08/30/2026
Thomas Merton, in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, offers something instructive here. He observes a peculiar irony: people who try to eliminate suffering from their lives — who run from their cross, who deny it exists — end up in a strange place. Everything starts to become painful to them, even their own soul. In trying to build a life of total comfort, even minor inconveniences begin to wound them.
But the opposite is also true. When we embrace our cross — embrace our suffering, not for its own sake, but for the life it makes possible — something opens up inside us. Merton's insight is that facing our fear and our pain, rather than fleeing it, enlarges the soul. It makes room. It opens us to a joy we couldn't have imagined otherwise.
What will you give in exchange for your life? If you gain the whole world and lose your life, what good would it do?
If you want to follow Jesus, don't worry about the crosses other people are carrying — that's God's work, not yours. But if you want to follow Jesus, pick up your own. This is the means to life. And this is the promise: when we carry our cross, we are opened to a life beyond our imagination, beyond our wildest dreams.
Amen.
