And that is when we feel disconnected from God. A burden becomes a heavy burden when it doesn’t feel connected to anything else. It is a burden that we have to carry by ourselves and is not shared. It is not part of anything larger. It just sits there and presses us down, down, down.
Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He says, “Take up my burden. It is the burden of the whole world and it will be a light burden. Take up my yoke and it will prove to be an easy yoke” (Matthew 11:30).
This is the mystery of the Christian life. It is not that God came to take our burden away or to take our cross away or to take our agony away. No. God came to invite us to connect our burden with God’s burden, to connect our suffering with God’s suffering, to connect our pain to God’s pain.
The great invitation of the Christian life is to live a life of connectedness with the Son of God who died broken. It is an invitation to dare to live connected to God who wants to give us his burden as a light burden because it is a burden that God has already carried for us.
There is more. Not only is God compassionate with us, but we have to be willing to be compassionate with God. We have to compati with God. Compati is Latin for “suffer with”—we need to suffer with God.
The invitation to suffer with God is probably the most profound thing that we see in the Christian tradition. Compassion means not only that God suffers with us but that now we are invited to suffer with God.
St. Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross speak about compassion. They speak about the mystery of suffering with Christ. They speak about their suffering as a participation in God’s suffering, and by that connectedness their suffering loses its absurd quality. It is still painful. It is still hard. It is still agonizing. It is still difficult. It is still lonely. But connected with the cross it becomes something new.
Look at the man who is pierced and broken and you see the love of God radiating out to you. You feel the warmth and the newness streaming through you. Every time you look at your struggles, your pain, and your anguish as the burden you have to bear, see your struggles as being struggled with right there on the cross by the Son of God. Your struggle becomes a light burden because it is the burden of God and God has suffered for us.
To “take up the cross” does not mean to look for pain. It doesn’t mean to go after the cross. It does not mean to search for a problem. We have a lot of problems. We don’t need more. Sometimes we think that to “take up the cross” means to be hard on ourselves. That is not what Jesus says. To “take up the cross” means first of all to acknowledge where we are suffering, to recognize it.
Sometimes we focus on the big problems. I think we should start with focusing on our small problems.
We are suffering almost every moment of our life. There is always something that is a little hard. There is always some pain there that we sort of walk right over and don’t take very seriously. But that pain is a cross. Are we taking it up? Are we acknowledging it? Are we saying yes? Often, it seems as if we are always willing to carry another type of cross than the one we already have.
“That person didn’t speak to me today. It is not a big deal but it hurts a little bit. This is a cross, a small one, but I acknowledge it as a cross.”
“I didn’t hear from my friend. That hurts a little bit. I don’t need to walk right over these hurts as though they don’t exist.”
What is so remarkable is that just being able to see these little struggles allows us slowly to come home to our own house and not be so scared that something more fearful might come. We don’t have to be afraid, because we are already able to acknowledge our struggle. We are familiar with it.
Jesus says, “Take up your cross.” He didn’t say, “Make up your cross,” “Create your cross,” or “Go after your cross.” He said, “Take up your cross,” and this means to have the courage to see your pain.
We live in a culture that constantly denies these interior pains. It doesn’t hurt any less.
We say, “My friend died. I have to be strong.”
It is very painful. There was a time when people mourned for a long time. They felt their pain and let the fruits of grief grow in them.
There are a lot of places where we are really in pain. Let us not ignore it. Let us not deny it but say, “Yes, this is difficult and I pick it up.”
Acknowledge it. Say, “This is where I feel pain. It is my life and my life also means my pain. Can I stay with this? Can I recognize it and say yes? I can live this life. I want to live this life. It is painful and it has unique hurts but it is mine. I want to embrace it because I will never taste joy in life if I keep ignoring my pain.”
It is the first thing that Jesus asks. He says, “Take up your cross. Take it up.”
“Follow me.” That is the second thing he asks.
Jesus says, “Make the carrying of your cross part of your discipleship. Connect it with me. Connect it with God’s way.”
We are called—we are urged—to bring our pain into the healing presence of the cross. That is what a life of prayer is all about. We pray when we say, “Lord, it hurts not to be liked by people that I love. I see how rejected you were and I want my experience of rejection to be connected with you.”
Or we pray, “Lord, I am so fearful today. I don’t know where it comes from, but I am anxious and fearful. It is there. Lord, I want to bring it into your presence and bring it right into the Garden of Gethsemane and connect it with your anguish so that my fear becomes your struggle. The struggle to live.”
