A Mother's Heart is a Gethsemane

 Not one of the apostles could stay awake to keep watch with Christ as He suffered His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, but I cannot help but believe there was one who kept watch with Him even though she was not in the Garden with Him.  Perhaps some of the mystics wrote about His Mother keeping watch in prayer with Him that night wherever she happened to be.  How could such a Mother, united so closely to her Son, not know in her heart and soul of His agony?

A mother suffers when her children suffer.  Perhaps in a way she even suffers more than they suffer, for she can see more clearly than they where their paths lead and the pain they will bring upon themselves.  She wants to spare them all the suffering that she can—even to wishing she could take on their pain for them.

"Father, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless not My will but Thine be done."

So Christ prayed in Gethsemane.  How powerless He must have felt as He knelt and prayed, faced with the anguish of knowing the suffering He would undergo.  Likewise how powerless a mother feels as she prays to the Father that He might take away her cup, which is to spare her children their suffering.

It is easy to focus on Christ's agony as His fear and terror of the cruel torture He would experience in being scourged, crowned with thorns, mocked, condemned to death, and crucified.  Yet what is such physical suffering in comparison to the pain of His heart?

He chose to suffer out of love.  Consider for a moment what that means: He suffered such a cruel death not merely to fulfill the demands of justice and allow us to enter heaven, but because He loves us and desires us to be in intimate relationship with Him.  One who loves infinitely must suffer infinitely.

He loves you and wants you close to His heart.  You.  Not the you that you would like to be, but you as you are.  You have a special place in His heart that He gives to none other.

So many turn away from such love.  Who can bear it?

Think of the pain you have ever felt when someone rejected your love.  His pain in Gethsemane—the cup He asked His Father to take away—must have been bitter with unrequited love. He longed so much for all to love Him and yet knew how many would reject Him. He must have felt as He knelt there that His sacrifice was in vain—that it was not enough for Him to suffer such pain out of love, for it would not be enough to win the hearts of all to love Him.  The devil must have tempted Him with the folly of His sacrifice, urging Him to give it up as fruitless because He would give all that He had and it would not be enough.

A mother's heart serves as a similar battleground.  A mother gives everything she has and it is not enough.  How much she must be tempted to think that it is all in vain and to feel the agony of her own powerlessness in the face of what she desires with all her heart and soul.  Truly she is united in that pain with Christ in Gethsemane.

IX. Jesus Falls the Third Time

V. We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless Thee.
R. Because by Thy holy Cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.

"Third time's the charm," as people say.  There is something significant in the number three: a powerful expression of finality.

When Christ fell the third time, how weak He must have been, how near unto the place of crucifixion and yet how far.  In His weakness He must have lain for a moment, trying to draw strength to rise, His will bent still toward our salvation, loving us with every moment of the immense torment He suffered as He lay against the rock-strewn ground.

Think of what the devil whispered into His ears.  For He was not left alone in that moment of weakness, but laid bare to all the snares of enemy.

What about your own falls?  It is when we are weakest that the devil likes to strike, for he cannot get us when we are wrapped about with the power and love of Christ.  It is only when we lie prone in our weakness and do not wish to go on that he can tempt us not to go on.  Then he can make us feel that all is hopeless, that we are powerless, and that we shall never rise from this darkness.

How much more must Christ have been tempted as He lay there.  Was it because He was God that He did not give in?

Rather it was love.  For only love can carry one through temptation.  Only love can make us so little heed our own darkness that we will to suffer it so long as God wills it.  Only love can raise us up when we have fallen.  Only love can give us hope in a brighter dawn.

And our Lord did not remain on the ground.  He struggled to His feet again, the cross still upon His shoulders.

Perhaps His entire human nature cried out that it was futile and that He would never have the strength to reach the place of crucifixion.  The enemy may have whispered of our infidelity, our lack of care for Him, our turning away and complete disdain for all that He was doing for us.  Yet He loved us still.  He went on because He wanted to show us that love in the most powerful way He could: by dying for us.  That death He had already begun, dying for us in each moment, and dying to the temptations that assailed even Him.

May He grant us the grace to rise from our hardest falls and to go on for love of Him.

Ah, my outraged Jesus, by the merits of the weakness Thou didst suffer in going to Calvary, give me strength sufficient to conquer all human respect, and all my wicked passions, which have led me to despise Thy friendship. I love Thee, Jesus my love, with my whole heart; I repent of having offended Thee. Never permit me to offend Thee again. Grant that I may love Thee always; and then do with me what Thou wilt. (From the Stations of the Cross according to Saint Alphonsus Liguori.)

