Suffering and the Cross

The following is a transcipt of a talk given by Craig for an ACTS Retreat group in 2019

I don’t know about everyone here, but I’ve struggled with suffering and carrying the cross but God’s been slowly helping me with this. Our topic for tonight, to kick off lent, is the cross, for how we carry our crosses determines not only if we get to Heaven, but the extent of our eternal bliss and we should all want a seat at the front of the throne.

We can’t receive the Holy Spirit in the same way if we are not open to bearing our crosses with love. For the Catholic Christian, the cross is the preeminent sign of our faith and that’s for a reason. I heard it mentioned that there are 3 purposes for the cross and this really helped me so I wanted to go over these. Crosses purify us number one, two, they sanctify us, and three, all crosses unite us to Our Lord.[1]

Number one crosses purify us. I know in my life with my kids for example, when I have gotten too attached to certain children God would often allow them to break a bone, for example, and then I couldn’t work so hard let’s say on sports. At other times when I would not be spending enough time with a child, they would have a more serious accident and God then forces me to spend forced time with them in the hospital and then all that time in PT etc. so that I don’t take them for granted.

I see the purifying cross all the time with my clients, often married men who are too familiar with other women and not being pure, at least emotionally, and then something happens to them, they get tension headaches and are no longer able to hang out with other women or in bars, for example. They get the purifying cross. If we are aware of how much God loves us and that nothing happens unless he allows it, anytime that we as Catholics get a cross we should at least be open to asking God if there is something that he is trying to purify us from.

Secondly, crosses sanctify us, meaning, they make us more like God, and worthy of being with God for all eternity who is Holiness itself. So, these are crosses that are not given to purify us of current sins. Think of all the crosses that the Blessed Mother carried or many saints. They were not given by God as a remedy for sin, but to purify their charity so that their love and merit could be increased through their surrender and death to self. For many of us I think the sanctifying cross works to sanctify our selfishness from original sin and attachments as opposed to purifying us from current sins.

By the way it is not our sinfulness that keeps us from God. God doesn’t love us for anything that we can do, He loves us in spite of our sins, as long as we are always striving to correct them. It’s our attachments that pose the greatest obstacle to our sanctification. As an aside, when one consecrates themselves to Mary, she then takes it upon herself personally to break every attachment that keeps us from God. But as the best of mother’s she does it ever so gently.

There is no better way to do this than the sanctifying cross. Nothing detaches us from our sin natures and our tendencies to choose ourselves than the cross. Nothing detaches us from the allure of the world and all its sins and temptations than the cross. Nothing detaches us from the devil and the power that the demons receive over us through past sins than the cross.

Detachment from the world, our fallen flesh, and Satan, our 3 foes in the spiritual life, all occurs through the cross, for crosses sanctify us the most so that we are free to love God and our neighbor. Without the sanctifying cross, we are left with all of our attachments, we are not set apart, not made holy, we do not have the freedom to love God and to do His will.

Within marriage God puts the cross within the fabric of marriage, indeed within the marital act itself, in that he has tied sex’s pleasure to life and the sanctifying crosses that children represent in terms of the death to self-entailed in raising children for Heaven. We are rejecting all of this today through our culture of death, through abortion and artificial contraception, instead of using natural family planning for serious reasons for spacing our children. Therefore, families are not being sanctified through the natural means that God intended.

Children are the ordinary means for spouses’ sanctity in God’s design, and when they are rejected, we are rejecting our holiness through the sanctifying crosses that they represent. Remember there is no glory without the sanctifying cross. These things are serious sins, because they prevent our sanctity in a serious way, as well as the human lives that God had planned for all eternity, warriors for the kingdom, no wander Satan is so strong today. Hillary Clinton asked Mother Teresa some time ago before she ran for president why she thought there wasn’t a woman president yet. Mr. Teresa said, because of, Trump. No, seriously, she responded in answer to the question of why there wasn’t one yet, that she was probably aborted.

