“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

THESE are words Christ addressed to his disciples as he bade farewell to them. “Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” (Jn 16,20) 

 Christ was consoling his disciples amid their sorrow over his impending departure. He used the analogy of childbirth to promise transformative joy as well as direct access to the Father through prayer in his name. 

 “A woman, when in labor, has sorrow, because her hour is come; but when she has brought forth the child, she remembers no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world,” he told them. Then he reassured them that “if you ask the Father anything in my name, he will give it to you.” (Jn 16,21.23) 

 This gospel episode simply shows Christ’s assurance of joy, a joy that transcends pain amid temporary worldly opposition, a joy that has lasting effects in eternal glory. This episode somehow reminds us to broaden our understanding of things as we go through the drama of our earthly life that will always involve suffering. More than that, it encourages us to learn the art of how to find joy even in our suffering. 

 We need to realize that in our life here on earth, joy and sorrow are intertwined, and we can manage to find joy even in suffering as long as we identify ourselves with Christ. We have to remember that Christ has conquered everything and has converted all the negative things in life into means for our purification and strengthening. 

 What we have to do is to unite whatever suffering we have with the suffering of Christ, because by so doing, we would be participating in Christ’s redemptive mission. So, we just have to relate everything to Christ by praying always, ever trusting in God’s presence and power. This mindset helps us develop a strong faith and confidence in Christ, enabling us to face whatever challenges and temptations would come our way. 

 Let’s be convinced that with Christ, suffering becomes an act of selfless love that can take on anything. Only in him can we find joy and meaning in suffering. With him, suffering loses its purely negative and painful character, and assumes the happy salvific character. 

 We need to process this truth of our faith thoroughly, always asking for God’s grace and training all our powers and faculties to adapt to this reality. That’s why Christ told us clearly that if we want to follow him, we simply have to deny ourselves, carry the cross and follow him. There’s no other formula, given our wounded human condition. 

 This self-denial and carrying of Christ’s cross will enable us to see that suffering is obviously the consequence of all our sins—ours and those of others. Embracing suffering the way Christ embraced his cross unites our suffering with that of Christ. 

 Our motive for it is like that of Christ. It’s the desire to conquer that suffering and ultimately our death through his death and resurrection. It’s obeying God’s will just like Christ obeyed his Father’s will. “Not my will but yours be done.” 

 Our reaction to any form of suffering in this life should therefore be theological and ascetical. It should be guided and inspired by faith. It should not just be physical or a natural affair. It should reflect the spiritual and supernatural realities to which we are all subject.

Let’s never be just by ourselves

THAT’S how we should be. To simply be by ourselves is actually an anomaly. As persons, endowed with intelligence and will, with the capacity to know and to love, we are meant to relate ourselves with others—with God, first, and then with everybody and everything else. 

 Thus, a point in the Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly states that, “being in the image of God, the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone.” (357) 

 The Catechism explains further, shedding light on the difference between a something and a someone. 

 The human person who is a someone and not just a something is “capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons. 

 “And he is called by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer him a response of faith and love that no other creature can give in his stead.” 

 A person is an individual who is always in relation with others. He simply cannot be on his own. His life, his growth and maturity, his capacity to resist temptations and to handle his weaknesses well would depend on his relation with God and with others. 

 Since we are made in the image and likeness of God, we as persons must somehow reflect also the perpetual relation within the three persons in one God. We are meant to be taken up, with God's grace, in that Trinitarian relation of knowing and loving one another. 

 That's why Christ told us in no unclear terms that the greatest commandment we ought to follow is to love God with all our might, and the second greatest is to love our neighbor. 

 We need to train ourselves to be always mindful and thoughtful of the others. In this way, we avoid confining ourselves to our own world which definitely will not be the real world, because it would be a world of pure subjectivism, detached from the objective world outside of ourselves. 

 We have to be both mindful and thoughtful, because this is what is proper to us. If we fail to cultivate these traits, we actually would be harming our very own humanity, aborting our road to human maturity, not to mention, the fullness of Christian life. 

 We need to be mindful because we have to know what’s going around us. We should never be aloof and indifferent. We have to be aware not only of things and events that are taking place, whether near or far, but also and most especially of persons, starting with the one right beside us. 

 And not only should we be mindful. We also need to be thoughtful. We should think ahead of how things are developing and of what we can do to help shape their evolution. Life is always a work in progress, and there are goals, the ultimate and the subordinate, to reach. We should not get stuck with the here and now. 

 We also should learn to read the signs of the times and to prepare ourselves for whatever indications or warnings they are giving us. This way we put ourselves in condition to influence the flow of things, and to somehow already fashion the future. In this way, we extricate ourselves from our own subjective world and get to grapple with the objective reality.

Harmonizing our life’s different dimensions

IT’S obvious that we have to contend with the many aspects and dimensions of our life—the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, the material and the spiritual, etc. We cannot deny that very often we see them competing or even in conflict with each other. 

 We, therefore, need to tackle the challenge and the complicated task of how to harmonize them in such a way that we can achieve what we may call as unity of life that pursues the proper and ultimate goal of our life. 

 Said in another way, we have to find a way of how we can live our spiritual and supernatural dimension of our life with naturalness as we go through our daily activities and concerns. The art and skills that are appropriate for this need should be learned and adopted as early as possible. 

 Definitely, this challenge and task would demand a lot of requirements from us. But to be sure, we can say that the basic requirement is for us to be fully identified with Christ, “the perfect God and the perfect man” (perfectus Deus, perfectus homo). 

 He is the very personification of how to integrate the different aspects of our life so we can achieve a certain consistency and continuity that would pursue the ultimate goal of our life. 

 In this regard, we cannot overemphasize the need for us to have regular time for prayer and avail of a plan of continuing formation so that our relation with Christ would really become alive and in a way that can effectively guide us in our daily activities. 

 With Christ, we would know how to live naturalness as we pursue our supernatural goal in the middle of the world. It has something to do with how to handle our human condition considering what we ought to be and what we are at the moment. Fact is, we have a supernatural goal, nothing less than to be united with God, which we have to pursue in the context of our human and natural world. 

 Naturalness is about how to mix the spiritual and material dimensions of our life, our personal and social aspects, and other elements in our life that, given the way we are, appear to compete with each other. How to integrate and harmonize them is the task of naturalness. 

 Naturalness is a very active affair, lived day to day, moment to moment, as we grapple with the continuous flow of our concerns. It’s the front man who does the dirty job of the bigger virtues of discretion, prudence and ultimately charity, the foot soldier who does the hand-to-hand combat, the peddler who does the door-to-door selling. 

 It has to know when to push and when to pull, what to say and show and what to be quiet about and hide. Obviously, it has to follow a game plan, with a clear goal in mind and a detailed knowledge of all the elements it has to contend with. 

 It has to know when to be active and when to be passive, when to be aggressive and when to be patient and tolerant. Of course, in our spiritual life, these elements while initially contrasting, can be blended and lived simultaneously, obviously as an effect of grace and our cleverness. 

 It also has to know how to project oneself to the future, given the data of the present and of the past. It has to learn how to relate history and current events with eternity. It should know how to connect the mundane with the sacred.