A Meditation on Love, Suffering, and the Folly of the Cross

To love is to suffer. Everyone says this, yet no one really believes it until the truth begins to bruise the heart. To love the Church, to give yourself over to her with the simplicity of a child and the seriousness of a vow, is to suffer at her hands. They never tell you this in seminary. There are no courses on how to bear praise without pride or how to endure humiliation without despair. They speak of kenosis and self emptying love. They teach the vocabulary. But no formation prepares a soul for the day the lessons become flesh.

No curriculum can train a heart for the moment when love becomes a Cross. One does not step into the folly of Divine Love through study. One is pushed into it by life and sometimes by the very people for whom one has sacrificed everything.

There are days when sadness rises like a tide. Not only for what has been surrendered, but for all that seems wasted. The years spent on what had nothing to do with Christ. The energy poured into egos, our own and those of others. The loneliness when projects collapse under the weight of someone else’s ambitions. The quiet grief when you see how easily brethren can overlook or forget you. Even when the neglect is benign it still wounds. And deeper still is the sting when what is holy is trampled, not by enemies, but by those within the household of faith.

Then there is the interior poverty. The shock of seeing one’s own pettiness while others expect sanctity. The strange heaviness of watching people lift you up and then strike you down with equal ease. The soul is stretched thin between the desire to serve Christ with purity and the painful revelation of how little purity there is within.

Yet none of this has the final word. For even in the throes of dying to self, even when the soul feels pressed to the point of sweating blood and tears, something of the kingdom breaks through. A quiet and invincible joy appears, not as a feeling but as a certainty. A peace rises from the depths that the world cannot give or take away. It comes hidden within the very wound that seemed ready to consume you. It is the presence of the Crucified Himself: the One who turned Golgotha into the gate of paradise.

This joy is not triumphalism. It is not the intoxication of the stoic or the dreamer. It is the steadying warmth that flows from Christ when the heart consents to stay on the Cross with Him. It is the faint but unmistakable dawn that appears in the darkest obedience. It is the light that proves the grave is already losing its claim.

And because this joy is real, it protects the soul from the subtle poison of self pity. For self pity narrows the vision until all that remains is the wound and the one who feels it. But the joy of Christ opens the wound toward God and reveals that suffering is never an enclosed space. It is a passage. It is birth pangs. It is the narrow way through which uncreated light enters the heart.

This world is suffering and sin. The Church is not untouched by either. Yet she is also the place where Christ hides Himself. The One who was betrayed, denied, struck, abandoned, and forgotten waits in the very heart of the pain.

If love is suffering, then suffering becomes the doorway to Him.

If the Church wounds, then Christ becomes the balm.

If the heart collapses under its own poverty, then grace becomes its only wealth.

Nothing else saves. Nothing else heals. Only mercy. And mercy, once tasted, begins to whisper the unexpected truth. Even here the kingdom draws near. Even here joy is possible. Even here Christ is all in all.