Remember out of Remembrance of me
Every day the Catholic Church remembers suffering in her traditions and rituals.
Mysteries in the Rosary recall the sorrows of both Jesus and Mary. The Stations of the Cross tell the story of Jesus’s Passion. The season of Lent invites the faithful to go into the desert with Jesus where He was tormented and tempted for 40 days. Sculptures, paintings, and crosses that hang in the Church display the agony of the Crucifixion and the suffering of the saints.
The Church in her wisdom beckons the faithful to not forget suffering.
The Church knows that remembering suffering is essential to healing. Remembering is how we know where we have come from and where we must go.
As Catholics, we believe that God sent His only begotten Son to heal us and set us free. God did not forget our suffering. God recalled how we continued to hurt one another by our actions. He remembered our cries. He remembered our afflictions. He remembered how we stored it in our bodies and passed it down, generation after generation. He remembered and then sent His Son to bear our suffering in His own body. Then in His great power and wisdom, He transformed our suffering through Christ’s Crucifixion.
The CCC (1505) says, “Moved by so much suffering Christ not only allows himself to be touched by the sick, but he makes their miseries his own: "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." But he did not heal all the sick. His healings were signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. They announced a more radical healing: the victory over sin and death through his Passover. On the cross, Christ took upon himself the whole weight of evil and took away the "sin of the world," of which illness is only a consequence. By his passion and death on the cross, Christ has given a new meaning to suffering: it can henceforth configure us to him and unite us with his redemptive Passion.”
In other words, the reason why we remember Christ’s suffering is because Christ made and continues to make our suffering His own. When we recall the suffering of Christ, we are invited to explore our own wounds and unite our wounds to Christ and the victory He has won for us through the Cross.
If we forget about Christ’s suffering, we forget our own story and how much we need a healer.
The rituals, traditions, and artwork that is so poignantly displayed in the Catholic Church remind us that we are not alone in our suffering and that we do have a healer. Our wounds matter. Our suffering matters. Our personal cross matters, and through the wounds, suffering, and cross of Christ, we are healed.
The challenge is we live in a culture of erasing what is painful.
We don’t like to experience suffering as a people. We will do everything in our power to eradicate it. We will numb it, suppress it, project it, or silence it. Sometimes, we will even go as far as kill our own selves so we never have to feel it again.
We also can get really good at distracting ourselves from it. We scroll for hours on our social networks, we watch ridiculous amounts of television, we become obsessed with our jobs, relationships, our fitness, our food, or just about anything that offers some kind of gratification. Sometimes, we even use our religion to cover up our pain. We get really good at reciting prayers, going to Mass or Church, doing virtuous deeds, but inside we are emotionally numb and detached from our suffering.
But God knows this isn’t good for our health and doesn’t help us to live authentic and whole. That is why when we try to outrun our suffering, it usually comes up in strange and rather destructive ways. It can create physical ailments, illnesses, negative thinking patterns, harmful behaviors, and compulsions. Essentially, our soul screams, “Please pay attention to your pain. You are hurting!”
So what do we do when we experience this? Are we supposed to just feel bad all the time? Are we not supposed to enjoy life?
Well, I like to think most answers are not black or white. I do not believe God wants us to suffer for the sake of suffering and that God finds joy in seeing us in pain. I also do not believe that God needs us to either always feel pain or always experience pure bliss. I believe God is the God of mercy, compassion, and love. God is the God balance.
Therefore, it isn’t about being joyful all the time and never experiencing pain, or always experiencing pain and never feeling joyful, but it’s more about living in the tension of both. It’s about acknowledging the reality of our story. The reality of experiencing difficult experiences that wounded us deeply and the reality of experiencing beautiful experiences that awoken us profoundly.
Suffering gets transformed when we remember it all. Just like God does.
The call to discipleship for Christians is to take up our cross and follow Jesus but we cannot take up our cross when we don’t fully understand what our cross is and how we can experience joy while carrying it.
When we don’t fully understand what it is, we usually think we’re following Christ but we’re really following our own ego, our trauma, our fear, or our avoidance of pain. When we don’t experience joy while carrying it, we usually are following Christ, but it’s done begrudgingly and with very little awareness. In any case, we have failed to transform suffering and taste the resurrection that was won for us.
The best way to truly remember it all and live in the tension of suffering and resurrection is to:
Live with more intentionality and awareness during the day
Allow yourself to be in your body and notice shifts in your body
Notice your thoughts and some of your negative core beliefs
Stay with the positive and reflect on the positive after you experience it
Examine your conscience at the end of the day
Go to therapy and work through traumatic memories
Go to therapy and talk through different thoughts, feelings, and dreams
Look through old happy photos
Take new photos and savor the happy moments
Be more in the moment and limit distractions
Acknowledge when you have a strong emotion and be curious about it
Create a strong narrative and explore negative beliefs or questions in your narrative
Ask safe people to help you remember lost memories
Think about one thing you can be grateful for daily
Also, when you are recalling Christ’s passion, participating in Mass or other sacred traditions, you can recall your own suffering and remember your specific wounds, and imagine offering them to Christ.
Christ wants to heal you and remind you through His own suffering, just how important your suffering is to Him. In other words, Christ wants you to remember. He invites you to “do this out of remembrance of me” because, through his Body and Blood, we have the opportunity to experience true hope, peace, and joy.