Newspaper Page Text
April 19,1979
PAGE 5
Must I Simply Accept The Pain In My Life?
BY FATHER EDWARD J. FARRELL
“And Jesus said to them: My heart is filled
with sorrow to the point of death ... He kept
saying: Abba, Father, you have the power to do
all things. Take this cup away from me. But let
it be as you would have it, not as I.” (Mark 14,
33-36)
We have a personal record of pain and a long
ancestoral history of pain. Pain, by nature
mysterious - sometimes anonymous and
rampant, specific or nameless - abides in us.
There is a personal pain that seems to have its
origin and destiny in our very own heart.
And there is a yet unremembered pain in
each of us that began before we lived - that
accumulated pain and weakness, collective
suffering and affliction, inherited fragileness
and fragmentedness that has been handed on
from generation to generation - not yet
fathered so not yet healed by all my ancestors
before me nor to be healed by me and my
descendants for a long time to come. For now,
in my own life, that pain, too, resides. “Must I
simply accept the pain of my life?”
Jesus puts the question in other words: “Can
BY SUSAN ANNETTE MUTO
Little Flower. Spoiled child. Patroness of
missionaries. Hypersensitive person. These and
many other contrasting labels have been applied
to Therese Martin (1873-1897). Biographers
eulogize her; pyschologists analyze her; but no
person authentically seeking God can dismiss
her. Like all sincere pilgrims she had to work
through the deformative influences of her past
and transform them into occasions allowed by
God to test her faith, purify her heart and make
her wholly his.
To find God in the present, to cling to him in
future trials would not mean traveling to far-off
lands. She discovered that her vocation to love
would have to be chastened in the crucible of
Carmel. There she would learn the doctrine of
spiritual childhood, which meant letting go of
her childish need to be the center of attention
and surrendering to Jesus with every fiber of
her being.
Her whole self - body, psyche and spirit -
became a sanctified temple of the Holy Spirit.
Simply obeying God’s will in daily life, she
found “that calm, tranquil peace which the
helmsman feels as he sees the beacon which
guides him into harbor. How brightly this
beacon of love burns! And I know how to reach
it and how to make its flames my own.”
These “flames” were the formative
influences on St. Therese’s life. What were they
and how can we make them our own? No
doctrine of a saint endures unless it is founded
on the central doctrines of the Christian faith
and on holy Scripture as a whole.
Though she had little direct knowledge of
the Bible, she found its teachings in the pages
of such spiritual masters as Thomas a Kempis
and St. John of the Cross. Especially in the
liturgy and the Office of Hours, she discovered
the riches of the revelation. In the end she
needed nothing but the Gospel message to feed
her spiritual life.
She was also nourished by the “flames” of
spiritual poverty, that is, she identified with the
self-emptying Christ. When God became man he
sank not only into the limitations of human life
but deeper still into the lowliness of the cross.
For Therese the only true way to Christ lay in
the sharing of this life of constant letting go, of
becoming progressively more poor and so more
free and dependent at each moment on the
never failing grace of God. She chose to place
her powerless being in the hands of God, to
become no more and no less than what she was
- his possession - as she was fond of saying, his
“little toy” that he could do with as he willed.
Besides being fed on the Scriptures and living
in the blessedness of spiritual poverty, St.
Therese has a sense of “being missioned.”
Though physical weakness prevented her from
ever moving beyond the confines of the
Carmel of Lisieux, she allowed God to use her
as a channel through which his message of
salvation could be heard. She never fell into the
quietist heresy, which depends on faith to the
exclusion of works. She avoided this pitfall
because of her understanding of the extension
you drink the cup? The cup I must drink?”
“Unless you take up your cross and come after
me... ” The Christian translates and
transforms the question “Must I simply
accept...?” into “Father!” “Father?” “When
my soul is troubled, and it is around midday,
and there is darkness in all my land, and years
of eclipse of the sun, and the curtain in the
sanctuary is torn - then the cry of the paining
Christian is: “Father! Father, into your hands, I
re-commend my spirit” (Luke 23, 44-46).
Each of us is called to a new conversion, a
growing edge, to a particular holiness and
change in our life. Almost always those changes
occur under the influence of pain. Pain is a sign,
not of death, but of life. How often the pain of
doubt, that pain of losing faith comes not
because we no longer believe but precisely
because we do believe and are so faithful. Or
the pain of despair - which comes because our
hope is so constant and enduring. Or the pain
of poverty - that poverty of not being able to
console or relieve the misery of a friend - not
because I have lost heart but because my soul is
so compassionate.
