I always thought that an ironman like me would have no trouble with a weighty cross because carrying a heavy burden was all about strength and stamina. I also believed that it was best to carry a cross in solitude: that asking for help was a sign of weakness.
In retrospect, I suppose it makes sense that when I received my initial cancer diagnosis, I excluded everyone from my fears about this nemesis. If my dad could look death in the eye without blinking, couldn’t I? If Jean de Brebeuf could endure painful suffering, couldn’t I? With little idea of how it works, I’d try to follow my mom’s lifelong example and offer it up.
However, after a few weeks thinking I was the man who could walk 500 miles, I realized that the burden of my new cross was making me withdraw at a time when I needed people the most. I felt that my solitary midnight prayers were like peashooters going up against a cannon.
And so, little by little, I opened up to the support of family and friends.
However, carrying a cancer cross can be a formidable and at times a lonely task. The suffering is real. Despite the many Simons of Cyrene who helped me along my way, I struggled. I often stumbled but, whenever I did, I was drawn closer to the foot of His cross.
A former teaching colleague and friend, Eric Guy, sent me a note early on in my battle that gave me pause. He wrote,
“Remember that as parts of Christ’s mystical body, we have the opportunity each day to participate in His salvific suffering.”
It took me time to understand the wisdom of his message: that my humble sufferings unite in a real way to Christ’s sufferings and to the sufferings of others and that my trials can be used for a greater good.
A masterful new TV show called Touch starring Keifer Sutherland makes the point that all of us are connected in ways that we can never begin to imagine. The fact that the program proposes that numbers are the basis for this connection is not the relevant point; it’s that we are all brothers and sisters on this small planet, that my life today is connected in some inexplicable way to the life of a business man in Los Angeles, an orphan in Burundi or a teacher in Hong Kong. What I do with the gift of my life and my trials makes a difference in this world.
On this Good Friday, may we shoulder our crosses and unite our slivers of pain and suffering with the wood of Christ’s cross for we are all connected …we are all one in His death and His triumphant resurrection.
“Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering…
But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ”
1 Peter 4: 12-13
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