Crosses, Crosses Everywhere

Written for the Sunday of the Holy Cross, 2025.

Photo by Gabriela on Unsplash

When I wrote about invisible crosses my heart was full of love for the feast, full of ache for all of the unseen sufferings people go through. The very many trials and temptations, thorns that prick, the burdens that crush. How it is in the very nature of suffering to make a person feel invisible and alone in the world, to isolate each of us with the demonic phrase, “You’d never understand...”

Then my parish priest gave a wonderful sermon in which he cautioned us all to pay close attention to what we think of as crosses to bear, to be careful not to make a cross where there is only inconvenience. And I have been mulling this ever since. Not because I withdraw a word of what I said, but because I feel, now, its incompleteness, its insufficiencies. Perhaps all talk of suffering is ultimately inadequate, until the day when it will finally be vanquished. Yes. I think this is true.

It is also true that, living in the material excess of the modern age, in a consumer society designed to cater to our every whim, we have all been primed to think of our wants and desires as important parts of ourselves. Thus, when our wants and desires are thwarted, we react with some level of rage — somewhere between irritated and irate.

Here’s a crash course in Orthodox psychotherapy: Our souls have two great powers, the desiderative power and the incensive power. The desiderative power is our power of desire, sometimes called eros, and it is meant to be turned primarily towards God, so that we may respond with desire to the great love He has for us. The incensive power is the power of action, of marshaling the resources of the self in the fight against sin, against anything that turns us away from that great Love of God. Almost all of our turmoil can be traced to the misuse of these two powers: desiring the wrong things in the wrong order, and allowing our anger to drive us in many wrong directions further from the true Way.

It’s precisely this misuse of these two powers that our consumerist society constantly exploits. We are constantly sent the message to want want want, and whenever that wanting is frustrated, our anger is validated and reified. Thus, we “suffer” every time we don’t get what we want.

But is this really suffering?

It’s true that the experience of suffering is somewhat subjective. What is bearable to one person can be unbearable to another person. We see this all of the time. In fact, this kind of subjectivity has a tendency to stoke what I call the “suffering Olympics” whereby people try to prove to each other that they too, have, in fact, suffered (or, conversely, to convince others that their “perceived” suffering, can’t possibly be the Real Thing). I have, anecdotally, found that the loudest participants in the suffering Olympics are frequently those who are mistaking the thwarting of their desire for a cross.

But there’s got to be an objective nature to suffering, too, hasn’t there? I mean, there are things that are objectively crosses, which are literally instruments of torture. Violence. Poverty. Disease. Death. But physical suffering like this, at the very least, is easy to identify. It gets murky when we begin to talk about other kinds of suffering. Abuse. Neglect. Betrayal. Pain. Even, if we can bear to admit it, our own loneliness.

All of these are a far cry from just not getting what we want.

Elder Aimilianos¹ wrote that, “Spiritual health is not found in the avoidance of suffering, but in its joyful acceptance.”

There is so much to unpack in this, in the role of suffering in the life of a Christ-lover. One thing is for certain, though. If we are to find joyful acceptance of even suffering is it not true, then, that when we simply don’t get our own way, we might actually rejoice?

Dinner is served, and it’s not great; merely edible. Rejoice!

The children are acting disagreeably and require active parenting. Rejoice!

The only open parking spot is at the far end of the lot, and it’s raining. Rejoice!

The store is out of the one thing I really wanted. Rejoice!

These things are not crosses at all. They are opportunities. Incidentally, this is why the stereotypical “Karen” trope is actually tragic. We clearly see how ridiculous it looks to conflate not getting our own way with suffering.

But it’s not always easy to separate these two things within our own subjective experience. Even when we do separate the wheat from the chaff, we’re still left with quite a bit of suffering in the world at large, even in the midst of so many glad opportunities. It feels too complicated, and maybe it really is beyond our power to understand.

