The Invitation to Love by Leo Cormican, O.M.I. - Chap 2 cont'd

Christ's Sorrow

            But Christ was also the most sorrowful of men. He saw, as no one else could, the full, profound horror of sin, its ugliness, foulness, loathsomeness. He saw the constant inclinations to sin in men, even in the best men. He saw the dominion of the devil over men, and the constant readiness of men to accept that dominion and to reject Christ. "All seek the things that are their own, not the things that are Christ's." (Phil. II.21.) Particularly in Gethsemane, He allowed this vision of sin to fill His Heart with bitter anguish. And for Him, this ugliness of sin was not the general, abstract thing that it must remain for us, for He saw all sin, all sins, in all their hideous details; He saw each of those sins steaming up as an unholy vapour against the face of His Father; He saw them descending upon Himself as blows, insults, scourges, nails, agony inflicted upon His own Person. He used His divine power and the powers given to His human nature to prevent this flood of ugliness, shame and insult from inundating and crushing His human heart during most of His life (as a thoughtful man will conceal a toothache so as not to cause embarrassment to his friends). But from the moment of entry into the garden to the last sigh on the cross, He allowed that flood of iniquity to work its full cruel power over His tender Heart.

            By becoming man, He placed man in an altogether new relation to God, because man now became able to rejoice and to gladden the Heart of God. The blows of the lashes, and particularly the insensitive cruelty of mind from which the flogging sprang, these things had the power to hurt God Himself. And that hurt was inflicted, not only two thousand years ago by men now dead; it is inflicted by you and me today. We still have the power to rejoice and to sadden the Heart of God, because His Passion goes on to the end of time—though how, we know not.

So Christ asks us, in reparation for our past faults and neglect and coldness, to join Him in His sorrows, to stop the insensitive cruelty we have shown Him; He asks us to return love for love; He asks us to take our stand not with the executioners, torturers and evil judges, but with Mary and John, to join Him in sorrow at the cross; this also we can do, for the Passion goes on to the end of time. He asks us now to share in the profound sorrows of His Heart that we may one day share fully in His joys, or rather in His joy, the mysterious joy of living in the bosom of the Triune God.

            We have here a simple way of summing up the essentials of devotion to the Sacred Heart. The essence of it is to give every possible joy to the Heart of the Man-God, and to avoid, as far as we can, giving Him pain; to share as fully as we can in His sorrows that we may share in His joy. To live by this effort is to join constantly, and ever more and more intimately, in the joys, the sorrows, the aspirations of the Heart of Christ. Now the one force that enables us to enter into another person's joys and sorrows is love. Love enables us to know others, to know their mind and heart, with a kind of knowledge that can be acquired by no other way than love. Without in any way belittling the formal study of theology, we can say that no knowledge acquired of Christ through books can compare with the knowledge that comes through faithful, persevering love; and this is true even of those who, on account of their duties, are obliged to obtain knowledge of Him through books. Love unlocks the heart, not only of him who loves but also of the beloved, and brings one into the inner recesses of the beloved's mind and heart. This is the meaning of the saying attributed to Aquinas that he had learnt more from his crucifix than from his books.

            God the Son gave Himself a human heart that He might as a man enter fully into the human emotions of joy and sorrow; He gave Himself a perfect heart that He might experience all that sorrow and joy perfectly. He gives us that perfect heart that we may be able to feel all He feels with His perfect heart. In return, He asks that we give Him our heart, not that He would take anything away from us, but that He may fill our heart, as He filled His own—fill it first with sorrow that He may later fill it to the very brim with joy. In proportion as we give Him our heart, He gives us the thoughts and feelings of His heart; His heart and ours become one, and Christ and the Christian become one in perfect love. So we can arrive at the highest happiness possible on this earth—a truly personal appreciation of the personal love which the Heart of Christ has for each man.

Invitation to Love by Leo Cormican, O.M.I.

