On the Carrying and Comparing of Crosses

One of our Lenten resolutions as a family is to say the rosary every evening together.  As we name off the list of intentions before we begin, friends and family that need prayers -- a seriously hurt child, a fight with cancer, a priestly vocation, a struggling business, a hoped-for conversion, for clarity of life's pathways -- I think of the line of the Salve Regina, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle,  "mourning and weeping in this valley of tears."  There are so many tears, Lord!  We all are struggling with something!  Help us!

I am nearing my 35th birthday and finally starting to allow myself to say that I have known suffering, without making excuses.  My life has been immensely blessed, even shielded from many of the hard troubles that I see others facing.  In the face of the obvious crosses of people I love or know, I look at my blessed life and scold myself for not being grateful every minute!  Why do I have hard times, I berate myself, why do I struggle when everything that matters in my life is so good, so easy compared to others?  If I am struggling, if I am low, it must be my fault!  There must be something broken in me that isn't noticing and grateful, that isn't embracing my beautiful life!  How can I even dare to use the word "suffering" or "cross" about things in my life?  Are toothpick sized crosses even crosses?

And that is where, as in so many areas of life, I come to the "fine line," the place where two contrasting pieces of truth touch and blend into a whole.  

I have been at the end of the tongue that tells me, "You aren't really suffering, you aren't carrying anything that isn't of your own making."  Sometimes that tongue has been my own.  And I've realized that that tongue has its origin in Satan -- the teller of half-truths that sound like the full truth.  Isn't that always what he does?  Tells part of the truth, while veiling the whole of it, to our truth-seeking human hearts?  And is a half-truth really a truth at all then?

Yes, a toothpick cross is still a cross.  Yes, I am learning what suffering is.  No, it is not my fault that I have hard times.  It is not "just me" that makes my own life hard on myself.  I am not the inflict-er of my struggles.  And yes, at the same time, my mindset matters! My complaining is a detriment to my life.  My practice of gratefulness will beget more peace and thus more ease.  I both have the power to increase the burden on my own shoulders as well as the power to lighten it by the way in which I approach every single rising on every single day.

I tell my children "Comparison is odious."  It is!  To compare my crosses to those of others is a detriment to me and to them.  To over-emphasize my own struggles with a view to putting theirs down, or to negate mine in favor of theirs is unjust to all!  If I say to a child who skins his knee, "That's no reason to cry," am I not denying what is in fact a hardship for their lives?  Does compassion for another person, any person, all people extend to all the hard things, the skinned knees to the brain-damaged child?  Doesn't Jesus have enough compassion for every pain, great and small?

It is good to regulate and order our reactions to hard things.  This naturally happens as we grow, when we realize that varicose veins in pregnancy is objectively less difficult than having to birth and raise a baby as a single mother.  But it does no service to say to oneself or others that your or their suffering is not worth the acknowledgement.  To deny the cross is to take away its power.  To take away the name of suffering from even the small and the insignificant is to deny that all of these smallest and largest are worthy of being part of the Holy Cross that bore our Salvation.  In order to potentize our suffering we have to call it by its name, so the Cross is part of our lives, a valuable and powerful part, neither veiled nor negated, but named and even embraced.

Caryll Houselander writes:
When we have something to suffer, big or small, it fills our consciousness, seeming unbearable until we compare it to the world's suffering, then it dwindles to a fragment.  But there is no comfort in knowing that others suffer more, and the more we realize the world's suffering, the more do we long to help it and the more helpless we feel to do so.
Yet it is a fact that our fragment can relieve the sorrow of all mankind.  Because Christ is in us, any suffering of ours is his Passion.  He took all human suffering, great and small, and wed himself to it, crowned it with his crown of thorns, clothed it in his purple garment, gave it the power of his love.  Christ's Passion redeems, not because it is our pain, but because it is his love infused into our pain......
We all share the responsibility for suffering, equally we are all trustees of Christ's love.  More, we own his Passion, it is ours to spend, or to waste by resisting the power which makes our fragment of sorrow potent to redeem.  Each one owes mankind his personal suffering.  The power of our suffering is not measured by its magnitude but by our will to give.