Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it
directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me,
going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.
Little — be always little! Be simple, poor,
childlike.
Preach the Gospel with your life — without
compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.
Do little things exceedingly well for love of
Me.
Love... love... love, never counting the cost.
Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray,
fast. Pray always, fast.
Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet.
Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.
Pray always. I will be your rest.
The Little Mandate of Madonna House
Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me. We are going
through the Little Mandate of MH each Tuesday on the blog, phrase by phrase.
These are words that Catherine received, we believe from God, in the 1930s when
she was discerning His call in her life. They are the heart of our
spirituality, what we try to live and believe we are called to be and do in the
world.
Here we
have, appropriately for Lent, the call to take up the Cross and follow Christ.
Catherine was initially disconcerted by this as it is different from what is in
the Scriptures. Christ calls us to take up our
cross and follow Him—the personal share of suffering or struggle we bear
both as human beings living in a fallen world and as men and women striving to
live the Gospel of love in that world.
Here,
though, it is His cross, and the
cross of the poor, that we are being asked to carry. Perhaps these are not
greatly different things in lived reality, but there is a focus here in the
Mandate that is worth pondering.
We are
called to bear not only our own sufferings, but those of the suffering
humanity. We are not meant to be defined by our own joys and sorrows, problems
and challenges and gifts, but to always be broken open to the other, to the
poor one before us, to the sorrows of humanity, be it the suffering people of
Syria or Ukraine, or the neighbour down the street.
We are to
carry their cross as well as our own,
Simon of Cyrene-like in the world. And in that we find ourselves carrying the
Cross of Jesus Christ as well—His own offering of Himself for the world and all
humanity. Without doubt we carry the tiniest sliver of this weight; He alone,
being God, carries the whole of it.
We think,
perhaps understandably, of this whole cross-carrying business as a heavy,
burdensome, sad, frightening thing. There is no question about the heaviness of
it. And fear—well, we’re only human, and to fear suffering is not exactly
something that needs an explanation. But it is not a sad reality—that is where
the difference comes in.
Taking up ‘My
cross (their cross)’ is not, fundamentally, a question of suffering first. It
is a question of loving, not suffering. And love, while it is a heavy burden,
is not a sad thing. What makes our lives sad is not the suffering we bear in
them because of our love; our lives our made sad by selfishness, not love.
It is
closing our hearts to others and (in that) to God that extinguishes the light
within us and makes us grim functionaries or tragic failures. This is the
secret of the cross, and it is impossible to communicate it in words alone. It
has to be known experientially, and even then its secret is communicated in
great hiddenness and silence.
‘The secret
of the Cross is joy,’ Catherine wrote. And it is the joy of being a great lover—lover
of God and lover of humanity. And this is what is at the heart of the Little
Mandate—the heart of the Gospel, too. “I have come that my joy may be in you,
and your joy be made complete.” (John 15: 11)
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