On Suffering, the Mystical Body, and Deification

Dawn Eden has a remarkable column on suffering here:

“Protestantism,” he said, “has no theology of suffering.” That’s not strictly true, of course – Protestantism, to borrow Whitman’s phrase, is large and contains multitudes. But once one discovers what the Church has articulated about the meaning of membership in Christ’s Mystical Body, such as Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, biblical teachings about suffering shine forth in their full meaning. This is particularly true with regard to St. Paul’s words in Colossians 1:24 (the key text for John Paul II in his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris): “[I] now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for his body, which is the church.” Fulton J. Sheen observed in Calvary and the Mass: This does not mean our Lord on the Cross did not suffer all He could. It means rather that the physical, historical Christ suffered all He could in His own human nature, but that the Mystical Christ, which is Christ and us, has not suffered to our fullness. All the other good thieves in the history of the world have not yet admitted their wrong and pleaded for remembrances. Our Lord is now in heaven. He therefore can suffer no more in His human nature but He can suffer more in our human natures. So He reaches out to other human natures, to yours and mine, and asks us to do as the thief did, namely, to incorporate ourselves to Him on the Cross, that sharing in His Crucifixion we might also share in His Resurrection, and that made partakers of His Cross we might also be made partakers of His glory in heaven. Pope Benedict XVI makes a similar point in his encyclical Spe Salvi, quoting Bernard of Clairvaux’s expression that “God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with.”"

Do read the whole thing. But this ties into the earlier discussions of deification. We are made members of the Body of Christ by the sacraments, by our faith, but first and foremost, by the grace of God which is the presence of the Holy Spirit. Given this, then, we are joined into the life of God. We are united with the Trinitarian life through the workings of the Holy Spirit made possible by Christ's incarnation, passion, and resurrection. God shares in our lives--we share in God's life. We are members of the Mystical Body of Christ, whose soul is the Holy Spirit. That grace which is drawn down by the prayers of one can affect many through the union of the members. That sin which wounds one also affects many through the union of the members. We are one, and many. We are God's own children.