I Have Suffered for You

The subject of suffering always brings people down to Monday morning reality. The reconciler's task consists in praying, greeting people, establishing a relationship... and suffering.

 

Why this is so is a mystery, just as suffering is a mystery. The only reason we can offer is that Jesus himself suffered for the sins of humankind. He suffered harassment from those who were jealous of his ministry, he suffered at Gethsemani and he endured death on the cross. Suffering played a large part in his life.

 

The first Reconciler thus made a bold statement: he came to rescue humankind from sin and he did it out of love, in the power of God and through suffering. Suffering is not popular. Mere mention of it is commonly avoided. We rarely, if ever, read of it in Catholic publications or hear about it from the pulpit.

 

At La Salette, Mary brings it to the fore as the principal means of protecting her people from punishment. This reconciliation ministry is only for those who love God and people enough to suffer for them and with them. The mention of suffering in Mary's discourse is bold indeed: the Mother of God is suffering in the very heart of glory. Who could have imagined it if she had not clearly stated it?

 Suffering is an integral part of the ministry of reconciliation. Even in heaven. The reconciling person, following in the footsteps of the reconciling Christ and his reconciling Mother will undergo suffering for the reconciliation of all people. All reconcilers are acquainted with suffering. It is part of the charism of reconciliation. Why this is so is a mystery, just as the tears of the Lady are a mystery, just as the suffering Christ and the Cross are a mystery.

Reconciliation and Suffering

Still, there are some visible, appreciable reasons for joining reconciliation with suffering:

 

Weeping Mother, in La Salette Shrine, Dobowiec, Poland

a) Suffering is a sincere and powerful proof of love. It is a crucible where true affection is tested. We have all heard of fair weather friends who desert their "loved" ones when the sun stops shining and hailstones begin to fly. Somewhere Pascal wrote: "I believe a witness who is strangled for his faith." More than any other sentence, Our Lady's revelation of suffering for us is the most important declaration of love in the entire message of La Salette. Those words, accompanied by her tears are the most felt expression of God's concern for us in modern times.

 

b) Suffering is the most powerful sign of faithful, abiding love the Lady manifested at La Salette. "How long a time have I suffered for you!... I am obliged to plead with him without ceasing. However much you pray, however much you do, you will never recompense the pains I have taken for you."

 

c) Again, the tears — the most striking and visible of all the symbolic gestures the Lady has given — are an obvious sign of suffering. They manifest a surfeit of moral pain. It was important to the Lady that these tears be seen. When the children first see her, she is sitting on the stone, her face in her hands, in an obvious expression of sorrow. In fact, this vision of the weeping Mother came before her spoken word. She allowed the children to see her thus afflicted and the scene was set. The tears clearly became the main theme, the message and the mood of the apparition.

 

d) The crucifix, which seemed alive to the children, is another open recall of suffering. It connects Calvary with the entire message. This suffering Person on the cross is her Son and she is suffering with him. The tears falling over the cross seem to point to that compassion. The crucifix also recalls the saving act of Calvary and the redeeming power of all suffering endured in union with him and in his name.

 

e) This aspect of suffering is also the most forbidding element in the La Salette event. People instinctively recoil from pain, any pain. When Jesus first told his disciples of his coming Passion, "that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed...." Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, "God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."

 

What Jesus said and did next is revealing. "He turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do" (Mt 16:21-23). There is no doubt that the Lord hated suffering, as the agony in the garden shows. But it was important that he not use his divine power to escape suffering and death. It was crucial (literally) that he not be prevented from showing his love for humankind by "going the limit" for it. In view of this, anyone who would keep the Lord from suffering and this manner of expressing love is acting in the name of Satan. Peter discovers this when the kindly Jesus calls his friend Satan.

 

The Apostles show their aversion to suffering, especially to the specter of a suffering Christ when the Master predicts his Passion for the second time. "As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, 'The Son of Man is to be handed over to men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.' And they were overwhelmed with grief." (Mt. 17:22-23)

 

Christ at the Column, by the Italian Renaissance master, Antonello da Messina (1430-1479)

f) Suffering is also La Salette's most difficult obstacle. The apparition has never inherited the appealing image of Lourdes and Fatima. It was never meant to. La Salette has espoused the central message of the Gospel, salvation, redemption, love through suffering. Tears and suffering are shown as signs and symbols of concern. The problem is that suffering is explicitly mentioned by the Lady and powerfully projected on all the world's screen by her sorrowful, sitting posture and her tears. People are touched by the statues and paintings of La Salette. They are sympathetic as anyone would be in the presence of a weeping adult at a wake. Especially when the adult is the Virgin. The immediate temptation is to sentimentality. But actual sharing of suffering and sorrow is another matter.

