Perhaps we’ve all experienced huge misunderstandings. Maybe we’ve been accused of acts we never performed. Or our life has taken a sharp turn in a direction we would never have chosen to go.

We in our darkness, fettered by forces beyond our control, have lost the gift of choice. Incapable of following our own will, we take the shape of wherever we are—even in battered, chipped vessels of clay—forced to take the confining shape of suffering, of acceptance, of twisted thorns. No other way. We must accept—as disciples of Jesus in Agony.

“Please, God, do not chip off a piece of this clay. But give me the grace to view it as that elegant vase until I have suffered enough to know that this vessel is the monstrance.”