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 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'm absolutely certain right now that it's not time to focus on the suffering that may come from my terminal cancer, which can lead to discouragement or fear. If I instead focus on Jesus’ suffering, as this prayer helps me to do, and the fact that He loves me and He'll take care of me through the suffering, then I don't worry so much. Even what others think of you doesn't matter, as long as Christ matters, and you know that you matter to Him, not just theoretically, but intimately.

I’ve been struggling with multiple sclerosis. It seems to me the truth of my purpose is bound with suffering. I desire true intimacy with the Messiah, Jesus my King, which means I don’t get to sidestep suffering. These are lonely days, but I’m not alone. I’ll need to go further with this prayer.

Thank you.

Thank you. I’m the parent of someone that was sexually abused as a child and experienced a rape in college, who has now turned to the very dark side of living. I am surviving a two-time lung cancer diagnosis stage IV and stage III. Jesus keeps bringing me back. Thank you. I wear an image of the Holy Face around my neck. No one but Jesus can understand my pain. 

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

This prayer is pulling me out of my "comfort zone" (or is that "avoidance zone"?) in which I have been skirting and in a certain and real sense avoiding entering into Christ's Passion.

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.