Spring 2005     Saintly people are the Church’s children who are fully children of their own times too, so conscious are they of their calling to be a leaven for society through the very holiness they pursue.  Even as spiritual a person as the monk St. Gregory the Great was called upon to serve pastorally as a bishop, thanks to the obvious gifts of sanctity God had endowed him with.   In our own times Carmel was blessed with a figure like Père Jacques Bunel.  He did not stand idly by when World War II brought foreign occupation by the Nazis in France and collaborationist cooperation by the Pétain regime in the southern part of his country. He intervened in favor of three persecuted Jewish youths.  While the war was raging he also gave a retreat to his contemplative Carmelite sister nuns of the monastery at Pontoise.    Later this year we hope to publish the text of the wartime retreat conferences he gave to them.  In one in particular he refers to the troubled situation they were living in.  The thoughts he expressed sound applicable to our own times, so we offer them here. They fit well this time of year when we look to the sufferings of Christ as source of our redemption and ultimate joy. (Look for notice of publication later in 2005 on this website.)   Conference 10   The Cross: To Baptize Suffering and Happiness  Friday Evening The profound problem of evil is a scandal that keeps many people far from God and drives many others away from him. Is it moral evil and sin at work? Yes, but there is more at work. Is it moral evil among those who should be setting an example? Again, yes, but even more so, it is physical evil and suffering. This is evil that we all witness. Take war, for example, with its deliberate destruction of cities and its unjustifiable slaughter of the elderly and the innocent, of women and children. Such is the scourge of war. Then there are diseases and calamities of all types--earthquakes, floods, droughts and monsoons which produce massive, multifaceted suffering. Children are torn away from their parents and families are broken up. How often I have heard my friends express their thoughts on this problem! They ask: “Do you think that, if God existed and were omnipotent, he would allow such slaughter? Would he tolerate the triumph of evil and let thieves live in peace? Would he permit deceivers to get the better of decent people? Would he let human passions be the strongest force on earth?” The problem of evil, as we can surely see, is the most profound of problems. Understandably, therefore, Christ wanted to resolve this problem. Accordingly, he willed to live here on earth for several years and then, engulfed in suffering, to die in public. As we have already noted, the Word made flesh could have gained God’s forgiveness of all possible sin by simply coming into our world. This simultaneously spontaneous, yet divine humiliation was so meritorious that all possible sin could have been wiped away by a simple request by the Word made flesh to his Father. Christ did not will to do so. Instead, he died under circumstances as wretched as those of the most afflicted on earth. Christ’s body was both extremely sensitive and perfectly balanced. Likewise, bear in mind Christ had an especially tender soul, which keenly experienced whatever happened in his body. A person who has been poorly raised, never treated with consideration and deprived of the refinements of education, feels physical ordeals and privations far less acutely than a highly educated, polished person. Christ’s perfect sensitivity produced unexpected results. His Passion, the sum of all his physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering, was completely crushing. We need only to look at him in the Garden of Olives, or when he is stripped of his garments or as he drags himself to Calvary. His only wish is to conform fully to God’s will. At the first moment of his Passion, blood gushed out like sweat on his body, as a result of the revulsion he experienced in the face of what awaited him. Such was his profound reaction to the pain he experienced. Thus, we see that, with full awareness, he freely willed to undergo this overwhelming ordeal of suffering in public. In truth, he had lived this passion from the start of his life on earth. God created us not for suffering but for happiness, above all and without exception. He wills our happiness in order that we may enjoy with him the fullness of joy. The misfortune is that we human beings do not know how to be happy. We learn everything about happiness except what is essential. What must we do to be happy? We seek all roads to happiness, yet do not find it. We spend time seeking it. It is a daily preoccupation. People even change jobs in their pursuit of that goal. We ourselves have no other instinct than to be happy. And we are right; all our being aspires to happiness. We have been so created by God.  We desire to be happy like God. God knows no alteration to his infinite happiness. Happiness is positive; evil is negative. God cannot make something negative. Evil does not come from God, because it is an absence of being, a lack of perfection. Happiness is the fullness of being, the overflowing of being. Evil is definitely not a divine work. Since Adam and Eve, people have been seeking happiness. Like Adam and Eve, they have sought their happiness by doing evil. We do the same thing. We begin the cycle again! All who preceded us and did not find happiness were deceived. In vain they heard theses words: “That’s not the way to happiness.” They did not listen. They wanted to discover their own roads to happiness. Those roads proved to be dead ends. They had to turn around and take another direction. What a waste of time! If we only listened to Christ who came to teach the world true happiness! Against true human happiness, there is, or appears to be, a great obstacle: the evil of suffering. There are two ways of dealing with suffering. The first way is to eliminate its causes by taking every precaution against it. When it does come, we try to whisk it away or suppress it by all the means at our disposal. However, there is a second way to deal with suffering: we can “baptize” it. In general, most people adopt the first way. There is not a single human being who does not experience suffering in one form or another. Sooner or later, even those who now seem to go through life singing, with the assurance of health and strength, are going to have their share of bitterness, grief, and sadness. To be sure, most people want to destroy misery. They want to eliminate it by avoiding it, strangling it, brushing it aside, or dismissing it. They do not want to tolerate it. Almost all parents are eager to remove suffering from their children’s path. They are anxious to lessen and suppress such suffering when it strikes. Christ knew that this way of dealing with suffering is simply a kind of stopgap measure, and does not strike the root of the evil. It can work for only a few hours or days or months, Christ adopted another way a deeply divine, definite way. Christ converted suffering into happiness. Suffering can still come, but it is no longer a sadness. Christ has taught us to overtake suffering at its source. There, where it springs up, we can seize and transform it; there, we can change its nature and make it a source of happiness. Since Christ chose suffering for himself, suffering is not a curse or a plague to be avoided at any price. Christ welcomed the cross and even said, “He who wishes to come after me must take up his cross every day and follow in my footsteps” [Lk 9:23].        