Take up Your Cross
“There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own. Once you have taken up that cross, you will be able to see clearly the crosses that others have to bear, and you will be able to reveal to them their own ways to joy, peace, and freedom.”—Henri Nouwen in You Are the Beloved (Convergent Books 2017).
I have always wondered what Jesus means when he asks us “to take up our cross.” Is our cross the difficult co-worker or family member who keeps us awake at night trying to discern how to love and live with them? Is it a painful physical ailment that now has become chronic? Has a job become our cross? Maybe it is an addiction. Is it the cross of food or financial instability?
Nouwen believes our cross is often the inner pain we bear. We keep pushing it into our unconscious, which keeps bubbling back up, sometimes like an ugly dragon. The pain is produced by the parts of our personality we dislike, by seeing and disliking them in other people, instead of owning them ourselves.
The deep inner suffering may also live within us because of some trauma or pain inflicted by others when we could not forgive them. They are still hurting us. We may have forgotten who the person is, mainly if it is a family member, but we still live with the pain.
Nouwen tells us that this inner pain is often even more challenging to bear than all the suffering in the world.
As we meditate about Christ’s wounds this Holy Week, we can believe that Christ within us can lead us to our own wounds and suffering. Connecting and feeling Christ’s wounds can connect us and bring us to awareness of the inner suffering that blocks our pathway to the God within us.
Nouwen believes that once we recognize and name our inner cross of pain, we will see the crosses others are bearing more clearly.
I see this in our grief recovery groups. The participants know the pain in others and begin to connect to them. Others who are suffering may know best the depth of each other’s suffering.
The miracle is that those who have experienced this inner pain are the ones who best heal each other.
This is called resurrection. It happens in community.
Joanna joannaseibert.com