Suffering is the way and glory is the destination.

Suffering is the way and glory is the destination.
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Let us imagine ourselves standing at the foot of the Cross, where Our Lord hangs crucified.

Let us pray to Jesus to help us to understand how necessary it is to suffer in order to resemble Him..

  As the followers of crucified Jesus we aspire to unite ourselves with Him.

Penance is  a means of subjecting the flesh to the spirit.

It helps us to become one with our suffering Lord,  Christ Crucified,

  It also helps us  to reproduce and prolong His Passion in our own body.

Love makes us desire to be like the one loved and to be his  equal in all respects.

He who truly loves has a spontaneous desire to share in the joys and sufferings of the loved one.

Real lovers of Jesus  Crucified should have a spontaneous desire to share  in His sufferings.

If our love for Jesus is real our desire to be crowned with thorns like Him will also be real.

It is an honour for a lover to be able to share in the entire life of the person loved, even if it is full of sufferings.

Can you imagine a mother

who enjoys a sound sweet-dreamful-sleep

while her child keeps  awake

weeping unable to bear the pain in its body?

The same should be for our soul too.

If we really love Jesus, can we lead a sorrow -free life with Jesus crucified in our heart?

If we can, either our heart or our life is fake.

If our soul is consecrated to God,

it will think it an honour to be able to share, even in a small way, in the Passion of Christ.

“But God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).

Mortification of the spirit is certainly more important than that of the body,

but  we must not forget that,

in order to save the world,

Jesus was willing to embrace both

in the most complete manner.

His whole life was a cross and a martyrdom.

It ended with the sacrifice of Calvary,

where His spiritual and physical immolation reached its height.

Any spirituality without physical mortification cannot be genuine as our spirit activates our body.

As is the activator, so is the activated.

One who is activated by self love cannot love the passion of Christ.

Only those. who have stripped themselves  of self love

and clothed themselves with Jesus ,  Crucified, can love His sufferings.

They will consider themselves blessed when they are gifted with sufferings.

They see God's love in the Cross and hence they cannot but love the Cross.

For them suffering is delicious, sweet and glorious.

For those for whom Jesus is sweet how else can His suffering be!

Jesus wants Himself to be wholly ours, in His glory and suffering.

Jesus in His divinity is glorious From all eternity.

But,

for us

unless we take part in His sufferings in this world

we cannot take part in His glory in the next world.

In our spiritual journey suffering is the way and glory destination.

Lourdu Selvam.