I woke by 2:20am. I felt the voice of my body speaking, a soft ache and gentle protest in my muscles, echoes from yesterday’s 10-mile hike. My legs felt sore, my shoulders heavy, and yet, strangely, it felt good. Not the comfortable kind of good, but the kind that tells you something meaningful was endured. Often, I’ve found, the good we seek in life comes mangled with pain. Joy rarely arrives without some bruises. It’s the paradox we live in, the cross that leads to glory, the loss that births love, and the ache that births awakening.
This paradox was whispered again to me this morning in the sacred stillness of Scripture which I listened to meditatively during the Holy Mass, the Fifth Sunday of Easter C. As I settled into my time of quiet prayer afterwards, I pondered the Gospel, John 13:31-35. The passage begins not with triumph, but with betrayal: “When Judas had left them…”And yet, at that very moment, Jesus says, “Now is the Son of Man glorified.”
The Glory Paradox
What a mystery. Betrayal becomes the doorway to glory. The darkest chapter begins the Gospel’s final crescendo. The Lord, in his quiet majesty, speaks of glorification not in the triumph of crowds or the miracles of Galilee, but in the shadow of the cross, where he is lifted not in acclaim but in agony. “If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and God will glorify him at once.”
The repetition isn’t mere emphasis, it’s a holy insistence. That this path, as winding and cruel as Golgotha, is not a detour from glory. It is glory.
Then comes the commandment. So simple, yet inexhaustible: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”This, he says, is the distinguishing mark of discipleship, not knowledge, not power, and surprisingly, not success. Love. Costly love. Wounded love. Love that stretches beyond comfort and preference. Love like his.
Pondering
And I found myself asking: how often have I tried to sidestep my own crosses, the little ones, the hidden ones, and the irritating ones that don’t look heroic but are still hard to bear?
Today must be a day to revisit the many ways I’ve quietly trimmed down the way of the cross I was called to carry. Those are shortcuts of the soul, really. Perhaps in insisting things go my way because the project or mission has my name on it. Or in the subtle impatience I feel toward those who are less organized, less disciplined, less hardworking, or less “together” than I am. Sometimes it’s harder to bear with people than to bear a burden.
What if true glory, the kind that glorifies the Father, is precisely in those inconvenient moments, when nothing goes as planned, when prayers feel unanswered, when outcomes collapse, and yet I praise God still? I know I do in imperfect ways. I could surrender even deeper.
Glory isn’t the absence of struggle; it is love, offered freely, amid the mess.
So I return again to the Lord’s command as a summons to live differently today: to love, to bear, to let go, and to trust that even in the ache, something glorious is being born.