Christ's Emotions and Ours

            Christ is, in a sense, the most emotional of men; His emotions are fine or exact, intense and fully developed—He did not take this part of human nature in vain, any more than He took hands or feet in vain; and His emotions were to be crucified as His hands and feet were. In Him there were none of the obstacles which ordinarily interfere with our emotions; He was not held back from feeling keenly, as we are so often, by mere fear of the consequences. So often we do not let our feelings "go", we do not allow things or people to have the full emotional effect they might have—not so much on account of the moral law that bids us restrain ourselves, but because we realize instinctively that emotion might carry us into lines of action of which we are afraid. If we hated iniquity as we should—with the intensity and fullness which iniquity demands—we should commit ourselves to conduct which might carry us further than we care to go. In Christ, the emotions met no such obstacle, because His feelings were always perfectly under His control, and He was willing to accept their full consequences; He loved us unto the end, unto death, unto death on a cross; He committed Himself to one cause with a thoroughness, a whole-heartedness from which the mass of us will always shrink. We naturally dislike to give ourselves wholly to any one thing, even to the love of God; we hedge, we hesitate, we wish to reconsider our bargains. And all this faintness of heart is opposed to the spirit of Christ: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yea and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke XIV.26.) What is demanded of us is a love strong enough to sweep away, if need be, all other loves, a love that will sacrifice everything rather than be separated from its God; for "thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, thy whole soul, and with all thy mind." We must then learn from Christ to school our emotions—not by merely restraining them, much less by trying to suppress them, but by giving them the full scope, the full fiery energy which they can find only in the fire of divine love.

            We need not think of each of the emotions separately; we can give full scope to all our emotions by uniting them to the two basic emotions of Christ—joy and sorrow; for Christ was the most joyful and the most sorrowful man who ever walked this earth. By knowing and sharing His sorrow and His joy, we can come to a full intensity as well as a full control of our own emotions.

Christ's Joy

            He was the most joyful of men. He always possessed the Beatific Vision, the greatest possible source of joy. Besides, the things of this world caused Him a joy of which we can, from the very great artists, form only a poor idea. His senses and emotions were finer, more sensitive, more acute than those of any other human being. Wherever He found beauty, goodness, nobility, He responded to them with great joy—because He Himself had made whatever beauty there is in the world, and He understood it so perfectly. Even as man He was the cause of whatever moral beauty or nobility there is, and He knew these things as only the maker can know the thing he makes. The artist finds a joy in the work of his hands which he can communicate to no one because the work is his in a sense in which it can never be anyone else's. And Christ was not only an artist, but a perfect artist; whatever left His hands was, in so far as it came from Him, perfect, and capable of giving Him a perfect joy. "God saw what He had made and it was good." Even we can recapture some of Christ's joy in reading what the saints have told of themselves; a love story such as the biography of the Little Flower can not only edify us but move us to approval, to profound admiration and true joy. The knowledge of what took place in the heart and soul of the Little Flower gathered from her autobiography is a weak and poor thing compared with the knowledge that Christ has, for He is the architect and primary workman of all that excellence. Christ had besides one abiding power which is found at best only in a transitory manner in other human beings—the power of retaining fresh interest in the wonderful things with which divine wisdom and love have filled the world. Wordsworth speaks in the "Immortality" Ode of what has bothered so many sensitive minds—the fact that, as we grow up, we lose the capacity for endless wonder and curiosity which is found in the child. To Christ, on the other hand, the glory of the sunset, the richness of the harvest fields, the endless variety of expression in the human face, the endless variety of human character—all the things from which has sprung the art of the world—these things never ceased to be the source of endless joy to Him. And we may say that Christ has put the musicians, painters, and poets into the world that we too, through these men, may retain some sense of the strange wonders God has created for us, around us, and in us. "All ye works of the Lord, bless the Lord." (Daniel III.57.)

            What is true of Christ's joy in general is particularly true of the joy He receives from anything that is done for Him. His keen and vibrant Heart responds so readily to any act of kindness or thoughtfulness to Himself; in the Bible story and in tradition He goes out of His way to show His appreciation for little things which are in themselves of no value to Him. Mary the Magdalen spills ointment over His feet in a sudden, surprising gesture of loving abandon; He rewards her with the promise that, wherever He is known, her act also will be known. Veronica wipes His face as He passes to cruel death; tradition affirms that He left the image of His face on the cloth. The more we enter into the sentiments of His Heart, the more clearly we see how deeply He appreciates what we do for Him, even though our gesture, like Veronica's, is almost a gesture of helplessness.

            Here again we find one of those paradoxes which run the whole way through the work of Christ; He is eternal and temporal, immortal yet subject to death; powerful yet weak. In the same way, He needs us and He does not need us. As God, He needs nothing, He needs no man; but as man, He needs other men, for it is part of human nature that it is not complete in any one individual (as the angelic nature is complete in each individual angel). Man is a social being because he needs other men; and God deigned to assume this need as He assumed the need for food; He assumed everything in human nature which is compatible with His divine Person. He has then freely chosen to save mankind in a way which requires other men than Himself. So the Omnipotent chooses to place Himself in a position in which He needs and can appreciate what other men can do for Him. And, mysteriously, He chooses to continue this need to the end of time.

