Being misunderstood

Today’s Mass readings# have to do with the way that the people’s misunderstang of Jesus was a factor in his Passion. In a Madonna House Staff Newsletter, reproduced in Grace in Every Season (pp. 66-67), Catherine Doherty comments:

People will not know you for who you are. They didn’t understand Christ in Nazareth for who he was. They won’t understand you either, and being misunderstood will be hard for you. It was hard for the God-Man to be misunderstood, too.

But you will rejoice with great joy, for all this will make you more like your beloved.

All these little things are the fingers of God the Father, conforming you into the loneliness of his Son, conforming you into the misunderstanding that his Son suffered, conforming you into Christ’s hiddenness, and into his pain. Slowly, the fingers of God’s will and the fingers of time will become one. You will be shaped and shaped, not knowing that you are being shaped. You will enter into a great darkness, a great aridity, a great temptation. But oh, rejoice! For this is the desert where Christ spent forty days fasting! This is his hunger you are experiencing. This is the Lover playing court to your soul, hiding himself, as lovers do, so that you, whom he loves, might arise and go in search of him.

The hide-and-seek of love, the eternal playfulness, is now lifted to a supernatural plane. Be at peace! This dark aridity is joyful, for this is the beginning of wisdom, for your beloved is the very Wisdom of God. He teaches you his wisdom now in the loneliness and silence of the desert, now in the quiet and darkness of the night of love. There are two nights in this world: the night of hate and the night of love. This is the night of love.

#Wisdom 2:1, 12-22;  John 7:1-2, 10:25-30