Reflection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

We all suffer. We suffer the loss of parents, dear friends and family. We suffer injury in accidents. We suffer as witnesses to loss. We suffer the loss of our own good health and energy. And at some time or other in our lives, we’ve been told to offer it up. In that spirit many of us have given gifts of Lorettine Days, offering the day for someone else’s well being.

What does that mean, to offer it up? For a start, it means to make meaning of our pain and loss. Victor Frankl, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” tells how he built meaning of his life from his sufferings and losses in a concentration camp in Germany. His dreadful experiences were building blocks – sufferings he experienced at the hands of others and sufferings he witnessed and sufferings he inflicted by not sharing what he had. We are not, most of us, made up only of suffering, and neither was Victor Frankl. He knew love. He experienced generosity. But his struggle was to understand his own experience of suffering and loss, and in his book he says that our task is to make meaning of that loss that we experience ourselves. Frankl says we can choose to be more loving and generous because of our loss, not in spite of it. 

I think one meaning of the Exaltation of the Cross is that choice that Victor Frankl is talking about. It is a choice to take up our own cross and carry it. 

At a Loretto Link retreat a couple of months ago we were presented with a kind prayer that breathes in the suffering of others and breathes out love and comfort and healing for them. To engage in such prayer, our instruction was to ground ourselves first in beauty and from that beautiful place breath in the sorrow. To choose, even for a few moments of prayer to carry other people’s pain is also, I think, a meaning we can find within the Exaltation of the Cross. 

A third meaning is to join ourselves in meditation to the suffering of Jesus on the Cross. St. Ignatius places us directly in the scene, even in the moments of Jesus carrying the Cross, being crucified and dying on the Cross. 

Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King called on people to embrace suffering to achieve freedom. In the Salt March to the Sea and in the March to Selma, just for example, marchers were brutally beaten, and some died. The horror of their treatment aroused others to action on behalf of that struggle for freedom. These were political acts. But both Gandhi and King viewed the free acceptance of suffering as a way to ease the pain of others spiritually as well as politically. 

The Cross is essential to the experience of being Christian, of being a follower of Christ. There isn’t a theological treatise of faith here. It’s practice. We have our own suffering to draw on, we have the suffering we see in others, we have the account of Jesus’ suffering. 

We also have the power to turn away from suffering. We can harden our hearts. The injunction “harden not your hearts” turns up at least 48 times in Scripture. Google says so. Today’s feast tells us to exult, to raise the Cross high and to see it, carry it, stand beneath it.

Our Loretto charism is to stand with Mary at the Foot of the Cross. One time the Contras in Nicaragua kidnapped a Witness for Peace delegation that two members of our Catholic Worker community were leading. We stood in front of the St. Louis University College Church in silent vigil. Standing there, I experienced for a few moments what it means to stand with Mary. I carry that little bit of enlightenment with me always.

Tomorrow is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Our other Loretto feast is the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary celebrated on the Friday before Palm Sunday.  It was that feast day, near the end of Lent, when I had an aha experience about being a member of this Community. Lent had been penitential – less recreation, more prayer, fasting. Then Friday morning came. Recreation at breakfast. Recreation all day. Fish for dinner, yes, but ice cream and candy, too. In choosing to dedicate ourselves entirely to standing with Mary at the Foot of the Cross, we didn’t give up joy. There is a call to spend tomorrow in prayer and fasting for the needs of the world. Pray always, of course. Fast if you will. But don’t forget to celebrate this confounding mystery, the Feast Day of Our Lady of Sorrows. In this terrible world that surrounds us, despite all suffering, we are called to be people of joy.