104: Suffering

Q- I am reading a book. One of the interesting ideas he has got me thinking about is this 'alienation of affection' between Jesus and Mary. As I understand it, it seems to talk about the spiritual development that Mary went through by way of the seven sorrows. I was wondering if you had insights on this.

A- First we need to understand that Mary's spiritual development is quite different from ours, even if in recent decades (from Vat II) her human journey was strongly underlined, showing that she too is well journeyed in her Faith.

There is a huge difference between underlining her “merits”, i.e. her human effort, by the grace of God, to correspond to the will of God, and saying that she is strictly like us. Of course she is not. She is born immaculate, by the merits of Jesus on the Cross. This doesn't at all cancel out her participation, her efforts, her merits, but it places her on a different level. The Grâce of God in her (the Holy Spirit) never found an obstacle in her for his action. So the “spiritual development” in her existed, but the starting point is already very high. She is already pure, transformed, incandescent and united to God when she starts. She doesn't need purification, but can still grow, because God is infinite and therefore one can still grow and grow spiritually.

Speaking about an “alienation” might be understood as a purification, or as a necessary action, or step, to be taken or undergone. It would mean that she wasn't pure, detached. She had human feelings, nothing wrong with that, but they were in good order in the sense that they gave the first place always to God. She wasn't attached egoistically to her Son.. She knew he is God, he is the Saviour, and that he had a mission.

Does this go without suffering? Well suffering existed but, in order to be more faithful to the spirit of the Fathers of the Church, I would say that the Saviour would have never made her suffer directly. Never. He is not the cause of suffering. All the suffering comes from the ugliness and darkness of sin, our sin, our sins.

Q- Did Mary have to suffer? - What was the purpose of Mary's suffering? - How did this relate to Our Lord?

A- What is the cause of suffering? Our sins. Suffering is an alteration/change in our body (the senses) and/or the soul (feelings, emotions). The cause of suffering for a pure person is sin, darkness, lies, hatred,... the mystery of Evil in all its forms and its consequences in us.

Per se she didn't have to suffer, but since she accepted to be involved in the life and mission of the Saviour, she gets her share of it. Salvation puts - out of Love - The Pure face to face with the darkness and ugliness of the sinner.

Q- What does this mean for us? Do we need to suffer to develop interiorly?

A- The causes of suffering for us are different. We suffer because that ugliness that became ingrained in us has to go, we need to be detached from it. Sin made our spirit have the shape of the Creatures. (When you “love” something, you spiritually acquire the shape of what you love, and this is a deformation of the “Likeness” of God in our spirit. Our baser, fallen nature, which becomes deformed when no heed is taken of our spiritual/conscience side, that which ennobles us.) Mary is a "creature" like us, but with ordered affections. (She is not a fallen human being, so her body obeys to her emotions her emotions obey to her soul and her soul to her spirit and her spirit is united to God and moved by Him.) Purification, sanctification, makes us progress, transforms us into Jesus. As a consequence, by the action of the Holy Spirit our spirit leaves that shape/form (resemblance with creatures), and takes, the form and shape of God himself: finding again the likeness with God that we lost. This process is painful. Painful not because it has to be painful. Pain is not a goal in itself. Trans-formation is the goal. Suffering is just a consequence.

This journey of transformation is necessary. We need courage in order not to focus on pain but on the real transformation that is occurring in us by the action of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise it is unfair and breaks the momentum of our transformation. Again: we need to focus our attention totally on the core of what is happening. Even if the pain is strong and perceived it is not the main event.

Being with God (in the process of transformation) or not (not corresponding to the action of the Holy Spirit), we do suffer as well because of the ugliness of sin and its consequences in daily life. This is not caused by God, but by us humans. We harm each other. Ignorance, sins, cause suffering. The person far from God will suffer more. The person with Jesus has the opportunity to unite his/her suffering to His Cross and therefore “use” the suffering as a powerful trampoline to push us ahead miles and miles... to accelerate. Suffering in itself is nothing, but when suffering occurs, if united to the Lord on the Cross, it becomes a very powerful tool of sanctification and transformation. This is why, sometimes when we read stories of saints we get the impression they loved suffering, or advised it. Their experience of uniting the suffering that occurred to them with Jesus' Power of Redemption on the Cross is so powerful that they seem to give us the advice that we need to suffer and we need to seek it,...

So again: everybody suffers: live on earth is not perfect and there are plenty or causes for suffering. If suffering is united with Jesus, it is different. Even if people differ on how all kinds of suffering that we see in the world could be united to Jesus' redemptive suffering on the Cross. Suffering far from Jesus, not knowing Him and therefore not uniting our suffering with him on the Cross could be tougher and bring less results (sanctification wise).

This is why Jesus during the Passion turned to the women and said: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”” (Luke 23:28-31)

Here He alludes to himself: the suffering inflicted on the “green” the spiritual, God. The dry, is the person disconnected from him, and is still suffering. Much tougher.

34: The Spiritual Journey 8/11

The Descent

With this 8^th diagram, we start a totally new part of the journey, the second and final part: the descent.

The descent, at the imitation of Christ.

Once we reach the “union with God”, once we reach the top of the mountain, we are not meant to loose that state, but we are meant to imitate Jesus, “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man,
 he humbled himself
 by becoming obedient to death - even death on a cross!” (Phil 2:6-8) Having reached the Union with Jesus, He is our Master, our example, we are not higher than Him, we are just invited to become like him. “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” (Luke 6:40) Like him, we have to start our descent.