VI. Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus

V. We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless Thee.

R. Because by Thy Holy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.

Do you think Veronica knew what she would do when she stepped out of the crowd to come to Christ as He carried the cross, His face disfigured by blood and grime?  Why did she not hide behind the others, expecting someone else to do something if anything could be done?

Perhaps Christ Himself caught her eye.  Perhaps she saw in that look such a longing for her love that she no longer cared what others would think and no longer cared what would happen if she stepped out.  His love has given so many the courage to die as martyrs.  It certainly would have been enough to compel her toward Him, His look answering the longing in her own heart.

When she reached Him, she must have wanted desperately to do something for Him.  She had nothing to give Him, no way to save Him.  Surely she must have felt powerless and hopeless in the face of such suffering.

Yet she did not let her powerlessness stop her.  She took off her own veil to wipe His face.  She did not lament the fact that she could not do more or that she could not remove His suffering, but she contented herself with making her own small act of love by wiping His face.  With her love, she brought Him consolation and at the same time accepted the Providence of God and the sacrifice of Christ her Lord whom she could not yet have fully known.

She expected nothing in return, but He gave her the image of His face impressed upon her veil.  What a great gift for so little!

Is it not so in our own lives as well?  We have nothing to give.  We are like the widow who can only give two pence.  Yet when we give what we do have in all of our weakness we find that God repays us with unfathomable generosity.

How can He love us so much?  And all He asks is that we love Him, thereby opening our hearts to His love...

IV. Jesus Meets His Mother

V. We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless Thee.

R. Because by Thy holy Cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.

How could our Lady bear to see her Son suffer so dreadfully?  Every mother's heart aches for her children and she longs to be able to take those pains herself so that sometimes she offers a greater sacrifice by seeing others suffer than by suffering herself.  Mothers hate to feel powerless, for they must reach out to serve, to love, to lift up: it is their very nature.

Yet Mary, the Mother of God, did not try to take away her Son's suffering as she followed Him on the way to the cross.  Her willingness to suffer with Him by seeing Him suffer united her loving heart with His.

When finally she broke through the crowd to meet Him face to face, the tears must have streamed down her wordless face that saw His face so disfigured.  She must have longed to take Him into her arms to comfort Him as she had when He had been a little child, but she could not, for that would have renewed His pains a thousand-fold.

Perhaps she reached out to touch Him gently, her fingertips softly caressing His cheek in the only place still unhurt.  In that touch, He who had felt power flow out of Him so many times to heal must also have felt power flow into Him: the power of His mother's love, a constant love that embraced the will of the Father in all its unpleasant manifestations.  So too in the meeting of their gaze must love have flowed.  In that moment, the God of the universe drew strength from His dear creation.

In our sufferings, may we look to our Blessed Mother, knowing that she longs to take away our pain and grief, but knowing also that she bears to see us suffer out of love.  She knows that what our Lord allows to happen to us out of His most abundant Providence will transform us, transfiguring the muck of our lives into a brilliant pearl to offer Him.

My most loving Jesus, by the sorrow Thou didst experience in this meeting, grant me the grace of a truly devoted love for Thy most holy Mother. And thou, my Queen, who wast overwhelmed with sorrow, obtain for me by thy intercession a continual and tender remembrance of the Passion of thy Son. I love Thee, Jesus my love; I repent of ever having offended Thee. Never permit me to offend Thee again. Grant that I may love Thee always; and then do with me what Thou wilt. (From the Stations of the Cross according to Saint Alphonsus Liguori.)

The Battle Is Not Yours

Conflict.  Pain.  Hurt.  Heartbreak.  Betrayal.

These tear us from within, gripping us in endless knots, shattering our self-wrought pretensions of security and confidence.  They challenge our perception that all is well and all will be well.

Sometimes it is worse when these things happen to those we love.  When we suffer we are so busy grappling with the raw emotions that we have little time to think or reflect.  In those moments, we struggle for control of ourselves or the situation, our desperation aimed toward some hoped-for goal.

If we see others in pain, we have no control.  We have no choices.  We are even more powerless than when we suffer.

That is why it is so hard to see those we love hurt.  In some ways, it strikes deeper to see wounds struck that we can never hope to heal, to see decisions made in anger, to see misunderstandings and pain erupt into a chasm of broken relationships that we cannot bridge.  We see the evils and we want to take them away, to soothe the burning heat, to wave away the stain of sins past that tinges every fresh choice and every perceived affront.  But we can do nothing.

Still we search desperately for some way that we can become the savior of the situation.  We encourage those who feel alone to rely upon us, we seek solutions to illness, we advise counseling or medication, we pray continuously for healing and conversion, we try to make others see the light because if only they could then all would be well, and on and on and on....

