We must bear our crosses; self is the greatest of them; we are not entirely rid of it until we can tolerate ourselves as simply and patiently as we do our neighbor.

If we die in part every day of our lives, we shall have but little to do on the last.

What we so much dread in the future will cause us no fear when it comes, if we do not suffer its terrors to be exaggerated by the restless anxieties of self-love.

Bear with yourself, and consent in all lowliness to be supported by your neighbor.

O how utterly will these little daily deaths destroy the power of the final dying!

François Fénelon (Source: Jonathan Bailey’s The Inward Odyssey Substack Newsletter)

It’s the daily dying that gets me. It can be so unpleasant! And it is much easier to think of our crosses as something external to us, like an illness, or physical suffering, or a person who annoys us or gives us trouble, than it is to think of our greatest cross as the one thing we have with us no matter what we suffer and no matter where we go: ourselves.

But François Fénelon is correct. If we die to ourselves each day, all that will be left is the small, final step from physical death to the fuller, more complete experience of eternal life that is had when a person in Christ passes from the earthly to the heavenly realm.

The little, daily deaths are worth dying. Learning to die them is part and parcel of the spiritual journey. The school in which we learn to die them is the school of Jesus Christ, who not only calls us to this kind of cross bearing, but who preceded us on the way.