June 3, 2014 Tuesday: Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs
Yet I consider life of no importance to me, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to bear witness to the Gospel of God’s grace.
Our Lady taught Mother Teresa that even pain could become a place of prayer. What seems to the world a lack of God’s presence becomes a place of meeting. Instead of struggling with pain as a distraction to our prayer, we can integrate our suffering into our prayer. We can lift our pain up to the Lord on the Cross, and hold it there before him. We can be there in peace, even in darkness, with that part of us that says “Why, Lord?” If we remain there with the brokenness this represents in us, we give Jesus the opportunity to be our Savior, to be our Resurrection again in the present, to take this pain and this problem and make it a part of his own Passion, and the doorway to share his Resurrection.
Christ has the power to do this, if we give him permission. He will transform our suffering and raise it to the Father. Though the pain might remain, our anguish will turn to peace. There will be healing of bitterness, of resentment, and of despair. Jesus does not take away all our wounds. Rather, he disinfects them and glorifies them. For Jesus, the Resurrection was not an emergency room where the Father took away all the signs of the Passion. Jesus rose with his wounds, wounds now transformed from darkness to light, dug into his hands in time and in pain and now become eternal fonts of light and blessing and glory.
Nor is the Resurrection Jesus’ reward for having suffered. It is rather the unstoppable explosion of glory that pours forth from Love’s triumph on the Cross. The Lord will do with our wounds the same as he did with that unspeakable wound that pierced Our Lady’s heart, so that we too may also rise with him.
Mother Teresa, In the Shadow of Our Lady by Fr. Joseph Langford
Our Lady taught Mother Teresa that even pain could become a place of prayer. What seems to the world a lack of God’s presence becomes a place of meeting. Instead of struggling with pain as a distraction to our prayer, we can integrate our suffering into our prayer. We can lift our pain up to the Lord on the Cross, and hold it there before him. We can be there in peace, even in darkness, with that part of us that says “Why, Lord?” If we remain there with the brokenness this represents in us, we give Jesus the opportunity to be our Savior, to be our Resurrection again in the present, to take this pain and this problem and make it a part of his own Passion, and the doorway to share his Resurrection.
Christ has the power to do this, if we give him permission. He will transform our suffering and raise it to the Father. Though the pain might remain, our anguish will turn to peace. There will be healing of bitterness, of resentment, and of despair. Jesus does not take away all our wounds. Rather, he disinfects them and glorifies them. For Jesus, the Resurrection was not an emergency room where the Father took away all the signs of the Passion. Jesus rose with his wounds, wounds now transformed from darkness to light, dug into his hands in time and in pain and now become eternal fonts of light and blessing and glory.
Nor is the Resurrection Jesus’ reward for having suffered. It is rather the unstoppable explosion of glory that pours forth from Love’s triumph on the Cross. The Lord will do with our wounds the same as he did with that unspeakable wound that pierced Our Lady’s heart, so that we too may also rise with him.
Mother Teresa, In the Shadow of Our Lady by Fr. Joseph Langford
