“Suffering is redemptive in part because it definitively reveals to man that he is not in fact God, and it thereby opens the human person to receive the divine.”

-from Life Issues, Medical Choices

Whoo! This quote made my head do a mini explosion this morning when I opened my Franciscan Media Minute Meditation email. It was like a thousand proto-thoughts collided into a tiny epiphany. If you know the movie “The Matrix”  (1999) then you know when Neo is first learning how they load new information with a stick poked into his brain and so they start to teach him different ways to fight and he learns now to do it in, like, five seconds so he opens his eyes all freaked-out like he can hardly believe it would happen so fast, and he goes, “I know kung fu!” I had a, “I know kung fu!,” moment when I read that quote.

Oh, the striving to be God-like that so many people do! Perfectionist trying to attain something they never can have. Control freaks trying to take-over everything but themselves. Type-A personalities who never think anything is good enough. (No hate…I’m all of those things – they’re just examples.) What do all of those personality traits cause? When you really think about it – they cause suffering. Why? Because we aren’t God but we are trying to act like it.

God had to come down into a wimpy people body (Jesus) so that we would understand that even He would have suffering as a human due to its bodily earthly confines. And through that illustration of trust – even through the darkest of times – we are shown a path to a closer relationship with God by allowing the hole that suffering creates to be filled by the divine. In essence, the void that is created by all the taking away of self that happens through suffering creates an opening to be filled by God’s love. Yowza.

That just reminded me how the whole process it a little bit like the Japanese art of Kintsugi. It’s where they fix broken pottery with gold. Instead of trying to cover-up a crack, they accentuate it with something precious and beautiful. So it’s like WE are the pottery and we suffer (get cracks) but then those cracks become part of our beauty because they get filled with gold (God’s love) that would never have been put there unless there was brokenness (suffering) to begin with. Then, by the end of the whole process, we’re even fancier than how we started out! I like it. I like it a LOT.

So take your “paws to pray” today and visualize God filling your broken bits with His golden love. You can incorporate it into a breathing meditation: breathe out to a count of four and breathe in for a count of six as you visualize pulling golden light in through your nostrils. Pull the golden light deeper into your body each time you inhale and let it seep into those little cracks and crevices that life creates in you. Once you have let the gold settle into your body, then take a moment to thank God for His healing love that make you better than you ever were on your own.

Featured Image credit: Franciscan Media Minute Meditations