Salesian Literature

Chapter 5  :  Gratifying and sympathetic love for our Lord’s passion

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If I picture to myself our Lord on mount Olives, his soul ready to die with sorrow (Mt. 26:38).  “Lord Jesus,” I exclaim, “what but love could make you, who are life itself, ready to die with sorrow?  Only love, which quickens commiseration, could cause your heart to share our wretchedness.”

 

How can a devoted soul, at the sight of the deep sorrow and dismay into which that tremendous lover was plunged, keep from feeling a loving grief?  Moreover, when it remembers that the whole of his distress was due, not to any deficiency or lack of strength, but to the intensity of his love, such a soul cannot but be overcome by grieving love.

 

Love makes lovers equal … “There he is, my beloved, a flame rising up from the midst of the thorn-bush of sorrow (cf. Ex. 3:2).  So am I; hedged in by grief, but afire with love, I am a lily among the brambles (Cant. 2:2).  Do not shudder at my acute anguish, but concentrate on the beauty of my gratifying love.  Unbearable are the torments he suffers, this divine lover of mine; that is what grieves me, leaves me senseless with pain.  Yet he is glad to suffer; he welcomes the agony; death is a joy to him, because all its pains are for me.  That is why, saddened as I am by his sufferings, I am beside myself with joy at his love; not only do I grieve with him, I also boast of him (cf. Rom. 8:17).

 

It was through love like this, Theotimus, that the seraphic St. Francis incurred the stigmata, that the angelic St. Catherine of Siena shared the burning pain of our Saviour’s wounds; gratifying love set a keen edge on aching pity.

 

Consequently, St. Francis and St. Catherine, when they received the stigmata, experienced unrivalled love in their pain, unequalled pain in their love – as they tasted that joyous love, shown in suffering for a loved one, which their Saviour practised to perfection on the cross (cf. Jn. 15:13).  In this way is born, like a mystic Benjamin, that inestimable union of the human heart with God, which is at once the child of distress and of joy (cf. Gen. 35:18).

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