Carrying Our Cross

We cannot remind ourselves too often that our life in the Risen Christ is an interchange between us of his love.  In the power of his love in ourselves, we give to him in our neighbor.

There is nothing Christ asked for more urgently in his earthly life than sympathy, nothing he asks for more often and receives less often in those in whom his Passion is lived today in its deepest humiliations and derelictions.

There are too many "commonsense Christians," afraid to spend themselves on anyone from whom they do not get visible results.  They are ready with hard work for reform, they pour out good advice, they are proud to be realists who repudiate everything that seems to them to be impractical, including the poetry of Christ, but they have no use for those baffling human creatures who won't — or can't — play the game by their rules.

These "realists" refuse to see that there are problems which cannot be solved, griefs which cannot be healed, conditions which cannot be cured.  They are impatient with the suffering they cannot end;  unable to accept its reality, they wash their hands of it, because they cannot, so they think, do anything about it.

But we cannot make an end of Christ's suffering, for as long as the world goes on, the Passion of Christ will go on in his members;  and he will ask, not for his suffering to be mitigated, but for sympathy.  In Gethsemane Christ tried to awaken his Apostles, not because they could take away his agony, but because they could give him their compassion.