Salesian Literature

Chapter 13  :  Calvary – love’s apprenticeship

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And now, to end my book at last … Our Lord’s passion and death form the sweetest, strongest motive capable of quickening our hearts in this life.

 

In heaven too, next to the vision of God’s essential goodness, our Saviour’s death will be the most potent source of rapture for the saints.  This was revealed in the transfiguration, a foretaste of heaven, where Moses and Elijah spoke with our Lord of the death which he was to achieve at Jerusalem (Lk. 9:31) – the death by which the world’s lover was robbed of life, to give it to those he loved.

 

Calvary is the mount of lovers.  Love which does not spring from the Saviour’s passion is a perilous plaything.  Heaven help the deathbed devoid of Christ's love; and heaven help that love which has no reference to Christ's death!

 

In our Lord’s passion love and death blend so inextricably, no heart can contain one without the other.  No life, without love, on Calvary; no love without the Redeemer’s death.  Beyond that, only two ways lie open – eternal death or eternal love; and the essence of Christian wisdom lies in making the right choice.  To help you there, Theotimus, I have written this book.

 

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And so I bring this long treatise to a close in words which echo St. Augustine’s – when, before an eminent congregation, he concluded a wonderful sermon on charity … Charity inspired and penned these pages for you, dear Theotimus.  May their contents find a lasting place in your heart, where charity can practise, rather than praise, my preaching.  So be it.  Blessed be God!

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