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St. Anna Schäffer wanted to be a missionary. Falling into a boiling laundry vat took away any possibility of that happening; she was bedridden for the rest of her life. It didn’t seem right. Hadn’t God put on Anna’s heart that she had a calling as a missionary? For two years, she struggled to see the purpose in this tragedy. With time, she adjusted her thinking, and she began to see her disability as a cross to be picked up and carried daily. Anna said she had three tools with which to bring souls to the Lord: her suffering, her needle, and her penholder.

“Whatever troubles may be before you, accept them cheerfully, remembering whom you are trying to follow. Do not be afraid.” —St. Mary MacKillop

“My joy is in leading a hidden life unknown to others.”—St. Euphrasia of the Sacred Heart

“The Lord has called us from different nations, but we must be united with one heart and one soul.” — St. Maria Elizabeth Hesselblad

For us as Christians, the highest value should always be love. If we’re going to accept the Judeo-Christian heritage as meaningful and authoritative in any way, we have to admit that love comes first and last. That puts us on a different track and forces a different set of questions. The deepest questions are not those of rights and power, or whether or not we’re getting everything that society owes us. The deepest questions are those of how love can be expanded and increased. How can we “defer to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21)?

G.K. Chesterton spoke of the “mystical minimum,” which he defined as gratitude. When we stand in the immense abundance of the True Self, there is no time or space for being hurt. We are always secure, at rest, and foundationally grateful. The grateful response for what is given—seeing the cup half full— requires seeing with a completely different set of eyes than the eyes that always see the cup as half empty. I don’t think it’s an oversimplification to say that people basically live either in an overall attitude of gratitude or an overall attitude of resentment.

Our world is filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled, inconsistencies within us and between us. Life is neither perfectly consistent and rational nor is it a chaotic mess. It does contain, however, constant paradoxes, exceptions, and flaws. That is the shocking and disappointing revelation of the cross. It is also a great weight off our backs. It leads to patience, humility, non-judgment, and suffering love. Now we have the right sense of proportion, limits, and expectations, with no room for utopianism, ideologies, any “final solutions,” cynicism, or needless discouragement.

If we don’t get forgiveness, we’re missing the whole mystery. We are still living in a world of meritocracy, of quid-pro-quo thinking, of performance and behavior that earns an award. Forgiveness is the great thawing of all logic, reason, and worthiness. It is a melting into the mystery of God as unearned love, unmerited grace, the humility and powerlessness of a Divine Lover. Forgiveness is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the whole gospel, as far as I can see. Without radical and rule-breaking forgiveness — received and given — there will be no reconstruction of anything.

Rituals create families, in a sense. Any parent knows that when they do something at least two years in a row, the little ones wait for it in the third year. Children have a natural sense of timing, ritual, seasons, and feasts. Ritual is the key to re-sacralizing the home. I don’t want to suggest the particular rituals that a family should name and claim. Certainly, each family has its own customs, and there are a number of religious resources that suggest new family rituals for those who need ideas.

The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we’re examining, more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level. It invites, and sometimes forces, the soul to go to a new place because the old place is falling apart. Most of us would never go to new places in any other way. The mystics use many words to describe this chaos: fire, dark night, death, emptiness, abandonment, trial, the Evil One.