I recently had a conversation with my sister about how life’s challenges have evolved since our thirties. Faced with decisions on how to care for aging parents, guide children we can no longer strap to our hip, handle our own physical ailments, manage job changes, or balance increased financial responsibilities, the two of us found ourselves blissfully recounting the yester years of simpler problems—where life revolved around correcting play-date tantrums, picking the best school for our kids, or simply putting a nutritious meal on the table. And jokingly, we asked, “Can we just have our thirties back?”
While there are certainly those who suffer in their earlier years, the depths of forty and beyond typically unleash a Pandora’s box of problems many of us are neither prepared for nor eager to embrace. This reality perhaps explains why there is a great temptation to ignore them altogether, find distractions, incessantly complain about them to our spouses, or more often, recapture part of the life we once knew (hello, mid-life crisis and new boat!).
But that would be missing the point, wouldn’t it? Clinging to what life once was, or the supposed “good ole’ days,” is actually shortsighted. The upside of these often age-driven challenges is that they aren’t just practical. They can be spiritually necessary.
It is here in these new, tougher challenges that abstract and theoretical Christianity is replaced with a concrete, hard (and at times, raw) Christianity. It is here where Christianity is tested AND sometimes truly discovered for the first time.
More importantly, though, it is here that spiritual milk turns to solid food and, if we let it, we can share an authentic intimacy with Christ that allows us to participate in His redemption of us all.
As Saint John Paul II writes in his 1984 letter on the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering, Salvifici Doloris, the nature of human suffering has the ability to connect to and share in the redemptive nature of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. He states:
Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.
None of it is easy, though. When the incredible metal of the cross meets our lousy, self-centered and self-focused road, we are left with the choice to either cling to Jesus or linger behind at a comfortable distance. And for us imperfect pilgrims, the right choice doesn’t always come naturally or quickly.
A parent needs help to simply function? A spouse is bedridden or suffers from addiction? A perceived wrongdoing is coming between family members? A child needs help making good choices? A friend needs money to make a mortgage payment? A lonely acquaintance simply wants to visit more? Whatever the issue, we Christians can be reluctant to sacrifice ourselves and our time to the needs as they appear in front of us. Like Saint Peter in the garden of Gethsemane, we fall asleep when we should be with the Lord; we sit idle in our own courtyards and deny Christ because His cross might impact our future and our own plans; and yes, when we do finally realize we have chosen poorly, we experience remorse and weep bitterly for having failed God. Again.
That’s the irony of Christ’s cross. It calls to us to share in it and also patiently awaits us in mercy. Yes, from the cross, Jesus said “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” and “It is finished” because He knew His suffering was accomplishing what ours never could alone.
The reality is that we are inevitably bound to fumble and make mistakes through our little life challenges. If we continue to cling to Christ on the Cross and in the sacraments, however, we will draw close enough to Him until one day we can finally exchange our person of yesterday for one that can genuinely say, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
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