Love for the Cross

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

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.

We're told in the liturgy, and also in St. Paul, that “we should glory in the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (cf. Gal. 6:14; Entrance Antiphon, Easter Triduum). Interesting words.

This meditation is about loving the Cross and thanking Our Lord for the crosses that He sends us.

Fulton Sheen says, “God loves us too much to leave us comfortable in our sins. Because the violinist wants the best from his violin, he tightens its strings in penitential disciplines until they can give forth the perfect note. If endowed with consciousness, the violin would probably protest the sacrifice it had to make, in preparation for the perfection it was destined to attain” (Fulton Sheen, Life Is Worth Living).

And so we are like the violin. Sometimes, Our Lord demands a little bit more from us. But all the saints tell us that God is blessing us with His Cross.

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque says, “Every cross is precious to a heart that loves its God, and wants to be loved by Him” (The Letters of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque).

St. Robert Bellarmine says, “If the angels of Christ's birth sang glory to God in the highest because of the humility of the crib, much more do they sing the same hymn with greater exultation, because of the humility of the Cross.”

St. Elizabeth of the Trinity says, “There is no wood like that of the Cross for lighting the fire of love in the soul” (The Complete Works of Elizabeth of the Trinity Volume 2).

We find Our Lord speaking frequently about this phenomenon of the cross. “In all truth I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest” (John 12:24).

We can see how the things Our Lord says to us about the cross—that the cross is a blessing that comes from God.

“Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus,” says St. Paul, “who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5-8).

Our Lord invites us to follow Him along the pathway to the cross. St. Josemaría used to say that joy and happiness in this world have their “roots in the form of a cross” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Forge, Point 28).

We try to run away from the crosses that God sends us, and we don't find happiness. Usually, the crosses that God sends us are little things every day: changes of plans, or things that go wrong, things that don't work out, pieces of bad news. Or our football team doesn't win the match, we lose a match or some game that we're involved in.

These are the little crosses of each day, but Our Lord is waiting for us. And He wants us to try and carry those crosses with cheerfulness.

St. Josemaría used to say, “In cheerfulness, in joy, no day without a cross” (Christ Is Passing By, Point 176).

Pope Benedict, in one of his earliest discourses as pope, said, “The Cross is the way to transformation. Without it, nothing is transformed” (cf. Benedict XVI, Address, July 25, 2005).

And so, each little cross that God may permit in our life is like a divine call.

Usually, the crosses are small things on a daily basis, but there might be occasions when God gives us spear crosses.

I was asked by a lady in another country who had become a Catholic to go and visit her husband who had just had an operation in hospital. She had converted to Catholicism, and he had converted much more recently.

Then he got two cancers, one in his larynx and one in his thyroid, sort of a double whammy. She asked me to go and see her husband in the hospital. He was a very important teacher at a university, and he loved his teaching.

The cancer in his larynx meant that his larynx might have to be removed and he wouldn't be able to teach anymore. I was expecting, when I went to see him, that he would say to me, “Look Father, why this? Why now? Why me?”

But as soon as I walked into the hospital room, before I could say anything, he said, “Father, I see this as a wake-up call for my children. I have three daughters: 19, 20, and 21, they're all in university, and they're having a good time. They don't know what life is all about.”

It was a very positive, supernatural approach to what was not a small cross.

In The Forge, Point 772, St. Josemaría says, “These are the unmistakable signs of the true Cross of Christ: serenity, a deep feeling of peace, a love which is ready for any sacrifice, a great effectiveness which wells from Christ's own wounded side. And always—and very evidently—cheerfulness: a cheerfulness which comes from knowing that those who truly give themselves are beside the cross and therefore beside Our Lord.”

And so, we can thank Our Lord for the crosses that He sends us—the small things, and also the big things.

There might be one or two bigger things that come in the course of our life, or of our marriage, or our family, that we never expected would happen to us, and possibly that thing is not going to go away. Maybe it's here to stay.

Then you can be sure that that's your pathway to holiness. ‘This is where God wants me to live out my Christian vocation.’

Or there might be other little contradictions, injustices. St. Josemaría used to use the adjective “providential” injustices. If we see those injustices that happen to us as coming from the hands of God, then we'll be able to keep our peace and our serenity.

Or sometimes God might allow misunderstandings, miscommunications, or all sorts of other things that might go wrong in the course of a day.

We find that the Holy Spirit comes to us through the wounds of the Crucifixion. When there's no Cross, there's no Holy Spirit.

Our Lord invites us to love the cross, as opposed to hatred for the cross.

The bad thief on Calvary has hatred for the cross. “Let Christ, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now for us to see it and believe” (Mark 15:32). With these words, even those who were crucified with Him were taunting Him.

Come down off that silly cross and then we will believe—this is what the enemies of the Church say to the Catholic Church.

Come down from your belief in the sacredness of every human life, or in the sanctity of marriage, or in the theology of the body, or in the belief that every marriage act must be open to the transmission of human life.

Or your belief that homosexuality is wrong, or that divorce is wrong, or that IVF is wrong, or that the morning-after pill is wrong.

Come down off all those silly crosses. Give in to the new truth—that the truth is merely what is pleasing, that gives rise to good feelings.

But Christ didn't come down off the Cross. He stayed there three long hours. He didn't listen to these taunts.

There's wisdom in the cross. There's light on the cross. There's joy in the cross. There's rest in the cross, because we know this is the will of God for us. ‘This is my pathway to holiness.’

Often the cross of each day is in the fulfillment of our duties. Sometimes those duties can be very easy to fulfill. But sometimes they might cost us our life's blood.

We might not feel like fulfilling our duty. We might be tired, or lazy, or there might be an important football match or TV program we'd prefer to be doing or watching.

We can try to offer Our Lord the martyrdom of little things, of the fulfillment of our duties in the small things: making our bed in the morning, putting order in our cabinet, leaving the bathroom tidy after we've used it, ready for the next person—giving out that sanctifying value of little things, which are great when done for love.

Often, it's the difficult things that make us improve. An athlete who is training for the Olympics or to improve their game or their standing, they have to go out of themselves, they have to demand a little more from themselves. They have to face the challenges of the difficult things.

Or we may find that God is asking us to do more fasting—possibly not just from food, but maybe from anger; discouragement; or complaining, whether it's external complaining or interior complaining; or judgments, or resentments, or bitterness, or grudges. Or maybe from spending. There's a whole pile of things we can fast from.

Or God may be waiting for us to give of ourselves a little more. We could ask Our Lord for the grace to be more demanding on ourselves, and less demanding on others. Sometimes the devil may drive us to be more demanding of others.

We could ask Our Lord that we might bear with joy, for love of Christ, the discomforts, or the scarcity of means, or all the consequences of the real detachment that we're called to live, or the extra demands that our family, our friends, our boss may make upon us, so that in those things we might live the virtue of generosity, or the virtue of professionalism, or to be very responsible.

Our Lord might ask us to mortify our tongue: “to keep that witty remark on the tip of our tongue” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 173), or that other caustic remark.

Or He may ask us to take care of our health. Put a little bit of effort into getting more exercise, walking, or whatever it may be, just to be in better shape, so that we last longer, and we give ourselves generously in those little sacrifices.

Or He may ask us to accept with love, as wanted by God for our growth, all the little sufferings, physical and moral: a common head cold, stomach pain, a bit of arthritis.

Or the other emotional pains we might feel from time to time, from pieces of bad news or other things that may happen to us; little hurts or little insults that unknowingly or unwittingly other people may pass in our direction. Or the effort to handle our limitations.

If we have desires to co-redeem, then those desires will be freely taken up. “Not my will, rather yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

Those desires to co-redeem lead us not just to accept, but to seek, with generosity, to outdo ourselves in our duty and in our sacrifice.

Love is active. It seeks. It doesn't just wait.

The Church invites us to contemplate the Cross and ask for the strength of love to carry it.

Many of the saints say that Christ is a book of wisdom and the center of that wisdom is the Cross.

Supreme Love revealed. Christ could have saved us in many other ways: by clicking His fingers, by not shedding all His Blood.

But if He had done it in other ways, man would not have known the extent of God's love for him.

Sometimes the cross may come in unexpected ways: loss of a loved one, a change of plan, or we fail in something. St. Paul says, “How inscrutable his judgments, how unsearchable his ways” (Rom. 11:33).

But all the time, when Our Lord sends the cross our way, we become more Christ-like. We put off the old person. We conquer that old self that's hidden deep inside us—that egoism, that self-love, which is the greatest enemy of our holiness.

St. Augustine says, “The Cross is a seat of learning. Through it, God reveals His infinite love.”

“At that time Jesus exclaimed, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to little children’” (Matt. 11:25).

There is a wisdom of the Cross that is opposed to the wisdom of the flesh.

We are reminded that the only victim is Christ. In The Way of the Cross at the Twelfth Station of St. Josemaría, we are told, “Love sacrifice; it is a fountain of interior life. Love the Cross, which is an altar of sacrifice. Love pain, until you drink, as Christ did, the very dregs of the chalice.”

We're also told by St. Paul that “your sadness will be turned into joy” (John 16:20). There may be human events that take place that elicit a normal human reaction of sadness, because we're human. But with a supernatural outlook, very quickly, that sadness can be turned into joy.

From the difficulties that God may permit or the failures that may occur in our life, we learn. We learn to be less judgmental of others and to make more allowances for their weaknesses when we see how weak we are ourselves.

We learn to understand others better. We see sometimes that God is at work here. Here is the finger of God, digitus Dei, working things out.

In the Old Testament Our Lord says, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Sometimes we need to say that to Our Lord in our prayer or remind ourselves of those words.

‘In these particular hours or days, I just need to be still and know that God is working in me or through me.’

In that way, we grow to a deeper intimacy with God. In The Way of the Cross, we say those beautiful words: “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.”

When our desire to serve is genuine, the only thing that we want to do is to fulfill the will of God. Many times each day, we could repeat the Morning Offering, as if telling Our Lord, ‘That offering that I made to you this morning—I really meant it.’

There may be unexpected crosses that occur. We're told in The Way of the Cross, “At times the Cross appears without our looking for it: it is Christ who is seeking us out. And if by chance, before this unexpected Cross which, perhaps, is therefore more difficult to understand, your heart were to show repugnance...don't give it consolations. And, filled with a noble compassion, when it asks for them, say to it slowly, as one speaking in confidence: ‘Heart: heart on the Cross! Heart on the Cross!’” (J. Escrivá, The Way of the Cross, Fifth Station).

There can be great apostolic value with the cross. The mysteries of life can have great apostolic value.

God can use our experience of the cross to bring souls closer to Him, maybe now or later in life. And so, there is a sweetness of the cross. Our Lord says, “My yoke is sweet and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30).

We see the providence of God taking place in little things. Sometimes, that cheerful reaction, that smile on the face of the cross, can be a big mortification.

G.K. Chesterton likes to say that of all the accounts of Christ on the Cross, one factor is missing: the joy of Christ on the Cross.

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it says, “The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle. Spiritual progress entails the struggle and mortification that gradually lead to living in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes. ‘He who climbs never stops going from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end. He never stops desiring what he already knows’” (St. Gregory of Nyssa, Homily; in Catechism, Point 2015).

In The Way, Point 213, we're told, “Jesus suffers to carry out the will of the Father. And you, who also want to carry out the most holy will of God, following the steps of the Master, can you complain if you meet suffering on your way?”

“We are blocks of stone,” we're told in Point 756 of The Way, “that can move and feel, that have a perfectly free will. God himself is the stonecutter who works on us, chipping off the rough edges, shaping us as he desires, with blows of the hammer and chisel.

“Don't let us try to draw aside, don't let us want to escape his will, for in any case, we won't be able to avoid the blows. We will suffer all the more, and uselessly—and instead of polished stone, ready for the work of building, we will be a shapeless heap of gravel that people will trample contemptuously under foot.”

We can ask Our Lord that we might have a deeper love and welcoming for the crosses that He sends us.

As Our Lady was beside the Cross all the way to the end, we know that she will trace the Sign of the Cross on our foreheads and help us to see that this is the holy will of God, and to love those crosses, just as she came to love the cross as she stood beside it.

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.

NJF