A Growing Gratitude for Crosses

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 26 November 2015.

The Crucifixion by Andrea Mategna

Some thoughts on Thanksgiving, also having finished transcribing Liza's What the Lord Hath Made Crooked letters:

I could enumerate so many blessings—worldly things—I've received in this life. That said, the most transformative perspective or schema I've experienced has been a growing gratitude for crosses:

for crookedness and constraints
for suffering and setback
for perplexity, sickness, and sorrow
for being passed over for honors,
for not even being in the running
for being hindered, hobbled, and hampered in the pursuit of accolades, ambitions, and accomplishments

Why is any of this a blessing? As the prayer goes,

Pray for us Mary, mother of sorrows, that we will crucify our pride with Christ on the Cross.

For me, the biggest shift has been having children. I started to realize that these sweet messengers of God's love were simultaneously scourges and sources of setback and suffering. But without scourging, I disappear into myself. Without the way of the cross, I don't look outward from an inner sense of my own importance.

Camus's Sisyphus doesn't attain consciousness until he embraces the full weight of his fate, absurd though it may seem. And yet, my fate is even more embraceable because it is eminently lovable. Marriage, too, that most ecstatic of human unions, has hidden within it a cross. Christ imbues all his sacraments and life generally with his paschal powers. But most especially suffering. Even all our joys and accomplishments have a cross hidden within them.

These moments and opportunities and honors and laurels that pass me by—usually because I am paralytic or pariah—these are blessings too. Because as Christians, we are all waiting on Christ, keeping our wicks trimmed through suffering.

The striving and struggle, when Christ crests the hilltop of Golgotha, when he stretches out his arms to the universe he created. In that strangest of all moments in our strange, singular religion we discover the unsearchable greatness of God

his terrible deeds
his glorious majesty
his wondrous works
his abundant goodness
his great kindness

It is at this moment when Christ himself, according to G.K. Chesterton, "seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Pray for us sinners, for a grace that overflows the cup of suffering.