Somehow we have to have the courage to say, “My body aches, Lord. I am in physical pain. I don’t know why the doctors can’t help with the pain. But I want to know that you know what physical pain is too, and that you are a God who has a body that has risen, and in that body the wounds were visible. Wounds in your hands. Wounds in your feet. Wounds in your side. Let my woundedness become part of your woundedness so that my woundedness does not make me bitter or resentful, angry or upset, but brings me in touch with the mystery of your death and resurrection. I bring into your presence my whole being. I bring to you all my anguish and pain. Let my cross merge with yours. My burden becomes your burden and the experience fills me with new life and new hope.”
That is what prayer is.
I worry a lot. You worry a lot. There are a lot of things we agonize over. We worry about tomorrow and yesterday, this person and that person. But are we really connecting it all? Are we bringing it into the present?
Bring it to the One who has already suffered through it all and has lifted it up in his Risen body.
Are you really making that connection so that something new can happen?
If that connection is being made, something new is being born. Every time a connection is made between us and the light of God, something new happens, some kind of renewal takes place in us. Every time we keep our pain isolated or hidden—“I am too embarrassed about it,” “I can’t tell anyone, it is too silly”—the burden becomes bigger and heavier.
When we pray, we connect our whole life with God’s life. God’s love can flow through our veins—our spiritual veins—through our heart and our being. We will discover a whole new way of being. We can live our struggles in a completely new way. All distinctions we make about our well-being—“I am happy,” “I am sad”—can in some way be transcended into something very new.
Take your worries and convert them into prayer. Take your fear and connect it with God’s fear. Take your depression and see it in the presence of God’s dying on the cross. Bring it to the Presence who has suffered all and lived it all. You will discover that in the presence of Jesus you can live beyond pain and joy, sadness and gladness. When you pray, you connect your life with God’s life. You live in a new way.
One time I was extremely depressed. I felt very sad about
everything. I was in Flagstaff, Arizona, so I decided to go to the Grand Canyon. I saw billions of years of creation and realized that if those years represented an hour, I had been born not in the last second but in a tiny fraction of the last second.
Looking out, I thought, “My dear. Why all these problems?” Looking at the Grand Canyon, at that enormous abyss of beauty, the strange depression fell away. I felt the silence. In the face of this natural wonder, I thought, “What are you worrying about? As if you are carrying the burden of the world—a world that survived before you, and is something that will go on a long time after you. Why don’t you just enjoy your life and really live it?”
This image of the Grand Canyon stayed with me for a long time. God is like the Grand Canyon. God suffered the wound, the wound of all humanity, and if I enter into the presence of that wound, my wound becomes a light burden or a light pain. Not because it is not there but because it has been embraced by love. I can live my pain and not be destroyed by it. I can acknowledge my pain and not be paralyzed by it. The Grand Canyon invited me to enter an abyss of divine love and to experience that I am immensely loved and cared for. I was invited to enter life with a new heart, with God’s heart.
* * *
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MANY OF US, if we are following Jesus at all, follow out of fear. But if we follow out of fear—fear of hell, of purgatory, of rejection, of not being acceptable—that is not following. Following Jesus cannot be a form of discipleship if it is out of fear. There is a lot of fear in us. Sometimes it overwhelms me how fearful we truly are.
We ask, “What happens if I don’t follow him?”
“What will happen when I finally go up there? What am I going to say?”
Maybe we don’t admit it, but sometimes we say, “Well, following Jesus is the safe way to go; you never know what is going to happen.”
Jesus does not want us to follow him out of fear. He wants us to follow him out of love. Throughout the New Testament we hear, “Don’t be afraid.” An angel says it to Zechariah (Luke 1:13). An angel says it to Mary (Luke 1:30). The angels at the tomb of the resurrection of Jesus say, “Do not be afraid” (Matthew 28:5). Jesus himself says, “Do not be afraid, it is I. Where I am you should not be afraid” (Matthew 14:27).
Fear is not of God, because God is the God of first love. As John says so beautifully, “First love casts out all fear” (1 John 4:18). The love of God is the perfect love that breaks through the boundaries of our fear. Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid. Keep your eyes focused on me. Follow me.”
Remember that last beautiful scene in the Gospel of John where Jesus says to Peter, “Simon, do you love me?” and Peter says, “Lord, you know I love you.” Jesus asks a second time, “Simon, do you love me?” and Peter says, “You know I do.” Jesus asks a third time, and Peter becomes rather disturbed. “Lord, you know I love you.” “Okay, disciple,” Jesus says, “feed my lambs, feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). Then Jesus says the most important thing for us to hear right now. He says, “When you were young you girded yourself and you went where you wanted to go and when you are old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will gird you and lead you where you would rather not go” (John 21:18).
Jesus means, “When you are in love, when you are really in love, you can be guided to places that you have not chosen yourself. The person who loves can go to places where she or he would rather not go.”
Jesus turns all psychology upside down.
