My dear friend,
You say that you have no reason for feeling the way you do—and then you go on to speak of how insecure you feel about your looks, intelligence, personality and all your abilities. It appears that you see nothing good about yourself. But every single human being is an immortal diamond, made in God’s image and likeness. Besides that, you have been baptized into the very life of Christ. If you could just see yourself as you truly are—just by the fact that you exist and not counting anything else about you, you would be stunned at the beauty and grandeur of what God has created in you. He suffered and died for you because He values you that highly. Therefore, you, like the rest of us, are all about Him. So how you feel about yourself, is really beside the point. What is important is that you reflect Him by just being you. I have never met you, and yet just by the words you have written I am moved to write you. I sense the good in you that you don’t see. I suspect that this is true of many others who have also read you words here.
If you would want to contact me further privately, just click on my name here and then on “Contact info.” For now I encourage you to spend time before Our Lord in the tabernacle. The moment He died transcends al time and covers everyone who has ever lived or will live. But it also remain IN time as the Blessed Sacrament. I am leaving a reflection for you below on the Passion to help you focus.
You are in my prayers,
Fr. Vincent Serpa, O.P.
Reflection on the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ +
The agony in the garden was really the agony in His mind. He suffered the passion in His mind before He suffered it in His body—to the point of actually affecting the latter by sweating blood. But from then on, both His mental and physical suffering affected each other.
At the base of all His suffering was the one thing that human beings dread the most: rejection. He was betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter and abandoned by all the rest of His Apostles; those He had hand picked as His closest intimates. He was most rejected by those who put Him to death. They not only wanted Him dead, they wanted Him to suffer. They not only considered Him to be worth nothing, they considered Him to be worth minus nothing! This significance was not lost on Him. He felt fully the rejection as each physical agony reminded Him.
So we thank Him for joining us in our human journey and actually choosing to experience what we fear the most.
We thank Him for enduring the arrest and the cruelty of the guards and the Sanhedrin. We thank Him for enduring the cruelty of Pilate who allowed Him to be executed rather than risk his own political ruin—and for the cruelty of Herod who considered Him a nuisance. We thank Him for all the time He spent satisfying their preoccupation with themselves, just delaying His ultimate death. We thank Him for the anxiety of that night in a cell.
The next morning He was brutally scourged with such intensity and violence that He became as an aged man in a matter of minutes. His multiple wounds bloodied His entire body. The loss of so much blood not only severely weakened Him; it also caused a severe, throbbing headache that remained with Him for the duration.
We thank Him for this and for the mockery He received when they put a purple cloak over His open wounds, inviting immediate infection and then pushed a crown of thorns down into His head which intensified His headache. They blindfolded Him and struck Him multiple blows, insisting that He ‘prophesy’ who had hit Him. He, of course knew. It was they who were blind. They spat on Him and made Him walk to the preatorium, even though He could barely stand.
He stood in the praetorium in utter disgrace according to the crowd—while in reality, He stood in utter glory: almighty God, being present to every person who has ever suffered rejection, joining them in their moment of pain. It was there that He was sentenced to death by crucifixion. Physically, He was utterly miserable. He revealed to St. Bernard that carrying the cross was His most painful agony. He was so weak and thirsty, He could hardly walk. The weight of the cross most likely dislocated His shoulder and caused Him to fall three times under its weight on to the stone street, filthy with animal dung. He got up each time.
It was only with the help of Simon of Cyrene that He made it to Calvary. There they drove the nails into the His hands (most likely through the carpal tunnels which could support His weight), causing pain throughout His upper body. The nail in His feet registered great pain through all the sensitive nerves there. As He hung between heaven and earth on the cross, his body began to shut down. After three hours, He reached the point where His weakened state was simply no match for what is known as sepsis (where the bloodstream is overwhelmed by bacteria) and in this eternal moment He died, giving us His life. While this moment transcends time, covering everyone who has ever lived or will live, it remains as the Eucharist, present to us in the tabernacles of the world. We thank you, Lord. We adore you O Christ and we praise you. By your holy cross, you have redeemed the world.
