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People sometimes get disheartened because they have read that suffering ennobles, and they have met people who seem to have come out of the crucible like pure silver, made beautiful by suffering. But it seems to them that in their own case, it is quite the opposite.
They find that, however hard they try not to be, they are irritable; that astonishing stabs of bitterness afflict them, that far from being more sympathetic, more understanding, there is a numbness, a chill on their emotions: they cannot respond to others at all.
They seem not to love anyone any more, and they even shrink from and dread the very presence of those who are compassionate and who care for them.
They say that in their case suffering is certainly a failure.
The truth is that they are too impatient to wait for the season of Advent in sorrow to run its course.
A seed contains all the life and loveliness of the flower, but it contains it in a little hard pip of a thing which even the glorious sun will not enliven unless it is buried under the earth. There must be a period of gestation before anything can flower.
If only those who suffer would be patient with their early humiliation and realize Advent is not only a time of growth, but also of darkness and hiding and waiting, they would trust, and trust rightly, that Christ is growing in their sorrow, and in due season, all the fret and strain and tension of it will give place to a splendor of peace.
The same is true of joy. We sometimes accuse young people of grasping joy and not realizing their blessings and not being made bigger and kinder and lovelier as they ought to be by all delight.
Joy, too, must also be allowed to gestate.
Everyone should open his heart very wide to joy, should welcome it and let it be buried very deeply in him; and he should wait for the flowering of it with patience.
Of course, the first ecstasy will pass, but because in real joy, Christ grows in us, the time will come when joy will put forth shoots and the richness and sweetness of the person who rejoiced will be Christ’s flowering.
We must never forget that it is the Holy Spirit who sows this Christ-seed in us, and the Spirit of Wisdom, Light, and Truth is given to us in countless ways.
We live in an age of impatience, an age which in everything from learning the ABCs to industry, tries to cut out and do away with the natural season of growth. That is why so much in our life is abortive.
We ought to let everything grow in us, as Christ grew in Mary. And we ought to realize that in everything that grows quietly in us, Christ grows.
We should let thought and words and songs grow slowly and unfold in darkness in us.
For there are things that refuse to be violated by speed, that demand at least their proper time of growth….
Today, in many souls, Christ asks that he may grow secretly, that he may become in them the light shining in the darkness.
Excerpted from the Reed of God, (1978), pp. 36-38.
Arena Lettres. It is now published by Ave Maria Press.