We do not want to admit that we can do nothing.

Yet it is not about us and what we can do.  If we are to achieve true sanity, we must let go of our need to fix things.

When we admit that we can do nothing, we set ourselves free from guilt and expectations—expectations, which so often swamp our small vessels—and allow God to be God.  He allows nothing evil out of which He cannot bring a greater good.  Where we cannot save, He can.  He is our Savior.  Many times we need only step out of His way and allow Him to do what He alone knows how to do: to heal the broken heart.

That means we stand ourselves broken and powerless.  We feel the pain that signals to us that something must be done and we simply acknowledge its presence.  We choose not to fill that hole we cannot fill.  We embrace our weakness.

For in weakness is the power of Christ made perfect, as Saint Paul said.

Somehow that paradox is true, but only because of Christ.  Our inability to do anything surrendered to Him allows Him to work.

The path of life does not follow a barter system: we do not give x to get y.  If we do, we will regret giving x and resent others who have y.  Sometimes we must hit rock bottom before we recognize this truth.  Yet when we come to the crux of it all and feel our powerlessness, we know it is true.

Even our prayers and sacrifices when performed only as a manipulation of God to make Him give us what we want—however good that for which we ask may be—are vain.  That is not love, but only self-interest disguised.

If we can let go of what we hope to gain and simply give, we can find joy even in the depths of pain.  It is the joy that rejoices in the darkness because we trust in the Ruler of all.  That trust—that surrender—allows our Lord to transform deeds once done as manipulation into gifts of love, freely given.

And there is nothing greater than love.

Your Pain for the World

"I feel very powerless.  I want to do something.  I have to do something.... I have to act in any way possible to alleviate the pain I see.  But there is an even harder task: to carry my own cross, the cross of loneliness and isolation, the cross of the rejections I experience, the cross of my depression and inner anguish.  As long as I agonize over the pain of others far away but cannot carry the pain that is uniquely mine, I may become an activist, even a defender of humanity, but not a follower of Jesus.  Somehow my bond with those who suffer oppression is made real through my willingness to suffer my loneliness.  It is a burden I try to avoid, sometimes, by worrying about others.  But Jesus says: "Come to me, all you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest" (Mt 11:28).  I might think that there is an unbridgeable gap between myself and the Guatemalan wood carrier.  But Jesus carried his cross for both of us.  We belong together.  We must each take up our own cross and follow him, and so discover that we are truly brothers who learn from him who is humble and gentle of heart."

These words of Henri Nouwen, set under the heading "Willing to Suffer My Loneliness," which I copied down months ago, speak so powerfully to how I feel now as I think of the world around me.  There are the incomprehensible sufferings of all those losing homes and loved ones in natural disasters and genocides.  There are friends close to my heart struggling with loneliness and broken relationships.  So much pain.  So much heartache.

Then there is the pain in my own heart.  No matter how beautifully things fall into place, no matter how many meaningful conversations I have, no matter how much I accomplish, still it is there: the pain of separation.

For we are made for more than this.  In the words of Chesterton's Poet in The Surprise: "This is good, but something is better."

That longing for something better—that longing for union—pulls at our hearts.  Often we experience it as a deep chasm of loneliness.  We try in so many ways to fill that chasm.  We even go so far as to disguise our need to assuage our loneliness as love for others.  Yet God knows our hearts.  He knows—as do we, when we are honest with ourselves—whether we reach out to make ourselves feel better or to bring love—to bring Christ—to others.

Sometimes there is nothing we can do.  That is when the pain is greatest.

In those moments, perhaps then it is enough simply to embrace the cross that is so much ourselves and our own loneliness, our own powerlessness.  There in the bearing of that cross we can do more for the world than  could any humanitarian aid group or charitable organization, for we can unite our sufferings with Christ's passion.

As we are taught in math: what is greater than infinity?  Nothing.

God Himself is infinite.  If we unite ourselves with Him, then we are greater than anything we could sum up of our own selves.

Whatever it is then that you must suffer today, may you have the strength to bear it as your own particular cross.  For in the carrying of that cross, you can come to a mystical union with Christ and with His body, the Church spread throughout the world....

Open the Doors of Your Heart

"Beauty will save the world," said Dostoevsky.  His words may be taken in a general fashion or referring to the Creator Himself.  Either way, he speaks to a deep truth.

Gregory Wolfe supports the power of this statement in his beautiful essay titled "The Wound of Beauty" in which he defends the need for beauty.  He also writes of the power of beauty to strike us to the very depths of our being: "Beauty itself wounds us, pierces our hearts, opens us up."

