Student and Teacher in the School of the Cross

by Fr. Roger Landry - March 26, 2010

On Palm Sunday and Good Friday, the whole Church will contemplate in unison the Passion of the Lord Jesus. It is a day on which we seek to grasp the greatest of all paradoxes: how a perpendicular instrument of shameful death can become the Tree of Life; how a device of frightening torture can be transformed into the indelible sign of divine love; how something that was foolishness to gentiles and scandal to Jews can be proclaimed as the most remarkable manifestation of God's power and wisdom; and how, if we are to be saved, we must run not away from it but toward it, embracing it, carrying it, dying to ourselves on it, exalting it, and being exalted on it.

Christians in every age have struggled to comprehend, both theologically and practically, how the redemption of the world and their own personal redemption can and will happen only through the Cross. There's no part of the Gospel that our human nature, which abhors pain and recoils from death, finds more difficult to accept. And most of us who end up accepting it do so only begrudgingly and minimalistically.

The patron saint of priests, St. John Vianney, rather than seeing the Cross as a curse, recognized it, with the eyes of faith in the light of the redemption, as a great spiritual caress. Throughout his life he sought to grow in love and in imitation of the Cross and to help his parishioners and penitents adopt authentically cruciform lives. As we approach the events of Holy Week, his example and insights provide a means for all of us to unlock so much more of the power of the mysteries we are about to relive.

St. John Vianney knew that one of the most important keys to living a truly Christian life was the attitude we had toward the Cross. "Most people turn their back to crosses and flee from them. The more they run, however, the more the Cross pursues them." The Curé of Ars saw, with the common sense he picked up working on the farm as a young boy, that none of us is able to escape the Cross. We will all experience suffering and hardship, contradictions, calumny and death. The key is what how we respond to them. "There are those who suffer like the good thief, and others like the bad thief," he said. "Both suffer the same pain but one knows how to make the sufferings meritorious by accepting them in a spirit of reparation."

The secret to having our crosses make us better rather than bitter is, like the Good Thief, by uniting not just our pain but ourselves to Christ with love. "There are two ways to suffer," he continued. "To suffer in love and to suffer without love. The saints suffered everything with patience, joy and perseverance, because they loved. We suffer with anger, scorn and laxity, because we don't." Just as Christ's Cross is a sign not principally of pain but of the love that made him bear it, so the crosses we're given are principally meant to help us to learn how to love like Christ.

This is why St. John Vianney would repeatedly remind his parishioners that the saints not only bore their crosses but loved them. They saw the Cross as the means by which they would be able to experience the life St. Paul described in his letter to the Galatians: they learned in the Cross how to be "crucified with Christ" so that "it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:19-20). "If we could pass a week in heaven," the Curé of Ars commented, "we would understand the price of present suffering. We wouldn't find the Cross so heavy. We wouldn't find it a rather bitter test." He pointed to the martyrs as the greatest proof of this. "Ask the martyrs if they are angry now," he would say with a smile, because the martyrs recognized that even the tortures they bore are nothing compared to the joy and glory they now experience. And compared with the sufferings of the martyrs, Fr. Vianney would always add, "the good God is not asking so much of us."

So in terms of forming the right attitude toward the Cross, he taught, we first have to recognize we need the Cross to bring about the purification required for our sanctification. There are two paths to heaven, he said: the first, trod by very few, is one of "innocence," where with purity of heart people seek to give themselves to the Lord and please him from their earliest days; the second, which needs to be journeyed by the rest of us, is by "penitence." For those on this path, Fr. Vianney said, "It's necessary to have crosses to think of God." For unlike the innocent who listen to the whispers of God in prayer and daily life, the cross is God's "bullhorn," to use C.S. Lewis' expression, to help us turn to him. It's not enough to "recognize crosses," but we "must love them and bear them with courage. They unite [us] to our Lord. They purify [us]. They detach [us] from the world. They export obstacles from [our] heart and help [us] to traverse life like a bridge helps to cross over water."

Once we recognize our need for the Cross in order to be saved, we need to run to it, he said, "like the greedy man runs after money." The greater our participation in the Cross, in other words, the spiritually richer we will be.

In order to run after the Cross, however, we need God's help, because it is so against the grain of our nature. That's why he taught, "We have to ask for the love of Crosses." He said, "When one loves crosses, one no longer has them." After describing how for many years he had had more crosses than he thought he could bear, he said everything changed when "I made myself ask for a love of Crosses. Then I was happy. I tell you truthfully: there is no happiness anywhere else!"

He learned over time the truth of St. Paul's words to the Corinthians, that the Cross is the greatest source of wisdom. "If you want to be truly wise," he said, "go to meet the Cross." He continued, "The Cross is the wisest book one can read. Those who do not know this book are ignorant, even when they know all the other books ever written. Those who love it, consult it, and deepen their understanding of it are truly wise. This book is bitter, but one will never be happier than to bathe in its bitterness. The more one is in this school, the more he wants to remain there."

Besides the unforgettable images of "book" and "school," Fr. Vianney used other metaphors to help his people acquire the proper attitude to the Cross. He also called the Cross a "bridge," a "ladder," a "gate" and a "key."

The Cross, he said, is "like a beautiful stone bridge built over a river to traverse it. Christians who do not suffer pass this river on a fragile bridge of a thin iron filament, always ready to break under their feet."

The Cross is the "ladder of heaven," the fulfillment of Jacob's ladder, by which we climb up into Christ's arms and ascend with him to the house of the heavenly Father.

It's the "gate of heaven," the narrow portal Jesus describes that leads to life (Mt 7:14).

And it is "the key that opens up the door of heaven," the cruciform opener that unlocks that gate at the top of the ladder after traversing life on that secure stone bridge.

St. John Vianney was a disciple and an apostle in the school of the Cross, and imparted to his people the wisdom that helped them join him in walking over that stone secure stone bridge, up the ladder, and through the gate of heaven that Christ opened by the events we will mark this upcoming week.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.