 

For this reason, La Salette will never be self-propelled. The first years after the apparition witnessed a widespread, spontaneous publicity. It was new, interesting, striking. It leaped oceans and continents. But La Salette will never have the Lourdes appeal, with the young, white-dressed and smiling Virgin, the miracles, the lovable and canonized Bernadette Soubirous. Nor will it ever be a Fatima with the dancing sun and the saintly children.

 

La Salette has to be literally, almost physically, taken to all nations and peoples. La Salette is unique in the Gospel harshness of its message. It is alone in the Virgin's end-of-message insistence on disseminating the message. "Well, my children, you will make this known to all my people." This command was repeated by the Virgin, but with this singular stress which can only be given in French (she had reverted from the native Patois to French for this last word): "Vous le ferez bien passer a tout mon peuple"; which could be loosely translated, if at all, with "Well, my children, make sure you make this known to all my people."

 

La Salette – a Message of Challenge and Hope

La Salette is a "witness message." It is prophetic. It is reproachful, accusing and threatening — not the stuff of popularity. In this it has inherited some of the hard, challenging character of the gospel. Whoever preaches it will be forever compared to the message and measured against it.

 

The charism of La Salette contains the elements of pain and proclamation. It includes the element of witness. They who preach suffering for the sake of the salvation of others, must have suffered, or be willing to suffer in the same way. Those who preach prayer and penance must also be prayerful and penitential people. Those who preach the tears must have cared enough, must be concerned enough about people to weep for them.

 

Speaking to church crowds about suffering in these times of instant and full gratification is not the most appealing prospect. I have often found myself ducking the suffering theme in homilies and conferences by quickly shifting gears to the splendors of love in St. John and the necessity of prayer. Beautiful topics in themselves and splendid enough to make me forget, for the moment, that I have neatly sidestepped that element that accompanies love and prayer to purify them. Down deep, where conscience sometimes slumbers, I know better.

 

(from left) Joy Davidman (1915-1960), beloved of C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), noted English novelist, poet, lay theologian, and Christian apologist.

It is often said that it is impossible to bear something for someone else. Is that true? In Jocelyn Gibb's Light on C. S. Lewis, Nevill Coghill tells a story C. S. Lewis once told him.

Lewis married late in life. In his marriage he found the very perfection of love, but too soon the wife he loved so much died of cancer. Once when Lewis was with Coghill he looked across the quadrangle at his wife, "I never expected," he said, "to have in my sixties the happiness that passed me by in my twenties." "It was then," writes Nevill Coghill, "that he told me of having been allowed to accept her pain." "You mean," said Coghill, "that the pain left her, and that you felt it for her in your body?" "Yes," said C.S. Lewis, "in my legs. It was crippling. But it relieved hers."

 

The Beatitude says, "Blessed are the merciful." The Hebrew word for mercy is Chesedh. In his commentary on Matthew, T. H. Robinson writes of this word: "Chesedh is the perfection of that mystical relation of one personality to another which is the highest of all possible grades of friendship. It means a systematic appreciation of other persons, the power, not merely to concentrate blindly on them, but to feel deliberately with them, to see life from their point of view."

 

It is involvement so complete that it issues in self-identification with the other person. It was this involvement and this self-identification that God accepted in Jesus Christ in the Incarnation. Matthew (8: 17) quotes Isaiah 53: 4: "This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: 'He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.'" There is a real sense in which Jesus Christ bore and endured the sin and the suffering of the human situation; and those who are his followers must be like him. (From Daily Celebration, 2, by William Barclay, Word Books, Publisher, 1973, pp. 81-82.)

 

Simone Weil, in her Waiting for God, wrote:

 

Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher, Christian mystic, and political activist whose life was marked by an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others.

It is affliction itself (in which) the splendor of God's mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart or its inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fill to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" If we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that Is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God.

 

We know then that joy is the sweetness of contact with the love of God, that affliction is the wound of this same contact when it is painful, and that only the contact matters, not the manner of it.

 

It is the same as when we see someone very dear to us after a long absence; the words we exchange with him do not matter, but only the sound of his voice, which assures us of his presence.

 

The knowledge of this presence of God does not afford consolation; it takes nothing from the fearful bitterness of affliction; nor does it heal the mutilation of the soul. But we know quite certainly that God's love for us is the very substance of this bitterness and this mutilation.

 

(from, The Face of the Reconciler: Bringing the La Salette Charism to Life, pgs. 18-21)

Sunrise silhouetting the statue of the Weeping Mother,
at the La Salette Shrine in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin