We Need the Cross

Do we see the necessity of the Cross in our lives? This is a question that is posed to us throughout the Lenten season. There are areas of our lives where we need to be pruned, purified, and set free. The Lord accomplishes this work through our willed mortifications, but most especially through unwilled sufferings. His greatest desire is our freedom, and that freedom comes through the Cross.

Mother Angelica famously said: “Holiness is not for wimps, and the cross isn’t negotiable, sweetheart—it’s a requirement.” In an age of comfort, we can falsely believe that the Lord only wants comfort and worldly goods for our lives. This is the lie of the prosperity gospel, which has completely jettisoned the Lord’s call for each one of us to pick up our cross and follow Him.

Lent is a good time to ask the Lord in prayer if we fully understand the demands of being His disciple. Do we grasp fully that we are called to embrace the Cross? Do we understand that we are not made for worldly pleasure and comfort? Do we know what true freedom looks like? Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene wrote in Divine Intimacy:

To those who dream only of prosperity and earthly glory, the language of the Cross is incomprehensible. Those who have a purely material ideal of life find it very difficult to understand any spiritual significance, especially that of suffering. St. Paul said that Christ Crucified was “unto the Jews indeed a stumbling block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness” (1 Cor 1:23).

There are areas of our lives that we struggle to surrender to the Lord. We do not want to be crucified in a particular area. There are crosses He permits, and there are crosses we choose. This season is a time when we intentionally choose some form of suffering through mortification. Often, however, Lent also comes with crosses we didn’t choose, and the struggle is to embrace both. The Lord is trying to free us through His Cross, which means to live in union with Him through our own crosses. Do we truly understand that everything must be given to the Lord?

I know that I still struggle with countless attachments. I don’t want to give up my comforts, and I grumble when suffering comes my way. What I fail to see in my grasping at worldly things is that the Lord wants to set me free. St. John of the Cross wrote: “Whether tied by a rope or a thread, a bird still cannot fly.” This is the lesson the Lord wants to teach us through permitted and self-imposed crosses. This freedom leads us to deeper intimacy with Him. Our lives start to belong more and more to Him alone.

Whether it is seeking to tame passions that are out of control, learning how to forgive, battling an illness, the loss of a loved one, or any other form of suffering that comes our way, it is an opportunity to grow in spiritual maturity. The spiritually immature still believe that God will only allow good things to happen to them in a purely worldly sense. They do not understand the necessity of suffering in the spiritual life.

The more we grow spiritually, the more we come to understand how much we need the Cross in our lives. Comfort leads to lukewarmness. The Cross wakes us from our sin-induced spiritual coma. It is the means by which the Lord awakens within us a desire for true freedom and love. The deepest intimacy we experience with Christ in prayer is when our sufferings are united to Him on the Cross. It is the path to eternal life. Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene says:

To human wisdom, suffering is incomprehensible; it is disconcerting; it can lead one to murmur against divine Providence and even to lose all trust in God. However, according to the wisdom of God, suffering is a means of salvation and redemption. And as it was necessary “for Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory” (cf. Luke 24:26), it is also necessary for the Christian to be refined in the crucible of sorrow in order to attain to sanctity, to eternal life.

In our present day, suffering is considered the greatest evil. The season of Lent makes no sense to a consumer-driven, materialistic, and addicted society. Why would anyone intentionally suffer for 40 days? The answer is because we know through Christ’s death on the Cross that suffering sanctifies us. We know that learning detachment leads to true freedom. Freedom is not being able to do whatever we want. That is addiction. Freedom is being spiritually detached enough to do God’s will joyfully.

This also means that the terrible and agonizing unwilled sufferings of life are a means of sanctification for us and others. Suffering is not a waste for the Christian. It is an opportunity to grow in intimacy with the Lord and to be purified of hidden sins that are hidden from us until suffering unearths them. Through redemptive suffering, our sufferings offered freely to the Lord can save and sanctify souls.

Let us remember as we enter this Lenten season, that we are a people of the Cross. The Lord is not calling us to a comfortable life. He is calling us to the Way of the Cross, because it is the only path to the Resurrection.

Our sufferings this Lent—whether willed or unwilled—are how the Lord will sanctify us. May we proclaim as Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene did:

O my Jesus, the Cross is Your standard. I should be ashamed to be delivered from it. From one evil only I ardently beg You to preserve me: from any deliberate sin, however slight. O Lord, I beg You by the merits of Your sacred Passion to keep all sin far from me. But as for other evils—bodily or spiritual sufferings, physical pain or mental anguish—I beg Your light and strength: light to understand the hidden meaning which you have in the plans of Your divine Providence, light to believe firmly that every sorrow or trial, every pain or disappointment, is planned by You for my greater good; strength not to let myself be influenced by the false maxims of the world or led astray by the vain mirage of earthly happiness, strength to accept suffering of any kind with courage and love.

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