Paradoxes of Catholicism Part 7

THE THIRD WORD

_Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother_.

Our Divine Lord now turns, from the soul who at one bound has sprung into the front rank, to those two souls who have never left it, and supremely to that Mother on whose soul sin has never yet breathed, on whose breast Incarnate G.o.d had rested as inviolate and secure as on the Bosom of the Eternal Father, that Mother who was His Heaven on earth.

Standing beside her is the one human being who is least unworthy to be there, now that Joseph has pa.s.sed to his reward and John the Baptist has gone to join the Prophets--_the disciple whom Jesus loved_, who had lain on the breast of Jesus as Jesus had lain on the breast of Mary.

Our Lord has just shown how He deals with His dear sinners; now He shows how He will _be glorified with His Saints_. The Paradox of this Word is that Death, the divider of those who are separated from G.o.d, is the bond of union between those that are united to Him.

I. Death is the one inexorable enemy of human society as const.i.tuted apart from G.o.d. A king dies and his kingdom is at once in danger of disruption. A child dies and his mother prays that she may bear another, lest his father and she should drift apart. Death is the supreme sower of discord and disunion, then, in the natural order, since he is the one supreme enemy of natural life. He is the noonday terror of the Rich Fool of the parable and the nightmare of the Poor Fool, since those who place their hope in this life see that death is the end of their hope. For these there is no appeal beyond the grave.

II. Now precisely the opposite of all this is true in the supernatural order, since the gate of death, viewed from the supernatural side, is an entrance and not an ending, a beginning and not a close. This may be seen to be so even in a united human family in this world, the members of whom are living the supernatural life; for where such a family is living in the love of G.o.d, Death, when he comes, draws not only the survivors closer together, but even those whom he seems to have separated. He does not bring consternation and terror and disunion, but he awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, he explains old misunderstandings.

Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted that this shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying.

_He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has _died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural, simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longer makes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life and interest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality.

Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He once raised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from the dead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way; but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs an even more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submitting to it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so far as mortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another so well. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the other too as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in this life. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had already been united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, they were to be made yet more one.

It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still be so tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should still be so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love with death, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that our reason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active and untamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yet a.s.similated the truth, accepted by both our faith and our reason, that for those who are in the friends.h.i.+p of G.o.d death is simply not that at all which it is to others. It does not, as has been said, end our lives or our interests: on the contrary it liberates and fulfils them.

And all this it does because Jesus Christ has Himself plunged into the heart of Death and put out his fires. Henceforth we are one family in Him if we do His will--_his brother and sister and mother_; and Mary is our Mother, not by nature, which is accidental, but by supernature, which is essential. Mary is my Mother and John is my brother, since, if I have died with Christ, it is _no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_. In a word, it is the Communion of Saints which He inaugurates by this utterance and seals by His dying.

THE FOURTH WORD

_My G.o.d, My G.o.d, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_

Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross pa.s.ses gradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in the outermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals with the one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who were always nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secret of all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There is no need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses.

I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalem and Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with G.o.d_ and _the Word_ that _was G.o.d_. Next, that the eyes even of His Sacred Humanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of G.o.d, since His union with G.o.d was entire and complete: as He looked up into His Mother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father; as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His Sacred Humanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary that G.o.d had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermission into the glory of heaven and saw His Father there.

Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry of dereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first uttered by David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritual darkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together, could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. For of His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence which He could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced and saturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He held firm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine and Human Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the a.s.saults of every pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond our power to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychology of the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us.... Do we expect to understand that?...

II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yet corresponding to something which we know to be true, which throws some faint glimmer of light upon this impenetrable darkness and seems to extend Christ's experience upon the Cross so as to touch our own human life. It is a phrase that describes a condition well known to spiritual persons: "To leave G.o.d for G.o.d." (1) The simplest and lowest form of this state is that condition in which we acquiesce with our will in the withdrawal of ordinary spiritual consolation. Certainly it is an inexplicable state, since both the ordinary aids to our will--our understanding and our emotion--are, by the very nature of the case, useless to it. Our heart revolts from that dereliction and our understanding fails to comprehend the reasons for it. Yet we acquiesce, or at least perceive that we ought to do so; and that by doing so--by ceasing, that is, to grasp G.o.d's Presence any longer--we find it as never before. We leave G.o.d in order to find Him.

(2) The second state is that in which we find ourselves when not only do all consolations leave us, but the very grip of intelligent faith goes too; when the very reasons for faithfulness appear to vanish. It is an incalculably more bitter trial, and soul after soul fails under it and must be comforted again by G.o.d in less august ways or perish altogether.

And yet this is not the extremest pitch even of human desolation.

(3) For there is a third of which the saints tell us in broken words and images....

III. Our final point, for application to ourselves, is that dereliction in some form or another is as much a stage in spiritual progress as autumn and winter are seasons of the year. The beginners have to suffer one degree, the illuminated another, and those that have approached a real Union with G.o.d a third. But all must suffer it, and each in his own degree, or progress is impossible.

Let us take courage therefore and face it, in the light of this Word.

