Élisabeth Leseur - Meditation on Suffering

I know that if I didn't begin each day with the daily meditations from The Magnificat I would be banging around like the pinball in the song Pinball Wizard by The Who.

This year, with my trials and tribulations, the theme of suffering has brought me some solace. I just want to share a few quotes from Élisabeth Leseur.

“Let it be done for you according to your faith”

God, I offer you my spiritual aridity and deprivations. I offer you the interior sadness, the injuries, the disappointments of my heart, so much anxiety for the spiritual well-being and the health of those precious to me, and all the many sufferings of life. I offer you darkness of spirit, weakness of will, interior sorrow, and burdens. I offer you my physical distress, this illness that has sadly limited my external life, the discomforts and exhaustion that my troubles bring right now. I bind these things into a sheaf, Lord, and come humbly with the shepherds to lay it in the manger.

Little Child, all love, all purity, all tenderness, give me purity of heart, tenderness, and charity. Accept my afflictions and use them for the good of others and for your glory. May your blessed hands help me to carry [my burdens], and may your love and the union of our hearts relieve my isolation. May it end one day, when, by your grace, you will convert and make holy those dear persons whom I beg you to make Christians and apostles, O Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God.

A few more quotes from Servant of God Elisabeth Leseur:

“Look around oneself for proud sufferers in need,” Élisabeth counseled, “find them, and give them the alms of our heart, of our time, and of our tender respect.”

“Suffering is the highest form of action, the highest expression of the wonderful Communion of Saints, and that in suffering one is sure not to make mistakes (as in action, sometimes) — sure to be useful to others and to the great causes that one longs to serve.”

And here is an entry from her diary dated, May 3, 1904, which is typical of her experience of sorrow: 

"Has my life known any unhappier time than this?…And yet through all these trials and in spite of the lack of interior joy, there is a deep place that all these waves of sorrow cannot touch….[T]here I can feel how completely one with God I am, and I regain strength and serenity in the heart of Christ. My God, give health and happiness to those I love and give us all true light and charity."

Sometimes the best place to be is in silence and Élisabeth sums it up this way:

“Silence is sometimes an act of energy, and smiling, too.”

Dear Lord, please kindle in my heart the indelible mark of suffering shared by all in the Communion of Saints and help me find union with Your Heart full of tenderness and charity.

Peace and Truth - The Peace that Convicts Us of Our Lies

The one symbol most often identified with Jesus and his Church is the cross. Today we celebrate The Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The cross is a sign of suffering, a sign of human cruelty at its worst. But by Christ’s love shown in the Paschal Mystery, it has become the sign of triumph and victory, the sign of God, who is love itself. Pope Benedict XVI wrote: 

In one respect the cross does have a terrible aspect that we ought not to remove... To see that the purest of men, who was more than a man, was executed in such a grisly way can make us frightened of ourselves. But we also need to be frightened of ourselves and out of our self-complacency. Here, I think, Luther was right when he said that man must first be frightened of himself so that he can then find the right way. However, the cross doesn't stop at being a horror... because the one who looks down on us from the cross is not a failure, a desperate man, not one of the horrible victims of humanity. For this crucified man says something different from Spartacus and his failed adherents, because, after all, what looks down at us from the cross is a goodness that enables a new beginning in the midst of life's horror. (Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium)

 As my friend, Gil Bailie surmises that if you or I were on the cross, looking down at our persecutors, we would have seen ravenous wolves. Jesus looks down and see lost sheep. In this difference of looks we have either the apparent peace we grasp at by expelling our enemies versus the look of Real Truth and Goodness revealed through the grace of His Peace. Pope Benedict XVI continues:

Peace convicts us of our lies. It brings us out of our comfortable indifference into the struggle and pain of the truth. And it is only thus that true peace can come into being, in place of the apparent peace, beneath which lie the hidden hypocrisy and all kinds of conflict. Truth is worth pain and even conflict. I may not just accept a lie in order to have quiet. For it is not the first duty of a citizen, or of a Christian, to seek quiet; but rather it is that standing fast by what is noble and great, which is what Christ has given us and which can reach as far as suffering, as far as a struggle that ends in martyrdom - and exactly in that way of peace. Christ embodies the great and undiluted loving-kindness of God. He comes to help us bear the load. He does not do this simply by taking away from us the pain of being human; that remains heavy enough. But we are no longer carrying it on our own; he is carrying it with us. Christ has nothing to do with comfort, with banality, yet we find in him that inner calm that comes from knowing that we are being supported by an ultimate kindness and an ultimate security. We see that the entire structure of the message of Jesus is full of tension; it is an enormous challenge. Its nature is such that it always has to do with the Cross. Anyone who is not ready to get burned, who is not at least willing for it to happen, will not come near. But we can always be sure that it is there that we will meet true loving-kindness, which helps us, which accepts us - and which does not merely mean well toward us, but which will in fact ensure that all things go well with us. Quote from: God and the World: A Conversation With Peter Seewald 

Collateral Beauty - What is truth, you ask? No idle questions answered here!

When I saw the movie "Collateral Beauty" nearly 2 years ago it jumped right up into my list of favorites. A devastating story being told by someone hit hard by life and refusing platitudes and the conventional quick fix answers from friends, society, church and religions.

Throughout the movie I found instances where we are invited to enter into the drama of life - the drama of suffering, which, when you think about it, is what we do as we participate in the mass of the passion of Christ each Sunday at church. 

The post: "The Beautiful Truth of Collateral Beauty" from Jeff Hual at Mockingbird peels away all the cloudiness, distortions and relativism of the world as it says: 

... Collateral Beauty goes straight to the heart of the matter, diagnosing the human condition.  The movie begins with Will Smith portraying an advertising executive named Howard, a guru in his field, who is addressing his associates. Howard asks the question that is most likely at the heart of our burning questions today:

What is your why? Why did you even get out of the bed this morning? Why did you eat what you ate? Why did you wear what you wore? Why did you come here? We’re here to connect, so how are we supposed to do that?

Love, time, death. These three abstractions connect every single human being on earth, everything that we covet, everything that we fear not having, everything that we ultimately end up buying, is because, at the end of the day, we long for love, we wish we had more time, and we fear death. Love, time, death. Let’s begin there.

I don’t know if the writer of these words is a Christian, but I can think of no better description of the human condition. In the absence of Christ, humanity is forever trapped in an insoluble situation. We live always with the fear of death; we can’t do a single thing to gain more time; and real love can be ephemeral, elusive. So we go to church on Good Friday seeking an answer to our insoluble problem, one that rings true, and brings comfort into our situation. 

Jeff goes on in the review to explain the supernatural turn of the movie when Christ through Love, Time and Death, in the form of three actual people, enter into the drama of Howard's life. He goes on to challenge each of us to delve deeper in our faith by asking those most vital and hard pressing questions that only come to us when we are struck down by life and find out at that moment that the only way out is through God's love. And for me, I throw the challenge out, if we are not the one struck down, but rather the one nearby, we are commissioned by way of our baptism, to be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them.