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(Veni Sancte Spiritus…)
“The Cross that sweetens our Bitterness”-
(Read Exodus 15: 22-27)
My dear sisters in Christ,
They say it is impossible
for us not to interpret whatever we hear or read in terms of our own background. Even though words and expressions all have
one or more meanings associated with them which in themselves are abstract,
they also stimulate our imagination and memory and as a result we can’t help
‘picturing’ to ourselves some sort of context within which what we hear or read
are then intelligible. Obviously, the
memories or images stirred up are always of our own previous experience. There is no reason why the Bible should be
an exception in this. As a matter of
fact, one of the reasons why we have Scripture scholars is to keep us from
distorting the message of the Bible. We
have our minds so filled with what we have learned about God from a Catechism,
and this knowledge is so modified by the cultural atmosphere in which we were
born and raised that we see far more asserted in Scripture than is really
there. But this in itself is not
necessarily harmful. In fact, it was
this peculiarity of the human mind that enabled the great Teachers and Saints
of the early Church to see in the Old Testament so many foreshadowing of the
New Testament. Reflection and
meditation upon the type would invariable lead to a better appreciation
of the anti-type. (By type
we mean the thing, person or event foreshadowing, and the anti-type is
the thing, person or event foreshadowed).
We ourselves have been doing this.
We have seen the struggle between Moses and Pharaoh as a type of
the struggle between grace and nature.
We have seen the Crossing of the Red Sea as a type of Baptism, and now
the passage we have just read from exodus provides us with another opportunity
to see a relationship of type and anti-type.
“…and the Lord showed him a tree whose wood turned the waters
sweet when it was thrown into them”. Of what is that tree and wood the type? You’re absolutely right; the anti-type is
the Cross of Christ.
After having spoken of the
escape from the slavery to nature that is brought about in us by grace, and
after having considered the awesome transformation brought about in us by
Baptism, it certainly seems strange that we should encounter any bitterness in
our new state of existence. We are dead
to sin, in the words of St. Paul, and we live unto God. What could be sweeter than that? Nothing, obviously, only we must remember
that the law of growth and development obtains in regard to our life in the
spirit, and there is no true growth without crises, and there is no crisis that
does not fill us with anguish and dread.
Suffering, trial and tribulation are, indeed, the common lot of mankind,
and we can expect them as much of not more than can those who do not share our
Faith and our new status as God’s Children.
If there is anyone among us who does not experience the bitterness of
this life, then it must be because he is either living among angels, or else
has learned to rely upon the cross of Christ to make all the bitterness turn to
sweetness.
How can we go about using
the cross of Christ to sweeten the sufferings we undergo in this life? I suppose there are several ways of doing
so, and each one of us has probably found a method that suits us best. Basically, it is because we keep the fact of
Christ’s Cross constantly before our eyes.
Then we draw from it what we need for any particular situation.
One thing that can help us
is to remember that Christ has experienced every kind of suffering. There isn’t anything in the way of mental or
physical pain that we can undergo that He hasn’t already tasted, and very
probably far more acutely than we have or ever will.
Let us try to name some of
the kinds of suffering He endured! What
about physical pain? He suffered in all
His senses. He experienced the bodily
pain of the scourging of the pillar.
Can any one of us claim that we have endured so grievous a torture? Practically every nerve in His body was not
only shattered by the power of the blows of that stinging whip, but the skin
itself was bruised off, exposing the tender nerve endings themselves, so that
even the air touching them would cause severe pain. And if that were not enough, the clothes that were put on His
body, now a continuous bleeding wound, stuck to Him and became part of Him, so
to speak, in virtue of the fact that the garments absorbed His blood and this
blood congealed. We wince when we have
to remove a piece of adhesive tape, to which some of our body hair has stuck
fast. When Jesus’ garments were rudely
torn from His body it must have been as painful as being skinned alive. So surely, anything we can suffer in our
sense of touch whether it be by heat or cold or any other kind of violence
cannot exceed that which Jesus had to undergo.
But what about the people
who suffer internal pain? For example, the pain from cancer or the
pain of a throbbing headache? Well, we
have no evidence that Jesus suffered from either of these, but we do know that
His body was so severely stretched upon the cross that it was almost completely
disjointed. That, surely, must have
caused very intense internal pain. And
what about His dead? It was crowned
with thorns, and when they nailed Him to the cross the vibrations caused by the
hammer blows in turn caused His Sacred Head to thump violently against the
wood. And this was only a continuation
of the pain caused by the soldiers’ striking His thorn-crowned Head with a
rod. Again, I think we must say that this
pain in His head was at least equal to the kind of pain we experience from any
headache or toothache or sinus-condition, or what have you.
And now let us get beyond
physical pain. Which of us can say we
have suffered mental anguish that is not known by Our Lord? I have often heard it said that physical
suffering is almost a joy compared to the anguish of mental suffering. Jesus must have hurt terribly when He was
falsely accused and unjustly condemned.
He was the greatest lover ever to walk this earth, being judged unworthy
to share the company of ordinary men.
He was judged unworthy to live, He who is the very source of life. He was reckoned among the worst of criminals,
He who was nothing but blessings and peace and riches for the entire human race. This is the blackest ingratitude. I’m sure you know how painful that is.
But the men who did what
we have just spoken of were either His enemies, or people who were devoid of
concern for Him or for anyone else.
Imagine the suffering that was His when His close companions deserted
Him, companions toward whom He had always displayed the tenderest love and
affection. And if that wasn’t enough,
the disciple He should have been able to trust most fully, and who did not run
away, stayed close by and ended up by inflicting an even more painful injury to
His loving Heart. Peter denied Him 3
times! It would have been easier on
Christ if Peter had run away, too.
Neither did Jesus escape
the suffering of shame and embarrassment.
He was forced to hang naked upon the Cross, in full view of the gaze of
an obscene crowd. And while He hung
there, He was mocked and insulted. He
was made the butt of jokes and jibes.
Even earlier, the soldiers had spat in His face and treated Him to other
abuses and indignities. All this was
endured by one who is worthy of all reverence, respect and devotion.
We have to suffer, too,
when we are tied down or imprisoned or trapped or in any other way
frustrated. Not only did Jesus suffer
this forced immobility by being nailed to the Cross, He also felt frustrated in
His failure to have reached the hearts of His fellow countrymen. His hands were tied in more ways than
one. They wouldn’t allow Him to give. Can you think of anything more painful to
one who loves?
And yet, in my opinion, we
haven’t even mentioned yet the very worst of His sufferings. That was the suffering of mind and spirit He
endured in the Garden of Gethsemane. It
was anguish so acute it caused Him to sweat blood. This is only my own personal conjecture, but I feel strongly that
Jesus suffered most there because He allowed Himself to feel the guilt of the
sins of all mankind, or rather, to sense that the Father looked upon Him as
guilty for them all. What I am trying to
say is this: Have you ever done anything,
either accidentally, or quite innocently, which your dearest friend interpreted
– because of circumstantial evidence – as a deliberate offense? Can you imagine what it is like to know that
the person you love most of all is utterly convinced that you have done him or
her a deliberate wrong? Well, knowing
it is not true and not being able to do anything about it is, in my mind, the
worst suffering of all. And that is why
Jesus, strong as He was, broke out into a bloody sweat. After all, the purer one is, and the more
perceptive his nature, the more he suffers when in the presence of evil. And here is Jesus, holiness itself, made to
feel identified with sin, made into sin,
as St. Paul says. Yes, the thought of
His having suffered so much can make our most bitter sufferings very sweet.
The experience, then,
concerning the bitter waters of Mara took place immediately after the
Israelites had gained their freedom.
This same bitterness follows invariably after every deep conversion. All joy seems to depart from life because
nature is not being gratified, and the experience of seeing nature still in
command in those who have not yet decided to let grace reign in their lives
only increases the suffering associated with a new kind of life. A new life in which we forget ourselves and
open out toward others, a life in which exercises of piety and devotion are
taken up and made a part of our daily schedule is very likely to seem dull and
uninteresting. This is in itself a type
of suffering, and combined with the inevitable sufferings we all encounter, can
put our new life with God in jeopardy.
It is absolutely necessary that all these things be made palatable, for
we cannot set them aside, they are as necessary to our spiritual health as
water is necessary to our bodily health.
St. John of the Cross makes a very interesting statement, he says: “Quod
sapit, nutrit”. This means that whatever is savory is nourishing. Suffering,
considered in itself, is not a good thing, and is not to be sought on its own
merits, that is, for its own sake. All
suffering must be related to Christ if it is to be of profit spiritually. In His own life, Jesus looked forward to the
Cross. He wanted to embrace it. He called His sufferings a Baptism He was eager to undergo. For Him, too, Baptism represented a change in status, the
beginning of a new and higher type of life.
It was to be the gateway to a Risen life, a life at the right hand of
His Father, in glory. It was to be a
higher life also in the respect that His spirit would be handed over to us and
thus He would be a living reality everywhere in the world. He would be able to live in every one of us,
and in every creature, too. His
suffering and death offered Him an entrance to that life, and a share in His
Cross is the only entrance we will ever
find to a share in that same risen life.
Thus we find the Cross of
Christ sweet, or rather, capable of sweetening a hard life because it is so
expressive of His love. In His Cross
the extent of His love and of His Father’s love is plainly manifested. “For God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son.” and Jesus
said: “Greater love than this no
man has, that He lay down his life for his friends.” But Jesus’ love supersedes
even this love, for by His Cross He showed a love for us – while we were still
His enemies – that dazzles the imagination.
And so it is this love we find signified by the Cross of Christ, which
we must mix with our own crosses to make them sweet, palatable, and spiritually
nourishing.
The passage of Exodus,
which we read of the wood, which made the bitter waters sweet, therefore, does
help us to appreciate the role of the Cross of Christ in our life and is a very
clear type of the Cross. But it is not the
only reference or ‘type’ of the Cross which we find in the account of the
Israelites journey through the desert.
There is at least one other, and it is referred to toward the end of the
journey, and it is Christ Himself who brings it to our attention. It is the incident involving the brazen
serpent. For Jesus said, “As
Moses lifted up the brazen serpent in the desert, so also I, if I be lifted up,
will draw all things to myself”.
The incident referred to
took place as the Israelites were approaching the day of their entrance into
Canaan. It was necessary for them to
make a long journey skirting the land of the Edomites. They began to grow tired and weary with the
inconvenience of the journey and began to complain against God and against
Moses. As a punishment, God sent
serpents in among them, whose bite burned like fire and killed many of
them. Then realizing their sin, they
went to Moses to ask him to intercede.
Moses in turn appealed to the Lord, who bade him fashion a serpent of
bronze and set it up on a staff so that it might bring health to all who looked
upon it, as they lay wounded.
We have to admit, my dear
sisters, that there is no time during our spiritual journey that is utterly
free of suffering or of some kind of bitterness. And this particular incident puts us on our guard against a very
special type of fault, one that can have disastrous effects because it can
nullify all that we have been able to accomplish in our moments of fervor and
in the enthusiasm of our youth, or our beginnings on the spiritual road. The fault I am thinking of is the sin of sloth. This may
surprise you, and if it doesn’t, it is because we don’t have a true
understanding of what sloth is. In the
strict sense, sloth is hatred of the effort involved in being good or of
leading an intense spiritual life. It
is such a terrible sin because it demeans the life of grace that has been
bestowed upon us. Hatred of the effort
involved is putting a value on God and on Christ, and a very low one at that,
for it says in effect that He is not worth a little bit of inconvenience. And at the same time, this incident reveals
a love for creature comforts, as represented by the complaint of the
Israelites, also, concerning the lack of water and the very bland, unsavory food
God had been sending them. Again, this
is equating the Christian life with goods of value far, far below the good of
being a child of God and a sharer in His divine life. We know ourselves how anxious we are about having an abundance of
comforts and conveniences, and if we haven’t seen it in our own lives, we have
an opportunity to see it in the lives of others.
That the Lord should
punish this sin of theirs by sending serpents with fiery bites shows that the
devil is cunning enough to enter in and destroy the spirituality of those of us
who fall victim to this fault of sloth and excessive love for creature
comforts. After all, any kind of
spirituality is supposed to assert in a forceful way the primacy of the
spirit. When we make our spirituality
dependent upon freedom from hard work or the easy access to physical comforts,
we have, in effect, destroyed it. I am
inclined to believe, or at least to hope, that the number of Christians, and
particularly of we religious – because we are presumably closer to the
‘Promised Land’ of a totally Christian life – whose spiritual life is snuffed
out by these two faults is very slight. However, I do believe that the number of
devout Christians and of we religious whose spiritual life is deeply wounded by
these faults is quite large (I hope I am wrong). There are so many lay-people who have told me in all honesty that
they can’t help thinking that priests and religious have no concern for
anything beyond what is compatible with their own comfortable uninvolved
way of life.
Here, too, then, the Cross of Christ is given to us as a remedy to heal
those wounds. Christ hanging upon the
cross so well represents His being made into the likeness of sin for us, as St. Paul says. He was, of course, not made into sin in that He shared our
sinfulness, but in that He did share our mortal nature and He shared the lot of
us who live in a world of sinful men and who are obliged to suffer the
consequences of being a mere mortal among mortals, that is, of being subject to
the pain and suffering drawn down upon us by our own sins and the sins of our
fellow-men. But in all this, Christ did
not allow His love for God and His fellow human beings to be stifled and
destroyed. He made of the consequences
of sin – the Cross – the means of asserting the supreme value of the life of
the spirit. He was able to show us that
neither material comfort nor all of them put together is worthy of being
compared to the value of one human being, and that no price is too high to pay
to preserve a human being’s share in the life of the Spirit. And we know from the Cross of Christ that
even were we sure that suffering on behalf of others is not going to help
preserve the life of a single soul, our healthy detachment from all created
values, and particularly creature comforts, does proclaim the primacy of
spiritual values and sets us free for a full participation in the Christian
life, that is, divine life.