When Jesus is humbling himself, He never stops from being God. Something similar happens to the person that reaches "Union with Jesus". When we reach the Union with Jesus-God, we do not stop from being united with Him, deep deep in us, but we do strive to imitate Him, in order to continue the application of the Salvation to our brothers and sisters. We are lead by the Holy Spirit toward this descent.

Paradoxically, after the Union with God, it is not death that is awaiting for us (as many manuals of Spiritual Theology seem to say), but the second part of our journey: continuing Jesus' Journey on earth.

Instead of aiming “higher”, toward a death that will give us God, we are invited to look down, to go down, following Jesus, the Logic of Redemption. We are invited to start a new journey of great achievements. Note that the frame remains Christological.

So from a Greek (Greek Philosophers) vision of the climbing journey toward the One, we switch to a christian, christological, vision. This point is fundamental in order to have the right global vision of the whole journey, in its entirety.

What has been achieved until now (the Union with Jesus), allows us, allows Him in us, to perform “great works”, “completing in our flesh” the work of Salvation, or better said: the application of the Salvation obtained by Christ on the Cross on our brothers and sisters.

It is only “being rooted in Jesus” that something so high could be achieved, with total synergy between Christ and us.

Let us now read carefully this 8th Diagram, it deserves all our attention:

Seeing the diagram, first of all one has to notice the curve. Once one reached the top of the mountain, there is curve, a descending curve. If part of our being remains “on top of the Mountain” (the spirit (and therefore the whole being) remains united to Jesus), the rest of our being (soul and body) has to come down, be mystically united to our fellow brothers and sister (by the Holy Spirit), in order to help them, helping Jesus' apply his Redemption to them. Of course all our being is now rooted in Jesus.

Secondly, one has to notice that this descending journey of the soul, after “the Union with Jesus-God” is following Jesus' journey. There is nothing “new”, there is no new journey. The Disciple now is much more at the resemblance of his Master. The Master is alive in him. The disciple is not inventing another journey, the Truth is that he has flesh, like the Son of Man, and the latter is in fact his role-model, showing the way for him.

The second part of the journey has the following main stages:

1- Acquisition of the Holy Spirit

2- Turning toward the depth of Charity (the curve)

3- Enrolled in participating into Christ's Passion

4- Death, out of love, giving our life to our brothers (martyrdom or equivalent)

This is a rapid outline. A lot should be said about each stage, and all what is happening inside.

The “mystical dimension” in the disciple's life is constant. It has been inaugurated by the Union with Jesus. Of course it started to exist and grow much before, with the Growth of Charity in us, during the purification time.

It would be good to see the diagram, to contemplate it and meditate on the various quotes and thoughts that are on it, in order to engage in this “turning point”: from the ascent to the descent.

Again: the "descent" is not about loosing Jesus, it is about letting Charity (the Power of Love of the Holy Spirit in us) guiding us toward “greater things”. “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12) The works we do in the descending curve are much “greater” than the ones done in the ascending curve. Why? The reason is simple: the Union with Jesus makes all the difference. The Merit of any act after the union is different. This is why it is very urgent to grow in love and in the quality of love, then to make ourselves busy, noisily busy, with a thousands of things, thinking that we serve the Lord, forgetting that the One Who gives efficiency to our acts is the Holy Spirit.

Let us read what saint John of the Cross says:

“Observe, however, that if the soul has not reached the state of unitive love, it is necessary for it to make acts of love, as well in the active as in the contemplative life. But when it has reached it, it is not requisite it should occupy itself in other and exterior duties—unless they are matters of obligation— which might hinder, were it but for a moment, the life of love in God, though they may minister greatly to His service; because an instant of pure love is more precious in the eyes of God and the soul, and more profitable to the Church, than all other good works together, though it may seem as if nothing were done. Thus, Mary Magdalene, though her preaching was most edifying, and might have been still more so afterwards, out of the great desire she had to please God and benefit the Church, hid herself, nevertheless, in the desert thirty years, that she might surrender herself entirely to love; for she considered that she would gain more in that way, because an instant of pure love is so much more profitable and important to the Church.

When the soul, then, in any degree possesses the spirit of solitary love, we must not interfere with it. We should inflict a grievous wrong upon it, and upon the Church also, if we were to occupy it, were it only for a moment, in exterior or active duties, however important they might be. When God Himself adjures all not to waken it from its love, who shall venture to do so, and be blameless? In a word, it is for this love that we are all created. Let those men of zeal, who think by their preaching and exterior works to convert the world, consider that they would be much more edifying to the Church, and more pleasing to God—setting aside the good example they would give—if they would spend at least one half their time in prayer, even though they may have not attained to the state of unitive love. Certainly they would do more, and with less trouble, by one single good work than by a thousand: because of the merit of their prayer, and the spiritual strength it supplies. To act otherwise is to beat the air, to do little more than nothing, sometimes nothing and occasionally even mischief; for God may give up such persons to vanity, so that they may seem to have done something, when in reality their outward occupations bear no fruit; for it is quite certain that good works cannot be done but in the power of God.

O how much might be written on this subject! this, however, is not the place for it.” (Spiritual Canticle B, 29:2-3)

(To be continued...)