Thirdly, crosses unite us to our Lord. St. Dismus, the good thief on the cross, is a great example of this. He encounters our Lord in the most intimate way on the cross, and there is no way this would have been possible otherwise. Through his cross he finds true humility saying that both he and the bad thief are worthy of their sentences. We are deserving of our sentences because of our sins too.

He then shows true faith and hope. His suffering leads Him to believe that Jesus is God and to trust in Jesus for the first time in his great need saying, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom”,[2] he asks through his new found faith, born of the cross.

Finally, Dismus’s cross gives him the opportunity to practice divine love for he defends our Lord Himself to the bad thief saying, have you no fear of God for blaspheming Him because of your cross. The same is true for us when we carry our crosses with humility, faith, hope, and love, we defend our Lord similarly to Dismus. Actually, in the earliest Catechism of the first Christians called the Didache, it lists complaining under the sin of blasphemy, like the bad thief. Since God is in control of all things, complaining was considered tantamount to cursing Him from a lack of trust for the crosses that He allowed. So too with all of us at some level.

Lastly, this encounter by Dismus on the cross, this union with Jesus through the cross ended up saving his soul, “this day, (Jesus said), you shall be with me in paradise”.[3] So too with us, our crosses purify us, they sanctify us, they unite us to our Lord, and in the process, like Dismus, they save our souls. And all of these are often going on at the same time.

No one understood the necessity of the cross better than the saints. They wanted to be united with our Lord the most in time and in eternity so they sought out the cross. They were not happy unless they had something to offer to God and “the greatest saints were those who suffered the most”,[4] to quote St. John Vianney. I am not saying that we have to seek out crosses, I know I have enough trouble just carrying the ones I already have. But it is good to focus on the ones that we do have. “He who seeks his life shall lose it”,[5] but he who loses himself through the cross, shall find me, and through me, shall find and save his immortal soul.

What I am often the most grateful for in this life are the worst things that my family had to go through looking back in hind sight. They caused us to have to rely upon God so much more and to mistrust myself to a whole new level, which, by the way is humility, and the opposite of this, until I had these crosses is pride. However, it is not easy, and the bigger the crosses the harder it is, the more we need to rely on God, that’s his plan, and the more we are called to grow in union with Him in this life and in the next.

If you have a really big cross, know that you have not been rejected and are not despised by God, He actually is showing you the greatest love by giving you the potential to love Him more than many others, for His greatest gift in this life is the ability to love him purely through the cross. This is how we merit eternal life and an increase in glory and reward and happiness, but it is not easy. That’s why we have the rosary and the Eucharist and each other to “bear one another’s burdens.”[6] We were never made to go through our crosses alone. They were hand hewn from all eternity so that, through them, we would be forced to turn to God, so that we can grow closer to Him and to one another.

God does not cause them, but He allows evil so that He can draw a greater good out of it and us becoming united to Him and to one another is the fruit and the blessing and the goal. We just can’t always see it, what God is doing, but through terrible things, God accomplishes the greatest things. Just look at the worst thing in the history of the world, the torture and killing of God Himself, deicide. Nothing is as infinitely bad as this and look at what this wrought, our redemption and the chance for all humanity to get to Heaven if we so choose.

From the worst has truly come the very best and so too in our lives and with our crosses, we just might not be able to see this for a while, sometimes maybe not even within our lifetimes. Know that when God appears conquered hiding his power from us through the cross, he is conquering all the more such as with His own son and our redemption when it looked like Satan had won. So too with every single one of us here tonight.

So too in our world currently, where God, through Marxist atheism, is appearing conquered by allowing Satan to think that he is the sure victor in the world and within the Church, to quote Saint Pope Paul the VI in 1972, who said that “the smoke of satan has entered even within the (Church), itself”. It is through our prayers and above all our suffering offered as spiritual coin and weaponry to God that in the end, God will conquer through the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary over the greatest error the world has ever known, the heresy of modern atheism.

What messes me up the most I think in carrying my crosses with love, is my imagining of what my life would have been like or what I dreamed it would be like in the future when this future is different from reality. Or as Socrates (allegedly) phrased it, “what screws us up the most in life is the picture in our head of what it's supposed to be”.