            The Sacred Heart is the great symbol of this need for other men, for a heart needs love, needs sympathy, needs help, needs consolation. The greater our devotion to the Heart, the more clearly and the more constantly we see this need of His for what we can do, and especially His need for our heart, for our love. One impelling motive that runs the whole way through the lives of the saints is the desire to do all they can for Christ; they are not content with fulfilling their duties, they multiply their acts of love. From all things, but especially from these acts of love, there comes a great joy to the Sacred Heart.

            Christ is then the most joyful man who ever lived—He has greater capacity for joy and He has more to give Him joy than anyone else.

The Invitation to Love by Leo Cormican, O.M.I. Chap 2 cont'd

Peace

            Love gives all. God gave us His only begotten Son, and together with Him has given us all good things. Love has given us not only justice but also peace. By His grace, Christ establishes peace within us—the tranquility of mind or soul that comes from the due subordination of our lower nature to our higher, and the subordination of the whole man to Christ by love. In so far as we receive this grace of loving peace, we are changed, and help others to change, from children of wrath to children of God; we are enabled to work toward that universal peace which is the total subordination of the whole race to God. And our power to spread that peace is proportionate, not so much to our influential position, our eloquence or practical ability, but rather to our love. The more we love Christ, the more effective instruments we become in His hands to do His work in the world.

            Justice, love and peace are then three great goods which Christ and we possess in common; He confers them on us, by them we govern our relations with Him, and we can work with Him as He spreads them throughout the world. It is only when we unite all three that we can see the true import of each; it is only when we live by all three at once that we can live by any one of them properly. St. Paul, expanding the parable of the Pharisee, counsels us against the attempt to separate justice from love, and almost every time he speaks of man justified from sin, he reminds us that the justification would never have occurred but for the great love God has freely chosen to have for us; our justice is not earned by our works but produced by the love of God. At the same time, we need to remind ourselves that our love for God is no mere matter of ecstatic thrill—it must undertake the stern (and always somewhat unpleasant) task of cleansing us still more from sin and from the effects of sin (guilt and inclination to further sin). "He that is just, let him be justified still; he that is holy, let him be sanctified still." (Apoc. XXII.11.) Love, to be truly love, must spread justice and peace—first throughout our own individual selves, and thereby throughout the world. The work of love is justice and the work of justice is peace. To live by justice, love and peace is to enter into the power of Christ's Heart by which He transforms the world. For love that aims at justice, aims to atone for injustice, for all the sins of mankind. And the more we love Christ, the more we think of sin as He thinks of it; the more we love Him, the more we feel with His Heart, aspiring after justice and peace as He does. True devotion

to the Sacred Heart must then include reparation and must establish a community of feeling between Christ and ourselves. Let us consider each of these.

Reparation

            Even without the Incarnation, reparation would have been a duty, imposed by the fact that man had sinned. But through the Incarnation, reparation becomes both more perfect (or efficacious) and a more urgent need.

            More perfect: At the very instant at which God becomes man, that man dedicates Himself to the great task of making full and perfect reparation to the majesty of God for all the offences of men. Since He is a divine Person, His atonement for sin is complete. And His whole life is intended not only to make reparation to God, but to unite other men to Himself so effectively that they too can make full and perfect reparation—not indeed by themselves, but by Christ acting through them in the Mass. By the immense gift of the Mass, not only the man Christ, but also other men, can offer perfect reparation.

            More urgent: The most urgent or impelling force is love. The Incarnation makes reparation a more urgent duty on us because the Incarnation makes it possible for us to love God far more perfectly and intensely than we could if we were not united to God in Christ.

            As long as we retain any human decency, we are able to see the need for making reparation to those whom we have offended. But our power to perceive the wrongness of what we have done (and the corresponding need to repair it), is in direct proportion to our love. The desire to make reparation to a distant stranger is not nearly so keen or decisive as the desire to make reparation to a loved friend. In proportion as we grow in love of God, we grow in the desire to make amends for all our offences, and for all the offences of others. True love ends by offering itself as a victim for all sin.

            Besides, through the Incarnation we are now in the state where our offences are not only against God, but against a man. If, of course, we were to take the two things in isolation from each other, an offence against God is infinitely more serious than one against a man. But the two are not in isolation, because God is now man, and it is impossible to do injury to any man without doing it to God; and we realize more easily what it is to offend a man than what it is to offend God—human nature is so well known to us, the divine nature is so mysterious to us.

