The Power of Love

Suffering, if we are one with Christ and so offer it in his hands to God, is the most effective of all acts of love. This is not a fanciful idea; it can be a reality. Christ is the incarnation of love itself. Love itself became flesh and blood, became our flesh and blood therefore with our suffering, with our pain and sorrow. He did not bring suffering into the world, but because we had done so and it was there, he came to wed himself to it, to make it inseparable from his redeeming love, one thing with love itself.

By making our humanity one with his, by making our suffering his own, he has literally given himself to us, made his suffering ours, so that we now have as our own his power of love. His sacrifice offered for the world is irresistible to the Father. Because it is real reparation for sin it lightens the heavy burden that is bending the back of humanity, and man can lift himself up. In it the world's healing begins.

It is this power of his own love that Christ has given to us. Because of it our personal share in the world's suffering is never useless, always potent. It is the most effective gift we have for the good of our fellow men. In Christ all humanity is contained. If we live in him we can lift up all the world's suffering in our own, and we can bear this mystery without staggering because of the miraculous economy of pity, through which in each man's suffering all suffering can be turned to love.

-- Caryll Houselander, Lift Up Your Hearts