the suffering christ 798 Truly, it is not right for us to refrain from tears, because on the back of the Incarnate Son of God, we have laid an enormous pile of evil deeds. We have constructed out of our crimes a gibbet for Him, and we have stretched out our iniquities upon Him. Although out of love for us, He Himself most bravely carried and fully expiated them, yet we still decline to carry out of love for Him [our] little crosses, insignificant afflictions. Either we avoid them, or we rush through them with many complaints and sometimes shameful impatience. Did we expect that we would enter into a different glory while partying, drinking, indulging ourselves, when even the King Himself obtained glory through His suffering? Or did we wholly forget His words and salvific warnings, which He made so clearly for us through the writer of His deeds that no explanation is needed? He said sometime: “If any man would come after [M]e, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow [M]e” (Mt 16:24). The Cross is an accepted affliction of the body; the Cross is uninterrupted, serious penance; the Cross is infamy, contempt, injury, and any kind of tribulation; the Cross is infirmity, lack of goods, hardships, forfeiting temporal goods, loss of wealth; the Cross is the lack of necessities, the pruning off of the superfluous, the subtraction of success, the entrance of adversity, and whatever either in the spirit or in the body causes difficulty. To carry such a cross out of love for Christ with an eager and joyful heart, we are all called by Christ Himself through His word and example — particularly, through the most bitter carrying of the salvific wood of the Cross — so that, ultimately, we may attain together with Him the eternal inheritance of everlasting joy and glory by following after our Predecessor on the way of the Cross. Christ, I go there, wherever You call me: Through hostility and fire, And through waters, and deserts, rocks, and thorns, Under Your leadership, all difficult roads will be made easier Especially if [our] companion Love imparts [to us] wings.
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