Before leaving this
subject of the Cross, we should return to that incident at Mara. It was there, after having shown Moses the
tree whose wood made the waters sweet, that the Lord gave certain decrees and
declared that if the people observe them, that none of the evils, which He had
visited upon the Egyptians, would ever afflict the Israelites, and that indeed
His decrees would bring them health. We
have no idea what those laws and decrees were that God gave them at that time
to live by, but since they were associated with the woes brought upon Egypt, we
can feel secure in interpreting them in terms of self-denial. Nowadays there are psychologists who tell us
that every form of self-control is wrong.
Freudians particularly tell us that repression and suppression of
the drives and urges of nature are causes of neuroses and other forms of mental
suffering. But God’s statement here
preceding the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai seems to be telling us that even
when our lives are not religiously motivated, it still becomes necessary for us
to subject our lives to a definite rule and pattern, and thus to impose some
control. He tells us that it is this,
which brings us health. And by the way,
the word health is another translation
of the word commonly rendered ‘salvation’. He seems to be saying here that even in
those who never have or ever will hear of Christ, His grace is operative, urging
them and appealing to them to affirm the primacy of the spirit by a cheerful acceptance of the Cross. He seems to be saying that these people will
not be allowed to perish. But whether
or not there is a reference here to people outside the Christian Faith, we can
at least say that this passage gives us a guarantee that enduring the cross and
finding it sweet does not injure our state of mental health. We must rather say that it frees us from
bondage to the material element in our nature, and does help us to become more
mature and truly human persons.
From Mara, the Israelite
people went on to Elim, where they found twelve springs of water and seventy
palm trees. This remark can be used, I
think, to remind us that the Cross of Christ, which we appropriate and unite to
our own crosses, is the basis of our hope.
Hope can be likened to water because we say, “Hope springs
eternal” and in his Epistle to the Romans (5:
3,4), St. Paul says: “We are
confident even over our afflictions, knowing that afflictions give rise to
endurance, and endurance gives proof of our faith, and a proven faith gives
ground for hope. Nor does this hope
delude us.”
For you see, my dear sisters, hope is the basis of our morale. Hope is the presentiment that one day we
shall possess in its entirety and without fear of loss the object of our
heart’s desire. Hope is really more
than a presentiment; it is a kind of anticipated possession of our heart’s
desire. Afflictions and sufferings that
give rise to patience and endurance, which give proof of and strengthen our
Faith, are tangible evidence that a spirit dwells in us which utterly
transcends our instincts and our natural urges. It belongs to our corporal life to make material comforts and
security the basis of our morale. This
morale is necessary because it enables us to face life and its problems
enthusiastically, and to maintain our confidence in our future well being when
we are faced with overwhelming odds to the contrary, that is in the face of
uncertainties of this life due to the presence of sinfulness. Afflictions borne in patience, united to the
suffering Christ, prove that our spirit is untouchable and thus indestructible
(i.e., its life) and give rise to the conviction that in due time we will come
into possession of all our heart’s desires.
Hope is so comforting to our spirit that it enables us to live as in an
Oasis situated in the middle of a cruel desert.
Yes, my dear sisters, we
religious certainly do need to appropriate the Cross of Christ and to seek in
it the sweetness that makes our own crosses palatable and nourishing. At the present time Religious life is under
fire on all sides as “destructive of human development and fulfillment”. People accuse us of seeking refuge behind
the structures of religious life because we are too weak and defective to stand
on our own two feet. They accuse us of
seeking a dignity and a status that we know we could never achieve as
individuals and in competition with others in the world at large. They accuse us of trying to palm off our
coldness toward people as chastity, and
our inability to get deeply involved in the problems of people as
perfect charity (i.e., directed to God alone).
Of course, we mustn’t make
excuses for or try to deny the dangers to a full and responsible life that
exists in our religious structure. But
we do know that we are convinced of the value and the viability of religious
life, and we must be prepared to accept the suffering of body and mind,
especially of mind, that goes with religious life. Religious life is the way God has called us to, we see it as the
way He wants us to live out fully our completely new status as His children, as
new, spiritual, divinized creatures. We
have exposed ourselves to a greater share of the bitterness of this higher type
of life. But by joining our sufferings
to the sufferings of Christ, we are able not only to sweeten life but also to
give it a sweetness surpassing our ability to express in words. I find this to be true looking back upon my
own religious life, and I am sure that each of you, in looking back, can say
the same.
MISSION
STATEMENT: This web site was created for the purpose of completing the work
of Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, O.C.D These conferences may be reproduced for private
use only. Publication of this material is forbidden without permission of
the Father Provincial for the Discalced Carmelites, Holy Hill, 1525 Carmel
Rd., Hubertus, WI 53033-9770.
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