Carrying Our Crosses: An Easter Reflection

1911. A nineteen-year-old girl lies desperately ill. She has been sick almost her whole life, suffering from tuberculosis which has infected her spine, leaving her in unbearable pain, partially paralysed, and only three foot ten tall.

Her family and priest fear the worst…

We’d call what happened next a near death experience, in our terms, but she said afterwards she had been as close to death as it was possible to come, without dying.

She had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who offered the girl three choices. To stay in heaven with her; that is to die and be freed of suffering. To come back to earth healed and live a normal life. Or to come back just as sick as she is, but use her suffering to save people’s souls.

Life-size statue of Eileen at the Eileen O'Connor Centre, Coogee

She chose the latter and willingly carried her cross. She came back and, from her sickbed, established a pioneering order of domiciliary nurses to care for the sick poor in Sydney’s slums.

The young woman is Eileen O’Connor. She is under investigation for sainthood, because that’s the way a saint carries a cross.

We’re not saints, but we still have our crosses to carry: illness, trauma, heartbreak. We carry our crosses, and sometimes we get crucified on them. But a humbling thought comes. What if we are a cross that someone else must carry? What if we are a cross that someone else gets crucified on, because of some hurt we have caused, knowingly or unknowingly?

We all carry crosses, we are all able to help someone else carry theirs.

Have you ever watched trapeze artists swinging then tumbling through the air to get caught? And then swapping roles, so the caught becomes the catcher? Have you ever noticed that there is a moment, when the artist releases the trapeze, and spreads out his arms, making a cross of his body for a split second, before he spins through the air and is caught by his partner?

And when he takes his own turn to catch his friend, it is the friend whose arms spread wide into the cross.

Let us take turns to tarry a while and carry each other’s crosses, and catch each other so we don’t fall.

Do we carry the cross… or does the cross carry us?

Screenshots from this video: George Caceres and The Flying Caceres | Extended Sneak Peek Full Performance | Ringling