If beauty wounds, then where shall we find healing?

Ultimately the source of our healing can only be found in the Incarnation.  For there the great rift between God and man is healed by the Creator becoming His own creation.

All of us are called to participate in that great work of healing through incarnating truth in our very selves.  Those of us called to be artists must take that incarnation a step further, revealing the depths of God through various mediums that reflect the core of our very selves.

Yet we artists are no less broken.

Unless we participate in the great work of redemption—the great work of healing—we fail in our vocation.  Our art becomes worthless, a merely shameful display of our talents and self-worth, an excuse for pride and vainglory.  Yet when we allow ourselves to collaborate in Christ's redemptive sacrifice, our handiwork has power beyond what we can imagine.

The question I would propose for you to ponder is this one: how does healing come through art?

I would argue that it comes through much the same way as when Christ healed.  He looked for an open heart—a heart of faith.  When He healed a man who was deaf and dumb, He said: "Ephpheta, which is, 'Be thou opened.'" (Mark 7:34)

It is through being open that we are healed.  Returning again to the theme of the wound of beauty, you can understand how it ties in here: the act of wounding is a means of making an openness.  Whether we allow that wound or whether beauty strikes us without our awareness, opening up our brokenness, we find ourselves in a perfect position to be healed because we have that openness—that vulnerability.  In so doing, we may find ourselves becoming channels of God's grace as well.

Sometimes I think our greatest challenge as artists is to embrace that vulnerability and not to flee from it.  We are often masters of flight.  We disguise our cowardice as perfectionism or scorn or pride or any manner of things.

In the end, when we allow ourselves to be powerless, we experience the freedom of true creation.  That is the paradox.  As Saint Paul said: when we are weak, then we are strong.

That experience of freedom—whether through creative work or through some other means—touches the very depths of our being.  It fills our restless hearts and we want nothing more.  For where we open ourselves to His working, we become one with Him, and He brings healing.

The presence of God hurts.  Beauty wounds.

Yet just as sometimes a bone must be re-broken to set aright or a wound opened to be drained, pain precedes healing—it opens the way.  So God sometimes hurts in order to heal.

All we need to do is open the door of our hearts.  When we have the support of those around us and see their own battle-wounds, we may find the courage to choose the glory of what feels to us like death.

For ultimately the battle for openness lies within the boundaries of our own hearts.  We must go into the desert there and wrestle with ourselves.

A seed must die to bring forth fruit.

Powerlessness

So many times we question God.  Either we want to know why He allowed something to happen or why He did not do something in response to our prayers.

We ask why because we feel helpless.  We feel powerless.

Of course we do not like this feeling, so we try to gain control in any way we can, scrambling in search of something that will give us security.  We build up facades, collect things and friends, and so on, all to counter that loss of control.

Still, in the end, we cannot seize control, but only a deceptive shadow of it.  Only God has the power to rule the universe.

Ultimately our condition is one of powerlessness.  We may experience it when we feel our own lives spinning out of control.  Or we may see a friend struggling and desire to lift him up out of that darkness, to win by our own prayers his release.  Yet God does not grant light.  He allows us and our friends to suffer.

For both of us, that is an experience of complete helplessness.  It may even be the proverbial rock bottom.

God brings us there that He may win our surrender.  It is often only when we cannot trust even ourselves that we learn to trust Him.  If we have nowhere else to turn, we will go to Him.  So He remains silent until we are brought to His feet and know that He alone is King.

Silence

The other day a dear friend of mine spoke of serving at a feast day Mass with a description so profound and yet so simple: "There was such a silence."

Silence.

The word rings out so beautifully and so fruitfully.  Yet how many people go to prayer and say they feel nothing or hear nothing and grow discouraged when they do not see the miracles in their lives that they desire?  Or perhaps the question is rather how many of us do not?

Often we find in prayer only silence, at least when we quit talking long enough to listen.  It is a powerful silence—a silence full of awe and even fearsome to us.

In my journey, I am learning more and more how powerful is that silence.  It is not the silence of a manmade idol that cannot heed our prayers, but rather the silence of a Being so great that our senses cannot fathom His greatness, so wise that our minds cannot understand His wisdom, and so loving that our hearts cannot contain His love.

He could work miracles so amazing that we would fall down in awe before them.  Yet how often are we distracted by the miracles and forget the miracle-worker?

Instead of miracles, He comes in silence.  He humbles Himself to become powerless in the depths of our hearts that we might open the door and accept Him into our lives.  Only once we have learned to find Him in the silence and seeming-emptiness does He reveal Himself.