Good Friday

Crucifixion (1500-08) - Grünewald

I began watching Gibson's Passion of the Christ last night. I woke with the lyrics and music of an old Paul Simon song going through my head, The Cross is in the Ballpark (The Obvious Child). May you have a blessed, peaceful, and holy Good Friday. As part of your meditations today, look through A Reluctant Sinner's entry for today here. Listen to the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. John at Daniel Mitsui's Lion and the Cardinal here.

Knox - 'He Suffered' - Pt. 6

The final excerpt from Monsignor Ronald Knox's essay, "He Suffered" in The Creed in Slow Motion, part 6:

ONE FURTHER QUESTION obviously occurs to one's mind. If we ought to welcome the suffering which God sends us whether we like it or not, oughtn't we, perhaps, to be taking on extra mortifications on our own, deliberately making ourselves uncomfortable, so as to have more suffering to unite with his? Well, of course the saints have always done that, scourging themselves and wearing hair-shirts and so on And there are very good people who do that sort of thing, but I don't think it is to be encouraged for the ordinary run of Christians. It can make you proud, it can make you self-righteous, it can make you unsympathetic to other people. When I say that, I'm not referring of course to self-denial. Giving up sweets in Lent, I mean, is perfectly all right, as long as the doctor assures you that sweets are not absolutely necessary to your health. But I don't think we ought to spend our time trying to think up ways of positively making ourselves uncomfortable, by putting salt instead of sugar in our tea and so on. We ought to ask god to make us very holy people; and perhaps when he has done that he will let us know what greater sacrifices he wants us to make for him, under our confessor's advice. Meanwhile, it's best for us to stick to ordinary ways, and content ourselves with bearing, for his sake, the mortifications which come to us from his hands.

- Ronald A. Knox

Knox - 'He Suffered' - Pt. 5

THERE IS ANOTHER WAY IN WHICH you and I can turn this evil thing, suffering, into something good; and that is by uniting it with the sufferings of Jesus Christ. We saw that, when he made atonement for our sins, he made it in full. He was perfectly sinless, and therefore it was his right, if he had wished it, to live without suffering; it is only because we are all sinners that we have all got to be sufferers. But he, of his own will, took our punishment upon himself; he would be hungry, and thirsty, and tired out, on the roads of Galilee; and at the end of his life he would go through a long pageant of suffering, which ended with death on a Cross. And all the saints have realized that their job was to suffer in union with Christ. St. Paul even talks of himself as paying off "That which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ" (Col. 1:23b-24). He thinks of our Lord as a rich Benefactor who has paid off, once for all, the debt of suffering we owed, and now it is for us to pay back that debt to him, as far as we can, by enduring our own sufferings in union with him. So it is that you get this same curious contradiction about the saints' lives which you find in our Lord's own life; they are always relieving the sufferings of other people, and at the same time welcoming suffering for themselves. You've all heard of Bernadette Soubirous, who had the visions of our Lady at Lourdes, and scratched up with her own hands the spring of water which has brought health, since then, to so many thousands of people. She became a nun, and it was found, before long, that she was suffering from a very painful and an incurable disease. But there was one moment at which she seemed a little better, and even fit to travel; so the Reverend Mother of her convent came to her and said they had arranged a nice treat for her. She was to go back to Lourdes as a pilgrim and ask the beautiful Lady of her visions if she might not be cured among the rest - surely there could be no doubt that HER prayer would be listened to! But Bernadette immediately said, "No; the spring is not for me." The spring is not for me; it was her business, as a saint, to win healing for other people; it was her business as a saint to win not healing, but suffering, for herself. (Concludes in Pt. 6)

- Ronald A. Knox

Knox - 'He Suffered' - Pt. 4

Ronald Knox's excerpted explanation of "He suffered" from his book, The Creed in Slow Motion, which we began here, continues here in Part 4:

LET'S BE A LITTLE MORE practical. We turn this evil thing, suffering, into a good thing when we accept it as God's will for us. I've tried to explain to you already that the only way in which we human beings can justify our existence in creation at all is to obey God's will for us. That is what we are FOR. A human being who is not out to obey god's will is exactly as much use in his creation as a toothbrush is in the possession of a man who has had all his teeth taken out. And there are two ways in which we can obey God's will, by doing what he wants us to do, and by suffering what he wants us to suffer. There's this trouble about doing what God wants us to do - that it's so often, at the same time, the thing we want to do. Even if it is the kind of thing that doesn't sound very attractive at the first go-off, even if it means (say) going out and being a missionary in foreign parts, or washing dishes all day in a canteen, it's extraordinary how people get to like it, and take a pride in doing it well, and want to go on doing it. That means that we are never quite sure whether we are doing what is God's will because it is God's will, or because it is ours. Self-love, self-admiration, will go on creeping in and disturbing the purity of our motives. But with suffering it's different; I mean, when it's suffering God sends us, suffering we can't get out of. It's almost impossible to feel any pride about that. And if God calls on you to spend twenty years lying on your back, in pain most of the time, and you go on telling him that it is his will, and you want it to happen because it is his will, then, believe me, you are in a fair way to going straight to heaven. (Continues in Pt. 5)

- Ronald A. Knox

The Accolade of Christian Knighthood

IF YOU READ THROUGH THE LONG list of St Paul's mortifications (2 Cor 11), or "infirmities", as he calls them, by which he vindicates his title to apostleship, you will find that whereas some of them are due to persecution from without, many of them refer merely to the incidental discomforts - cold, sleeplessness, shipwreck, and so on - which were incidental to a busy life like his ... "Whom the Lord loves, he chastises," he tells us and again, "If you are without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are you no true sons." In a word, suffering of some kind is the badge of the Christian profession, the accolade of the Christian knighthood (emphasis added). Suffering, to be sure, is the common lot of mortality, but Christians - I mean good Christians - will suffer more than their neighbours, because they are less indulgent to themselves, less sparing of their personal comfort, more sensitive to the needs of others. And they have, too, a warfare to fight against spiritual enemies, all the more painful because they are really in earnest about it, because they really care.

As chastised, and not killed, Servants of Christ, we must embrace, with sublime confidence, his assurance that not one hair of our heads can fall to the ground without the will of our heavenly Father (Mtt 19,30). The providence that watched over our Lord in his helpless infancy, the providence which he trusted so utterly amidst the dangers which surrounded him, has watched over his Church all through the ages, will watch over us when all hope seems lost and all prayers unanswered. The eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

- Ronald A. Knox

Deo Gratias

First of all, a huge thank you for all of your prayers. I am home and happy to be so. The experience provided a few surprises. Dr. Choti at Johns Hopkins began my surgery nearly three hours later than expected last Wednesday, but all went well.

He routinely removed the gall bladder, what happens with all liver resectioning, no encroachment of CA there. The tumors were all removed. I provided him with a surprise, however. The CA had moved to the diaphragm. This never appeared on any CTscan or MRI, but makes sense of other symptoms; namely, the originating complaint of pain when laughing, running, yawning, etc. This being the case, the CA in the diaphragm was probably there since at least my father's birthday, February of 2009. Dr. Choti asked if I had had pain in my shoulder - a big "YES" - which is a key symptom of problems in the diaphragm. The tumors in the diaphgram, now, are gone.

So, the hidden CA in the diaphragm led us to the early diagnosis of CA in the liver while it was still quite operable AND the removal of the CA in the diaphragm which Choti says he successfully removed. I am breathing easy, the shoulder is not nearly as painful, and except for the usual pain of going through the muscle wall, I am not doing poorly at all.

On the other hand, I cannot do any exercise other than walking, I cannot drive while on Oxycodone pain medicine, and are under orders to "mend" for the next 3 weeks, after which I see Dr. Choti to strategize.

Again, thank you for your kind well wishes and prayers; keep them coming!