The Four Incentives to Suffering Well

55. To help you suffer well, form the holy habit of considering four things:

1. The Eye of God

First, the eye of God, who, like a great king from the top of a tower, watches his soldier in the midst of battle with delight and praise for his courage. What does God look upon on the earth? Kings and emperors on their thrones? He often looks upon them only with contempt. The great victories of the armies of the State, precious stones, things in short that are great in the eyes of men? What is great in the eyes of men is an abomination before God. What, then, does he look upon with pleasure and delight, and about which he asks news from the angels and even from the demons themselves? It is a man who fights for God against fortune, against the world, against hell, and against himself — a man who joyfully carries his cross. "Have you not seen a great marvel on earth that all of heaven watches with admiration?" says the Lord to Satan. "Have you not seen my servant Job," who suffers for me?

2. The Hand of God

56. Second, consider the hand of this mighty Lord, who causes all the natural evil that befalls us, from the greatest to the least. The same hand that laid an army of a hundred thousand men upon the ground caused the leaf to fall from the tree and the hair from your head; the hand that touched Job roughly touches you gently through the small suffering it sends you. With the same hand he forms day and night, sunshine and darkness, good and evil; he has permitted the sins committed in wronging you — he did not cause their malice, but he permitted the act.

So when you see a Shimei hurling insults at you and throwing stones at you, as he did at King David, say within yourself: "Let us not take revenge; let him be, for the Lord has commanded him to act this way. I know that I have deserved every kind of outrage, and it is justly that God punishes me. Stay your hand, my arm; hold still, my tongue; do not strike, do not say a word. This man or this woman insults me or wrongs me — they are ambassadors of God who come in the name of his mercy to exact a friendly reckoning. Let us not provoke his justice by usurping the rights of his vengeance; let us not despise his mercy by resisting his loving strokes of the lash, lest it hand us over to the pure justice of eternity for its own vengeance." See the hand of an almighty and infinitely wise God supporting you, while his other hand strikes you; he puts to death with one hand and gives life with the other; he brings low and raises up, and with both arms he reaches from one end of your life to the other, gently and mightily: gently, by not allowing you to be tempted and afflicted beyond your strength; mightily, by sustaining you with a powerful grace proportioned to the strength and duration of the temptation and affliction; mightily again, by himself becoming, as he says through the spirit of his holy Church, "your support at the edge of the precipice beside which you stand, your companion on the road where you go astray, your shade in the heat that burns you, your clothing in the rain that drenches you and the cold that freezes you, your carriage in the weariness that overwhelms you, your staff on the slippery paths, and your harbor amid the storms that threaten you with ruin and shipwreck."

3. The Wounds and Sufferings of Jesus Christ Crucified

57. Third, look upon the wounds and sufferings of Jesus Christ crucified. He himself says to you: "O all you who pass along the thorny and crucified way by which I have passed, look and see" — look with the very eyes of your body, and see with the eyes of your contemplation — whether your poverty, your nakedness, your contempt, your sufferings, your abandonment are like mine; look upon me, who am innocent, and then complain, you who are guilty! The Holy Spirit commands us, through the mouth of the Apostles, to take this same look at Jesus Christ crucified; he commands us to arm ourselves with this thought, more piercing and more terrible to all our enemies than any other weapon. When you are assailed by poverty, abjection, suffering, temptation, and other crosses, arm yourselves with a shield, a breastplate, a helmet, a two-edged sword — namely, the thought of Jesus Christ crucified. There is the solution to every difficulty and the victory over every enemy.

4. Above, Heaven; Below, Hell

58. Fourth, look upward to the beautiful crown that awaits you in heaven, if you carry your cross well. It is this reward that sustained the patriarchs and the prophets in their faith and their persecutions; that animated the Apostles and the Martyrs in their labors and their torments. "We prefer," said the patriarchs with Moses, "we prefer to be afflicted with the people of God, in order to be happy eternally with him, than to enjoy for a moment a sinful pleasure. We suffer great persecutions for the sake of the reward," said the prophets with David. "We are like victims destined for death, like a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men, through our sufferings, and like the refuse and the offscouring of the world," said the Apostles and the Martyrs with St. Paul, "because of the immense weight of eternal glory that this moment of light suffering produces in us."

Look above our heads: the angels cry out to us, "Take care not to lose the crown marked for the cross that is given to you, if you carry it well. If you do not carry it well, someone else will carry it as he ought and will seize your crown. Fight bravely by suffering patiently," all the saints tell us, "and you will receive an eternal kingdom." Let us listen at last to Jesus Christ, who tells us: "I will give my reward only to him who suffers and conquers by his patience." Look below at the place we deserve, which awaits us in hell with the bad thief and the reprobate, if we suffer as they did — with murmuring, with spite, and with revenge. Let us cry out with St. Augustine: "Burn, Lord, cut, carve, and sever in this world to punish my sins, provided you pardon them in eternity."

Never Complain Willfully of Creatures

59. 12. Never complain willfully and with murmuring of the creatures God uses to afflict you. Distinguish for this purpose three kinds of complaints in affliction. The first is involuntary and natural: it is the complaint of the body, which groans, sighs, laments, weeps, and cries out. When the soul, as I have said, is resigned to the will of God in its higher part, there is no sin in this. The second is reasonable: it is when one complains and reveals one's suffering to those who can remedy it, such as a superior or a physician. This complaint may be imperfect when it is too eager, but it is not a sin. The third is sinful: it is when one complains about one's neighbor in order to escape the suffering he causes, or to take revenge; or when one complains about the pain one is enduring while consenting to the complaint and adding impatience and murmuring.

Never Receive Any Cross Without Gratitude

60. 13. Never receive any cross without kissing it humbly with gratitude; and when God in his goodness has favored you with some considerable cross, thank him for it in a special way and have others thank him, following the example of that poor woman who, having lost all her possessions through an unjust lawsuit brought against her, immediately had a Mass said with the ten-cent coin she had left, in order to thank God for the good fortune that had befallen her.

Take Up Voluntary Crosses

61. 14. If you wish to make yourselves worthy to receive the crosses that will come to you without any part of your own, take up voluntary ones with the advice of a good spiritual director. For example: do you have in your home some useless piece of furniture to which you are somewhat attached? Give it to the poor, saying: Would you want to have something superfluous when Jesus is so poor? Do you have a dislike for certain food? For a certain act of virtue? For a certain unpleasant smell? Taste it, practice it, endure it — overcome yourself. Do you love some person, some object a little too tenderly and eagerly? Absent yourself, deprive yourself, distance yourself from what flatters you.

Do you have some natural impulse to see, to act, to appear, to go somewhere? Restrain yourself, be silent, hide yourself, look away.

Do you naturally dislike some object? Some person? Go to them frequently; overcome yourself.

62. If you are truly Friends of the Cross, love, which is always inventive, will make you find in this way a thousand little crosses, with which you will enrich yourselves without noticing, without fear of the vanity that so often mixes with the patience we show in bearing conspicuous crosses. And because you will have thus been faithful in little things, the Lord, as he has promised, will set you over much: that is, over much grace that he will give you, over many crosses that he will send you, over much glory that he will prepare for you...