Holy Week: Pick Up Your Cross and Follow the Lord!

Simon Helps Jesus to Carry the Cross -- Titian c.1490-1576

This Lent I made Suffering with a Purpose: How to Turn Failures into Victories and Pain Into Joy, part of my daily meditation. Each chapter focuses on a Station of the Cross. A first reading offered so much food for thought that I began re-reading the book as soon as I finished it. The author, Fr. Hubert Van Zeller, has been like Dante's Virgil to me. I will be praying for him this Holy Week in thanksgiving for his wonderful work of God.

As Holy Week begins I am going into silence, so this will be my last post until Easter week. I also will not be moderating comments until then. What will I contemplate this week? The journey to Calvary in the footsteps of Jesus. Who will I choose as my companion? Simon of Cyrene who literally followed in Christ's footsteps. He did not choose to follow Christ; he was compelled to do it by the Romans. But as he followed, he recognized the Savior and later he and his family were among the first converts. 

I want to take up the cross WILLingly, embracing it with my whole WILL-- all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. Like Simon, I want to walk in the footsteps of Jesus offering my sufferings willingly in union with His. How often I fail, I shudder to think; but if patience is a virtue, then it includes patience with myself and my failings. Patience means to suffer and endure and sometimes it's hardest to be suffer and endure the cross I am to myself.

I offer here a few thoughts from chapter 5 of Suffering with Purpose on the fifth station. 

• Suffering is redemptive and my suffering, united to the suffering of Christ can save souls; "From the concept of the Mystical Body it follows that the pain of one member can do duty for the punishment of another -- that vicarious suffering draws off poison with which others are infected."

• All of us suffer a kind of martyrdom. For most it is a white martyrdom or what one of my sisters describes as "crucifixion by thumbtack." We can turn those thumbtack sufferings to great benefit as St. Therese said about picking up a pin for the love of Christ. "...the martyr re-enacts the sacrifice of Christ, laying down his life for the love of God....The martyr is not just an example of personal holiness and heroism....he is a conductor of grace whose work for others in the Church has been effective because of his holiness and heroism...The sufferings that even the least of us endures are a reflection of. martyrdom. They are a kind of mystical blood-letting." 

• All of us are weak. That is no impediment to serving God as St. Paul reminds us. God's grace is sufficient for us.  As Simon's conversion on the road to Calvary teaches: "Once a man is granted to see what the cross is all about, there would be little sense in his holding back. But we do hold back, and this is because we tend to be ruled, not by sense -- still less by love or by faith -- but by fear."

This Holy Week, I am praying to cast all fear aside and walk with courage in the footsteps of the Lord seeking only His will and my own peace of soul, picking up my cross daily and following Him.

May Jesus Christ be praised, now and forever.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

St. Joseph, Pillar of Families and Patron of the Universal Church, pray for us.

St. Simon of Cyrene, pray for us.