This was my homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Edith Stein was born Jewish. Her family was not overly religious, but inculcated in her a love for those who suffer. Which is why, at the outset of the first World War, she volunteered to care for the soldiers of the Austrian Army who were suffering from typhus, dysentery and cholera.
It was there that she first began to struggle with the question of how to explain the horrors of war. How can a living and merciful God permit such suffering?
It’s a struggle we can all relate to. Did you read, by the way, the account of eight year-old Iegor Kravtsov? He and his family were forced to hide for months in the basement of their home in Ukraine, not far from the steel plant in Mariupol which was decimated by Russian missles.
His grandfather was killed when a shell hit their house. And then it got worse. The second grader wrote in his journal: "I have a wound on my back. The skin is ripped off. My sister's head is broken. My mom tore her hand muscles, and has a hole in her leg.”
And suffering is not just found in war. There is the suffering of everyday life, which each of us knows. The teenager whose first love just rejected him, the child, whose mother’s addiction subjects him to a life of violence and abuse, you and me, when our dreams are shattered or when blind fear wakes us up in the middle of the night, or when we walk away from the grave having buried the person who loved us better than anyone else.
But back to Edith. Her struggles with the question of suffering led her to the Gospels and she eventually became a Carmelite nun and took the name of Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, a name which reflects her lifelong struggle with suffering in everyday life.
For, in the words of Viktor Frankl sufferin is “an ineradicable part of life.” And if we are to find meaning in life, we must also find meaning in suffering.
St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross looked for the answer to that question in the writings of the great Spanish mystic, Saint John of the Cross, who prayed from a cell where he had been imprisoned for ten years:
“Where are you hiding, my beloved Lord. You have left me. You ran away like a deer, having struck me down. I ran after you, calling, but you were gone!”
He also wrote this:
…I saw the river over which every soul must pass
to reach the kingdom of heaven
and the name of that river was suffering:
and I saw a boat which carries souls across the river
and the name of that boat was love.
So suffering is the river that flows through each of our lives, and love is what gives it meaning.
For love is not a warm feeling or an insipid poem on a flowery Hallmark card. Love is the willingness to suffer for the good of the other and the salvation of souls, including our own.
This is what we mean when we say that Jesus saved us by dying on the Cross, for from that Cross he taught us the meaning of love: to so love God as to open my arms and accept whatever he asks of me, and to accept it as perfect joy.
When we can’t understand the suffering, when we can’t figure it out the Cross he has sent us, when there is no possible reason why we would choose it: to open our arms on the Cross with him, in perfect obedience to God’s inscrutible will.
In the words of Saint John, to “cast off all things and use only the cross as [my] cane…[to be] truly resolved to suffer willingly for the love of God in all things.”
So, the next time the Lord send you a Cross, accept it as his gift to you. Accept it as the Divine Teacher instructing you how to love.
It is why we gather here, around this Altar and beneath that Cross, joining all the sacrifices and struggles of our lives to his perfect sacrifice, offered on the altar of the Cross for our salvation.