For, as we can sanctify bodily pain by the memory of the nails, so too can we sanctify spiritual pain by the memory of this darkness. If He Who _never left the Father's side_ can suffer this in an unique and supreme sense, how much more should we be content to suffer it in lower degrees, who have so continually, since we came to the age of reason, been leaving not His side only, but His very house.

THE FIFTH WORD

_I thirst._

Our Lord continues to reveal His own condition, since He, after all, is the key to all Humanity. If we understand anything of Him, simultaneously we shall understand ourselves far better.

He has shown us that He can truly be deprived of spiritual consolation; and the value of this deprivation; now He shows us the value of bodily deprivation also. And the Paradox for our consideration is that the Source of all can lose all; that the Creator needs His creation; that He Who offers us the _water springing up into Life Eternal_ can lack the water of human life--the simplest element of all. In His Divine Dereliction He yet continues to be Human.

I. It is very usual, under this Word, to meditate on Christ's thirst for souls; and this is, of course, a legitimate thought, since it is true that His whole Being, and not merely one part of it, longed and panted on the Cross for every object of His desire. Certainly He desired souls!

When does He not?

But it is easy to lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualize everything, and pa.s.s over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodily pain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the pains of crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, the torrential sweat, the burning of the sun--all these culminated in the torment of which this Cry is His expression.

Bodily pain, then, since Jesus not only deigned to suffer it, but to speak of it, is as much a part of the Divine process as the most spiritual of derelictions: it is an intense and a vital reality in life.

It is the fas.h.i.+on, at present, to pose as if we were superior to such things; as if either it were too coa.r.s.e for our high natures or even actually in itself evil. The truth is that we are terrified of its reality and its sting, and seek, therefore, to evade it by every means in our power. We affect to smile at the old penances of the saints and ascetics as if we ourselves had risen into a higher state of development and needed no longer such elementary aids to piety!

Let this Word, then, bring us back to our senses and to the due proportions of truth. We are body as well as soul; we are incomplete without the body. The soul is insufficient to itself, the body has as real a part to play in Redemption as the soul which is its inmate and should be its mistress. We look for the _redemption of our body_ and the _Resurrection of the Flesh_, we merit or demerit before G.o.d in our soul for the deeds done in our body.

So was it too with our Lord of His infinite compa.s.sion. The _Word was made Flesh_, dwelt in the Flesh, has a.s.sumed that Flesh into heaven.

Further, He suffered in the Flesh and deigned to tell us so; and that He found that suffering all but intolerable.

II. In a well-known book a Catholic poet[1] describes with a great deal of power the development of men's nervous systems in these later days, and warns his readers against a scrupulous terror lest they, who no longer scourge themselves with briers, should be neglecting a means of sanctification. He points out, with perfect justice, that men, in these days, suffer instead in more subtle manners than did those of the Middle Ages, yet none the less physical; and puts us on our guard lest we should afflict ourselves too much. Yet we must take care, also, that we do not fall into the opposite extreme and come to regard bodily pain, (as has been said) as if it were altogether too elementary for our refined natures and as if it must have no place in the alchemy of the spirit. This would be both dangerous and false. _What G.o.d hath joined together, let no man put asunder!_ For, if we once treat body and soul as ill-matched companions and seek to deal with them apart, instantly the door is flung open to the old Gnostic horrors of sensualism on the one side or inhuman mutilation or neglect on the other.

[Footnote 1: Health and Holiness by Francis Thompson.]

The Church, on the other hand, is very clear and insistent that body and soul make one man as fully as G.o.d and Man make one Christ; and she ill.u.s.trates and directs these strange co-relations and mutual effects of these two partners by her steady insistence on such things as Fasting and Abstinence. And the saints are equally clear and insistent. There never yet has been a single soul whom the Church has raised to her altars in whose life bodily austerity in some form has not played a considerable part. It is true that some have warned us against excess; but what warnings and what excess! "Be moderate," advises St. Ignatius, that most reasonable and moderate of all the saints. "Take care that you do not break any bones with your iron scourge. G.o.d does not wish that!"

Pain, then, has a real place in our progress. Who that has suffered can ever doubt it again?

Let us consider, therefore, under this Word of Christ, whether our att.i.tude to bodily pain is what G.o.d would have it to be. There are two mistakes that we may be committing. Either we may fear it too little--meet it, that is to say, with Pagan stoicism instead of with Christianity--or we may fear it too much. _Despise not the chastening_, on one side, _or faint_ on the other. It is surely the second warning that is most needed now. For pain had a real place in Christ's programme of life. He fasted for forty days at the beginning of His Ministry, and He willed every shocking detail of the Praetorium and Calvary at the end. He told us that _His Spirit willed it_ and, yet more kindly, that _His Flesh was weak_. He revealed, then, that He really suffered and that He willed it so.... _I thirst._

THE SIXTH WORD

_It is consummated._

He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners and saints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and the Body of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. And there is no more for Him to do.

An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbath is come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemption is greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to the Book of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be thrown instantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown and master. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments and broken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in the capital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did._ And even G.o.d Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gone down in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life, then, is now to begin.

Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning.

_Consummatum est!_