David J. Centner, OCD
Fr. David, a Discalced Carmelite friar at the National Shrine of Mary, Help of Christians at Holy Hill, Wisconsin, writes about a perennial question in Christian spirituality.
Jesus tells us in the Gospels, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14, 27). For the early Christians, this must have been a very hard saying. The cross was the instrument of execution of slaves and one of the most horrible of ways to die. Jesus demands that his disciples embrace the cross, not merely put up with it. They must have reflected long and hard on this reality. St. Paul certainly did. After decades of ministry filled with a good deal of suffering, he wrote, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6, 14). As centuries passed, schools of spirituality developed that placed a special emphasis on participation in the passion of Christ.
The understanding that suffering has a value in the world seemed to be the common belief of all Catholic Christians until the very recent past. “Offer it up” were words that bore a message that was often both a comfort and a challenge. Today, “offer it up” might suggest to many an attitude of denial. To others, it might suggest the self-absorption of a masochist or a convenient excuse for a loser. Yet the precept of the Lord is inescapable even in our time. We must take up our cross daily and follow after him, or we cannot be his disciples. Taking up one’s cross daily means we are to embrace suffering daily. Is that possible? How are we to go about it? In this essay, we will try to find an answer. The heart of any discussion of Christian suffering must begin with the person of Jesus Christ. Our aim is to be conformed to him or, as St. Paul tells us, “to have the mind of Christ.” Paul explicates the meaning of “mind of Christ” by invoking the hymn to Jesus’ self-emptying or kenosis that we find in chapter 2 of the letter to the Philippians.
Have among yourselves the same attitude
that is also yours in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God -
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
that is above very name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth
and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2, 5-11).
Taken at face value, this self-emptying in order to be murdered on a cross is utter folly. Amazingly, Paul does not here explain why anyone would do such a mad thing. Jesus himself tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (John 3, 16). Jesus himself so loved the Father and those the Father gave him that he would not lose any of them. “And this is the will of the one who sent me, that I should not lose anything of what he gave me, but that I should raise it on the last day” (John 6, 39). Paul, of course, knew all this. So did his readers. For love, Jesus emptied himself. For love, Paul has done the same. For love, we are to love one another as Jesus has loved us. Yes, even to the point of embracing the cause of our death. The cause of our death? Here we are taking that term in a very broad sense. We mean by it everything in life that we experience as diminishing us in some way. But ultimately it will also mean physical death itself, not as a diminishing of us to the point of nonexistence, but as a final surrender to Christ.
We do all this for love. That may sound sentimental, and we know that purely sentimental love can often get us into great trouble. Sentiment is a feeling. The feeling of love figures in many unwholesome situations and relationships. It is especially evident in co-dependent relationships. Real love is hard-nosed, tough, and faces the world very realistically. If love causes us to bear our crosses, then it must be more than sentiment. It must be real. Real love is a choice. And this realism of love is an important key to what Christian suffering is all about.
St. Thomas Aquinas defines suffering as renisus voluntatis ad id quod est vel non est - the resistance of the will to what is or is not (Summa Theologica, Ia-IIae, q. 35). We may be surprised that Thomas does not even mention pain. For most of us, suffering is about enduring pain. Thomas, however, insists on the resistance of the will as being central to suffering. He is saying that it is not the fact of pain that makes us suffer. It is our unwillingness to bear anything at all that causes us to suffer. I may suffer from a toothache—I don’t relish the pain and would gladly be rid of it. But I may also suffer when I must face things that are not intrinsically painful but simply inconvenient, as in listening to a particularly boring conversation, or something that goes contrary to my expectations. We suffer at any brush with the real world that goes against the grain.
Pain, taken by itself, is a feeling. Sometimes it is a real blessing, for it drives us to take care of ourselves. At other times, it is wholly unwanted. Then it becomes suffering. We have a beautiful example of suffering in Jesus’ agony in the garden. He faces certain death with the fear and trepidation of a man who is wholly alive. He asks that his cup be taken away. Here we see the renisus voluntatis. But then he takes that resistance of his will up into a choice motivated by love for the Father: “Not my will but thine be done.”
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