Testimony: Learning to Love the Cross
By Lisa Nicholas
Featured in Sharing Your Catholic Faith Story: Tools, Tips, and Testimonies
“The more we embrace the Cross, the more we become one with Jesus.”—Bl. Charles de Foucauld
When I look back to see how the Lord has been working all my life to draw me closer to Himself, I am reminded of a scene in The Silver Chair, one of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles: two children have been sent by Aslan (the Christ figure of Narnia) on a perilous quest to rescue the lost prince of Narnia. Aslan gives them instructions on how to complete their quest but, in the hardship of their journey, they get so tied up in their own discomfort that they forget to look for the signs he has told them to watch for. Only after much struggle and danger do they happen to look back over the way they have come; now they can see clearly that a series of troublesome trenches through which they have struggled are actually a message carved in the earth, spelling out one of Aslan’s instructions for anyone to see who cares to look. What the children in the story couldn’t see at the time is plain in hindsight—but they have left it almost until too late before they look back.
In hindsight, my own journey through life, much of it vexing and painful at the time, takes on a clear shape. That shape, carved into the path of my life, is the shape of the Cross, and the instruction it spells out: “This is the way; walk in it.”
My Introduction to the Cross
I hardly realized it at the time, but I learned basic theology of the Cross at about the age of six. At that time, and for several years afterward, I was essentially unchurched. My parents were either indifferent to religion (my father) or suspicious of it (my mother). I, however, craved it. One summer I was allowed to attend Vacation Bible School with some Baptist neighbors, where I learned the song, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” The Bible, at that time, was literally a closed book to me. The only Bible in our home was one my mother had been given as a girl, when she briefly attended the Lutheran church with a school chum. It had a zipper around the edge, with a brass pull tab in the shape of a cross. I used to sneak into the living room, where the Bible sat gathering dust on the lower shelf of an end-table, and unzip it to peer inside. It seemed wonderfully mysterious and I would have loved to know what it all meant. But I didn’t want my mother to know I had been snooping, so I zipped the cover shut and dusted it to remove my fingerprints.
At that time, when I was in first grade, a Catholic family lived across from us, with kids about the same ages as me and my brothers and sister. One day the girl, Donna, showed me through their house. On the coffee table in their living room sat a large family Bible, open for all the world to see. She told me they read it as a family every night. Then she took me into her parents’ bedroom to show me a picture of a bearded, long-haired man kneeling in the woods at night, his hands clasped on a large rock while a stream of light fell on his face. He was God, Donna told me, but His name was Jesus. She pointed to the cross on the wall, which I noticed had a man nailed to it—that was Jesus, too. Later, when I told my mother that Donna’s parents had a picture of God in their bedroom, she told me that was nonsense—God is invisible. Jesus was just a man. That was her opinion, but deep in my mind and heart I was putting together those two important facts: Jesus (Who is God) loves me, and He suffered and died on the Cross.
I was the only one of four children in our family who showed any interest in religion, but I didn’t show it often, for fear of my mother’s disdain. She believed religion was mind-control and didn’t want anyone putting the wrong ideas in my head. But God must have known my desire (I’m sure He’s the one who put it in my heart), because one day, when I was ten years old, He worked a miracle. That was the only way I could explain how my mother, of all people, happened to ask me if I would like to attend Easter Mass with her at the neighboring parish. I’m sure I must have been speechless for a moment as I tried to figure out if this was a trick question, but I managed to stammer, “Yes! Uh, sure!”
What I didn’t know (and realized only decades later) was that, from my mother’s point of view, the quickest and best way to get the four of us kids out of the public schools and into the much better local parochial school was for our entire family to become Catholic and join the parish. Attending that Easter Mass was just the first step.
Whatever my mother’s motives were, I knew God had a hand in it. So, our family received basic religious instruction and, a few months later, as I was beginning sixth grade, I was baptized, received my first Holy Communion, and began Confirmation class, all within a few days’ time. As it turned out, there was no opening at the parish school in my grade, so I was prepared for Confirmation in Saturday morning CCD class, where I drank in everything Sister Ignatius could teach us. I was thrilled to be confirmed the following spring, when the bishop told us we were now soldiers of Christ, a vocation I couldn’t wait to live out.
My Cross to Bear
Unfortunately, my family was not destined to be “happy Catholics.” My parents stop attending Mass almost immediately after my younger brother and sister were enrolled in the parochial school, and my older brother never went to Mass at all, that I can recall. Although my younger siblings and I continued to attend Mass on our own, as a family we were sham-Catholics.
Even that pretense was abandoned when we moved to Texas during my freshman year of high school, to a house in a neighborhood without a parochial school. My younger brother and sister went back into the public school system and my mother decreed that we would no longer be attending Mass. I said I could walk to Mass on my own—the church was right across from my school. But my mother forbade it and that ended the matter.
Those high school years were a sore trial for me, partly because I was being forced to live in exile from the Catholic Church. Also, our family problems were getting worse. My younger brother and sister were having difficulties at school, my older brother dropped out altogether, and my parents fought constantly. Meanwhile, I slid into a deep depression that I only began to climb out of after getting involved in the drama club at school during my junior year.
