Today we're continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality and continuing to speak about one of the means of our incorporation into Christ, which is through suffering. Again, most of these are from Father Marciano Ciccarelli's reflections from his book written in Italian, "The Cornerstones of Franciscan Spirituality," which will actually be wrapping up very shortly, maybe within a month or two.
Suffering, which by now many of us know, is a daily companion on our earthly pilgrimage. Suffering is accepted by the Franciscan soul together with humility and poverty; it's our means of incorporation to an identification with Jesus. In this way, its most profound meaning is understood. Suffering is no longer a desperate and meaningless torment that consumes and destroys our lives, but it's now a fruitful trial from which comes forth life, actually our life in Christ. Suffering is like our birth pangs through which we bring Jesus into the world. It's a crucible of purification in which the creature leaves the dirtiness of sin in order to come through the suffering refined. Our sufferings and struggles are part of the spiritual mystery of life and death, which begins in us with baptism. In baptism, we're made participants of the death and resurrection of Christ; we're made dead to sin to the old man that's the child of sin, and we become alive to grace, alive to the divine life of a child of God. This mystery of death and life develops and completes itself in every soul during its terrestrial life by means of our free and generous collaboration with those sufferings of Jesus. To suffer this way, to suffer in union with Jesus, is to live in Christ.
Jesus is the big suffering servant, as Isaiah calls Him. In Isaiah 53, we are His little suffering servants. We die to the life of the world by renouncing the disordered pleasures that it offers and by accepting lovingly every suffering in order to one day reawaken to a celestial life in Christ. We're kind of like the caterpillar that crawls on the ground, crawls up the tree, and makes a cocoon on the tree, on the tree limb, and then after a little while comes out of the cocoon as a butterfly. The tree is the cross of Jesus that we have to embrace. The sufferings of this life are the little cocoon that Jesus prepares for us. Remember, "No cocoon, no butterfly."
Plus, I don't think any of us really want to remain and crawl on the ground as an ugly caterpillar for all of our life and for all eternity. I don't think that's either very desirable in itself. The embrace of suffering prepares and matures in us that hidden life of Christ with God in God, as St. Paul says in Colossians 3:3. More than a sign of agony or of death, it's a sign of the dawn of redemption, actually. Sufferings of the children of God, children of Jesus, children of God. In this spirit, the seraphic school can welcome suffering as a divine messenger. You can think of suffering kind of like a bolt of lightning that hits and crushes our little idols, breaking subtle and tenacious ties that keep us too attached to creatures in an unhealthy way and impede us from soaring to God. Suffering is also a clear sign that we're not to make our homes here down on earth, right? Our paradise is not down here. It's supposed to be up there in heaven. And suffering breaks the charm of the earthly life, which passes away quickly, and it calls us back to the great and eternal reality of God. Or you can think of suffering like the wise pruner, which the heavenly Father, the divine farmer, uses to prune His living branches, grafted into the vine, which His Son. So we can bear greater fruit.
The Franciscan soul doesn't stiffen with stoic pride or without tears or into an impassibility, which would extinguish our natural sentiments when we suffer. No, the Franciscan soul suffers and weeps with simplicity, with humility. But it finds strength and love to be sustained in peace through the sufferings, to offer everything to the Lord, and even the strength to thank Him at times.
Its greatest suffering, the one which breaks its heart, is often the memory of having offended the Lord and having hurt our neighbors and the awareness of the injuries which caused the suffering and death of the sweet Jesus on the cross who loved us so very much. St. Francis would lament, "Love is not loved, Love is not loved." Love with a capital L is not loved. That's often the greatest suffering for the seraphic soul, the fact that God is not loved as He should be.
The other sufferings, even though they are vivid and hurtful, become absorbed by that first and greatest suffering, and they become a means for purification and expiation for our sins and also the sins of others, too. So, in this optic, suffering can be welcomed and valued because it chisels and forms the soul, tempering it in the greatest trials of life. Suffering renders the soul fruitful, just like the long spring rains turn into a source of life for the grains of the field. Suffering renews the soul, sanctifies it in the fullness of Christ. As St. Bonaventure writes, the cross of Christ has a renovative nature, so it renews all things, it makes all things new, especially the tragic reality of life's sufferings.
In a word, suffering is not to be feared because God brings much good out of the pains of His little suffering servants. Remember, "No cocoon, no butterfly." 
So let's ask Our Lady for that grace to see suffering more from God's point of view and for the grace to accept it and embrace it with a spirit of faith, and a spirit of hope.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.