This is especially true I think in our culture which is centered on disordered self-love and says that you can have your cake and eat it too. It says you can be a faithful Catholic and follower of Christ and still sin. You can have all the pleasure you want and suffering gets in the way of this and so suffering is the greatest evil and to be avoided at all cost. Like St. Peter who tried to convince our Lord that he could avoid the cross, we are saying as never before in our world, not to Jesus but about ourselves and the cross, God forbid, if suffering shall ever happen to us.[7]

But suffering is redemptive, suffering gets us to Heaven and the greatest places in Heaven and we should all want a place at the front of the throne and we aren’t going to get it if we live for ourselves and avoid the cross. The greatest evil in the world and in our times is not suffering, its sin. It’s my sins, which nailed my God to the cross.

Jesus death on the cross was conceived by Satan. The same with all the bitter suffering in the world, take Auschwitz, sexual assault, any of it, all of it was conceived in Hell, as it’s the devil who plants these thoughts in human hearts. What God showed one of my clients who could not trust Him as a result of her suffering is that what the devil conceives is not a child, but an antichild so to speak. What he plants with that is the idea that God doesn’t love His children. Because the devil is a liar it is the furthest thing from the truth. That’s the classic argument of the atheist, how can God exist if He allows suffering? So suffering is a part of Satan’s plan for us to try and destroy our faith in God.

One reason that God permits these evils is because God’s overcoming it is a great glory, it reveals His Glory. It is not that His glory is more important than the suffering of his children, however.

He showed my client that Jesus would have suffered the greatest suffering there is because he suffered the weight of the world’s sins, and He is God, so the distance is infinite, the weight is infinitely more because it’s the perfect God suffering to the utmost degree.

He showed her if God did not spare His only son, who was sinless, who are we to say that we should be spared any suffering. Which illustrates how bad sin is, but also shows Christ living out the redemption in each of us and calling us to be part of it. That’s what St. Paul said, to paraphrase “through my sufferings I make up for what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ”.[8]

Suffering can be an act of God’s mercy as odd as that may sound because really our sins deserve eternal punishment, He showed her. So for God to give us something smaller and make it meritorious for us and other souls, and our life in Heaven, is a great act of mercy. So there is really no injustice in God permitting suffering, because it’s really less in justice than what God could allow. There is certainly injustice if one human being causes another to suffer, however.

God showed her that it’s also a lie from Satan to think that a good father doesn’t let his children suffer in a fallen world, in a perfect world maybe, if Adam and Eve hadn’t fallen. But in a fallen world a father has to let his children suffer, so that they learn not to do something that they are not supposed to do in terms of natural consequences, or so that a child learns to make a sacrifice of love, which is a greater good. We can freely choose to suffer for love.

Love is always overabundant so it makes up for the lack of love and evil and then some, so effectively, in a fallen world she was shown, it is only not unjust, but necessary for us to experience some suffering because we can always be growing in charity. Even those who are very holy can experience suffering so their charity can be greater. Even Mary who had no sin still had to grow in suffering in terms of her offering on the cross and even her whole life, because suffering is an offering of one’s love which causes an increase in charity, for through Mary’s suffering it was a giving up of herself. Every little suffering is an offering of yourself because you are giving up what you have.

The only suffering that’s worthless is the suffering that we don’t give to God; the suffering that we don’t allow to bear spiritual fruit. It’s actually a gift for God to allow us to have suffering in this life, rather than in Purgatory, because when He allows us to offer it here, we are closer to Him and will be closer to Him in Heaven, whereas in Purgatory, there is no merit to it.

You could even say, with people who’ve suffered, God showed this client, that maybe they didn’t cooperate with God to bring the greatest good out of it. So for example, in Auschwitz, the grace that God offered to Maximillian Colby, maybe He offered to every one there, but maybe He is the only one who took God up on it.[9] Or at Catholic supply recently, the woman who said, no as well[10]. She would have made use of the grace God gave her and died a martyr’s death for the sake of chastity.