            Our sins have inflicted loneliness, grief, shame on the Heart of Christ. Our sins took up the lash to flog His naked body, our sins imposed on His head the crown of thorns, dragged Him to the Hill, and drove nails through His hands and feet. Our sins have done immediate and personal wrong to a human being; and we can understand much more easily what it is to flog an innocent man than what it is to offend the infinite majesty of God. If we realize that this innocent man is our greatest lover, the urge towards reparation becomes irresistible. Love cannot be satisfied till it has made full reparation for the wrong done. As He took compassion on us when we were lost in our sins and in danger of damnation, so we should take compassion on Him in His sufferings, for His sufferings are what our sins have done to Him. Reparation is our compassion on Christ, as His agony and death are His compassion on us.

            And, although He now reigns in glory, we are still able to compassionate His suffering Heart. "How can we believe that Christ reigns happily in heaven if it is possible to console Him by such acts as those of reparation? We answer in the language of St. Augustine: 'The soul which truly loves will comprehend what I say.' Every soul which burns with true love of God can see Christ suffering for mankind, afflicted by grief in the midst of sorrows suffered for our salvation... The sins and crimes of men, no matter when committed, were the real reason why the Son of God was condemned to death; even sins committed now would be able of themselves to cause Christ to die a death accompanied by the same sufferings and agonies as His death on the cross. At the present time we may and ought to console that Sacred Heart which is being wounded continually by the sins of men." (Miserentissimus, § 16-18.) We still have the power to hurt Him and to console; we exercise these powers whenever we do any wrong to any human being, whenever we do any good. True compassion is not a shadowy, impersonal gesture towards a remote, inaccessible God; it is an act of tender, discerning love for individual human beings. It is a form of love for our neighbour, and must be offered first to our greatest and closest neighbour, Christ—the Christ who is as near to us as our own hearts, in which He dwells by faith.

            Reparation is an act by which we feel what Christ feels about sin—the desire to atone for sin, to wipe it out utterly by means of love. To desire to make expiation is to be one with Christ in heart and aspiration; this oneness can be extended till it includes a true bond of sympathy between Christ and ourselves.

The Heart as the Bond of Sympathy

            The second great consequence of joining justice, love and peace is the setting up of a bond of sympathy between Christ and ourselves. Perhaps a little cautionary note is needed. Our sympathy is not merely sentimental or merely emotional; if it is to be stable or effective, it must have a basis in the intellect coming from the clear perception of some truth; it must lead to the formation of some practical decision by the intellect and to the carrying out of that decision by the will. It is in this sense that we are asked "sentire cum Ecclesia" (to feel with the church)—to judge and act in a way inspired by the teaching of the church in daily conduct, in politics, in social or economic action.

            Now Christ feels with us, and we must strive to feel with Him. He feels with us, He feels all that is done to us—so perfectly and so universally that He could say: "Whatever you do to the least of My brethren, you do it to Me." Let us remind ourselves here that God uses no "as if" philosophy, no make-believe—He needs not to act out of imagination. The manner in which it is possible for Christ now to experience all the wrongs that are done to men—this is unknown to us; the fact that He does—this is of direct revelation.

            Christ perfectly "sympathizes" with us—He feels with us and for us in all our trials, difficulties, temptations. His fellow-feeling for us is a phase of His universal compassion for fallen mankind. For compassion is really com-passion, passion with, feeling with another, making the feelings or experiences of another our own, feeling what is done to them in the same way as we feel what is done to ourselves.

            The central point of this community between Christ and ourselves is that He asks us to have compassion on Him, to feel with Him, to share His pains that we may share also in His joys.

            Having taken on our human nature, He deigned to feel all our human feelings or emotions (because none of them are bad in themselves, and in Christ is found the plenitude of human nature). Even love for woman finds at least an analogy in Christ though He remains ever a virgin in mind as in body; He loves His spouse, His wife, the holy church, with an intensity, an ardour, a devotedness of which the strongest sexual passion is but an image. It was not by any accident that St. Thomas spent his last days commenting on the "Canticle of Canticles"; it was not by any accident that St. Theresa of Avila describes the pains and joys of loving Christ in terms applicable to the highest and best love which a woman can feel for a man. Even the natural, human love which Christ has for His mother is absorbed into, becomes part of, the love which He has for her as a member of His spouse, the church. Mary's love for Him is absorbed into the love she has for Him as the bridegroom of the church. Married love is not the highest love man can have. It is, however, the highest natural symbol of the intensity and ardour of divine love.