As things became more difficult at home, I implored God to help me hang on until I could leave home for college. God’s response was clear: my family was my cross to bear. At the time, I didn’t really understand what He meant by that—although I certainly found family life excruciating. I didn’t want to bear them, I wanted to escape them.
One day, while digging through an old cigar box of mementos, I found a relic from my days as a happy young Catholic: a small crucifix that Sister Ignatius had given me as an award for being the star pupil of her Confirmation class. On the front, a mother-of-pearl inlay surrounded the figure of Christ on the Cross, and on the back were tiny Stations of the Cross, almost too small to recognize. I gazed at them and thought I understood a little of the pain of bearing a cross.
I was convinced that, once I got away from what I regarded as the toxic influence of my family and returned to the practice of my Catholic faith, my life would be much happier. I would be able to make new friends, grow closer to God, and discover my calling in life. I was in no hurry to get married, having seen how unhappy a bad marriage could be, but I longed for the close friendship of someone who really knew me and loved me as I was. I wasn’t particularly career-oriented, but I hoped college would help me see how I could put my talents to work in a productive way that would be pleasing to God.
During college, I was very active in the Catholic community on the campus of my little liberal arts college. I did everything I could to deepen my knowledge and experience of the Catholic faith, despite the fact that our chaplain (a very kindly priest) seemed to think that we shouldn’t be burdened by “too much religion” (a too-common attitude in the ’70s). After all those years apart from the Church, I felt I had a lot of catching up to do. One of the things I was interested in was learning how to pray. I took part in a renewal program called Genesis II, which involved watching films of a priest talking about various aspects of the faith. It wasn’t very inspiring, but I remember one detail that stayed with me—the priest in the films said that simply longing for God was itself a kind of prayer. About the same time, I found a book in the campus bookstore called Closer than a Brother, a modernization of The Practice of the Presence of God (Brother Lawrence), which was my introduction to the contemplative life and sharpened my hunger for a sense of God’s presence in my life.
I graduated with a double major in English and Spanish with high honors. My academic prowess seemed to provide the only hint of how I could put my talents at God’s service, so I followed my professors’ advice and continued on to graduate school, accepting a doctoral fellowship in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. Overnight, I went from the comfortable environs of a tiny liberal arts college where I was a biggish fish in a small pond to a gigantic state university where I was a lonely minnow in a vast ocean.
Academically I did well and I learned to enjoy teaching, but in most ways those years in Iowa were the worst of my whole life. Although there was a Newman Center near campus, it wasn’t geared toward graduate students and I had trouble connecting with other Catholics. My peers and professors in the Comp Lit program all thought it was weird that I went to church and “actually believed all that stuff.” My loneliness grew and my morale sank lower and lower. I yearned more than ever for a sense of God’s loving presence in my life.
I didn’t tell my parents about my unhappiness—I wanted them to think I was doing well. All my siblings were having problems of their own, some of them quite serious, and I didn’t want to be a failure. That’s the way I felt—a failure. About to become a dropout. Useless. Friendless.
Then something happened, just as I was at my lowest, during Holy Week while I worshiped in the dingy basement chapel of the Newman Center. After the Holy Thursday liturgy, when the altar had been stripped and the Blessed Sacrament removed to a makeshift side altar decorated with flowering plants, in imitation of the Garden of Gethsemane, the priest invited us to stay and keep watch with the Lord during His hour of agony. I literally could not leave—I remained in my seat, praying and weeping tears that I could not stop. At midnight the priest returned to lock up for the night, but I would have stayed all night if he had allowed it.
The next day I returned for the Good Friday liturgy. When it came time to venerate the Cross, two young men carried in large beams of fresh timber, which they dropped with a horrible clatter onto the floor at the head of the center aisle. I still remember how the sound of hammer blows ricocheted like gunshots from the linoleum tile when they nailed the beams together to make a cross for our veneration. I felt I could almost see Jesus nailed there and, when I went forward to kiss the bare Cross, I could almost sense Jesus’ bloody feet beneath my lips. I staggered away from the chapel afterward overwhelmed, and spent the next twenty-four hours in seclusion, trying to understand the experience.
Sometime on Holy Saturday, I pulled out a laminated prayer card that a high school friend, who was preparing to be an Episcopal priest, had sent me after I wrote to him about my troubles. On the card was the story/parable of “Footprints in the Sand.” In a dream, a Christian looks back and sees the course of his life as two sets of footprints on a beach, side by side. “Why are there two sets of prints?” he asks the Lord, and Jesus replies, “Because I was always there with you, even when you didn’t realize it.” Then the man notices that at the darkest moments of his life there is only one set of prints, and he complains to the Lord: “How could you leave me alone at the darkest, most difficult moments of my life?” The Lord replies, “Precious one, I have never deserted you and I never will. Where you see only one set of prints, that is when I carried you.”
I understood then that, while I was longing for the friendship of Christ, He had been there with me all along. Far from being indifferent to my suffering, He had made my suffering His own. I knew that, whatever lay ahead for me, He would be with me and He wanted me to be with Him. But it would not always be easy, because it would be the Way of the Cross.
