Forming Saints in the Domestic Church (The Cross)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

"And when they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, and the robbers, one on his right hand and the other on his left. And Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.' And when dividing his garments, they cast lots" (Luke 23:33-34).

These are the hours of the Crucifixion. As we were saying in the last meditation, the Church is in mourning for the death of Christ.

Holy Saturday is a silent day. The church is silent, the church is empty, not just because of the pandemic, but that's the way it's liturgically organized.

We live out these hours and moments in the company of Our Lady, trying to digest the lessons of Holy Week, and in particular, the lessons of the Cross, and to see what messages this has for the theme of this recollection, which is about forming saints in the domestic Church.

One of the central messages that Our Lord tells us this week is about the importance of the Cross and the centrality of the Cross.

John Paul II liked to say that we find the meaning and the purpose of our life in Christ (cf. John Paul II, Homily, August 14, 1993).

You can say even more: that we find the meaning and the purpose of our life in Christ on the Cross, because that's where Christ is at His greatest.

He is the eternal High Priest. He offers Himself to His Heavenly Father as a sacrifice, practicing the priestly virtues of humility, of obedience, of generosity, of sacrifice—virtues which, as Christian parents or families or family members, we are called to put into practice every day, to accept the little pinpricks that God may send us on a daily basis.

The changes of plans, the ups and downs, the setbacks, are also the more major crosses that God may want to visit us with in the course of our life.

A Standard Four little girl told me once, “Father, I hate carrots, and my mommy is always giving me carrots.”

I had to say to her, "You see, that has something to do with what Our Lord said in the Gospel. He said, ‘Unless you take up your carrots and follow me, you cannot be my disciple’” (cf. Matt. 16:24).

We all have our carrots: something, somehow, that God sends along that we didn't particularly want or we weren't expecting.

But you can be sure the hand of God is there.

He hopes, like His prayer in Gethsemane, that we will say, “Father, if you are willing, let these carrots pass from me; yet not my will, rather yours be done” (cf. Luke 22:42).

It's a very powerful prayer that Our Lord says in the ecstasy of His prayer in the garden.

The key word is the first word: “Father.” There is no contradiction between the fact that His Father God is about to visit Him with the greatest amount of human suffering that anybody ever experienced, and the fact that He is a loving, heavenly Father.

“If you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11).

Possibly the key word in that phrase is the word “more.” The Church teaches us that God blesses us with the cross. The cross is not a punishment. It's not damnation.

It is the means to our holiness.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle” (Catechism, Point 2015).

Holiness is in the Cross. It is in accepting the crosses and in thanking God for the crosses that He sends us.

I was impressed one time with a lady who had many major crosses in her life. She told me, "You know, Father, I thank God for the crosses that He sends me, because I realize it could be much worse.”

That's a very healthy thing. Acts of thanksgiving can be a very useful mechanism to help us to see the other side of the story.

If you have a pain in your shoulder someday, and you thank God for the pain in your shoulder or thank Him for the other thirty-five joints that seem to be working quite well this morning, that can change your whole day.

Acts of thanksgiving help us to see the good things, the blessings, and to see the crosses as blessings, because we realize it could be worse.

If the cross comes along in your marriage, or in your family, or in your health, or in your finances, or in your work, that's a good thing. Because when you have found the cross, then you have found Christ.

Christ is on the Cross.

If something comes along in your life that you weren't expecting—you thought, ‘This might never happen to me in my marriage, in my family,’ something totally unexpected and possibly something that's not going to go away, ‘this is my lot for eternity’—you can be sure that is your pathway to holiness.

This is the particular pathway that God has planned for you. It is in accepting that cross, and looking for the grace in the sacraments to learn how to handle it day by day, that you will find your fulfilment.

Also, in trying to carry the cross in your life or in your family, you will give that marvelous example that God has planned for all eternity that you would give your children: to be a Christian mother or father, so that they grow up knowing what that means.

