When I was young, my old man warned me about the Sadness, a persistent and bitter melancholy common to our kin, a dismal heirloom passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. This unpromising inheritance was at the time mysterious, but in the years that followed I came to know it very well.
Every trick I tried to dispel it. I swallowed doctors’ capsules and barmen’s draughts with equal enthusiasm, and with equal despair I found them wanting. I remained, season in and season out, trapped in the Sadness: now as the heaving storm of depression, now as the cold drizzle of disappointment. Oh, I could be happy. Yes, happiness came as warmth in deep winter, strange and fleeting.
When I stumbled into Christ’s love, I expected all this to change. I expected a cure. There was reason to be optimistic. His grace had ended with remarkable — miraculous — swiftness a long-haunting nightmare. The experience was incredible, and I eagerly awaited His next big move, which I 
matter-of-factly informed Him was to be the dismissal of the Sadness.
He greeted this demand as He greets all demands: with silence, as well He should. I confess I was indignant. Then wounded. Then angry. Then humiliated. Finally, I prayed.
How did I pray? I prayed ferociously. Having an extremely monotonous and menial job, there was plenty of space for spiritual exertion. One day, as I plucked rocks from the earth, as I lifted heart and mind to the Virgin, it struck me! (I should say, He struck me, through her.)
That evening, I dashed home, reached for the Good Book. Would you believe it, the Scripture was positively alive. I turned to Luke, to Christ’s great sermon, and — with such force I nearly fell over — the answer to my poor beggaring leapt from the page.
“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”
It had not occurred to me, stupid man that I was (am), that the curse was no curse at all, but a gift, a small but necessary splinter from the true Cross. I had always figured that my thorny crown lay somewhere in the future, to be donned as a veteran disciple of tempered faith. More importantly, I had always figured that my thorny crown would be, well, more gory than glory.
It confounded, this notion that the terrible old saying — no cross, no crown — applied not just to Christ, but to me as well, and that further I had been climbing Calvary all along without knowing it, enduring splinters of the rough-cut wood without understanding that their pain . . . purified.
Reflecting later, Mary’s intercession did not surprise. She is, of course, Our Lady of Agony. She who was free of sin was besieged by sorrow. Surely, full-filled with the Lord, she understood that sorrow and grace are — bafflingly, horrifyingly, awesomely — intimately wed. Those for Whom He cares, those who care for Him, He disciplines. It is true that Christ liberates, that He can cure our spiritual and even our physical maladies. Yet just as often He bestows the fearsome gift of suffering, that we may know Him better. Even many pious believers can not accept this: that Christ brings not the balm of happiness, but rather the fire and sword of love.
It was Aeschylus, the wise old pagan, who wrought these towering lines, which come as from the trumpet of an angel:
Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Today, I embrace best I can (which is not well enough) the awful grace. I try to count my curse a blessing. I affirm that the Lord has, from the start, lavished His punishing love upon me; that it is here to stay, for His love never ends.