Part of God’s Family
Through the decades since that time, I’ve had to suffer many hardships and disappointments, and I’ve often repeated what St. Teresa of Avila once said to God: “If this is the way You treat Your friends, it’s no wonder You have so few of them.” And yet, God has fulfilled every desire He placed in my heart while I was young.
Shortly after that spring in Iowa City, He brought me back to Texas and introduced me to a little parish where I learned the richness of the Catholic faith, not just in formal doctrine but as it is lived out, day by day, through the Church’s liturgical year, with its alternating seasons of penitence, celebration, and “ordinary” time. It was there that I learned to pray, not only with the Church but also in the secret of my heart. And it was there, too, that I learned, as Blessed Charles de Foucauld (also known as Brother Charles of the Cross) said, “The more we embrace the Cross, the more we become one with Jesus.”
That small parish became my “parish family,” the Christian family I had yearned for as a child; for many years it was the family to which I devoted myself wholeheartedly, as I would have liked to have done with my own parents and siblings. But, like any family, the parish was not made up of perfect people nor was it always free from quarrels and misunderstandings, disappointments and estrangements. Sometimes my own contributions went unnoticed, unappreciated, or even thwarted. Gradually, though, I learned to give without looking for recognition or counting the cost; gradually my “love offerings” to God through my parish were purified of my pride and hurt feelings.
Learning to love sacrificially in service to my parish helped prepare me to bear other crosses in my life: in my employment, in my health, in my personal aspirations and relationships. And, finally, life brought me to the cross that God had assigned to me when I was still a teenager.
This happened about ten years ago. I was teaching at a university in southern Indiana when a series of catastrophes occurred in my life that stripped me of almost everything I had, in worldly terms: my job, my health, my savings, even my possessions. Sick, exhausted, unemployed, and demoralized, I returned to Texas where, for the first time in more than thirty years, I found myself living with my parents—a situation that I thought represented the lowest point in my adult life.
Ever since I left for college, my mother had regarded me as the one who had “deserted” the family, and it is true that even after I moved back to Texas I spent little time hanging around the homestead, preferring my independence and the life I shared with my parish family. But, for the next twenty-five years, I was the one who stayed put while the others wandered off on their own. My younger brother and sister each migrated to the west coast in their early twenties and returned to Texas only when their personal situations demanded it; my parents traded their house for a motor home and spent nearly ten years on the move, settling down again in the Dallas area only when they began to need regular medical attention. By that time, they had come to prize their independence as much as any of us younger ones did. They had no intention of sharing their home with any of their children again. Moving in with them was literally the last thing that occurred to me when my own situation became dire.
As it happens, at that exact time, my parents’ lives were also reaching a crisis. My father, already in his eighties, suffered a series of health catastrophes that neither he nor my mother was equipped to handle. They needed help as much as I did. God used this “perfect storm” of troubles to bring us back together as a family.
Learning to Embrace the Cross
Thus, my “temporary” stay with them became permanent. Putting aside my own problems, I helped my mother deal with my father’s declining health and growing dementia, giving her the relief she badly needed so that she could relax a bit after a lifetime of worry. That was also the period when the rest of our family was slowly being drawn back together, as my scattered siblings returned to Texas. Soon we found ourselves all living within a couple of miles of one another for the first time since we were kids.
Although I never married or had a family of my own—another cross I’ve had to bear—I now find myself the practical support of my surviving parent and siblings. As I write this, all three of my siblings are disabled physically and mentally; my father has passed into eternity (which I pray is a blessed one with the Lord); my mother, due to her frail health, relies on me for daily help, cooking her meals and assisting her with personal tasks.
I have finally learned what the Lord meant when he whispered in my heart forty years ago that “my family is the cross I have to bear.” He didn’t mean, “Well, you simply have to put up with them, like it or lump it”; He meant, “This is the way you must show your love for them, by bearing with them patiently, as I did with those who persecuted Me and put Me to death, by clinging to the Cross for their sake. This is the way you draw close to Me. This is the way I will prepare you for Eternity.”
I have come to love my family more than I ever did as a child, and I’ve learned that God is always giving me what I need rather than what I think I need. The loss of so many vestiges of my former life—a hard cross at the time—has become a kind of freedom to put myself at the Lord’s disposal in ways I had never imagined; so, in that way, embracing my cross has allowed me to die to my old life and rise to a new one with Christ.
My life has been full of adventures and struggles but, as I look back now, this is what I see: with all its stumblings and turnings, the path of my life spells out the beautiful message of the Cross: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Thanks be to God, I am still learning just what that means.
Lisa Nicholas is a member of the Ordinariate parish of St. Mary the Virgin in Arlington, TX, where she has served in many capacities over the past three and a half decades. After earning a Ph. D. in Literature from the University of Dallas, she taught for a number of years in Indiana and Texas. Now she lives on a lake shore at the edge of Dallas where she writes, translates, and edits Catholic authors at Mitey Editing.