They have a living example—a personification of Christ in their midst—who knows how to be cheerful and peaceful and joyful and optimistic and full of faith and full of hope.

The child will learn how to live those virtues in concrete circumstances, which they will surely find in their life: failing an exam, missing a shot, enduring some illness, having some accident; or some cross that may come up along later in their family, or in their marriage, or in their apostolate in reaching out to other people.

I am a great believer in the fact that when God sends us a cross, He sends us a great apostolic potential.

You may find a few months or years down the road, God brings you in contact with somebody who's carrying a similar cross. Because you've been there, you know how to help them. You become their Simon of Cyrene because Christ has formed you in that way.

A couple of years ago, a lady told me she had a miscarriage. She told me that the other mothers in the class where one of her children were, were very kind, very helpful, very attentive.

They really helped her very much through those three or four months of natural grieving that she had.

But she said, "There was one mother there who lost a seven-year-old child a few years previously, and that mother used to come and sit with me. It wasn't the things she said; it was just her silent presence. She knew what to say, but also what not to say. Sometimes she just sat there with me."

And she said, "All the other mothers were so kind and so good, but the contribution of that mother meant more than all the others.”

That lady had been there. She knew what was needed. She knew the word or the gesture that only those who have learned about love from the cross know is important.

The cross is very formative. We teach our children to carry the cross at times by saying “No" to them.

There's an American educationalist called Stenson who has a number of books around the place, who likes to say, “No is also a loving word” (James B. Stenson, Father, the Family Protector).

Children need to hear words of loving denial from time to time. When they're told they cannot have this, or they cannot do that, or they cannot have a mobile phone even when everybody else has one, or a whole series of other things, they learn in time how to accept that No.

And they learn how to say No to themselves, which is a very important message because Christ has told us: "Unless you deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me, you cannot be my disciple” (Matt. 16:24).

Our Lord invites us to teach those words of loving denial so people can learn self-denial. Ultimately, our holiness is all tied up in conquering our self-love.

The greatest problem in our spiritual life is that we love ourselves too much. That's called our pride, manifested in egoism and selfishness.

Ask God for the grace, and the Holy Spirit, for the grace to let you see the manifestations of your selfishness, of your pride, so that we become more aware of our self-love, because that's what we have to conquer.

Until we bring the enemy out from the shadows, we don't know who it is that we're fighting. It is against that enemy that our greatest battles have to be waged—to say No to ourselves, to control our anger, to practice charity, to suspend our judgments, to cut our tongue, or all the other little occasions that may lead us into sin.

One of the great subliminal messages of Holy Week is the gravity of sin.

Sin is so great that God had to die on a Cross and give every last drop of His blood, because He loved us so much.

Lord, help me to grow in my hatred for sin, and not just for mortal sin but also for venial sin.

Sometimes little children ask the question, “Father, is that a sin?” Or they ask, "Is that a mortal sin?” which is sort of the wrong question; as though if it was venial, it would be okay. But all sin hurts Our God.

A lady told me once, “Father, what have we done to Our God?"

We shouldn't just be fighting in the realm of mortal sin or venial sin.

Normally, we may find the cross in the little things of each day. A man told me once how the one thing that he disliked was going shopping with his wife to the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon and pushing the trolley up and down the lanes as she picked off different things and sometimes changed her mind.

He would get more and more exasperated. So his battle in his spiritual life was to keep his big mouth shut. He used to come back every week and say, “I managed not to say anything this week.”

He came back the next time and said, "I kept silent this week.”

The third week, he came back and said, "I think she's beginning to notice, because this week she turned around and said, 'What's the matter? Are you sick?’”

He had to say, "Can't you see I'm about to explode?”

Sometimes in those ordinary situations of family life, there can be great challenges to practice virtue, to be more Christ-like, to be more patient. “Charity is patient. Charity is kind” (1 Cor. 13:4).

