When love is deep and true, there is a joy in suffering for the beloved. Caring for a newborn or sick child can be an example of this.
Peter Giersch (Day by Day with St. Francis, February 8th)
Peasant Family at the Table, by Jozef Israëls, 1882.
When Adam sinned, involving us all in sin and suffering, the punishment given to him and his descendants was this: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (Gen 3:19). […] It is part of the mercy of the punishment, that through it many men would begin to know God, even before the full revelation of His love was given to the world, or to them individually.
When revelation came, it would be, in spite of its depth within depth of mystery, one that would come, at least to the countrymen, as something familiar, in a sense already known, like the revealing of a sleeping memory from childhood.
The man who grows wheat —who ploughs and sows and reaps; who who sets his pace to the rhythm and time of cycles of light, to seasons of gestation and birth, death and resurrection; who measures by the shadows of the sun and calculates by the width of the skies— lives, even if he does not fully realize it, in harmony with the Eternal Law of Love. [...] The life in the wheat means his own life to him, but so much more than simply not being dead! It means the gladness of life: the delight that he has in his work, the bracing of his body to the frost in the morning air, the stretch and ripple of his muscles, his enjoyment of food and drink, the blessedness of sleep — the answer of his senses to the loveliness of the world around him, the sight of his roses in the dew, the smell of his apples in the loft, the touch of his children's hair, the volume of the infinitesimal sound that fills his silence. His awareness of the wonder of life on earth, which comes to him from the response of the life in him to the life around him. [...] Even more than this, it is not only in him, this life that good bread gives; it is in his wife and children and friends. One life in them all. Not only does he share it with them, and through it abide in intimate communion with them, but in a true sense he has given it to them, by giving his body to the earth. He gave his body to be their bread, and he wrestled with storm and drought, with frost and scorching heat. When he worked until darkness covered the land, when the sweat ran down his face as he tilled the earth.
He can look at his children gathered round the tea table in his cottage, beautiful in the ring of the lamp's light, with their bleached hair like locks of flax, and their russet and golden skin, truly children of the fields of wheat, and he can know that not only is he their father who gave them life, but the laboring man who has given them the joy and the health and the beauty of their life, in giving his body to the sowing and growing and reaping of their bread.
This gives a wholly new meaning to the idea of earning a living; it is not, or should not be, just earning a "living wage," but working for a sacramental life, part of, but only part of, the answer to the petition that Christ put onto our lips: "Give us this day our daily bread!" (Matt 6:11)
Caryll Houselander (The Passion of the Infant Christ, pages 3-4, 4, 5). Bolded emphases added.
Life's curses, like life's blessings, are always mixed.
Nancy Mairs (Carnal Acts: Essays, page 130)
detail of a stained glass window designed by Fr. Sieger Koder for St. Bartholomew's Church, Leutershausen
