By Fr. Roy Cimagala
INDEED, we have to admit that we practically are all cowering in fear and anxiety, and suffering from all kinds of privations, physical, mental and emotional, all arising from this pandemic that we are having these days. But it would be a big pity if in all these conditions we fail to take advantage of the golden opportunity these conditions are actually offering us.
If we are guided by our Christian faith, we know that we are not meant only to suffer and then die. We are meant for joy and bliss and life everlasting. But our suffering and death possess great value that can do us a lot of good.
If we have learned well from Christ’s life and example, then we would know that our suffering and death can be our best and ultimate expression of our love for God and for everybody else, because Christ has made all human suffering precisely as the supreme manifestation of love and as the ultimate means for our salvation.
Remember Christ saying, “Greater love has no man that this: that a man lays down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15, 13) That would be pure love, fully gratuitous, with no strings attached. And it’s a love that is motivated by no less than the greatest need of man: our own salvation, the full recovery of our dignity as children of God.
If we can only have the same attitude that Christ had in accepting his passion and death as we go through our current rigmarole of lockdown, quarantine and all that stuff, then we would be turning our imposed sacrifices into something very positive, helpful and constructive.
No, we are not meant to suffer, and suffering is not God’s will for us. Our suffering is always self-inflicted which God allows to happen because he respects our freedom, no matter how much we abuse it.
But God knows how to turn our suffering and death around. In Christ, we have been given the way of how to reverse the purely negative character of our suffering and death into something positive and redemptive.
That is why we have to learn how to love suffering, not in the perverted and masochistic sense, but in the way Christ accepted his passion and death. He did no run away from it when the time came for him to go through it. He presented himself, in fact, and embraced all that suffering and death quietly in obedience to the will of the Father for the salvation of man.
Let’s remember that it is our sin that has brought our own suffering and death. And it’s a sin that would require God himself with our cooperation for it to be forgiven. Why? Because it is God whom we have offended, and we on our own cannot undo it. It would need God himself becoming man to undo it. By so doing, we have the way to be forgiven of our sin.
When we would finally be able to accept and live this truth of our faith, then we would not be afraid of any suffering that will befall us in our earthly life. In fact, we would welcome and embrace suffering, convinced that we would be enriched and glorified by it. We would be convinced that by embracing suffering we would be tightening our identification with Christ, and would be showing the greatest love we can ever have.
Yes, love is proven more genuine and more Christ-inspired if developed, lived and shown in the crucible of suffering. A love that only thrives on good times is not an authentic love. It has to have the form of the cross for it to be authentic.
So, we can say that our present condition is actually an invitation for us to mature in our humanity and in our Christian life.
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