He doesn’t say, “When you are young you stretch out your hands and let other people gird you and when you grow old then you can do your own thing.” No. Jesus says it the other way. He says, “When you are young you can do what you want to do and when you are old you will be led where you’d rather not go.”
The spiritual life is a life in which we are more and more able to be led, to be guided to hard places, to places we would rather not go. For Jesus it was the cross. For Peter it was the cross. For Paul and all the disciples, it meant a lot of suffering. It is not masochism. It is not self-flagellation. It is not being hard on ourselves. It is being in love. It is being so fully and so totally in love that we go to places we would rather not go.
The interesting thing is that when we are in love we don’t feel the pain in the way that other people think we would. If we are truly in love, our eyes are not focused on what hurts. Our eyes are focused on the person we love. We make one step, and another step, and another step, and another step. A mother or a father says, “Of course I will stay with my child who is sick. I love my child. I am not going to leave my child alone.” Other people might say, “They are really suffering.” But they have the energy to stay with their child who is ill, because they love their child so much.
When we are in love we can go to very difficult places and feel, not the pain first of all, but the love.
I am not saying that there is no suffering. I am only saying that our attention is not focused on it. Other people might say, “Oh, my dear, what suffering. What agony. How could anyone do all of that? It is terrible. I wouldn’t be able to do it.” From the outside their ability to live the suffering might look like an impossible feat.
When we go to work with the poorest of the poor or with people who are dying or in misery, or we give up a job to do other critical things, people might say, “My God, I don’t know how you do it.” Many of us can reply, “I am alive. It is easy. I don’t see all those problems that you are speaking of. I am just following. I am guided to all these places that never in my life would I have thought I would go to.”
A mother might have a child who is so sick that she has to stay with her for her whole life. She thought she could never handle losing her freedom in this way. Everyone asks her how she can do it. She says, “I can do it. I am not scared. I am in love. I am following.”
Following the One with whom we are in love is the full meaning of following Jesus. We follow not out of fear but out of love.
Dear Lord,
Give me eyes to see and ears to hear. I know there is light in the darkness that makes everything new. I know there is new life in suffering that opens a new earth for me. I know there is a joy beyond sorrow that rejuvenates my heart. Yes, Lord, I know that you are, that you act, that you love, that you indeed are Light, Life, and Truth.
People, work, plans, projects, ideas, meetings, buildings, paintings, music, and literature can only give me real joy and peace when I can see and hear them as reflections of your presence, your glory, your kingdom.
Let me then see and hear. Lord, show me your vision, become a guide in life and impart meaning to all my concerns.
AMEN
(from The Only Necessary Thing)
CHAPTER FIVE
THE REWARD
“My Joy Will Be Yours”
Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
JOHN 16:20–22
Then Jesus says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”
JOHN 15:11
The reward of following Jesus is joy. It is part of being in love. We have to claim joy because that is the great gift Jesus came to bring us.
Joy is not an easy subject to articulate. We seem to be a lot better at talking about sorrow. But we have to learn to speak about joy, because joy is the great reward for those who take up the cross and follow Jesus.
Joy is hard to talk about but it is important to speak about because if you look around at people in m
ost towns and cities you notice that people are so very serious. Very, very serious. It is amazing. If you walk down the street, people have serious faces. Everyone is doing very serious things. They are doing it and they are doing their thing and it has to be done now because it is urgent. It has to be done this week because it is very serious. The interesting thing is, that seriousness, that certainty, that certain somberness is quite often characteristic of people who are rather well off. When I am teaching at the divinity school it is hard to get a little smile out of anybody.
“Don’t interrupt me. I have a paper to write. I have to be critical. And it is very important.”
It seems that seriousness has something to do with accomplishment. We are involved in these projects. We have objectives and they have to be done. They have to be accomplished. And we are very, very serious about it.
Once, I lived in Lima, Peru, in an extremely poor area. One thing that makes an overwhelming impression on anyone who visits—and I am not romanticizing—is that poor people, people with all kinds of difficulties, are not going to sit there and talk about those difficulties. Here’s a little story:
I went to Lima because I thought it was a good idea to go there and do a project. I planned to do something about all that poverty. I was living with a family in a barrio outside the city limits called Pamplona Alta. It was a very dry type of desert land but with thousands of shacks built into the slopes of the surrounding hills. Every day I had to walk at least twenty minutes to get from the house where I was staying to the church. It was an incredible experience, because as I walked out of the house where I was living with Pablito, Maria, Sophia, Pablo, and little Johnny, little kids ran out of their houses to see me. They’d say, “Padrecito. Padrecito.” They came from the houses and they grabbed me. They hadn’t seen such a nice, tall American for a long time, and they reached out to me and before I knew it I had one kid on every finger! They didn’t let me go.
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