CHRIST AS WOUNDED
John of the Cross once laid out a series of spiritual counsels which, if followed, he believed, would lead to deeper intimacy with Christ. The first three of those counsels work this way:
1) Study the life of Christ. We cannot move into deeper communion with Christ without first knowing who he is. Hence initially we must study his life, particularly as it is spelled out in the Gospels.
2) Strive actively to imitate Christ. For John of the Cross, imitation is not a matter of trying to somehow mimic what we think Jesus might have looked like or of trying to parallel what Jesus actually did (he taught, healed, and fed people; thus I will be a teacher, a nurse, or a social worker). For John of the Cross, imitating Jesus means trying to have the same motivation he had, trying to feel like he felt, and trying to do things for the same reason the did them.
His next counsel, however, has a strange sound to it. It reads this way: Endeavour to be inclined always: not to the easiest, but to the most difficult; not to the most delightful, but to the harshest; not to the most gratifying, but to the less pleasant; not to what means rest for you, but to hard work; not to the consoling, but to the unconsoling; not to the most, but to the least; not to the highest and most precious, but to the lowest and most despised; not to wanting something; but to wanting nothing; do not go about looking for the best of temporal things, but for the worst, and desire to enter for Christ into complete nudity, emptiness, and poverty in everything in the world.(Ascent to Mount Carmel, Bk. I. Chapter 13)
John doesn't say "choose" what is more difficult, but "endeavor to be inclined towards it". It is rather a counsel for discernment. Ultimately what it is saying is that we know that we are actually imitating Christ when humilation, the lowest place, emptiness, the unpleasant, pain, and wound actually enter into our lives.
Reversely stated, if we are perennially standing on the side of glamour and success, admired, without wound and humiliation, we are probably not really following Christ - who is marked, first of all, by wounds - but are probably serving ourselves in his name.
It is not incidental that, in Christianity, we worship the humiliated one.
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