The bright side

The cross is not the dark side of which the resurrection is the bright side.  In John's Gospel, Jesus speaks repeatedly of being glorified in his death.  The glory is in having kept faith, in having seen it through to the end, in having surrendered himself in unqualified love to the Father.  This is now, because of him and through him, a human possibility.  The only dark side, for him and for us, would be to turn against the light by setting our will against the will of God. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus - Death on a Friday Afternoon

Our desires are so often in conflict with the revealed will of God, and it is amazing how we will twist our interpretation of God's will to match our own desires.

- A husband in the grip of the "seven year itch" may convince himself that it was never God's will that he should marry the wife with whom he now seems to have so little in common, and that it cannot be God's will that he be chained to her for the rest of his life. Yet once he has committed his own will - his own choices - to God's, he may eventually come to see the utter foolishness and unrivaled pride behind his misjudgment and to treasure the bride whom he once disdained.  The whole episode may then serve as a touchstone of truth in later circumstances.

- Our hearts breaking with helpless love for our children as they suffer from a debilitating or life-threatening medical condition, we may be tempted to grasp at any solution, regardless of its effect on others.  To stay the course, seeking only options for them that also honor the dignity of all people, is a challenge that we often find is beyond us.

- When we see others make choices and commit acts that are hurtful and heinous, it is a challenge for us to simultaneously mourn for both their victims and for their own loss of dignity.  We judge - and treat - them as less than human, as having forfeited any right to any degree of respect.  We let our fear and our revulsion obscure the truth that their own souls are more tormented by their actions than ours are.

- We allow ourselves to disregard the more fundamental needs of others, especially those far from our sight, in our focus on those that are directly before us.

The examples are beyond any individual's ability to recount.  But when we choose to embrace the will of God even when it seems to be calling us to an act that is beyond reason - when a lonely and isolated wife continues to work on her marriage in new ways even when she sees no hope of ever being fulfilled in it; when a terminally ill patient rejects an option that would in fact diminish his remaining dignity; when we forgive one who has done the unforgivable; when we choose to live even though the pain of it seems unbearable and the choice to die would seem to offer immediate relief - the light is always revealed in it.

When I get focused on the darkness and difficulty in my life, I'm often amazed in retrospect at how small the situation really was, and chagrined at how much light I ignored in misdirecting all my attention onto those circumstances rather than on the One on the cross whose light is the answer to all darkness.