Making lemonade out of lemons
Opinion
In recent years I made a series of major decisions that were accompanied with pain, disappointment and suffering. For a while I got caught in a cycle of revisiting the decisions and trying to identify where I went wrong. My friends say that I made courageous choices. Yet, amidst the consequences, I am tempted to be hard on myself.
We are hard-wired to avoid suffering and to assign blame. But on this month’s feast of the Holy Cross I wonder if it’s a bit like saying to Jesus, why didn’t you keep quiet? You knew people were out to get you. Why did you associate with someone you knew would betray you? Instead, Mary and John were at the foot of the cross, loving Jesus, not blaming him. Jesus could have made different choices and avoided crucifixion but then where would we all be?
We are disciples, called to live in imitation of Jesus on earth and to enter into the Paschal Mystery with our own lives. You probably know this short verse from the popular devotion of Stations of the Cross:
We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you
Because by your holy cross, you have redeemed the world
This processional devotion was promoted in the Holy Land in the 13th century by the Franciscans. Not everyone can make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land so the faithful adapted the devotion to a route that we walk with stopping points constructed outdoors in our local area or markers placed inside our churches or even booklets we can follow while remaining in one place.
This prayer itself is a shortening of a longer prayer written by St Francis of Assisi for the friars to offer whenever they visited churches. St Francis wanted his friars to know that they could encounter Jesus wherever they were. The same could be said for us. Wherever we are, the Cross of Jesus is present to us not only as a sign of suffering but of the entire Paschal Mystery – the death, rising and ascension of our Lord.
Redemptive suffering always seems like dangerous territory. We don’t want to condone violence or court affliction. Still, sometimes life hands us lemons so the alternatives are to continue suffering or make lemonade. That is the exaltation of the Cross.
It isn’t easy but taking a risk and carrying the burden is a participation in the Paschal Mystery. The Cross was not a mistake; it was the Father’s will. I can’t know for certain if my choices were one or the other but I can problem solve the outcome in prayer as an occasion for graced growth and healing.
The crosses we encounter need not have the final word. Raised up with faith, they can transform and exalt us for a purpose beyond what we could have ever imagined. This is the paradox of the cross: periods of exhaustion, humiliation and death become occasions for triumph, honour and new life.
The liturgy ties all these elements together to encourage us in our trials. The second reading, when the feast falls on a Sunday as it does this year, is the canticle from Philippians (2.1-6) that proclaims the humiliation of Christ through his obedience on the cross and the glorification and exaltation that followed. This hymn also appears often in the Liturgy of the Hours. I recommend it to you as a prayer to draw upon in times of suffering. In the alleluia verse the liturgy calls the assembly to respond to this reading with praise through the prayer adapted from St. Francis: We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you …
Although the establishment of this feast day commemorates three distinct historical events (the finding of a relic of the Cross in the fourth century; the dedication of two churches on the site, today the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the retrieval of the relic from thieves in the 7th century and its triumphal procession back to Jerusalem), the liturgy itself recalls Good Friday. It invites us to reflect upon the paradox of the Cross amidst our own experience of suffering.
When we are exhausted by grief and loss, may we find hope and consolation by entering the Exaltation of the Cross.
Simone Brosig is Pastoral leader, Community Life and Worship
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