However felicitous one may be in one’s personal life, this pain must never be allowed to die away. How could we forget—though the joys we experience be ever so genuine and ever so great—the suffering of the “Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world”: the suffering which has redeemed us and is the key of our eternal happiness? Far from it. He who is wounded by the love of Christ will pray: “Let me be wounded by his wounds, let me become inebriated with the cross and the blood of Thy Son.” It is, in the first place, “they that mourn” for this cause whom the Lord means when He says, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”

We should mourn because of the sufferings of mankind in this world

But His word also refers to those who cannot pass by with indifference the ocean of suffering that fills the world. A man so absorbed by his personal happiness as to remain completely untouched by the multifarious suffering that surrounds him is evidently shallow and heartless. From the life of a true Christian—regardless of his personal lot—this sharing of the world’s burden of suffering cannot be absent.

At every moment an infinity of heart-rending things happen in the world. The fact that this earth is a valley of tears never remains hidden even in anyone’s immediate environment, unless his eyes are blinded. To everyone who loves, and in the measure in which his love is a living one, the words of St. Paul apply: “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is scandalized, and I am not on fire?” (2 Cor. 11:29).

Blessed are those who suffer from the disharmony of the world; who from charity help the rest carry their heavy burden; whom the accident of their good fortune does not prevent from being aware of the nature of a fallen world. These—the yearning, the waking, the loving ones—will be comforted in eternity, where “God shall wipe away all tears.”

We are all called to take up our cross

But more—the Cross as such towers ineluctably over the life of every Christian. Through Christ, suffering has acquired an entirely new meaning. What was merely an inexorable consequence of original sin before Christ has now assumed the character of a fruitful penance and purification—a manifestation of love. Suffering love has redeemed the world. The cross stands forth as the symbol of redemptive and expiatory suffering freely accepted by merciful charity.

No one who is unwilling to take up his cross can truly follow Christ. In the life of every Christian, that cross is there. Not unless he embraces it with eager readiness—perceiving in it the call of God and accepting it as a means of his mortification—can he be transformed in Christ.

To evade the cross is to evade Christ. Whether we try to escape from it in fact, to hide it from our eyes, or to bury it under a layer of shallow pleasures and peripheral interests—it is Christ from whom we thus separate ourselves. “But it behooves us to glory in the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ: in whom is out salvation, life, and resurrection: by whom we are saved and delivered,” the Church sings in the Introit of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Again, in Passion Week: O Crux, ave spes unica, hoc Passionis tempore (“Hail Cross! thou only hope of man, Hail on this holy Passionday!”), Venantius Fortunatus, Vexilla Regis.