Transforming Pain into Love

I want, beloved Father, this afternoon, precisely when pain and death apparently defeat me, to establish a reign of freedom over pain and death itself.

“Oh, Father of tenderness: this afternoon I take in my hands this bitter cup, and I lovingly deposit it in your hands as an offering of love and the price of ransom. I assume the pain of all of humanity in my own pain. I assume the assassination of millions of innocent people in my own assassination. I want to bear the infinite injustices and injuries of humanity in my own sentence. In my own agony, the dying of all times will also agonize.

This afternoon, my loving Father, I want the immensity of human suffering, once transformed into love by my suffering, to have the sense of redemption and the value of expiation, thereby sanctifying pain forever. I want the pain and love of this afternoon to embrace like twilight and dawn and let redemption be a tree with open frontiers which, with its shade, cover the entire human race. I want to push humankind towards an unknown home, to free the tired feet from their heavy chains, and put into action a love that does not possess nor is possessed.

Harvest time has come for the humble; the dawn advances through the dark routes of the night, and in the very heart of death, the tree of the resurrection is growing straight like a cypress.”

Extracted from the book “The Poor One” of Nazaret by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga