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.)
