(The Nationalist, 13 March 2006)
Spring is in the air. The weather is good. There’s new life and growth in field and garden. Farmers have completed ploughing and sowing for the autumn harvest. Gardeners also have been busy in the ongoing battle between weed and flower.
Ground has to be broken before seed can be planted. If a seed is to germinate, it has to break open. Sealed up in itself, it is infertile, and dies. Broken clouds give rain. Grains of wheat have to be broken open and ground down to be baked into bread. In some cultures, bread is not cut, only broken. In the Eucharist, we receive bread that is broken; the priest breaks the Host just before Communion. In the early centuries, the Eucharist was known as “the breaking of the bread”.
Something similar applies to ourselves. God has to break us, to plough our souls so that the seed which is his life can take hold, breaking through the hard shell with which we try to protect ourselves. God has to break down the self-centeredness that keep us enclosed within ourselves. He does this so that we can open out and begin to live. To live means to live for others. God has to dig down into us so that he can plant his word in us in depth, not sitting loosely on the surface, producing nothing. And that may be painful.
It’s not uncommon for people to discover by personal experience that a breakdown – in physical, emotional or mental health, for instance – may be a step towards a breakthrough. Alcoholics, for example, are not on the road to sobriety until they first acknowledge what they are and their need of the help of a Higher Power to break from the addiction.
But those who try to go it alone, who feel self-sufficient, remain locked up in themselves. They cannot grow as human beings, until they are broken and acknowledge their need of another.
Jesus was broken on the cross; the way he followed was one of suffering, but not because he liked it any more than we do. He shrank from suffering, but it was the deepest sign of his commitment, and inseparable from his mission. To have asked to be saved from it would have amounted to asking to be relieved of his mission. But it was for that reason that he had come to his final hour, his moment of decision. It was the time to plunge into the crisis, to make a final act of surrender, not knowing anything except that God his Father would not abandon him.
There is a mysterious link between suffering and salvation, pain and gain, cross and crown. Suffering can be saving. There is no alternative short cut or quick fix. If we share in Christ’s sufferings, we will share also in his glory.
For those in a hurry: ‘Leap into the present instant; the past and the future are contained within it, and it carries its load of the eternal’. (Jean Sulivan, Morning Light, p.180)