On the cross or under it?

We learn this great mystery before the Eucharistic Lord: to think of our prayer life as embracing all the circumstances and details of life, interpreting them in that hour. I believe that every single person in the world in his heart is either on the cross or underneath it. On the cross with Christ – “I am crucified with Christ,” says Paul. Those of us who are suffering are more physically on the cross. The Blessed Mother and St. John and the women at the foot of the cross were on the cross by sympathy. So everyone in the world is either on the cross by recognizing the merits of Christ and by sharing that cross, or else under the cross.    And many of the faithful today are under it, saying, “Come down, come down and we will believe.” There is a new disease creeping into the Church, staurophobia.  Stauros in Greek is “cross,” and phobia, “fear:” staurophobia, fear of the cross. Anything but discipline. The holy hour, therefore, will train you in abandonment and resignation, in acceptance of God's will and in utilizing all of the actions of the day. For on the last day the Lord will say, “Show me your hands” and we will have to have the scars as he had them. And once we take that one scar of the hour and give it to him every day, then we can be sure that he will say to us, “'Come, beloved of my Father in heaven.”