"There is a fathomless mystery in Jesus' cry of abandonment, in which he gathers every cry of humanity. This is a cry of labor for the 'new creation,' of our new birth as sons and daughters of God.
Yet, this labor is not accomplished without us. Jesus' extreme love impels us to live every suffering - as much as we are given - like him and in him.
And we can do it.
We can if, in each personal suffering and in those of others, we recognize a shadow of his infinite suffering, an aspect, an expression of his. Then, each time this suffering shows itself, we do not distance ourselves from it, but accept it fully as if we were accepting him. Forgetting ourselves, we cast our whole being into what God asks of us in the present moment, in the neighbor he places before us, motivated only by love. Then, very often we will see our sufferings vanish as if by some magic, and only love remains in the soul.
To treasure each suffering as one of the countless faces of Jesus crucified, and to unite our suffering to his, means to enter into his own dynamic of suffering-love. It means to participate in his light, his strength, his peace; it means to rediscover within us a new and abundant presence of God."
--Testimony of Hope by Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận
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1 comment:
To love is to suffer, isn't it? There is just no way around it. If we love someone, all of their hurts become our hurts. Still, it is a treasure to love, but harder to embrace the suffering that comes with it. I like the confident words in this post "we can do it".
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