Salesian Literature

Chapter 9:  How God’s eternal love for us prompts our hearts with his inspirations so that we may love him

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With unchanging love I love thee, and now in mercy I have drawn thee to myself.  Israel, poor homeless maid, I will build thy fortunes anew (Jer. 31:3-4).  These are God’s words promising that the Saviour, who is to come into the world, will found a new kingdom in his Church; it will be his spotless bride, the true Israel of the spirit.

 

Now, as you know, he saved us; and it was not thanks to anything we had done for our own justification.  In accordance with his own merciful design he saved us (Titus 3:5), by that age-old, or rather eternal charity, which inspired his divine providence to draw us to himself.  Had not the Father attracted us, we should never have come to the Son, our Saviour (cf. Jn. 6:44); we should have failed to find salvation.

 

Aristotle called a certain short-legged species of bird, apodes[1]; their feet were so frail as to be useless.  Once those birds alighted on the ground, there were forced to say there, unable to take off again as neither legs nor feet could propel them back into the air.  There they would lie until they died, unless a sudden gust of wind happened to catch and lift them.

 

The angels resemble a species of bird, so rare, so beautiful, we call it bird of paradise; the only time it is seen on the ground is when it is dead.  The moment that angels turned from God’s love to self-love, they fell as though dead, and were buried in hell.  Their fall had the same effect on them as death has on us: death separates us from this mortal life, their fall separated them for ever from eternal life.

 

We human being, however, resemble rather the apodes.  If we happen to leave the atmosphere of divine love, to settle on the ground, cling to creatures – which we do every time we offend God – we are at death’s door indeed.  Some faint emotions are left, like legs and feet, to make an attempt at love; but they are so weak, we cannot extricate our hearts from the slime of sin, cannot take off again on wings of charity, cannot resume the flight which – wretches that we are – we disloyally and deliberately abandoned.

 

It would be no more than we deserve, if God were to abandon us, that is certain; so disloyally have we forsaken him.  However, his eternal charity rarely allows his justice to resort to that punishment; instead it excites his pity, prompts him to recall us from our misfortune. He does this by the favourable wind of his inspirations.  Powerfully, but gently, they play upon hearts, striking them, moving them, raising our thoughts, impelling our emotions into the atmosphere of God’s love.

 

Now this first impulse, emotion, which God gives our hearts to urge them on to what is good for them, is clearly ours, though not of our doing.  It arrives unforeseen, before we can think of it; left to ourselves, we are unable to frame any thought concerning our salvation as coming from ourselves; all our ability comes from God (2 Cor. 3:5), who has loved us into being, chosen us to be saints (Eph. 1:4).  So, with happy auguries, he meets us on our way, impelling us to repentance, to conversion.

 

Picture, if you will, the poor prince of the apostles, his soul deadened with sin, on the painful night of his Master’s passion…  Repentance was as foreign to his thoughts as if he had never known the Saviour.  Like an unfortunate earthbound apode, he would never have known recovery, had he not heard the cock (as it were an instrument of God’s providence) crowing;  had he not caught in that same instant the Saviour’s gracious gaze.  Like an arrow of love it transfixed the stony heart of that man of rock until he wept bitterly (Lk. 22:52-62) – as water flowed from the rock of Horeb when Moses struck it in the desert…

 

Picture him, once more, sleeping in Herod’s prison with two chains on him … He was there in the capacity of a martyr, yet he symbolized a man who sleeps in sin, prisoner and salve to Satan.  Who was to set him free?  Suddenly an angel of the Lord stood over him, and a light shone in his cell.  He smote Peter on the side to rouse him: Quick, he said, rise up; and thereupon the chains fell from his hand (Acts. 12:6-7)…  So inspiration, like an angel from heaven, strikes the sinner’s heart, prompting him to rise from his sinfulness.

 

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[1]  A word meaning “footless”: a reference to the rudimentary feet of the sea-swallow.

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