The thing that makes love agonizing is that it recalls the suffering that is centered on control, our desire to maintain it, and the risk of losing it in our life. Both the experience of falling in love and the experience of suffering arise from a loss of control. In the case of love, control is given up. One surrenders his or her individual control for something else, for the interdependence of relationship that, as my fellow Franciscan friar Richard Rohr has said, “makes you willing to risk everything, holding nothing back.”
If love is the free surrender of one’s control, then suffering is the involuntary taking of that control away. Rohr likes to say that suffering is simply defined as “whenever you are not in control.” It’s not so difficult now to see how the line between love and suffering is both thin and blurry. The significance of control, its surrender, and its loss, plays an important role in our faith and is a focal point of our reflection on the experience of Jesus Christ on the cross.
—from the book The Last Words of Jesus: A Meditation on Love and Suffering
by Daniel P. Horan, OFM
