Salesian Literature

Chapter 4  :  Gratifying love shows itself more by sympathy

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Compassion, sympathy, commiseration, pity – what are they but expressions of emotion urging us to share the sufferings, the grief of someone we love?  Just as gratifying love shares the delight and contentment of the beloved, so it also makes his troubles its own.  Love is the cause of both effects by binding lovers’ hearts together; in this way it makes prosperity and misfortune common property between friends. The study of sympathy throws much light on the whole question of satisfaction.

 

Compassion is measured by the love from which it springs; in this way, a mother’s sympathy in the distress of an only child is very great, as Scripture frequently proves.

 

How Agar’s heart overflowed with sympathy at Ishmael’s anguish, when she saw him almost die of thirst in the desert! (Gen. 21:16)  What sorrow of soul David felt at Absalom’s misfortune! (2 Kings 18::33)  Remember St. Paul … sharing scruples, ablaze with indignation at an injured conscience (2 Cor. 11:29), in continual anguish over the loss of the Jews (Rom. 9:2-4), death daily at his side in his labours for his spiritual children (1 Cor. 15:31).

 

Above all, think how love carved all our Redeemer’s griefs, tortures, fatigue, pains, anguish, wounds, his whole passion and death, on the heart of his blessed Mother!  Those nails which crucified the Son’s body also crucified a Mother’s heart; those thons which pierced his brow pierced through into her devoted soul.  She experienced her Son’s distress by commiseration, his anguish by sympathy, his sufferings by compassion; finally, the sword of death which empierced that beloved Son’s heart also transfixed the heart of his loving Mother (cf. Lk. 2:35).  Well might she have said: Close my love is to my heart as the cluster of myrrh that lodges in my bosom all the night through (Cant. 1:12).

 

Sympathy too is measured by the anguish we see being endured by those we love.  However slender our friendship for someone … the greater their misfortune, the greater is our pity.  The daughters of Jerusalem could not help weeping for our Lord (cf. Lk. 23:27), though few of them really cared for him; Job’s friends too, disappointments that they were, wept loud and sore at the frightful scene of his overmastering grief (cf. Job. 2:12-13).

 

Commiseration, however, goes much further: it is intensified by the presence of something pitiful.  That is why poor Agar left her dying son, to ease to some extent the aching pity she felt, saying: I cannot bear to see my child die (Gen. 21:16).  That is why our Lord, on the other hand, wept at the door his friend Lazarus’ tomb (cf. Jn. 11:35), also when he caught sight of Jerusalem, his own city (Lk. 19:41).

 

Gratification grows after the same fashion.  The dearer a friend, the more delight we take in his satisfaction; we feel his benefit as our own.  The more he prospers, so much the greater is our joy.  To see him actually enjoying the possession of something, renders our enjoyment complete.

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