Redemptive Suffering and Resurrection Joy
© Sister M. Lucia Richardson, OSF 2010
When it comes to suffering, we have a great gift in our faith as Catholic Christians. We suffer differently, not like other religions or as the faithless, who see suffering as something to be detached from, meaningless, or only for solidarity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states in paragraph 309, “There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.” So what is the Christian message? That is what I would like to explore with you here.
God did not create suffering. He created good, and we are part of that (Cf. CCC 1). He loves us dearly, but He did not make us robots. He gave us choices. One choice: to choose ourselves or to choose Him. Our original parents had that choice. We had perfect unity in creation. We are created from and for unity, not for evil and suffering. However, that unity, both in creation and in our parents’ relationship, has been broken. This seems like a simple choice with simple consequences, but, in the large scheme of things, this choice has ripple effects throughout all of creation. It is almost as if creation needed to choose a side, and the choice was entrusted to us, humanity. We chose against what we were created for. We were created for unity with God, and the absence of that union resulted in suffering, evil and death entering creation. This was not meant to be.
God will not reverse our decision. He honors what we want—life with Him or without Him. His role is permitting suffering and respecting our freedom. It breaks His heart that we suffer, but He still allows it. Why? There is an innate sense that there is a power greater than suffering, which causes us to cry out, “Am I nothing to you?”
God’s answer was to show us the compassion (cum passio-“suffering-with”) of Christ on the Cross. He has taken an active role in our suffering, by sending Christ. Christ came to restore unity, and the path he chose to use was His own suffering—with, and for, us.
“For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.” - St. Augustine
The divorce that our original parents made from their relationship with God was too big for us to fix on our own. Since God created that relationship, only God could repair it. But humanity made the wound, so God became human to repair the wound. Suddenly, because the God-Man conquered death through suffering, evil and suffering have been transformed into means to conquer evil and death.
The way Christ invites us to suffer with him is through carrying the cross. For Christ, the cross was the actual instrument of his death. For us, our cross is the collection of sufferings that are part of our life and vocation. Because suffering is now a part of Christ’s work and redemption, we can share in that work of redemption by offering and uniting our wounds to Christ. The words “Offer it up” are not always helpful, but what does that actually mean? To offer means to give something to be used. We offer our sufferings to Christ so that He can use them, but we cannot offer something that we have not accepted as ours.
So how do we accept our sufferings and wounds? Acceptance is allowing our eyes to adjust to the darkness and recognize that Christ is there with us. It is choosing the crosses we did not choose, which is different from rebellion, resignation or hopelessness (Cf. Philippe, J. (2007). Interior Freedom.) . It is a yes to reality because of our hope for the good. A deep acceptance of our wounds also takes away the added pain and tension brought about by constantly rejecting suffering.
Our suffering—our wounds—are now no longer meaningless or purely negative; they are also sources of grace and points of intimacy with God. Christ is waiting in our wounds, to show us His particular love for us, in wounds that only He and I share. “The Sacred Heart desires other hearts that are pierced by suffering that he can pour himself into.” (Jacques Philipe, Time for God) In my particular vocation, I am married to Christ, and he is my suffering Spouse. He is nailed to one side of the Cross and I am nailed to the other. That cross in our marriage bed. But this can apply to all souls, because we are all called to union with Christ and have unique wounds that we only share with Christ.
Carrying the cross is a sacrifice of love, carried out in trusting obedience, through faith and in great hope. It is the way we journey on the Spiritual Life, and our cross is exactly what we need to become holy. When we carry our cross in union with Christ, we are participating in Christ’s redemptive work! There are souls out there that are waiting and looking for us to carry our cross with them so that they can carry their cross with Christ. In witnessing hope while we carry our cross, we reveal the power and goodness of God.
Some graces that I can really appreciate in retrospect have been the sufferings in my life, and how the Lord has used me to witness His love to others. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4) This is where I find my personal charism, my vocation within a vocation. The Lord has allowed me to encounter many people whose parents are divorced, something that I experienced four times before I was 24. These experiences left me afraid of commitment, abandonment, and rejection. The more I focused on the pain, the more inward I turned, away from God and away from others. Occasionally, in those scared places, I would hear God’s voice whisper His love to me, and He gave me the grace to turn toward him and claim purpose in my suffering. This has been the greatest consolation I could ever ask for.
Through vulnerable honesty in prayer, through spiritual direction and prayer journaling, and through quiet moments with the Lord in prayer, I now believe that the Lord invited me to share in these sufferings of His on behalf of my brothers and sisters around the world who live with the pain of a shattered family and all of the accompanying wounds. There was a time that the Lord challenged me, and told me in prayer that I was living my spiritual motherhood as a single mom. Despite the fact that this made sense for me, it still broke my heart. The Lord wanted me to lean on him; He wanted to be on a team with me. He wanted to grow life in others with me.
I had to believe him, and my faith has never been failed by His promises. My hope in Him has been proven in the healing that He has accomplished in my life. In the Eucharist, he has healed my abandonment wounds by His continuous presence, and has drawn to His presence in others instead of pulling away. It is here—in the re-presentation of Christ’s Paschal mystery of his passion, dying, and rising—where we can unite our sufferings to Christ’s and see them become life-giving. When the bread and wine are offered at mass, we can offer our sufferings and struggles with those gifts. We can offer our sufferings as a sacrifice, just as Christ did, in order to give us life. Then our sufferings take part in the life of the Church and of others. This is where the cross meets the altar. It is a sacrifice and offering of our prayers up to God on the altar of our hearts.
