4 Vol. LVIII, No. 1 Magnificat plan for His child. It is by a design of His love that suffering, in all its forms, visits us. The practice of the virtue of patience is also to make reparation for sin and to enter into God’s design through the sufferings and tribulations that He sends us. Many authors put this motive of reparation first, but I wanted to begin with a more positive motive, which is to give glory to God. — SOURCE OF SUFFERING It is not God who made suffering. Suffering is the fruit of sin. Man was made for God, for the joy of union with Him. And ever since man, by his sin, broke this divine project, he suffers, he is disoriented, he gropes. Man’s intelligence is obscured, he can no longer see clearly. All his faculties are in darkness – all of them! – because of sin. But by a kind of sleight of hand, we might say, Infinite Love succeeded in turning suffering, which came from our sin, into the remedy for our sin. Man sins, bringing about suffering, and Infinite Love makes it the remedy for sin. It took God to think of this! I believe that this is one of the most beautiful manifestations of His Infinite Love. Our sin brings about suffering, we are condemned. And God, in order to manifest His Infinite Love, elevates the suffering caused by man’s sin to a sublime dignity, one could say an almost infinite dignity. — IDENTIFYING WITH CHRIST We meditate on this virtue of patience in adversity especially during the Christmas season. It is first manifested through Mary and Joseph: during the five-day journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem and the rejections in Bethlehem. Contemplate the details of their comportment, totally imbued with patience. When Jesus arrives, what meekness He has, what patience! And the world is already going to pursue the little Infant. The Holy Family must make haste to flee into Egypt. Contemplate how they acted during their journey; they left the grotto of Bethlehem in the middle of the night, without any preparation, to undertake a long passage through the desert in all sorts of difficult conditions. They took refuge in Egypt, a foreign land. We ought to contemplate their patience in order to imitate it, and thus enter into these dispositions of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Since the coming of Jesus, it seems that suffering is what has the capacity to identify us most with Jesus, the Christ, the Word of God incarnate. Go anywhere in the world, with any denomination – Catholic (it goes without saying) but also Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan – go around the world and show a cross, just a cross made of two little pieces of wood or two pencil lines. Everyone will recognize the sign of Jesus before the word cross is spoken. The cross is synonymous with Jesus, so much did He appropriate it to Himself. I sincerely and deeply believe that the example of Jesus is what can motivate us the most to practice patience in the adversities and trials of life; and there are many! I do not think there is a word that has more synonyms than suffering: cross, adversity, tribulation, trials, aches and pains, infirmity, disease... In THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT In the most difficult circumstances, the Holy Family gives us the example of true Christian patience.
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