Everywhere We Meet the Cross!
Pastor’s Column
13th Sunday Ordinary Time
July 2, 2017
“Whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
---from Matthew 10:37-42 (this Sunday’s gospel)
All of us have periods of our lives where things just don’t seem to go the way we hope they will. We have to struggle with God’s permissive or active will… things he allows in our lives or chooses for us that we would not necessarily prefer! How true it is that, in seeking to escape one cross we have encountered, we often run into a heavier one. Life for a Christian carries deep meaning in precisely those events we have voluntarily shared with the Lord, crosses accepted, even while we try to mitigate the sufferings that are inevitable in our fragile and temporal existence. Nothing is more true than these words from The Imitation of Christ, a wonderful little spiritual book. St Therese of Lisieux had most of it memorized!
Father Gary
“Everywhere me Meet the Cross”
from the Imitation of Christ St Thomas a Kempis
Book 2, Chapter 12
“No matter how you plan things and arrange them to your liking, you still will find something to suffer, either willingly or unwillingly, and so you will always find the cross.”
“If you reject one cross, be sure that you will find another, perhaps a heavier one.”
“Christ’s whole life was a suffering and martyrdom: and do you expect pleasure and enjoyment for yourself? You make a grave mistake if you look for anything other than suffering; for this mortal life of ours is full of misery and surrounded with crosses.”
“If you trust in yourself, you will never accomplish this, but if you put your trust in God, you will be given strength from heaven.”
“Prepare yourself, then, to suffer all kinds of adversities and inconveniences in this wretched life, for you cannot avoid them no matter where you go, and they will find you no matter where you hide. So it is in this life, and there is no avenue of escape except to keep yourself in patience.”
