Easter Sunday

I heard the sermon twice—more or less the same thing at the Easter Vigil and again this morning at Mass. Take up your Cross and follow me,” or “You can’t avoid the crosses God has planned for you so you might as well embrace them and put them to good use by offering up your suffering for good.”

I was introduced to this theme as a small child. My mother explained to me that I had a heavy cross to bear. I didn’t understand it then, and the entire concept of bearing my cross made me angry. Not because I had something that could be so easily named my cross, but that God who is supposed to love me would deliberately introduce pain and suffering for the purpose of seeing how I held up under it. What kind of a father would do that? What kind of a loving God would demand suffering of his people, his children? His Only Begotten Son.

Hearing the old, familiar theme again today, I bristled yet again. Yes, pain and suffering happen to people. My dear friend gets ovarian cancer for no good reason. Except that in the physical world where we live, cancer happens. Blindness happens. Death happens. People cope with their pain and suffering each in their own ways. One of my beloved uses hers as a battering ram to open the gates of heaven, and a bludgeon to drive her children through. That is too harsh. She follows Father’s advice and offers her pain and suffering, emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual pain and suffering, to bargain for the “lost” souls of her children.

I think my problem may be that I haven’t really experienced pain and suffering that qualifies as a cross to bear, to offer up for sins, atonement for sins, or payment somehow for favors. I am a stranger to real, debilitating pain. I’d like to stay that way. And suffering outside of physical pain is whatever you make of it. Do you count the annoyance, the frustration, and the limitations of blindness as suffering? It seems to me that that raises it to a dangerous level of importance and prominence. If I “suffer”, it will take over my life, become the centerpiece, the most important thing. I don’t want it to be that. So it doesn’t qualify as suffering, just an annoying, inconvenient pain in the ass. That takes it out of the realm of cross to bear, pain and suffering to offer up for the salvation of my soul, etc. Perhaps I’m throwing good capital down a rat hole?
Personal tragedies? I’ve had a few major tumbles. Do they qualify? Does God take my baby away to induce pain and suffering the way a parent induces vomiting for a child who has drunk a bottle of grape-flavored cough syrup? To purge and cleanse and save? And what do I do with that ipecac? Turn it into empathy for others or hold tightly to my loss? I suffered, I guess,--it hurt to lose her. At the time I could not have offered the hurt and anger up for anything. I was sucked down and drowning in an emotional maelstrom, fighting, raging against the God to whom I was supposed to offer it up?
Today, I choose to remember the tiny hand that clutched my finger, the soft lush hair on the tiny head, the beautiful miracle of her fleeting life. I recognize that in this loss were the roots of understanding of many things. But now my little one is not a cross to bear. She is a vine growing, supporting, flowering and fruiting in unexpected ways. She is a gift, not a cross.

So again I ask, what kind of God calls himself loving and forgiving and yet demands a brutal, bloody sacrifice to appease him?

Happy Easter!