Salesian Literature

Chapter 5:  A special gift of God – the happiness of dying in a state of charity

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Ultimately, when the king of heaven has led a soul he loves safely to the end of life, he will continue to help it through a happy death to the nuptials of eternal glory – where it is to reap the blissful fruits of perseverance.

 

Completely captivated by the bridegroom’s love, the soul will recall the manifold graces and helps that prompted it, aided it on it pilgrimage; it will continually kiss the kindly helping hand which guided, attracted, uplifted it all along the way; it will attribute its whole happiness to the divine Saviour, who gave it everything the great patriarch Jacob asked for on his journey, after he had seen the ladder reaching up into heaven (cf. Gen. 28:20-21).

 

“Yes, Lord,” the soul will find itself saying, “you were with me, watched over me on that journey of mine, gave me the bread of your sacraments to eat, the wedding clothes of charity to cover my back, saw that at least I return safe to this abode of glory, my eternal father’s house.  All that is left, Lord, is for me to affirm that you are my God for ever and ever. Amen.”

 

In this way we can trace a sequence in the dispositions of God’s providence, where our salvation is concerned, back down the scale from fruit to root, from glory to the work of our redemption.  God, in his goodness, bestows glory as a result of merits, merits because of charity, charity due to penance, penance in return for obedience to vocation, obedience to vocation as a consequence of vocation itself, and vocation as a result of our redemption.  The whole of this mystical counterpart to Jacob’s ladder rests on the Saviour – both the end reaching up into heaven to the bosom of the eternal Father, to the love that welcomes his chosen ones to glory; and the end standing on the earth, in the bosom, the pierced side of the Saviour, who died on Calvary to make it all possible.

 

All the dispositions of God’s providence, after all, are strictly dependent on the ransom paid by our Saviour.  He merited them for us, in strictest justice, by the loving obedience he gave, an obedience which brought him to death, death on a cross (Phil. 2:8).  It is the root from which all our graces come – spiritual grafts, as we are, on his tem.  Once we allow our graft to take, we shall surely bear – through the life of grace he transmits – the fruit of that glory which he has in store for us.  If we prove to be broken shoots or grafts; if, I mean, our resistance interrupts the course, the sequence of the dispositions of God’s mercy – small wonder that we should find ourselves eventually completely cut off, thrown (like withered branches) into eternal fire (cf. Jn. 15:5-6; Rom. 11:17ff).

 

See how earnestly God wants us to be his: he has become utterly ours, giving his life, his death – his life, to exempt us from eternal death; his death, to endow us with eternal life.  Let us be at peace, then; let us serve God – to be his in time, but still more so in eternity.

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