By practicing those ordinary virtues in the ordinary situations of life, we teach our children around us to practice those virtues. They see what that means, what self-denial means.

When we live a spirit of service, when we go out of our way to help some other family or some person that's going through a rough time, or that needs our help, they see that we sacrifice our time, our energy, that we live family priorities, that we eat together each evening or whenever we can, especially in the holidays or weekends.

Living and giving time and energy and attention to your children can take a lot of effort.

There was a kid in a school once in Manila where I was for many years. I asked him—he was about seven or eight—"Do you say your night prayers?”

With great confidence he said, "Yes, always." I was a bit surprised to hear somebody say “always.”

I was a bit curious: “How come, ‘always?’”

He said, "Oh, myself and my brother, we have our dinner and then we get ready for bed. But we don't go to bed or to sleep until my daddy arrives home. When he parks the car, the first thing he does is he comes up the stairs, and he says our night prayers with us.”

That father was a busy executive. He came home tired from work every evening. But before even having dinner, he made sure he saw his children, every day, every night, even just for a few moments. And he prayed the night prayers with them.

This kid was able to say “always.” He has that example for his whole life—the example of the virtue of his father: tired, weary, but living those family priorities, transmitting that message to his children that ‘you are the most important thing in my life.’

That's a message we transmit in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of moments.

When they see our struggle, then children learn to have that backbone, that fortitude to go against the grain, to conquer their own selfishness, and their own egoism, and their own passions, and their own appetites and desires, so that they practice a certain self-mastery.

In the documents of the Church, you may often find those words: self-mastery, self-control.

It's not a word we hear too frequently in modern parlance, but it’s very important for children to learn that sort of message: to be in control of myself, my base tendencies, so that when it comes to study, I can apply my mind.

Even if my mind feels like it's in Hawaii, I bring it back and bring back my imagination to focus on the piece of paper that's in front of me—those words, that lesson, that I have to try and kick into my brain.

From our meditation on the Passion and the virtues of Christ that He practices there, we learn many wonderful things—to accept the will of God in all the ways that it comes to us.

At a meeting of priests in Singapore, where I used to live many years ago, an elderly Belgian missionary priest stood up and said, “I learned the meaning of vocation from a young married couple many years ago."

He said, “My first assignment as a missionary was in the United States. I got to know this young couple. They were 25 years of age. They were expecting their first baby, and the baby turned out to be a Down's baby.

“The doctor said to the mother, whose name was Nancy, 'Are you ready to accept this child? I can't tell you it's going to be easy. But I can tell you that for every ounce of love that you put into this baby, you're going to get a pound of love in return.’

“Nancy said, 'Yes, we're ready to accept whatever comes.’”

This priest said, “I was very moved by that: ‘we're ready to accept whatever comes.’"

He said, “I realized that's the meaning of vocation: to be ready to accept whatever comes."

All sorts of things may come in your marriage, in your family, but it’s always a blessing. God has other plans.

On that occasion, God used that young married couple to form the life of that priest and all the other priests to whom he shared this story. Now on a different continent, I’m sharing that story with you, all because of Nancy and her husband.

That priest said, “A couple of years later, I was asked to go and work in Rome and handle the architectural and the legal and the financial and the planning aspects of our organization all over the world.

“One day, somebody came to me and said, 'What are you doing here, working behind a desk in Rome? You are supposed to be a missionary priest. Why aren't you off in Alaska or Brazil someplace?’”

He said, “I got my answer from Nancy. I didn't ask for this job. I don't particularly like it. I'd much prefer to be somewhere else. Any other time but now. Any other place but here. Any other job but this. But,” he said, “I try to be ready to accept whatever comes. This is what came along.”

He said, "If somebody came to our organization and said, 'I'm willing to join your organization if I can work behind a desk in Rome and do all the jobs that I like,’ they would be told, 'I'm sorry, you don't have a vocation to our organization. The deal is that you have to be ready to accept whatever comes.’”

