Jesus asked the sons of Zebedee,
“Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”
They said to him, “We are able.”
(Matthew 20)
Henri Nouwen wrote,
Drinking the cup of life makes our own
everything we are living.
It is saying, “This is my life,”
but also “I want this to be my life.”
Drinking the cup of life is fully appropriating and
internalizing our own unique existence,
with all its sorrows and joys.
(from Can You Drink the Cup? by Henri J. M. Nouwen,
Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN, 1996)