Inward Crucifixion and Suffering

The term crucifixion implies suffering. The crucifixion of our inward nature cannot take place without the experience of suffering. The suffering, which we experience, is mental, and is analogous to that, which we experience at any and all times, when our desires are crossed and disappointed. It is the pain or suffering of ceasing to be what we have been by nature, and what by nature we have loved to be. A desire, a love, a passion, disappointed of its object, is always a sufferer. Such is the natural law in the case. And the intensity of the pain will be in proportion to the intensity of the passion. If we loved the world with but little strength, if we were bound to it but by slight adhesion, the process, which sunders this attachment, and disappoints this love, would give but slight pain. But bound as we are in fact with a tie which reaches forth from the heart to its object with the first moment of life, and which grows stronger and stronger with every pulsation, until it embodies, if we may so express it, the whole strength of the soul, the pain of separation, which corresponds to the strength of the previous attachment, is keen and intense indeed. The suffering of a parent, who sees all his attachments and hopes expiring in the death of a beloved child, are not keener. Hence in experiencing the new inward life, we are said to be crucified to that which went before; not only because we die to it, but because in dying to it we suffer.

But the pain of inward crucifixion, although it is probably the circumstance which in part has given origin to the name, is a different thing from the crucifixion itself. 

What, then, is it to be inwardly crucified? To be inwardly crucified is to be dead to every desire, whatever it may be, which has not the divine sanction; to be dead to every appetite and every affection, which is not in accordance with the divine law; to have no desire, no purpose, no aim but such as comes by divine inspiration or is attended with the divine approbation. To be inwardly crucified, is to cease to love Mammon in order that we may love God, to have no eye for the world’s possessions, no ear for the world’s applause, no tongue for the world’s envious or useless conversation, no terror for the world’s opposition. To be inwardly crucified is to be, among the things of this world, “a pilgrim and a stranger”; separate from what is evil, sympathizing with what is good, but never with idolatrous attachment; seeing God in all things and all things in God; having God for our friend and heaven for our country. To be inwardly crucified, in the language of Tauler, “is to cease entirely from the life of self, to abandon equally what we see and what we possess, our power, our knowledge, and our affections; so that the soul in regard to any action originating in itself is without life, without action, and without power, and receives its life, its action, and its power from God alone.” [Choix d’Ouvrages Mystiques, Institutions de Frere Jean Tauler. Ch. 12.]

— from The Life of Faith, Part 2, Chapter 12.