There is in Catholicism a doctrine, tradition, a “teaching.”  God sends us suffering, crosses. We each have our cross, and we are not only to accept our cross, but to embrace it. By the standards of modern psychology, or even by the standards of reason, that’s a very unhealthy attitude. By those standards, we should rail against suffering, overcome it, conquer it. If there’s a problem—solve it. If there’s pain or disease, or deprivation, find a remedy—cure it. It’s when we can’t solve it, cure it, overcome it, that modern psychology counsels us to find a way to accept it and make peace with it somehow, usually by looking at the other parts of our lives and finding some respite or fulfillment there. Vagueness here is necessary, for our crosses are as individual, as customized as DNA.

But that elsewhere-maneuver is not enough for a Christian. We must also forgive. We have our example of suffering and the right response to it in Christ. “Father, forgive them….” We know what we have to do, and it’s not so easy as psychology’s recommendation. And, in some cases, the suffering is enduring. It lasts a long time, a lifetime. It’s not just one incident, one time, one act of violence or hurt, but something that happens over and over and over and over, and over…. This, too, must be accepted and embraced over and over…. Sometimes we are amazed that this or that still has the power to hurt us.  How can that be, we wonder, how can that still have the power to hurt me? But it does. Not only that, but the pain is just as great now as it was twenty years ago, fifty years ago, however long ago it began. 

We don’t get to a “place” where it no longer hurts; we don’t get to a point where we no longer care, where we no longer feel the pain. If we were able to do that, we’d be damaged beyond the recall of love and salvation. And so, to save us from that fatal condition, God sends us a new cross. And then we find that it’s the old one, the same one we rejected by cultivating an immunity or indifference, a numbing apathy induced by behavior, chemistry, or whatever means we find. 

And so, ultimately, we must surrender to it, not flee from it. We must bow “under the weight of the wood,” and know, fully and well, that the only response to suffering that’s ever really been possible is to suffer it. Only when we do that—and we can only do that after all our efforts to escape have failed—can we begin to embrace it as we’ve always known we should, as we’ve always known in the darkest recesses of our hearts that we must.

Lent is a time to give up chocolate, to make extra donations to charity, to go to daily Mass or spend time reading the Bible. These are little rehearsals, a childlike game of pretend, just as we “play house” as children to prepare us for grown-up marriage. The Church gives us these little practices when we’re children to prepare us for the grown-up business of real surrender, real self-giving, and real love.