Pain is inherent in our nature, in the
inharmoniousness of the self, of the personality
- those lacks and conflicts in ourselves. Pain is
of the redeeming work of Christ through every
member of his mystical body.
Christ carries his cross for us, but not instead
of us. Each Christian is given his own share of
the cross to carry, his own function to perform
for the sake of building the kingdom. Therese
took as her special mission the drawing of all
things to reconciliation with Christ through the
ordinary, everyday encounters and trials of life.
No matter how small the field of action may
seem to be, the paschal mystery can operate
wherever there is a person ready to open
A CANAANITE WOMAN “managed
to find Jesus in the house to which he
had gone to escape attention,” Father
John J. Castelot writes. She crouched
at his feet and cried out “almost
the unresolved personality differences between
certain parts of ourself which are growing and
other parts which are not growing.
There is pain which comes from life
situations. Pain can be a way of entering into
the heart of Christ and knowing what sin really
is. It even seems that the more one loves and
prays and cares, the more pain enters into that
one’s life. Real love turns into some form of
pain. Real pain turns into some form of love,
some form of conversion and change. The more
one realizes the love of Jesus and needs of
people, the more one finds himself in an
ongoing state of pain and suffering and
conversion.
One sign that this is genuine pain is joy. Joy
itself is not without pain. Everyone must suffer
pain both from one’s own self and from others,
but the mark of whether it is Christian or not is
the mark of joy and peace. This is what is
redemptive. There can be identical pains but
pain as such is not necessarily redemptive.
It can be pain in despair and resentment, a
pain that expands us or shrinks and contracts
our whole being. The seal of Christian suffering
is transparency and joy which comes not from
avoiding or removing pain, but from leaning
into that pain, passing into and through that
pain instead of walking around it, passing on
into the very sacred heart of Jesus where all
pain is gathered and remembered and handed
over to our Father.
We carry about within ourselves the reality
of all the pains of Christ. There is in us a sense
of unmitigated tragedy that can be transformed
into a tangible kind of grace - a new capacity
to have hope and courage in the face of absurd,
pointless and meaningless suffering.
There is in us a capacity to heal - in
proportion to our pain - when we drink from
the cup. Can we even drink of the cup unless
we know our pain and hurt from the wounds
marking our hands and our side and our heart?
Can there be Eucharist without pain? Happy
are they who are called to the supper. Blessed
are they to whom Jesus puts the pain-filled
question: “Can you drink the cup? The cup I
must drink?” - the cup that is the cup of
thanksgiving.
himself to the pain and cost of this
transformation.
Thus in St. Therese we see a living witness to
the call Christ issues to his flock - to be formed
and reformed in the image and likeness of God
and transform the world. Passive acceptance of
his life offers us the opportunity to love God
with our whole h6art and soul and mind and
our neighbor as ourselves. Let us then never
make a plaster saint out of Therese but venerate
her as a dynamic master, whose doctrine of the
little way is an invitation to live Christian values
in the modern world.
frantically, ‘Lord, Son of David, have
pity on me! My daughter is terribly
troubled by a demon’ (Matthew
15,22).” (NC Sketch by Jack Higgins)
Throughout Scripture, we see
suffering. The pinnacle of pain was
reached by the Son of God and his pain
resulted in our redemption. Even Jesus
knew pain. His example proves that we
can live with pain and when it is
transcended, we find joy. He asks each of
us, as he asked his apostles, “Can you
drink the cup? The cup I must drink?”
Jesus primarily preached in his own
country. Only occasionally did he travel
further. On one of those occasions, he
went to Phoenicia. There a woman
begged him to rid her daughter of a
demon. At first, it appeared that he
would not grant her request. But she was
insistent. And Jesus did not deny her. As
V
we experience pain and suffering in our
own lives, when we ask for strength to
bear what we must, God will not turn
away. He will hear us and answer us as he
did the Canaanite woman.
St. Therese of Lisieux did not attain
sanctity by traveling to far-away lands
and performing extraordinary deeds. As
we examine her life, we realize that one
need not be brilliant nor in a position to
perform marvelous works to attain
sanctity. Sanctity can be reached during a
very ordinary lifetime. Like Therese, we
can take as our special mission the
drawing of all things to reconciliation
with Christ through the ordinary,
everyday encounters and trials of life.