There is a wonderful book called The Trauma of Everyday Life, by Mark Epstein², who is both a psychotherapist and a practicing Buddhist. It’s this book that introduced me to the Buddhist idea of the “tolerable,” and how that might impact our relationship with suffering. Take a look:

“Painful experiences do not have to be cultivated specially — they do not have to be sought after or induced — there is already more than enough to go around. A willingness to face the feelings we already have is much more valuable than trying to escape from them…, exaggerate them…, or minimize them altogether…

In later years, in the Buddhist cultures that grew up in India and then in Tibet, the word that was used to describe the world we inhabit translated as “tolerable,” in the sense of being barely tolerable. The Buddha believed that this quality of “barely tolerable” was perfect for spiritual and psychological growth.”

Crosses are those things that are barely tolerable. In fact, the only reason we know that they are tolerable is that we wake up the next morning, and we’re still breathing. The torture of the experience has not, in fact, overcome our lives or our general experience of sanity.

Which brings me to Steven-John Harris³, who believes as an Orthodox Christian psychologist, that the spiritual cause of madness and insanity is a refusal to suffer. That is, to refuse to suffer is to leave a certain part of the self un-lived, to be dissociated from life and therefore Life. His work, To Be or Not to Be: Explorations in Madness and Faith goes deeply into how the stubborn refusal to suffer implodes on itself, often in the form of neuroses and mental illness or disorder.

That doesn’t bode well for society, if its members conflate the frustrating of their appetites and cravings with suffering, and then frantically seek to avoid that suffering.

If you’ve listened to the first season of our podcast, The Diner, you know that Timothy Patitsas⁴ talks about healing trauma with the Beauty of Christ crucified. It’s a complicated image, for sure, and thank God for that. If it were true in its simplest form, then the encounter with Christ in the mere attendance at Liturgy would save souls left and right. Unfortunately, we know through our own experience that this isn’t happening, and maybe the reason why is because before we can be healed by Beauty, we have to recognize how terrible the plight of the world, and of our souls, really is.

I had a conversation with someone recently, an adult Orthodox Christian, who told me that he was looking at the Wikipedia page on the problem of evil, and he thought that it was pretty adolescent and so easily refuted. Why did people get so bent out of shape about evil? Don’t we, as Christians, know that Christ wins? So what’s the big deal? To say I was horrified would be an understatement. Because while it is true that Christ’s victory is eternal (and we’re preparing to celebrate that victory in a worthy manner), it is also true that He bears all of our sufferings, right now, at the very bottom of the inverted pyramid of humanity. He is Christ Crucified as well as Christ the Victor. Dismissing the devastating power of suffering actually only minimizes the tremendous work Christ does for us and through us.

I’ll leave it here, with another quote from Elder Aimilianos⁵:

“Leave it to God. Whatever God gives you is best for you. God never gives you a Cross without first weighing and measuring it very carefully to make sure that the Cross will result in your spiritual growth. So don’t think it’s random, don’t think it’s chance, don’t think it’s too much. It’s been very carefully weighed and very carefully measured, so that it will result in spiritual growth and spiritual benefit…

God cannot be born within us without birth pangs. And the suffering that we experience, whether it’s emotional suffering or physical suffering, these are the birth pangs, the travail, the suffering in our life that will enable God to be born and to grow within us. So we should feel pity for the person who has not tasted involuntary pain because that person is not likely to impose upon himself a sufficient amount of voluntary pain. So feel pity for the person who does not know involuntary pain because they’re not going to inflict it on themselves. They’re going to want to stay in their comfortable place, their comfort-zone, and they’re going to resist all kinds of change.”

That whole passage rings very true to me. And yet — I don’t think I could bear it at all if I didn’t hold two other things together with it, namely, Ivan Karamazov⁶ and Matthew 18:6. Just as Ivan does, I want to know, experientially, that the suffering of the smallest person in the most hidden place is both known to Christ and will be subject to His justice and mercy. And it is because Jesus promises His accounting of even sparrows and hairs from heads that I can begin to trust Him with the annihilating weight of the world.

1. The Life and Teachings of Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra Fr. Maximos Constas

2. The Trauma of Everyday Life Mark Epstein

3. To Be or Not To Be: Explorations in Madness and Faith Steven-John Harris

4. The Ethics of Beauty Timothy Patitsas

5. Psalms and the Life of Faith Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra

6. Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky