaning, are part of Your plan to redeem the world."

Teach us, O Lord, to embrace You and Your cross.

Inspired by the Year of Faith, Susan Szalewski began writing weekly columns for us. Although that year is over, we liked them so well that we asked her to keep writing. Thankfully, she said yes. So watch for these on Thursdays and see the Year of Faith Blog here.

Jesus' Easter Game of Hide and Seek‏

Our Tabernacle doors, created by artist John Lajba, depict
the disciples recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever."

    - Hebrews 13:8

Most of Jesus' life on earth is hidden from us, including His Risen Life.

Even now, He is risen and among us but chooses to remain hidden, wrote Caryll Houselander in her book The Risen Christ.

"He is 'the Way'; the Way does not change," Houselander said. "We are helped by this consistency to recognize Him in His hidden life in ourselves."

Like his disciples, we don't always recognize the Risen Lord. But His appearances in Scripture highlight Jesus' gifts to us and give us some clues on how He reveals Himself to us, the author said.

"To the stricken world in the person of Magdalene, compassion: 'Why are you weeping, for Whom are you seeking?'

"To the apostles, His first word, 'Peace!'

"To Thomas, 'Believe' because of the wounds -- 'the courage of faith.'

"To Peter, the wonderful opportunity to affirm His love.

"To the disciples who mourned Him as lost, communion with Him."

Jesus continues his hidden, daily miracles, appearing to us in the breaking of the bread and through many other "unobserved, unguessed miracles of grace, contrition, conversion, hope, forgiveness, love, taking place secretly in the human soul."

He is hidden in everyone, Houselander said, but we must have the eyes of faith to see Him.

 "He may come as a little child, making enormous demands, giving enormous consolation; He may come as a stranger, so that we must give the hospitality to a stranger that we should like to give to Christ; He may come to us in His Passion, disfigured by our sins and all sin, asking the utmost courage of us, that we may not be scandalized and may believe. He may come to us as a servant and compel us to the extreme humility which accepts His service, as Peter had to do, when He washed his feet, and as the disciples did with unquestioning joy, when He cooked their little meal on the seashore."

Perhaps the most difficult place to find the Risen Christ is in ourselves, she said, because we see ourselves as so unworthy. But we all have the means to radiate our Lord to others: "words, a human voice, sympathy, hands to serve."

Remember, the Risen Christ is appearing to us, and "the only condition for finding and recognizing the Risen Christ today is that we love Him: not power, chance, or virtue, but only love."

Inspired by the Year of Faith, Susan Szalewski began writing weekly columns for us. Although that year is over, we liked them so well that we asked her to keep writing. Thankfully, she said yes. So watch for these on Thursdays and see the Year of Faith Blog here.

It's Been a Rough Week

It’s been a rough week.

Here at St. Columbkille we’re mourning the death of our principal, Dr. Cheryl Blue.

Tragedy struck on a national level in the terrorist attack Monday in Boston and again last night at an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas.

Sometimes it’s hard to not become saddened, discouraged or even angry about all the pain and loss of life. Sometimes it’s hard to not question why God allows these bad things to happen.

But we are Christians, who know that God’s plan of salvation does not spare us from suffering. He made suffering part of that plan, the cross that leads to the Resurrection. The Father sent His Son to show us the Way. Jesus took on all our pain and death and transformed it.

“The power of Christ is able to control fiercer storms than those of the wind and sea. It is able to still the torrents of evil of the whole world in the stillness of His own heart. It is the power which enables Him to command the floods of all the sorrow in the world and hold them within His peace. It is the power which not only gives life back to the dead, but can change death itself into life. It is the power of divine love.”

Those words, from the 20th century author and mystic Caryll Houselander, struck me during this horrific week, particularly the second-to-the last line.

“It is the power which not only gives life back to the dead, but can change death itself into life.”

God can take all the death we saw in the past week and change it into life -- a life that is eternal and more glorious than anything we can imagine.

That is power of the Resurrection. That is why Christians have hope, even in the midst of evil and death.

Inspired by this Year of Faith we will be posting columns like this from Susan Szalewski about exploring and/or deepening our faith. Watch for it on Thursdays.

Faith in the Midst of Drought

As we enter the Church's Year of Faith, we are in the midst of a drought.

Everything seems withered and parched, which is perhaps a good metaphor for where we are morally and spiritually. Our nation, our world, has lost Jesus, like Mary and Joseph did in Jerusalem.

Caryll Houselander -- a British mystic, poet and spiritual teacher who lived during World War II -- described in her writings how events in the Gospel are relived over and over in the lives of individuals and nations. She wrote about how everyone at some point experiences the loss of the child Jesus.

And "there is no emptiness like the emptiness of the house from which a child has gone away."

In the middle of the last century Houselander wrote: "gradually we have frittered our freedom away: always increasing our wants, little by little making more and more necessities for ourselves; forming habit after habit of petty indulgence; until one day (if we are given the grace of realising it), we discover that we too have lost the Divine Child."

How much truer that seems today.

Houselander wrote the following about World War II England, but she could have been describing the present-day United States as well:

"England, as a nation, is also going through the experience of the loss of the Divine Child.

"The Christ Child in a nation is like the presence of the child in a house: everything centres upon his youth; and he fills everything with his life. If he goes away, the child's values go, too, such as the sense of wonder, mystery, beauty, and adventure: the poetry which, free from materialism, is the most complete realism.

"In England, there are traces of where the Child onced lived: there are remnants of the Faith; but not the certainty of the Faith that there once was. There is a wistful longing to believe; but not the joyful freedom of living in belief.

"There is the desire to set up laws of justice for everyone's happiness; but not the spirit of the Child's obedience to God's Law in the heart of all men: and indeed without that no codes and laws can have value; because those who make them have not the capacity to keep them."

Houselander's advice: "seek, seek, seek" all your life for the lost Child.

He is the fulfillment of all our longing. He gives us the Living Water for which we thirst in this drought.

Inspired by this Year of Faith (which began a week ago today) we will be posting columns like this about exporing and/or deepening our faith. Watch for it on Thursdays.