Good Friday Reflection

I’ve been meaning to write on quite a lot of experiences that have been happening to me so far in 2013, but I’ll just start with a short Good Friday reflection.

Blessed John Paul II wrote an Apostolic Letter back in 1984 entitled, “On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering.” All of today (and all of Lent, really), I have struggled to center myself in the way that my parents taught me growing up. In fact, I’m pretty dissatisfied with how I conducted myself this Lent. I tried to give up certain things but did not really stick to them, I did not pray nearly as often as I would have liked, and today, I did a very poor job of celebrating Good Friday as it ought to be celebrated. I feel very guilty.

But anyway, I was sitting here trying to figure out what I could do at this hour to participate further in the solemnities of Good Friday, and like a chump, all I really thought to do was search the internet for Good Friday reflections that I could read or meditate upon in my dorm room. After going over a few things, Blessed John Paul II’s letter caught my attention.

There are so many different kinds of suffering, but all of these kinds, of course, boil down to the its nature of pain.

Good Friday emphasizes on the suffering Jesus withstood for the sake of our sins. Sufferings that, I interpreted, were meant to be for us—the actual sinners. When I was growing up, I had different ways of understanding His suffering. When I was a kid, I was taught about the Passion in such a way that concentrated so much on the gruesome that I couldn’t quite connect the act of Jesus’ crucifixion to my spirituality. I still have a lot to work on there, even now. When I was a prepubescent chick in middle school, I would hear torture stories or sufferings that saints, or monks, or modern-day heroes would undergo, and I would wrongly compare those to Jesus’ Passion. Up until those years, I had interpreted His Passion to be the worst earthly pain anyone could undergo, and when I heard of these other things that other people went through, I was confused. I wrongfully believed that other people’s sufferings were worse than Jesus’.

There is more than one thing wrong with the sentiments I felt when I was in middle school. The first is that the way I compared the sufferings of others to Jesus was incorrect. Jesus did represent us, and all of us do partake in His Passion in our own ways every day, but all I understood was the the shallow end of His suffering: the perceived, physical brutalities that are actually incomparable. Another misconception I had was on the nature of the Passion itself. All I could see were the literal struggles of crucifixion (which are enormous themselves). When all I could see were those literal struggles, it was easy for me to fall into the mistake of remembering that crucifixions were common modes of execution in those times, which led me to make the grave mistake of undermining the actual act of going through a crucifixion. Man. I seriously shake my head at myself back then.

What I realize now is that Jesus’ Passion was far more than undergoing a crucifixion, a huge, horrible suffering on its own. As partly human and partly divine, Jesus was not just going through a human punishment: he was going through a punishment that possessed qualities of the divine as well. This kind of punishment is not something that anyone else on this earth can do. No mortal being can undergo carrying the weight of the sins of the world. In the Stations of the Cross, Jesus is depicted falling three times: an act I interpret as a sign of just how heavy a weight our sins have amounted to, for them to be heavy enough for God to fall under. One fall for the sins of the past. One fall for the sins of the present. One fall for the sins of the future. Sin, it seems, will always be with us on our imperfect world, embedded in the infallibility of human nature when we committed Original Sin.

And human nature is a complex one. This brings me back to Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter in which he writes on the nature of human suffering.

He writes: “‘Suffering’ seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man. It is as deep as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to man’s transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense “destined” to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way […] the Redemption was accomplished through the Cross of Christ, that is, through his suffering […] It can be said that man in a special fashion becomes the way for the Church when suffering enters his life. This happens, as we know, at different moments in life, it takes place in different ways, it assumes different dimensions; nevertheless, in whatever form, suffering seems to be, and is, almost inseparable from man’s earthly existence.

Human suffering evokes compassion; it also evokes respect, and in its own way it intimidates. For in suffering is contained the greatness of a specific mystery. This special respect for every form of human suffering must be set at the beginning of what will be expressed […] by the deepest need of the heart, and also by the deep imperative of faith […] These two reasons seem to draw particularly close to each other and to become one: the need of the heart commands us to overcome fear, and the imperative of faith […] provides the content, in the name of which and by the virtue of which we dare to touch what appears in every man so intangible: for man, in his suffering, remains an intangible mystery.”

In all honesty, this particular Apostolic Letter stood out to me in recent light of my own recent experiences in suffering. The suffering I personally overcame, what I like to imagine as my own personal cross, was one in which I drew closer to God, not further. In the nature of my experience, I could have just as easily distanced myself from God; but instead, I was treated to the experience of combining human suffering with divine communication. I definitely believe that the only reason I am okay is through God’s divine intercession. My faith in this transformed my suffering into something far more than even I can see, feel, or understand (and I believe I can see, feel, and understand a lot of the suffering I went through). Needless to say, I found a lot of comfort in Pope John Paul II’s interpretation of suffering.

Just like Original Sin, suffering is very much a part of our human nature, “inseparable from man’s earthly existence.” Through Jesus’ Passion, we are brought closer to God not only because He saves us from our sins, but because God, in his partially human existence manifested in the Son, experiences human suffering with us.

One of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, once wrote, “I can withstand any pain as long as it has meaning.” Even though it is extremely hard for me to believe sometimes, I believe the very nature of suffering is that it always has meaning. John Paul II says that suffering evokes compassion, respect, and intimidation, and through these three profound experiences of human emotion, we, as humans, come together as perfectly as we can on this imperfect world in a way that gets us closer to a state of perfection that God originally intended. Without suffering, we cannot get closer to God. Without suffering, Jesus would not have died and fulfilled his mission to overcome death and rise again.

Without suffering, I most certainly would not be where I am in my life right now: healthier, happier, stronger, wiser, closer to what’s important—closer to God.

I am scared to suffer….but today, on Good Friday, I remember that it is okay to be scared. The Lord Himself prayed in the Garden of Olives for God to allow the cup {of His Passion) to pass from Him. Jesus prayed so hard that beads of his perspiration contained blood. But our suffering is important: it is a part of us that we accepted when we committed Original Sin. But our suffering is not in vain, and not without meaning.

We are not alone when we suffer. God is always with us.