There is a great difference between carrying a crucifix and allowing the Cross to shape your life.
Saint Padre Pio did both.
He bore the wounds of Christ in his body, but the extraordinary thing was not simply that his hands and feet were marked. The extraordinary thing was that his whole life was slowly being taken over by Christ.
That is exactly what Saint Paul means:
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
Paul does not mean that his personality disappeared.
He means that Christ had become the centre.
His plans, his suffering, his work, even his weaknesses were now being handed over to Christ.
And Our Lord tells us how that happens:
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
We sometimes make self-denial sound rather miserable.
But think of a musician learning an instrument.
At first there are scales, repetition, discipline, doing things when you would rather not.
The discipline is not there to destroy the music.
It is what makes the music possible.
Christian self-denial is like that.
Christ asks us to say no to what makes us smaller so that His life can become greater in us.
Padre Pio understood this profoundly.
People remember the stigmata, but day after day he stood at the altar and celebrated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
And for endless hours he sat in the confessional. Why?
Because the Cross is not a curiosity.
It is where Christ saves.
And Confession is where the fruits of the Cross are applied to sinners.
People came carrying things much heavier than any visible wound: guilt, old sins, habits, bitterness, years away from God.
And Christ met them there with mercy.
Padre Pio could be very direct because he believed something wonderful: a soul can change.
Sin does not have to have the final word.
Grace is stronger.
Jesus asks today: “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?”
Padre Pio knew the answer.
Nothing in this world is worth losing God for.
A human soul is made for Heaven and redeemed by the Blood of Christ.
So the Cross is not God taking life away from us.
It is Christ rescuing us from everything that prevents us from truly living.
That is the beauty of today’s feast.
Holiness is not becoming strange.
It is becoming so united to Christ that His patience, His truth, His mercy and His sacrificial love begin to appear in us.
And perhaps our prayer today should be simply:
Lord, let there be less in me that resists You,
and more in me that belongs to You,
until I too can say: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
