Unintended Cross

I remember, not long ago, sitting in a car and listening to the grief-laden story of a woman in her fifties. I must confess my heart went out to her. She was a devout Catholic. According to her account of it, when she was a girl an artistic career had been open to her; but this venue had closed when she became married.

Her married life had apparently been a veritable Way of the Cross. Her husband was a healthy robust extrovert, who brushed aside her sensitive qualms and wishes. From the earliest days they had not hit it off together. She had concentrated her affections and ambitions on her only daughter. This girl, she felt, would live the life she had been unable to lead – receive trainingpage 594 in ballet and eventually dance her way overseas. She emphasised that she had given her daughter a strict training in the practice of the Faith. And now – she could not understand why – the daughter had ‘turned against her’, abandoned the Faith and a ballet career, and announced her intention to marry a divorced man.

She could only attribute the calamity to diabolic influences working through the man concerned. He, she was convinced, was the serpent who had corrupted her child and laid waste a paradise in which mother and daughter were united by their devotion to God and to ballet-dancing. I could see her point of view; and there was no doubt that her anguish was real. But it so happened that I had also met her daughter. The daughter – a buxom, maternal lass whom anyone would associate with prams and napkins – had told me that she had a horror of the Faith.

To her it meant primarily the endless unhappiness and wrangling which she had witnessed between her father and her mother. In her early years she had taken her mother’s side; but as she grew older she had begun to see her father was not a monster but an ordinary bewildered man. She had decided to stake her cards on the chance of natural happiness, outside the Church, with the man of her choice.

It was no use my trying to tell the unfortunate mother that the Faith and ballet are two separate things; that her own inability to enjoy married life had engendered in her daughter a conviction that the practice of the Faith spelt permanent unhappiness on earth. It was too late; and it would have been impertinent anyway.

Nor could I persuade the daughter – though I did try a little – that the unhappiness of her parents did not invalidate the teaching of the Church. The damage was already done. Most people, lacking the logical powers of Saint Thomas Aquinas, make decisions on the evidence of their feelings. The man whom the daughter wished to marry was, incidentally, a sincere and humane agnostic.

It was still possible for the mother to regard herself as a person to whom God had sent three very great afflictions – an incompatible husband and a daughter who disregarded her dearest plans for her and married outside the Faith. Her real suffering could not be doubted. Yet I felt that the whole tragedy could have been avoided if the mother had somehow been able to accept the difficulties of her marriage wholeheartedly and minimise them.

One does not readily leave the place where love has been given and received. I am inclined to think that the majority of lapses from the Faith occur when people have only a sense of duty to oppose to temptation, not a sense that the Church is where human love flourishes best.

There are, as I see it, two kinds of suffering. They are shown to us in the traditional interpretation given to the action of Simon of Cyrene. Simon was first singled out from the crowd and given the Cross to bear – we may supposepage 595 that he lifted it unwillingly – he lifted it certainly, and that was something, but without joy, with an inner sense of disgust and humiliation and revolt. To my mind, this is neurotic suffering. I am no stranger to it.

The second kind of suffering began when he realised whom he was carrying the Cross for. The burden, though it grew heavier step by step, became a holy gift. He would not have exchanged it for a sack full of diamonds. When his revolt left him the sense that the burden was unendurable left also. He could say, in effect, ‘This is what I was born to do.’ I believe that the first kind of suffering is not intended by God, though He permits it; whereas the second kind is His very lifeblood.

I think that we Catholics do not suffer less than others. We may indeed suffer more. But if our suffering is unwilling and neurotic, the world will judge the Church by it and decide that there is no joy to be found there; whereas, if our suffering is joyful (and best of all, hidden from sight) the world will be drawn to it as if by a magnet. One of the mystical writers describes a vision in which she saw the face of Our Lord in His Passion, and it was joyful.

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