Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We're continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality today, speaking of another means for growing closer to the Lord.
Lastly, we spoke about humility.
Today we'll begin to look at the one thing that we don't like to look at, which is suffering.
At the beginning of the evangelical life of Saint Francis was an encounter with Christ crucified.
It was like a burning kiss of love and of suffering.
And it began when Francis overcame himself by kissing a leper, which he had encountered, and had reoriented all of his energies of his youth towards searching for the Lord at that time.
Saint Bonaventure writes this in his Legenda Maior.
“He says, one day Francis was praying in seclusion, and in his exceeding fervor was wholly absorbed in the Lord, and there appeared unto him Christ Jesus in the likeness of one crucified.
Beholding him, Francis's soul melted within him.
And so deeply was the remembrance of Christ's passion imprinted inwardly on his heart that from that hour, whenever he recalled the crucifixion of Christ, he could scarcely refrain from tears and from groaning aloud.
Even as he himself told his friends afterwards when he was drawing near his end.
For in truth, by this vision, the man of God understood that gospel's saying to be addressed to him, which says, if you will come after me, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me,” writes Saint Bonaventure.
At that time, Christ crucified spoke to Saint Francis at San Damignano.
The stigmatization had already appeared on the horizon, even though it was a long way off.
Francis's encounter with the cross of San Damignano was the first prelude of that stigmata.
The suffering image of the crucified one was never canceled again from the heart of Saint Francis.
It would become a sweet and tremendous reminder, together both a joy and a suffering too.
The suffering of the lover, meaning Christ, made Saint Francis cry aloud.
It was such an uncontrollable and sorrowful sobbing that it moved to tears a man whom Francis encountered in the fields and who asked him the reason for his crying.
Why are you crying?
Saint Francis said, I weep over the passion of my Lord.
That was his reply.
The suffering of Christ was a mystery to which the soul of Francis drew near, trembling and quivering with compassion.
He had understood from that first encounter at San Damignano that all human suffering had passed through the heart of Jesus and had made him suffer.
But in passing through that divine heart, overflowing with love, suffering had lost all of its bitter gall.
Suffering can no longer be something that leads to despair, something dark, turbid, agitating.
Through Christ, it actually becomes an instrument of purification and redemption, a means to assimilate oneself to Jesus, a means essentially of perfection.
The God who is love has taken possession of it and has transformed it.
Suffering was the offspring of sin and the kin of death.
Through Christ, it becomes the way of purification and the source of a higher life.
We know God didn't create suffering.
God, who is infinite blessedness, called from nothing all creatures in order to have them participate in his goodness, in his happiness, were made for joy, and so naturally, we turn away, we pull away, we recoil from suffering.
But when sin disturbed the order established by God and separated creatures from him, it also broke the equilibrium that existed in nature and lacerated the soul of man.
This is how suffering was born and how earth became a valley of tears as we sing in the Salve Regina.
From Adam to the last man, we have experienced and will continue to experience a river of tears, an ocean of pain which floods the earth.
The only one who didn't have to suffer pain as a necessity, as an inevitable punishment, was Jesus, the God-man, who was totally innocent alongside of his blessed mother, too.
Yet he wanted to become, as Isaiah says, the man of sorrows acquainted with grief, Isaiah 53:3.
He wanted to become the man of sorrows to identify with us, and Our Lady wanted to become the sorrowful mother to give birth to us as well.
Us sinners can't possibly escape from the sting of suffering.
It falls on us as a merited punishment because it's an inherited share that we get from our first parents, Adam and Eve.
It's what they left us as an inheritance.
Jesus, who could have avoided it, didn't want to.
He wanted, again, to have a solidarity with us sinners, and so he spontaneously embraced suffering for us, as Isaiah says in Isaiah 53:7.
Jesus opened his heart to the fullness of sufferings, sufferings which invaded his body and his soul like the waters of the ocean, suffering which he then purified and redeemed, and again, made it an instrument of good, something that only God can do, bringing good out of evil.
Let's ask Our Lady, then, the sorrowful mother, for the grace to respond to the sufferings that our Heavenly Father sends us in a Christ-like way. That way, it will truly become a means of sanctification for us and a source of grace and blessings for others, too.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.