Someday, as a parent, as a father of a family, you may have to sweep a floor or wash the dishes or change a nappy or wash the car. With that, you show your children what it takes to build a home.

Everybody must be ready to do anything. That way we form ourselves to do all sorts of different jobs. We make ourselves useful and effective.

Sometimes that means carrying the cross, doing things we don't feel like doing, conquering our likes and dislikes, not allowing words to be part of our vocabulary like: “I feel like, I don't feel like; I want, I don't want.”

I fulfill my duty.

I heard recently that the governor of the Central Bank of Kenya organized a talk for the children of all the employees in that bank.

Some of the parents were very happy to hear that the governor was going to address their children. They all went along there thinking they were going to hear some very lofty words about the economy or about finance or investment or something.

He gave them some sort of a formative talk. The central moral or gist of it was: the most important thing that you can do at the moment in your life is to make your bed every morning.

They were not very impressed, but their mothers were: ‘I've been trying to tell them that for the last 10 years.’

Sometimes just to fulfill the ordinary duties in the home, irrespective of how we feel, can form us to be great people.

Somebody defined “professionalism” once as doing the best job we can do, irrespective of how we're feeling; providing a good service.

Peter Drucker has a book called The Effective Executive where he searches out and asks the question: “What makes people effective?"

He says people are effective because they don't just do good things; they do the right things.

And they do the right things because they ask themselves the right question, which is: “What can I contribute?" He said everybody in every organization has to ask themselves: "What can I contribute?”

In every family, at every meal, in every home, every day of the holidays, we have to try and teach people in our family to ask themselves that question.

I may need to pass somebody the salt. I may need to fill their glass with water. I may need to call my grandmother. I may need to finish off this little job in the garden.

What can I contribute? Sometimes those little things that we find that we can contribute, that nobody else can contribute, makes us effective.

Mother of a family, father of a family: try and work at being more effective in the formation of the saints that God has entrusted to your care; the formation of their souls.

Christmas, and the message of Christmas, in many ways, is easy to transmit. There are many material things that transmit the message. Easter, to a certain extent, has some material things; perhaps not so easy as Christmas.

Generally, Pentecost has nothing. We should try and lift up Pentecost on our screen—one of the greatest feasts of the whole of the liturgical year: the Holy Spirit coming to build up the Universal Church and the domestic Church.

If you can come out with a Pentecostal chapati or ugali, maybe you could enrich the family finances.

John Paul II says we go to the great spiritual messages through physical signs, material signs, and symbols: crucifixes, crosses, rosary beads, incense, ashes.

Our Church is full of physical signs and symbols: the Way of the Cross. These things get the message across to young children.

Try to foster those physical signs and symbols in your home: images of Our Lady, perhaps in each room, a crucifix somewhere, a place where the family gathers to pray. Make use of the symbols the Church gives us: palm branches or other things, holy water.

These transmit a message to the children; learn to form their soul also as they go through life.

These days, the Church gives us the very special symbol of the Cross. Teach your children to make the Sign of the Cross well.

For First Communion class in that school in Manila many years ago, I used to encourage the children to make their First Confession face to face, to see how they made the Sign of the Cross.

You would be amazed at all the variations that children can come up with when it comes to making the Sign of the Cross. And yet, that Cross is so central in our life.

These days remind us that we are called to be very Christo-centric. Each Easter that comes brings new graces for us to penetrate a little more deeply into the mystery of the Cross and into those wounds of Christ.

Fulton Sheen says there's an “eternal freshness in the wounds of Christ” (Fulton Sheen, YouTube, Classic Catholic Audiobooks, Meditation Podcast).

The Holy Spirit is there. There is peace, there is consolation, there is joy. “My yoke is sweet, my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). The Cross is sweet.

As we accompany Our Lady on this day, in her sorrow, but also in her hope, we can say: "Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.”

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JM