To Know the Cross

To Know the Cross -  Thomas Merton

 Thomas Merton was a modern day monk who was a prolific writer and a convert to the Catholic faith. 

 

I pray that we may be found worthy to be cursed, censored, and ground down, and even put to death in the name of Jesus Christ, so long as Christ himself is not put to death in us. Paulinus of Nola

The Christian must not only accept suffering: he was McGill holy. Nothing so easily becomes an holy of suffering. Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps, to harden them. Endurance alone is no consecration. True asceticism is not a mere Colts of fortitude. We can deny ourselves rigorously for the wrong reason and end up by pleasing ourselves mightily with our self-denial.

 Suffering is consecrated to God by faith and not by faith and suffering, but by faith in God some of us believe in the power and the value of suffering. But such is the belief is an allusion. Suffering has no power and no value in its own.

It is valuable only as a test of faith. What if our faith fails the test is it good to suffer then? What if we enter into suffering with a strong faith and suffering, and then discover that suffering destroys us? To believe and suffering is pride: but to suffer believe in God, is humility. For pride may tell us that we are strong enough to suffer, that suffering is good for us because we are good. Humility tells us that the suffering is an evil which we must always expect to find in our lives because the people that use in ourselves. But they also knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek him in suffering, and that by his grace we can overcome evil with good. Suffering, then, becomes good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly mercy of God. It does not make us good by itself, but it enables us to make ourselves better than we are. That’s what we consecrated to God and suffering is not our suffering but ourselves. Only the suffering of Christ are valuable in the sight of God, who hates evil, and to him they are valuable chiefly as a sign. The death of Jesus on the cross has an infinite meaning and value not because of its death cause of its death the son of God. The cross of Christ is nothing in the power of suffering or death. It speaks to the power of him who overcame both suffering and death by rising from the grave.

 The wounds they evil stamped upon the flesh of Christ are to be worshiped as holy not because they are wounds, but because they are his wounds. Nor would we worship them if he had nearly died of them, without rising again. For Jesus is not merely someone who once loved us enough to die for us. His love for us the infinite love of God, which is stronger than all evil and cannot be touched by death

Suffering therefore can only be consecrated to God by one who believes that Jesus is not dead in it is the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good but because they have meaning, and because resurrection Jesus has robbed them from their meaning

To know the cross is not merely to know our own sufferings, but across the sign of salvation in no one’s seen by his own sufferings. To know the process to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ more than it is to know the love of Christ underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. For to know his love is not merely to know the story of his love, but to experience in our spirit that we are loved by him today in his love, the father manifests his own love for us through his Spirit poured forth into our hearts…

 The effect of suffering upon us depends on what you love we have only ourselves suffering is merely hateful it has to be avoided at all costs. It brings out all the evil that is in us, so that the one who loves only himself including any sin it up with any evil on others merely in order to avoid suffering himself. Worse if a person loves himself and learns that suffering is unavoidable, he may even come to take perverse pleasure in suffering itself, showing that he loves and hates himself the same time. In any case if we love ourselves, suffering inexorably brings out helplessness, and then, after making known what we are, striving to make ourselves, even worse than we are.

If we love others and suffer for them even without a supernatural love for other people and God, suffering can give us a certain nobility and goodness it brings up something find in our natures and give glory to God who made us greater than suffering. But in the end natural unselfishness cannot prevent suffering from destroying us along with all we love if we love God and love others in him we will be glad to let suffering destroy anything in us that God is pleased to let it destroyed, because we know that all it destroys an important we will prefer to let the accidental trash of white be consumed by suffering in order that his glory may come out clean everything we do.

If we love God suffering does not matter. Christ in us, his love, his passion in us: that is what we care about. Pain is not cease to be paid, will begin be glad of it because it enables Christ to suffer in us a newborn to the father by being greater in our hearts, and suffering would ever be.

Plough Publishing House, 2003:  Bread & Wine:  Readings for Lent and Easter. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY