Image: Luis Rauschhuber, Suffering Man (Leidender Mensch), 1971.
☩ I: DESERTED BY THE WORLD
François Mauriac, from The anguish and joy of the Christian life:
Today, in the evening of my life, I know the final answer. It is Jesus Christ alone who quiets the radical anguish that is in us — an anguish which is so consubstantial with the human condition that it is cruelly manifest from childhood to the grave. The torment of loneliness, the vacillating shadows of those we love as they leave us in the horrible mysteries of death, the secret and permanent thirst we have for limitless gratification of our ego, the unhappiness of being a man who loves but is not loved or who is loved but does not love, the trials of old age and the gradual deterioration of strength, the decline of the mind and the approach of ineluctable dissolution: if these do not constitute anguish, a radical anguish, in the human heart, there is still the metaphysical anguish of “being in the world” and not knowing where to find peace and happiness.
The enemies of our souls live within our gates, they occupy our souls before we are aware of our manhood, of our strength, of our very life. Youth has been described as a summer evening with moonbeams streaming this way and that across the terraces, with the sky vivid before us in all its beauty and with our hearts filled with hope and naive love. But when autumn comes, when we mature and discover ourselves to be shipwrecked mariners over whose heads the winds whistle and against whose bodies the sea beats with unquenchable fury; when we realize that we are deserted by the world and stand alone before life and before our destiny; when in short the pitiful illusions of an insatiable heart are shown to us in all their poverty, in all their weakness, and the phantoms of feeling are not sufficient to shore us up against the demands which we ourselves make of ourselves, it is a different story altogether. We still struggle, we still cling to our illusory hopes and dreams. But it is only a question of time before these break apart against the rock of reality and we realize what monsters we are in the depths of our being. Monsters - except for one fact, that Christ loves us and died for us to give us life and to give us love. “If thou didst know the gift of God,” Christ said to the Samaritan woman. And what is this gift? It is the very opposite of anguish: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” Peace and joy discovered in the Cross, in a plenitude of suffering which consists in embracing, each one according to his vocation, the suffering of the hungry, the persecuted, the imprisoned, the tortured, the exploited: the vast unloved stretching from one end of the world and history to the other and making up Christ’s body in time.
II: SUFFERING AS COMMUNION
Caryll Houselander, from The Way of the Cross:
Because Christ has changed death to life, and suffering to redemption, the suffering of those who love Him will be a communion between them. All that hidden daily suffering that seems insignificant will be redeeming the world, it will be healing the wounds of the world. The acceptance of pain, of old age, of the fear of death, and of death will be our gift of Christ's love to one another; our gift of Christ's life to one another. No man's cross is laid upon him for himself alone, but for the healing of the whole world, for the mutual comforting and sweetening of sorrow, for the giving of joy and supernatural life to one another. 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. "If any man has a mind to come my way, let him renounce self, and take up his cross, and follow me. The man who tries to save his life shall lose it; it is the man who loses his life for my sake that will save it" (Matt. xvi.24-26).
III: TO WALK ON THIS EARTH
Edith Stein, from Love of the Cross: On St. John of the Cross:
We can assume that the prospect of the faithful who would follow him on his way of the cross strengthened the Savior during his night on the Mount of Olives. And the strength of these cross-bearers helps him after each of his falls. The righteous under the Old Covenant accompany him on the stretch of the way from the first to the second collapse. The disciples, both men and women, who surrounded him during his earthly life, assist him on the second stretch…
…But because being one with Christ is our sanctity, and progressively becoming one with him our happiness on earth, the love of the cross in no way contradicts being a joyful child of God. Helping Christ carry his cross fills one with a strong and pure joy, and those who may and can do so, the builders of God’s kingdom, are the most authentic children of God. And so those who have a predilection for the way of the cross by no means deny that Good Friday is past and that the work of salvation has been accomplished. Only those who are saved, only children of grace, can in fact be bearers of Christ’s cross. Only in union with the divine Head does human suffering take on expiatory power. To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly to sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels, this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth."
IV: RELIEF WITHOUT ILLUSION
Paul VI, from the closing speech of the Second Vatican Council:
"But we have something deeper and more valuable to give you, the only truth capable of answering the mystery of suffering and of bringing you relief without illusion, and that is faith and union with the Man of Sorrows, with Christ the Son of God, nailed to the cross for our sins and for our salvation. Christ did not do away with suffering. He did not even wish to unveil to us entirely the mystery of suffering. He took suffering upon Himself and this is enough to make you understand all its value. All of you who feel heavily the weight of the cross, you who are poor and abandoned, you who weep, you who are persecuted for justice, you who are ignored, you the unknown victims of suffering, take courage. You are the preferred children of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of hope, happiness and life. You are the brothers of the suffering Christ, and with Him, if you wish, you are saving the world."
I’ve been quite sick for coming up on two months now, which may have affected the above choice of topic. Although probably not by much: I have the kind of personality for whom the memoirs of Raissa Maritain should carry a content warning.
I’ve been working on some longer pieces recently. Two for substack, a piece on conscience and a series on the future of the Church, should be up fairly soon. My New Statesman debut - an essay on Britain after Christianity - is online here, and a short Lent review of mine for The Tablet can be found here.
Also for Lent: along with some of my friends, I’ve been fasting and praying for the release of Jessica Reznicek, a Catholic Worker serving an eight-year prison term her sabotage of pipeline construction machinery was defined as “terrorist” by judicial fiat. You can read a Rolling Stone piece about her case here; you can find more information about our action here and on this twitter thread; and you can support Jessica in other ways, including writing to her, here.
Please pray for Jessica if you can; she needs it. We all do.
Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world - Pascal tells us - we must not sleep during that time.
Wishing you a quiet night and a perfect end.☩
I really needed this. God bless you.