We have already considered God’s preparation of Mary to be the mother of his eternal Son. What extraordinary supernatural gifts God poured out on her at the moment of her creation and throughout her life. Would God not have loved his mother to have given her such exceptional gifts? But he also gave her the fullest measure of suffering. Do we not call the Virgin Mary, “Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows?” Since the number seven is considered a sign of perfection, it follows that her suffering represented the epitome of living, human suffering. That is the destiny of Christ’s mother. It makes us stop and think. We can understand how Christ would be willing to carry such a weight of sorrow, but why would he have so weighed down his mother? Would anyone of us be willing to heap such a weight of suffering on our mother? We would gladly be killed, if necessary, to spare our mother pain or suffering. What kind of criminal would not weep at the shame inflicted on his mother by his sentence?        At no moment did Christ conceal any element of his passion from his mother. There has to be an unfathomable mystery in this freely willed suffering for God to treat his mother in that way. Christ treated all the saints, without exception, in the same way. To the measure that he loved a soul, to that degree he saddled it with trials.        What else would you expect? Christ is not someplace other than on the cross, with his head torn open by the crown of thorns and his body pierced by the whips and nails of his executioners. Yes, Christ is on the cross. Christ without the cross would be too bland; the cross without Christ would be too severe. If you truly wish to do nothing apart from Christ, then you must meet him and embrace him, where he is.        You are familiar, are you not, with the vision of Saint Francis, depicted in a remarkable painting. Saint Francis is portrayed embracing Christ on the cross. But Our Lord draws his own right arm from the cross in order to embrace his friend Francis. When Christ embraces someone, that person’s head is touched by the Crown of Thorns on the Lord’s head and the mark of the cross is left on him. When Christ grasps someone’s hand, the mark of blood is left on him, because the Lord’s mangled hand is covered with blood. To espouse Christ is to espouse the cross. To be his companions, we must faithfully follow him, as he carries the cross and as he hangs on the cross. Christ who came to teach us to be happy found an abundance of suffering that upset human happiness. He has transformed that suffering by teaching us that there is a force, a lever, to raise the world. It is redemption! When we have said that, suffering is no longer suffering nor something evil. Through his suffering, Christ has redeemed the world. Through her suffering, the Virgin Mary has shared in the redemptive work of her son. Each of us through our suffering can personally participate in the work of redemption as well. What an honor! With what tender affection God treats us! He could redeem us without our efforts, but he did not wish it so.        Instead, God grants us the richly comforting and inspiring sense that we participate in our own redemption. The undeserved solace thus gained can be transformed by our own self-imposed suffering or by our acceptance of providentially sent trials. Thus we can regain our dignity and innocence, while experiencing the inner joy of being collaborators in the attainment of our own true happiness. Each one of us, through our suffering in union with Christ, can share in the redemption of our families and friends, our enemies and people all over the world. Our only limit is our generosity. If only the whole world knew that! If people had only tasted the bitter fruit of redemptive suffering and had only understood the great human dignity attained by experiencing this bitter happiness, then there would be no scandal in suffering. Then suffering would no longer spark revolt, but would be a source only of happiness. Suffering, when seen as a constituent part of redemption, becomes for us something splendid and well worth the pain of living it out.        You know how conscientious our spiritual mother, Saint Teresa, always was. I leave you with these reflections on her life. She so thoroughly understood the concept of the baptism and transfiguration of suffering by Christ that she was concerned if by sunset she had not experienced any trials in the course of the day. She had adopted as her motto, “aut mori aut pati.”  She would say at such times: “Are you going to forget me?” “Are you going to stop loving me?” “Aut mori aut pati.”        Saint Teresa was well aware that God afflicts those whom he loves when she said: “Oh, to die and thus to see you! But, if you will for me to live longer here on earth, then please grant me suffering, so that I will not waste the time.” Life without suffering is a waste of time. Every hour not united to God’s will is an hour squandered. Trials can take many forms, such as strict silence, distasteful duties, exhausting work and very trying acts of obedience. Yet, every trial we evade represents time lost.        I call on you, my God, and on you, ever Virgin Mary, for you have never wasted your time. I call on you, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse of the Child Jesus for you have never wasted the time given to you for your own sanctification and for God’s work of redemption. Teach me to love. Teach me how to implement the beautiful motto, “Aut mori, aut pati.” Oh, to die, my God! But if you will that I still live, then grant me suffering, which becomes the source of happiness, as suffering baptized.  Amen.             Later this year the Publisher of ICS Publications will lead a pilgrimage to “Carmelite France.”  Two stops on the itinerary will pay tribute to French Carmelite martyrs.  The first will be the common grave of the Martyrs of Compiègne at the Picpus Cemetery in Paris (see To Quell the Terror).  Then the group will go to Avon, near Fontainebleau in the far suburbs of the capital, to pray at the grave of Père Jacques Bunel in the conventual cemetery of the friars.  This will be the sixtieth anniversary of his death as a result of maltreatment during captivity in the concentration camps of the Third Reich (see Père Jacques: Resplendent in Victory).   At the time we post this there are still some places free for anyone interested in joining the group.  Please consult the following page on our Province’s website for further information about the itinerary and a tour coordinator to contact: http://www.ocdwashprov.org/id50.htm.