I am a professed secular Franciscan. At our last fraternity meeting, we studied the following scripture passage from Mark’s Gospel.
³⁴ He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵ For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. ³⁶ For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? ³⁷ Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? ³⁸ Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father. (Mark 8:34-38 NRSV)
During a rather long discussion about whether one could substitute the word “soul” for the word “life” in the Gospel passage (sigh), I focused on the opening remark of Jesus on one’s taking up their cross and following him.
As a kid in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, we were taught that the amount of one’s suffering in life was a badge of honor. We were making up in our own suffering that which was lacking in Christ’s suffering, a notion I found even then, utterly ridiculous. “Offer your suffering up for the poor souls in Purgatory,” the nuns used to instruct us. This glorification of suffering is reflected somewhat in a non-official world religion theology paper we passed around in one of the graduate school theology classes I had while working on my Masters in Pastoral Studies at the St Paul Seminary. The sheet used the crass phrase, “Shit happens!” and applied it to the world religions, e.g. for Zen Buddhism, the phrase was altered to “What is the sound of shit happening.” Catholicism’s version of the phrase was, “Shit happens! And we deserve it!” Of course, Vatican II altered a lot of what I was taught by the nuns prior to the Second Vatican Council, though, there are quite a few priests and bishops ordained over the past 25 years who love all that pre-Vatican II garbage.
So what did Jesus mean when he said that we must take up our cross and follow him? What follows is my reflection on that statement of Jesus.
To be disciples of Jesus, to serve others as Jesus had, requires us to live lives of inconvenience. We must be willing to stop everything we are doing to assist someone who is in need. It can be something as simple as talking to someone on the phone, or taking time out of one’s day to drive someone to a doctor’s appointment and wait to drive that person back home again. Or, it may mean that we give up a part of our lives to be present to people who are in crises and do it without any hesitation, like getting being present to someone as they lay dying. The most extreme example of this was the recent death of the Minneapolis police officer who was coming to the aid of a person he thought had been shot, only to find that the man was the shooter. The Jesus in John’s Gospel would say, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13, NRSV)
Each Gospel has a different Christology. Mark’s Jesus is far more human, than that of Matthew’s who portrays Jesus as the “New Moses”. Luke’s Jesus portrays him as the “Compassion of God” (Monica Helwig’s title), and, John’s Gospel, in which Jesus is the Logos of God, “Jesus Christ Superstar”, to borrow a reference from popular culture. Scripture scholars account for this difference in Christology to the fact that each Gospel was written for a different Christan community in the early Church. The Gospels are not historical records but the understanding of a particular community of disciples of who the Christ is. This also leads to the question of when did Jesus become self-aware of who he was. We really do not know for certain. The Gospels indicate different times. Luke’s Gospel suggests at the age of 12 years old, when he stayed behind in the Temple. John’s Gospel would suggest that as the Logos of God, he knew who he was from the very beginning, And then, we get to Mark’s Gospel.
Mark’s Gospel has no infancy narratives. Whether the biblical exegesis supports it or not, I have always thought that in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan reawakens within him his true identity and the mission he was incarnated to do. He goes to the desert to figure out who he really is, and gradually learns as he begins his ministry, e.g. his dialogue with the Syrophoenician woman who pushes back against his Jewish prejudice toward Gentiles. This difference Jesus discovers in himself is not really accepted by Mary, his mother, nor his family, who come to bring him home, proverbially in a straight-jacket, because they think he is crazy and is an embarrassment to the family. “Then he went home; ²⁰ and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. ²¹ When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”(Mark 3: 19b-21, NRSV)
The quote from Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin came to my mind when reading this, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” In my understanding of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is a spiritual being having a human experience. Only in the case of Jesus, he was the Divine One, the Logos or Word of God. His baptism in the Jordan and the exclamation of the Father of who Jesus was, jolted Jesus out of a kind of spiritual amnesia. Jesus the Christ in Mark’s Gospel suddenly knows who he is, what he is to do, and rushes to fulfill his earthly mission.
I fully believe Chardin is correct in writing that we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but rather spiritual beings having a human experience. As the psalmist in Psalm 139 writes, we are formed as spiritual beings by God and placed in the womb of our mothers. “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. ¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. ¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. ¹⁶ Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. ¹⁷ How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” (Ps 139:13-17, NRSV)
Unlike Jesus, whose divinity was well established as the Christ, we are not fully mature spiritual beings, but spend our human existence discovering what it means to be and live as spiritual beings. We spend an entire lifetime learning who we are as spiritual beings, and seeking to know the name God gave us at our creation. Near Death experiencers speak of the same thing, though instead of the word soul, they will use the word spirit.
I have ruminated on the vast mystery of Psalm 139 from the days when I first sang a setting of it in the 1970”s (Yahweh, I Know You Are Near, St Louis Jesuits, NALR). Formed by and in the image of God, how am I to know the name God gave me when I was created by God? How am I to discern, like Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, the mission I was created to fulfill in my lifetime? It is a discernment that does not end, but continues up to our last breath. Jesus speaks of being willing to take up one’s cross and follow him. In other words, suffering is one of those pathways in which we begin to discern who we are as God knows us, and what our purpose or mission is in life.
Suffering is a part of our lives in this world. As much as we wish to escape suffering, suffering still finds us in one form or another. To suffer just for the sake of suffering is ridiculous and sinfully masochistic. However, using the suffering that befalls us helps us to form a bond of understanding with others who are suffering and that assists in our discerning who we really are as spiritual beings. We understand our own powerlessness in our suffering and the suffering of others. We can’t kiss it and make it better. Smugly uttering pious platitudes in an attempt to alleviate the suffering of another person is an anathema to the one suffering; it is tantamount to cursing them. When one can’t “let go and let God” because their pain threshold is a “10” and the mere touching the sheet that rests on an infected leg is agony beyond agony, the phrase, “to let go and let God,” instead of placating the suffering person, accuses the person’s lack of faith to “let go and let God” as the cause for the extreme pain being experienced. The only thing we can do is to acknowledge our own powerlessness and just be present to the one who is suffering.
I have experienced a lot of suffering in my own life. What I discovered in all of it was who I am as a spiritual being. After the head-on collision is 2002, I spent a couple of weeks in the trauma center of North Memorial Hospital following the surgery on my left leg. The pastor for whom I worked at the time, Fr Steve Ulrick, visited me. I was laying there all hooked up to tubes and leads. He didn’t ask me how I was doing, nor offer any words of comfort and sympathy. Rather, he said, “So where’s the grace in this!” I was incredibly pissed off at him asking me that because I was hurting like hell. I replied to him, “Ten years ago, I would find a way to punch you in the nose, Steve! But I know where you are going with your question and I don’t know where the hell the grace is in all of this! It will be something revealed to me later.” Those ended up being prophetic words.
When one experiences great suffering, the spiritual being awakens within us. I believe that we begin to see our suffering connecting us to the suffering of those around us. In knowing suffering, we established an empathetic link to others, and though the suffering of others might vary from our own, a common understanding or bond is established with them.
When I was able to get around on crutches and begin to drive again, I started to make pastoral visits again. I visited a parishioner, Mike, who was a quadriplegic. Mike had been a quadriplegic since a diving accident when he was 23 years old. What a lovely man, so full of love and acceptance, when he could be so incredibly bitter and angry. After I gave Mike, communion, I blessed him and he responded, “I love you.” As I got into my vehicle, I thought of the common bond I shared with Mike, the significant difference being that while one day I would be able to walk again, Mike would never be able to walk, ever. However, for a brief eight weeks when I was confined to bed and to a chair, I experienced the day-to-day life Mike lived. It was then that I began to understand Steve Ulrick’s question, but I altered it from “Where is the grace?” to “What am I supposed to learn from this?”
Cheri Register, in her book, Living with Chronic Illness, writes that as one who suffers from a chronic illness, she hates the saying, “There by the grace of God, go I.” She finds the phrase demeaning of others who are suffering. She wrote that instead, the phrase must be, “Here, by the grace of God, I am.” One would have looked at the life of Mike with pity and be aghast at how cruelly life treated him. Yet for the remaining years of Mike’s life, he was so immensely loved by his wife, and by all his neighbors. He could exude love because he received so much love from others. No one who knew Mike knew him as a pitiful quadriplegic stuck in a motorized wheelchair. They knew Mike as a tremendous human being who worked like everyone else did, only remotely at home, who just happened to be quadriplegic. When Mike died, I preached at his funeral Mass. The Church of St Hubert, which seats 1100 people, was filled to the brim.
Were I merely a human being having a spiritual experience, I would be bitter and angry at that that snotnosed 16-year-old kid, with no car insurance, who plowed head-on into my car that March 7th night in 2002. He not only nearly killed me that night, but the result of that accident almost killed me nine years later when I needed more corrective surgery from the initial injury suffered in that car accident which brought on a MRSA infection that sent me into renal failure and very, very near death. I was on medical leave from June 2011 to March 2012, with no left hip as the infectious disease doctors sought to find an antibiotic or combination of antibiotics that would kill the MRSA and not kill me (I am deadly allergic to most of the antibiotics used to kill MRSA). I could be bitter and angry at all the repeated surgeries and the extreme pain I experienced during that time to drain the infection from my what had been my left hip. I could be bitter and angry that the impact of that kid’s car slamming into mine injured my right hand so severely that two hand surgeries could never return full function to my right hand, thus ending my career as a professional musician. My wife, Ruth, could be bitterly angry at the inattentive shit who backed over her with his pickup truck as she walked home from church on October 18th, 2018, irreparably injuring her back so severely that her career and her ministry as a registered nurse was ended permanently.
However, we are spiritual beings having a human experience and in carrying our crosses as they come into our lives, we learn how to connect our suffering to the suffering of others, just as the Jesus in Mark’s Gospel learned human suffering in connecting his suffering to that of the rest of humanity. In our own suffering we learn compassion and love, pain and powerlessness, and solidarity with all who are suffering. Julian of Norwich, the English anchoress, in her writings, Revelations, calls this our “Oneing” with one another and with Christ.
In the Last Supper discourse of John’s Gospel, Jesus knows the extreme suffering that awaits him in the Kidron Valley. This discourse is his last lesson to the disciples. In his counsel to them, he lays it on the line to them. The world will not be receptive to their message. They will experience suffering and death because of it. However, he reassures them that though he may not walk in the midst, he will never leave them abandoned. Then Jesus tells them two things that will assure them eternal happiness. Jesus instructs the disciples to “remain in me.” Then, following that, he says, to “remain in my love.” Jesus assures us that if we do this, then his joy will be in us and our joy will be complete. He concludes, “Love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:1-12) Or as Julian of Norwich wrote in her Revelations, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”