When People Say “Take Up Your Cross” - Helping Catholics Reclaim the Truth of its Meaning

At the heart of embracing your cross is learning how to accept the life you have, and not the one you wish you had. 

Italian theologian and philosopher Martino Rossi Monti has written about how attitudes toward suffering have evolved. A thousand years ago, the representation of Christ’s suffering was often intended to provoke a visceral, empathetic reaction to the person looking on. It was a ‘sensory’ presence — not about hiding.  The people of the day did not want to simply endure pain, they wanted to be changed by it. A transformation! 

But as modern medicine has evolved, we have moved from putting pain out in the open and instead made it something more private. Another reality of being in Louisiana is the very active death row not far from me in Angola State Prison. I couldn’t help but recall stories of throngs of people attending executions in the Middle Ages. But now, we physically separate the inmate from a dozen witnesses by thick glass. And immediately after, the curtain is drawn and bleach chemicals used to cleanse the room. 

Monti says that public pain was once deeply connected to the spiritual life — even public executions. But now, we’ve pushed it off to the problems of biology and the spiritual life is largely excluded. As a people, we are increasingly seeking to hide from pain and embarrass those who experience it. How does this relate to LGBT and divorced/remarried Catholics today? (Do they have pains— that even if we disagree with the outcomes—that we don’t fully understand?) 

All of this is the opposite of the Little Cajun Saint, 12 year old Charlene Richard. She didn’t hide her cross. She carried it into the light and the cheerful acceptance of the life she had (ill, short, tragic) transformed others around her. Her cheerful acceptance didn’t erase pain, but it allowed others to witness Christ’s power at work. The mystery of embracing the cross is a mystery of accepting the life you have. It allows us to move forward and not stay stuck. 

For the rest of us, the cross is not an invitation to deny the traits or to impose shadows onto us, but to accept our situation and life it with authentic joy and faith according to exactly how God made us. 

We have to stop telling people “take up your cross” until we ourselves understand what that means. Essentially, we are volunteering to go deep into the wounds and be transformed by the person suffering. And for those in pain, this vulnerable openness will help you joyfully embrace — not run from— reality.