Testimonials

I wanted to thank you for speaking on the prayer: doce me passionem Tuam. I have been trying to figure out how to pray through a long, painful illness, and this unlocked something for me.

I had been trying out the Jesus Prayer, which I really do love, but "teach me Your suffering" aligns so much more with what I'm struggling with. Constant physical and emotional suffering makes it intensely hard not to be self-centered because your whole self is loud with pain. But this prayer redirects that noise back to Jesus, and that is desperately what I needed. 

So thank you! 

I have experienced His Consolation, the Holy Spirit, during the utterance of this prayer. Thank you for your ministry.  

I feel that I know Christ’s passion. Daily I immerse myself in His passion. I see Him being scourged while looking at the bystanders. I see Him being scorned by the soldiers while they pound the crown of thorns onto His head. I see the light going on for Simon of Cyrene as He looks into Jesus’s eyes and determines that he will do everything possible so that Jesus will neither fall nor be hit again. Giving us His Mother, promising heaven to a thief, struggling to breathe while writhing in pain, forgiving us because we don’t know what we are doing, and finally commending His spirit to the Father. I feel the remorse for a life full of disobeying my Heavenly Father. It usually brings me to tears.   

Do I need more? Do I need to go deeper?

Here’s my answer: Doce me passionem Tuam. 

I am no mystic. Locutions, visions, apparitions and revelations are not typically part of my interior life. But on one occasion, after praying the prayer doce me passionem Tuam many times daily for nine months, God allowed me to feel, for a brief moment and from a distance, the reality of one sin—not a sin that I had committed, thank God, for I think that would have driven me mad. When I turned my attention to this sin for a split second my body and soul recoiled involuntarily, retching and convulsing, snapping back like a hand touching a hot stove. Had I directed my attention toward that sin for one second longer I believe my involuntary bodily reaction would have broken my neck. Fixing my attention there would have been no more possible for me than holding my hand on a hot stove: I lack that strength of will to overcome the recoil I felt in my whole body and soul. 

Words fail me here: I could spend years rewriting these few paragraphs and fail to convey something of what He permitted me to sense in that brief instant. What I felt only momentarily on that occasion, looking on from a distance, that abyss of darkness which I could not approach—that is precisely where Jesus went on the Cross in order to find us and bring us back. He ventured right into the heart of that darkness: not just into the consequences of one sin, but into every sin that had been or would ever be committed until the end of time. He walked directly into that abyss on the Cross; and somehow, He came back from it. He conquered it by his Love. 

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Jesus was entirely innocent. None of those sins were His. He did this for love. Not one of us deserved this; and of course, none of us could have done it, even with one single sin. In the agony in the Garden, Jesus saw what the Cross would entail, saw it so clearly that He sweat blood. The next day, on the Cross, He chose to venture into the center of that black abyss of madness and feel all of it. His interior suffering on the Cross was not just an act of passive endurance. As when he had to exert his will to carry the Cross up Calvary, as when He had to exert his will simply catch a breath when He hung upon the Cross, so also He exerted His will—both human and divine—to face the darkness of sin, to walk into the center of that realm of un-making, un-doing, un-being—that place of everything that is not of God and therefore a horror to the human mind and body, and an infinitely greater horror to the mind of God. That abyss was also the sword that pierced the heart of Mary (Lk 2:35), his Blessed Mother, as she stood at the foot of the Cross and accompanied Him. 

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When something physical breaks, you can at least imagine the concept of putting it back together, even if it is broken beyond repair. But how do you repair what man does when he destroys himself through the use of his own freedom? That is what Jesus somehow did on the Cross: He contended with and healed our madly misdirected freedom—while neither destroying our freedom nor coercing our will. Jesus Christ’s interior suffering on the Cross—His taking on sin and “becoming sin”—we cannot fully grasp what that means. It was a kind of hell of inner suffering beyond human imagining, a screeching blackness where time stopped: those three hours on the Cross might as well have been an eternity.

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If we can occasionally feel the terror and horror of sin—the awful insanity of aligning of one’s will, one’s very self, with the monstrous power and evil of the Serpent—we can perhaps intuit the tiniest grain of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. All freely chosen sin is madness, un-being, complete disintegration of what and who we are at our deepest core. Our sin constituted His interior suffering. To save us from that, to rescue us from ourselves, it was necessary for God to somehow contend with our freedom, with our insane choices and their destructive effects, to heal our shattered souls in some mysterious fashion that is far beyond our comprehension. Although I am a doctor, I do not know how Christ, the Divine Physician, heals that—how you put something like that back together—but somehow Jesus did so on the Cross. His suffering accomplished it. Doce me passionem Tuam.

For forty plus years I have suffered. Some of my sufferings have been of the routine and mundane type; those that typically befall us all at one point or another (the loss of a loved one, a difficult injury, family discord). But some of my sufferings have been of the truly heinous type, those too difficult to type let alone speak out loud. Even though from the outside, my life looks fairly devoid of much suffering, the fact that I am alive and functioning is a miracle.

While my life looks fairly free of suffering to one who just knows me at a superficial level, I have struggled nearly daily to reconcile my suffering with my otherwise deep and unwavering belief in God. I have always known God loved me but I did not understand how an all-loving God could allow me to suffer so much. It made no difference to me whether He merely permitted or actually directed such suffering. I hated anything that caused me to suffer. I wanted to be free of suffering. I would have done anything to be free of suffering. So much so, that I constantly struggled between my desire to be free of the sufferings of this world with my fear that any action I might take that ended my life on my time and terms, would plunge me into greater suffering and take me farther from the God of love and peace who I so prayed would free me from my suffering.

I am profoundly grateful God managed to keep me alive long enough to learn this prayer: doce me passionem Tuam. It has changed everything. At first I approached it assuming that by learning about Christ’s suffering, it would give purpose to my own and somehow that purpose would create value that would enable me to endure it with less agony. That still had me and my suffering at the center. But I prayed and slowly God revealed to me (and He is still revealing to me), what He suffered, for me. That changed everything for me.

I still suffer, both from what I have endured in the past and what I am subjected to in the present. This prayer is not a magic antidote to pain. It doesn’t mean the physical pain I experience, for example, is suddenly gone. But it means that in putting Christ and His suffering at the center of my prayers and my life, I am aware at a deep level of something that transcends everything I have and will suffer, and that is His deep and abiding love for me.

This prayer helps me to embrace my current suffering out of love for Him. It helps me to no longer fear any future sufferings. And my past sufferings I realize are a gift. Sometimes, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see how God used suffering to refine and sanctify me or others. Some sufferings I still don’t see the value of here in this life; but I now have complete confidence that my all-good, all-loving, all-knowing God, Jesus Christ, has not wasted a single moment of my suffering and He has used it for my good. In praying this prayer, the psychological and spiritual torment of my suffering has gone away and I have grown in my knowledge that my suffering is not a sign that God has forgotten me or doesn’t care but rather of His profound and deep paternal love for me.

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Every day this prayer brings me new insights into the love of Our Lord who suffered so much because He loves me, and it brings me deep consolation in this life and an abundance of hope for the life of the world to come. There is no place I would rather be now than nailed to the Cross with Christ, and if it is not His will that I should suffer that much today, then I seek to be at the foot of the Cross, with Our Lady, gazing into the eyes and heart of my suffering Lord, whispering that I love Him and imploring Him to teach me more about the meaning of His suffering. The more I learn, the more I know Him and His love for me, and the closer I grow in union with Him. If you have any doubts, just pray the prayer every day for two weeks. Each time you pray it, thank God for one thing He has suffered for you. I promise it will transform your soul and your life if you do.