Only you…

Inner authority (which I always describe as the power to “author” life in others) does not have to do with transmutation of forms and order and title, and the changing of power roles, but the transmutation of our very substance.  This is the needed “transubstantiation.”  For this reason, I cannot give up on Jesus.  He’s such an easy one to believe and follow and love.  He uses everything to help, heal, and change people. 

The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he uses tragedy, suffering, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound us but in fact to bring us to God.  So there are no dead ends for Jesus.  Everything can be transmuted and everything can be used.  EVERYTHING!

Failure itself is the raw material of salvation…

Richard Rohr, from The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered

Talking with a friend recently I happened to remark that what I miss in any other faith is Jesus. I may have put it in an unhelpfully offhand way, but it is true. Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and without him it’s hard to imagine how we could ever be set free, truly free (John 14:6; 8:32). He is the everlasting mercy of God (Jude 1:21), and the healer of all who will turn to him… nothing whatever will be able to keep us from his love (Romans 8:35ff), as the martyrs (all those who suffer and die for their faith) show us daily, still.

[Title from Andy’s Park’s song of the same name]

Just like the Cross…

When I was young, I wanted to suffer for God. I pictured myself being the great and glorious martyr. There's something so romantic about laying down your life. I guess every young person might see themselves that way, but now I know it is mostly ego.  There is nothing glorious about any actual moment of suffering—when you're in the middle of it. You swear it's meaningless. You swear it has nothing to do with goodness or holiness or God.

The very essence of any experience of trial is that you want to get out. A lack of purpose, of meaning—is the precise suffering of suffering! When you find a pattern in your suffering, a direction, you can accept it and go with it. The great suffering, the suffering of Jesus, is when that pattern is not immediately given.  The soul can live without success, but it cannot live without meaning.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 86, day 94

I can so witness to the truth of Rohr’s words here. The experience of meaninglessness, the sense that almost any circumstances than the present ones would be more godly, more formative, more obviously holy to oneself and to the world, is overwhelming. Nothing, it seems, could be farther from the tragic dignity of suffering for the sake of one’s faith. The present circumstances are just a mess, bloody and tangled and degrading, “nothing to do with goodness or holiness or God.” Just like the Cross, really, when you think about it…

More about crosses...

Jesus was at pains to insist that he neither wanted nor had followers, but friends. "I have called you friends," he explains to his disciples, "because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father" (John 15:15). Those who sought to learn from him would not copy his attitudes and behaviours, but would undertake the more difficult business of plumbing their own depths, exploring and embracing their own selves, and shouldering full responsibility for their very being. Or, as he famously expressed it, they would take up their own cross - a cross that was distinct from his.

This learning process, this discipleship, is dynamic and subject to constant variation, consistent with any relationship between and among living beings... The process of daily, constant learning about self and one's world is a demanding discipleship and the central activity of discernment. Understood this way, we see that any so-called discipleship that obscures or escapes such learning is not worthy of the name; it is just evasion, denial, busyness, and distraction, and ultimately, destructive dishonesty. True discipleship not only dirties the hands, it breaks the heart, opens the mind, and stretches the nerves, as all good learning does. Yet, paradoxically, it is this very dangerous conversation that constitutes the core of discipleship and the intimate heart of relationship with God.

Transforming Vocation, Sam Portaro, Church Publishing, 2008, with thanks to Speaking to the Soul

Taking up one's cross is just part of being one with Jesus, his friend rather than his servant. We can serve Christ without this identification with him in his suffering: we can stand outside the intimate and messy process of discipleship and say, "What precepts did Jesus teach, so that I can obey them?" and continue as sterile jobsworths in the bureaucracy of religion, binding loads for others to carry. Or we can open our hearts, as Jesus did, to the poor and the broken and rejected, to the unacceptable people, the lepers and the swindlers and the adulterers and the ritually unclean. Identifying ourselves, as Jesus and Francis did, with those Isaiah wrote of in his Chapter 61, will lead only to the Cross; and the Cross is the only way to life:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion - to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendour.

Isaiah 61.1-3, as quoted by Jesus in Luke 4.14ff

On the taking up of crosses…

Jesus says: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him… take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). He does not say: “Make a cross” or “Look for a cross.” Each of us has a cross to carry. There is no need to make one or look for one. The cross we have is hard enough for us! But are we willing to take it up, to accept it as our cross?

Maybe we can’t study, maybe we are handicapped, maybe we suffer from depression, maybe we experience conflict in our families, maybe we are victims of violence or abuse. We didn’t choose any of it, but these things are our crosses. We can ignore them, reject them, refuse them or hate them. But we can also take up these crosses and follow Jesus with them.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey.

I think we need to hear this as Nouwen meant it. It is fatally easy for those whose cross it is not to argue that, on these grounds, victims of abuse and injustice should “just put up with it.” This is not what Jesus meant, and I don’t believe it is what Nouwen meant. Jesus was both vocal and practical in his support of the abused (Mark 5.21-43, John 8.1-11)—but taking up something as one’s cross is not the same as agreeing to do nothing about it. Ignoring, rejecting, refusing, hating: these are not ways to do something about injustice. The martyrs do none of these things, yet in their non-violence, in their Gospel response, they achieve far more for justice than any violent revolutionary ever did.