            For the love of man and woman is the most fruitful kind of human love, the fruit of which is other human beings. And the spouse of Christ is our Holy Mother the Church from whose teeming womb come the sons of God till the number of the elect is made complete. On this divine spouse Christ lavishes His riches, His tenderness, His own divine Self. And mysteriously, this spouse is no mere impersonal entity, distinct from the body of the faithful. It is we, the faithful, who are Christ's spouse. "If any man does the will of My Father, he is my mother and My brother and My sister". (Mark III.35.)

Invitation to Love by Leo Cormican, O.M.I. - Chap 2 (cont'd)

Generosity

            Christ is generous towards us. The Passion and the Mass are the transcendent reality and the divine symbol of Christ's endless generosity. He held back absolutely nothing, but, for our sake, surrendered Himself wholly to God's will in a perfect act of infinite generosity. Not even He could make an offering more perfect. We must respond with a like generosity—with a generosity that will show itself in practical gratitude for all He has done for us, and in complete self-surrender to all He wishes to do to us. This self-surrender and gratitude will prompt us constantly to do all we can for Him.

            Such generosity towards Christ is a great practical safeguard in the Christian life. It develops a holy dread of sin, keeping us away from the occasions even of venial sin; it stirs us to beseech Christ for help in temptation; it urges us to repent immediately of sins committed (for generosity does not preserve us from all sin); finally it enables us in practice to distinguish the humility which realizes its own nothingness from the laziness which is content with its own weakness. How many Christians suffer from retarded spiritual growth, because they take too low a view of what Christ expects of them and of what they could do united to the strength of Christ. Contentment with mediocrity is not what it is often mistaken for—a practical judgment of our own limitations or a prudent middle course between sin and saintliness; mediocrity is a slur on Christ's generosity and a contempt for His promises.

Compassion

            Christ, and the Christian, show generosity most effectively in compassion. Christ had compassion on us, on our sins; "while we were yet sinners, Christ died on our behalf". (Roms. V.8.) We must have compassion on Christ, on Christ suffering for our sins. The huge range of Christ's compassion on man is given in the three terms used in the preface to describe His kingdom: justice, love and peace. If we do enjoy these three goods to any extent, if we may hope for their increase, it is because Christ has taken such profound pity on mankind smitten with sin, hatred and conflict. It is by spreading justice, love and peace that we can take compassion on Christ and on suffering humanity.

Justice

            Christ is our justice, our justification. Not merely has He been just towards us, but He conferred justice on us when, through baptism, He raised us up from the death of sin. "Even when we were dead in our transgressions, God Who is rich in His mercy brought us to life with Christ." (Eph. II.5.) Christ is now our justification in the eyes of the Father. He destroyed the decree that was written against us, nailing it to the cross, so that there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ. (Col. II.13; Roms. VIII.1.) If we are in Christ, we are in His love: to the extent we love Christ, we are one with Him, and the Father cannot condemn those who are one with His own divine Son. Christ freely bestowed justice on us; the least we must do is to be just to Christ, giving Him all the service and obedience which is His due. And we can go further. Like Christ, and by Christ's power, we can produce justice in the world; we can do our share towards justifying men from their sins. To use this power of reconciling man to God is to have compassion on the whole body of Christ which is the church. The ordained priest exercises this power in a special way, but it belongs to the church which as a whole possesses a royal priesthood. (1 Pet. II.5.)

Love

            In the actual dispensation of God, however, love is still the great force, and justice cannot be conferred on men or spread through the world without love. We cannot understand Christ justifying man unless we see Christ loving man. If Christ is led to justify us, and to justify us in the special manner of Calvary and of the Mass, He is led by the greatness of His love. All this justification of man is the work of God, who is "rich in mercy", and has saved us "by reason of the great love wherewith He has loved us." (Eph. II.5.) Our dealings with Christ similarly must not be confined to justice; our power to co-operate with Christ in producing justice depends so much on our love. For us, as for Christ, the great driving force must be love. For love sets up far higher and more intimate relations than justice could by itself. Justice prompts us to give another all that is his due; love prompts us to give him all. "If a man take thy coat, give him thy cloak also; if he force thee to go one mile, go with him other two." (Matt. V.40.) Christ here was outlining, not our duties in justice, but the generosity that grows out of love.