Redemptive suffering is the answer to our prayer and the key to happiness and love in relationships. Christ did not come to remove all our suffering on this earth, but to fill it with His presence. St. Peter tells us, “By His wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24) The resurrected Christ still has His wounds; they have become part of His glory and the life He has to offer the world. His wounds radiate God’s healing into the world.
“Within thy wounds hide me” is a line from one of my favorite prayers, the Anima Christi. When we ask Christ to hide us in his wounds, we become very familiar with them. We become familiar with Christ’s wounds as we become more familiar with our own. He never asks us to suffer without Him. We are not meant to suffer alone. Throughout our whole lives He is suffering with us, but only comes as close to us as we allow him. He is a gentleman—He does not barge into our lives and demand that we are close to Him. He gives us a choice that is just like the choice our first parents had: to choose ourselves or to choose Him. Let us choose to allow Him to draw close to us in our suffering and bring us His joy. The joy of the Resurrection.
“For the joy set before Him, he endured the cross, heedless of its shame.” (Hebrews 12:2) When we unite our sufferings with Christ, we can experience true joy. Not just the emotion, or having a joyful temperament. Joy is a choice that no one can change; it is very different from always looking on the bright side. We can have joy even when suffering because it is not contingent on having positive circumstances; it means living in the presence of God no matter what is happening. Each day we can see the grace of God carrying us, providing for us and raising us from the death of sin. This gives us great joy. St. Francis understood this sort of joy. St. Francis wrote the Canticle of the Creatures and the Praises of God towards the end of his life. He was suffering intensely with cataracts, so much so that any light painfully pierced his eyes. Yet, because he knew that he was suffering with Christ and could offer his suffering to Christ for the salvation of others, he was able to have true joy. He had the ability to live beyond his feelings and see his sufferings as part of a much bigger process of the redemption of the world. He was able to see through the suffering and find beauty, purpose and joy.
As we continue to walk with our wounds each day, let us unite ourselves to the suffering Christ. Let us watch him transform our wounds into life-giving wounds, just like his glorified wounds in his resurrected body. Just imagine the beauty of Heaven, after the resurrection of the body, when we will be able to see our wounds and all of the ways that our wounds made us more like Christ and became life-giving for others. Until then, let us ask Him with great faith, hope and love to show us how to carry our crosses, bear our wounds, and join Him in the little resurrections that He shows us each day.
I would like to leave you with this little meditation, the words of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Fifth Movement: Resurrection.
“O believe, my heart, oh believe,
Nothing will be lost to you!
Everything is yours that you have desired,
Yours, what you have loved, what you have struggled for.
O believe,
You were not born in vain,
Have not lived in vain, suffered in vain!
What was created must perish,
What has perished must rise again.
Tremble no more!
Prepare yourself to live!
O Sorrow, all-penetrating!
I have been wrested away from you!
O Death, all-conquering!
Now you are conquered!
With wings that I won
In the passionate strivings of love
I shall mount
To the light to which no sight has penetrated.
I shall die, so as to live!
Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My heart, in an instant!
What you have conquered
Will bear you to God.”
—GUSTAV MAHLER
Prayer (Adapted from a quote by St. Francis de Sales)
Heavenly Father, we know that Your wisdom has foreseen from eternity the cross that you present to us, as a gift from Your inmost heart. This cross you send us you have considered with Your all-knowing eyes, understood with Your divine mind, tested with Your wise justice, warmed with Your loving arms and weighed with Your own hands to see that it be not one inch too large and not one ounce too heavy for us. You have blessed it with Your holy Name, anointed it with Your consolation, taken one last glance at us and our courage, and then sent it to us from heaven, a special greeting from God to each one of us, an alms of the all-merciful love of God. Help us to accept this gift and allow it to draw us closer to you. Amen.
About the Author:
Sister M. Lucia Richardson, OSF is a religious sister of the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration. Born and raised in the Midwest, she has been blessed with the grace of knowing God's love and healing presence in the midst of much family turbulence, separation and divorce. Eucharistic Adoration and life with her Sisters in community bring her an abundance of joy that she loves sharing with others each day.
About the Image:
I drew this image the Lent before I entered religious life. I deeply desired to have a large family of my own, but was confident and grateful for my newly discovered vocation. Life was changing, and I struggled a lot with change. In prayer, I understood the Lord calling me to a place of intimacy with Him, through accepting all of these little crosses that were part of my present and would be part of my future. His wounded hands showed the marks of His Cross, and my wounds would be the mark of mine. But in His hands, my cross was small. Not in the sense that it was less and I should be grateful, but in the sense that He is greater, more powerful, than anything I will face in my life. My crosses become a gift from Him to me. They fit me perfectly, like a yoke, and He will carry His right alongside me.
Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals
Where are you in your relationship with suffering? Do you find it meaningless or isolating?
What was your understanding of redemptive suffering prior to reading this article? How did it change after reading this article?
Reflect on this passage: “In my particular vocation, I am married to Christ, and he is my suffering Spouse. He is nailed to one side of the Cross and I am nailed to the other. That cross in our marriage bed. But this can apply to all souls, because we are all called to union with Christ and have unique wounds that we only share with Christ.” What unique wounds do you share with Christ in the intimacy of your relationship with Him?
Meditate on the line “The divorce that our original parents made from their relationship with God...” Had you thought about original sin as a divorce of humanity from our creator before? How does that resonate with you?
How does the image by the author speak to you?