So God allowing suffering wouldn’t be some injustice on God’s part, because even our smallest sins should merit more than all of our suffering to date, because of whom they offend, remember we talked about that in the faith talk, we judge our sins by whom we sin against, so even the least sins should merit infinite suffering because they are committed against God who is infinite.

Also, it wouldn’t be a case of God being a bad father, because God certainly teaches us things through our suffering and quite possibly spares us from other things we might have done had we not had to depend on God because of our suffering. Finally, we all have to undergo trials to show our love for God. Suffering allows us to love God for His own sake, so it purifies our love.

I want to close with a brief excerpt from St. Thomas More on tribulations who was martyred for the Faith, but first I want to say that carrying our crosses is not the same as needing healing from trauma. All of us have our breaking points where suffering overwhelms our mind. That’s called PTSD and all of us carry some level of dissociation from this. It’s not just from a war or abuse, but simply anything that overwhelms us in life. The cross is meant to get us to go to God but lasting psychological trauma that comes from suffering is not of God and He wants us to get this healed. In fact, it’s a principle that God allows our hidden pain that we all carry to get triggered so that we will get the healing that is often necessary.

In closing here is St. Thomas More[11] on tribulations:

“God sends us also such tribulation sometimes, because His pleasure is to have us pray to Him for help….When the disciples in the tempest stood in fear of drowning, they prayed to Christ and said: ‘Save us, Lord, we perish.’ And then at their prayer He shortly ceased the tempest. And many a man in his great pain and sickness, by calling upon God, is marvelously made whole. This is God’s goodness, that because in wealth we remember Him not, but forget to pray to Him, sends us sorrow and sickness to force us to draw toward Him, and compels us to call upon Him and pray for release of our pain.”

If we lay first, for a sure ground, a very fast faith, whereby we believe to be true all that scripture says (understood truly, as the old holy doctors declare it and as the spirit of God instructs his Catholic church), then shall we consider tribulation as a gracious gift of God, a gift that he specially gave his special friends; a thing that in scripture is highly commended and praised; a thing which, the contrary, long continued, is perilous; a thing which, if God send it not, men have need to put upon themselves and seek by penance; a thing that helps to purge our past sins; a thing that preserves us from sins that otherwise would come; a thing that causes us to set less by the world; a thing that much diminishes our pains in purgatory; a thing that much increases our final reward in heaven; the thing with which all his apostles followed him there; the thing to which our Savior exhorts all men; the thing without which he says we are not his disciples; the thing without which no man can get to heaven.[12]

[1] Peter Gruters. [2] Luke 23:42. [3] Luke 23:43 (parenthesis is mine). [4] Thoughts of the Cure D”ars, compiled and arranged by W.M.B, TAN, 1984. [5] Matt 10:39. [6] Gal 6:2. [7] Matt 16:22 [8] Col 1:24. [9] St. Maximillian Colby is a saint who freely chose to be a martyr in Auschwitz, trading places and saving the life of a man with a family who was going to be executed in a German concentration camp during WWII. [10] In 2019 Thomas Bruce sexually assaulted 2 women in a Catholic Supply in St. Louis, Missouri, shooting and killing the third, Jamie Schmidt, when she refused. [11] King Henry VIII’s favorite, Thomas More became the first layman to become Lord Chancellor of England. In refusing to support King Henry in his desire to divorce his wife, Katherine, in order to have a male heir to the throne, Thomas was convicted of treason, held in the Tower of London for one year, and finally beheaded when he would not acquiesce. His famous last words before his martyrdom were, “I die the Kings good servant, but God’s first.” So St. Thomas knew a thing or two about suffering and his words on the topic are born from intimate knowledge of the topic and of Christ Himself, through the sharing of His cross. [12] Spirituality for All Times Readings form the Catholic Classics, Ronda Chervin, Ph. D. and Kathleen Brouillette, ENROUTE, 2015, pgs 192-193.