/ ■
The Little Flower - St. Therese Of Lisieux
s — )
“EACH ONE OF US IS CALLED to
a new conversion, a growing edge, to a
particular holiness and change in our
life,” Father Edward Farrell writes.
BY FATHER JOHN J. CASTELOT
The Gospels record only rare instances of
Jesus’ preaching to non-Jews. While Luke is
pre-eminently the Gospel of universal salvation,
the author reserves the evangelization of the
gentiles to the missionary activity of the church
in the Acts of the Apostles. John has an
account of Jesus’ dialogue with the Samaritan
woman, but all his other contacts, except for a
few casual ones, are with Jews. Mark and
Matthew occasionally extend his ministry into
gentile territory, as in the case of his encounter
with the Syro-Phoenician (Canaanite) woman in
the district of Tyre and Sidon, just north of
Galilee (Mark 7,24-30; Matthew 15,21-28).
This is a curious incident, if only because
Jesus’ treatment of the woman seems so much
out of character. She managed to find Jesus in
the house to which he had gone to escape
attention (Mark 7,24). Mark tells us that she
“crouched at his feet,” but apart from this
detail, his narrative is rather dull.
It is the dialogue which comes to the fore. In
this instance, by a strange reversal of
techniques, it is Matthew who gives the most
picturesque account. He ■has the woman crying
out almost frantically: “Lord, Son of David,
have pity on me! My daughter is terribly
troubled by a demon” (15,22). That a gentile,
unconcerned with messianic preoccupations,
should address him with a specifically messianic
title is unlikely, but perhaps this is Matthew’s
way of indicating the willingness of the gentiles
to accept Jesus in contrast to the hostile
rejection he met among his own people -- a
major theme of his Gospel.
Jesus’ response was silence, a none too subtle
refusal to entertain her request. In Matthew the
little drama is played out not in a house but
outdoors, and the disciples are annoyed at the
scene she is creating. They beg the Master to get
rid of her, and he replies more to her than to
them: “My mission is only to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel.” Harshly exclusivistic as
this may sound, it makes explicit the
undeniable fact that Jesus did confine his
activities to his compatriots for the most part,
and it reflects the tensions created in the early
church by the admission of gentiles into the
community, tensions which can be felt all
through Matthew.
On the other hand, this is not the only
occasion on which Jesus apparently refused a
request only to grant it subsequently (see John
2,1-11). And in the context, it serves to
underscore the eagerness of the gentiles for
Jesus’ ministry in contrast to his own people’s
rejection of it.
“Almost always those changes occur
under the influence of pain. Pain is a
sign not of death, but a sign of life.”
(NC Photo by Mimi Forsyth)
The woman was eager. She would not be put
off. Once again she pleaded: “Help me, Lord!”
At this point Jesus gave her a most
uncharacteristic answer: “It is not right to take
the food of sons and daughters and throw it to
the dogs” (Matthew 15,26). In the Jewish
vocabulary of the day, “dogs” meant gentiles,
and it doesn’t help much to point out that the
Greek word used here means “pups”; Jesus was
not speaking Greek.
Still undaunted, the distraught woman
insisted: “Please, Lord, even the dogs eat the
leavings that fall from their masters’ tables.”
According to Matthew, Jesus commended
her for her faith and granted her wish. Mark, on
the other hand, makes no mention of her faith,
but has Jesus say: “For such a reply, be off
now! The demon has already left your
daughter” (Mark 7,29).
Now, following the interesting suggestion of
John L. McKenzie, this commendation of her
“reply” may well be an indication of the real
nature of the dialogue. It is not a profound
theological discussion, but rather an exchange
of gruff good humor, a sort of battle of wits.
Jesus teases her with his put-down (is it too
much to imagine him grinning?) and she
outsmarts him by turning his words to her own
advantage. He, in turn, has to admit that she
has come out ahead in the exchange by coming
up with “such a reply.” (Has the grin now
become a warm smile?)
Jesus grew up among earthy, unsophisticated
people, and must often have engaged in that
bluff banter so typical of simple country folk.
He would have been quite at home in this
verbal duel with the woman. And if they had
been really fencing, he would probably have
cried: “Touche!” One thing we don’t have to
imagine: He answered her insistent plea.
KNOW^
YOUR
FAITH
(All Articles On This Page
Copyrighted 1979 By N. C. News Service)
V /
The Canaanite Woman
J