Salesian Literature

Chapter 15  :  The wounded heart pines away with love

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It is a well-known fact that human love may not only wound the heart, but also make the body so ill that it is ready to die.

 

Not only that: love, when it is ardent, so forcibly inclines the soul to the object loved, so deeply engrosses it, that it neglects all its other functions, sensitive as well as intellectual.  The soul – it seems – to feed and foster this love, forgets all other cares, all other activities, even itself.  That is why Plato described love as “poor, ragged, naked, barefooted, undernourished, homeless, now sleeping rough, now cap in hand at the door, always destitute.”

 

Love is poor, because everything has to be renounced for the object loved; it is homeless, because the soul has to go out, to follow what it loves; it is undernourished, pale, thin, exhausted, because it causes loss of sleep, lack of appetite for food or drink; it is naked and bare-footed, because all other emotions have to be ignored save those connected with the object loved; it sleeps rough, because it leaves the loving heart exposed; it stands cap in hand at the door, like a beggar, because it keeps the lover’s attention on the beloved, constantly ensures that he has the beloved’s ear to beg those favours that never satisfy love’s greed.  Finally, it is of the essence of love to be always destitute; if ever we have our fill of it, it is no longer ardent – and, consequently, no longer love.

 

I am quite well aware, of course, that Plato was referring to the petty, pitiful and paltry loves of this world; nevertheless, the same characteristics are to be found in the love of God and of heavenly things.  Turn, for a moment, to those early professors of Christian doctrine, the first doctors of evangelical charity … Listen to what one of the most hard-worked of them had to say: Still, as I write, we go hungry and thirsty and naked; we are mishandled, we have no home to settle in.  We are still the world’s refuse; everybody thinks himself well rid of us (1 Cor. 4:11,13), the scum of the earth.  So great is our mendicity, he meant, that if the world were a palace, we are but the sweepings from its floors; if the world were an apple, we are but the unwanted peelings.

 

What else reduced those primitive theologians to such a state, can you tell me, but love?  It was love that stripped St. Francis of Assisi before his bishop, that laid him naked on the floor to die; it was love that made him a lifelong beggar.  It was love that sent the great St. Francis Xavier, in poverty, want and rags, to India, to Japan.  It was love that caused the great cardinal St. Charles, Archbishop of Milan, to live in direst poverty amid all the wealth his birth and dignity afforded – in the words of that eloquent Italian preacher, Monsignor Panigarole[1], he resembled a dog in its master’s house, where all he ate was a little bread, all he drank was a small quantity of water, all he ahd to lie on was an armful of straw.

 

Most assuredly, the wounds and pangs of love, when they are frequent and intense, cause us to pine away, suffering from love-sickness.  The heart-sickness of Sts. Catherine of Siena and Genoa, or of St. Angela of Foligno, or St. Christine, or of the saintly Mother Teresa, or of St. Bernard, or of St. Francis of Assisi, beggars description.

 

As for the last named, when that great servant of God, an utterly seraphic man, saw the living image of his crucified Saviour in the form of a shining seraph that appeared to him on the mountain of La Verna, his heart was touched beyond belief, seized by a sensation of infinite joy and compassion.  As he looked into this beautiful mirror of love, in which not even the angels can satisfy their eager gaze (cf. 1 Pet. 1:120, he fainted with delight and gratification.  Btu as he saw too the scars and wounds of his crucified Saviour, he felt in his soul the pitiless sword (cf. Lk. 2:35) that pierced the Virgin Mother’s heart on the day of her Son’s passion, felt it with as much anguish of soul as if he had been crucified with his Lord.

 

For Francis, here was no image traced by human hands, but a tracing from the original itself by the practised hand of a heavenly seraph, so that it mirrored to the life the divine king of angels, bruised, wounded, pierced, broken, crucified.

 

As the soul of St. Francis was touched and softened, so that it almost quite melted away in loving pain, it became supremely fit to receive the stigmata, the marks of the love and pain of his supreme lover.  His memory was thoroughly steeped in the vivid recollection of that divine love; his imagination was intent on picturing the wounds and bruises which his eyes saw so clearly depicted in the vision before him; his mind was receiving the likeness, the infinitely life-like symbols, which his imagination supplied; and finally, love was throwing all the efforts of his will into finding his gratification in, conforming himself to, the passion of his beloved.

 

No doubt at all but that soul of his found itself wholly transformed into the express likeness of Christ crucified!  The soul, however, as the determining principle of the body, used its power over his body to impression hands, feet and side its own spiritual wounds and pains.  That is the wonderful thing about love: it renders the imagination so keen that it penetrates to the external senses.

 

Love, therefore, caused St. Francis’ spiritual sufferings to show through on his body, so that he experienced a martyrdom in his flesh through the kindling of his soul.  But love in the heart cannot cut holes in the flesh, so the fiery seraph came to its aid.  The penetrating rays from its shining form burnt into the saint’s body the physical marks of Jesus crucified which love had already imprinted spiritually on his soul.  Dear God above, what loving pain, what painful love!  Nor did the stigmata fade with the vision; for the rest of his life that poor saint was to drag himself along, pine away, like a very sick man – but the disease was love.

 

The saintly Philip Neri, at eighty years of age, suffered such severe attacks of palpitation, due to his love for God, that the heat generated by the beating of his heart dislocated his ribs, forcing them out of their proper position – even breaking the third and fourth – so as to allow him air to breathe.  The saintly Stanislaus Kostka, a boy of fourteen, was so beset with love for his Saviour that many a time he collapsed from exhaustion, utterly overcome.  He was even driven to apply cold compresses to his chest, to ease the fierce burning he used to feel.

 

After all, Theotimus, how do you think a soul can go on living in this vale of tears, and not be constantly in pain, pining away, once it has experienced at all freely the gratifying delights of God? that great man of God, Francis Xavier, was often heard to cry aloud to heaven, when he thought he was quite alone: “No, Lord, please!  Don’t overwhelm me with such an influx of delight.  If that’s what you mean to do, in your infinite goodness, then take me to paradise.  Once a man has glimpsed, in his soul, the charm of your loveliness, life can hold nothing but bitterness for him while he is unable to possess you.”

 

So if God bestows his favours on a soul in any way, generously, and then takes them back, he wounds the soul by that privation.  Even afterwards it pines away, sighing with David (Ps. 41:3):

 

My soul is thirsting for God,

the God of my life;

when can I enter and see

the face of God?

 

Or it groans with St. Paul: Pitiable creature that I am, who is to set me free from a nature thus doomed to death? (Rom. 7:24).

 

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[1]  Francis Panigarole, a Franciscan from Milan, later Bishop of Asti (1548-94).  He preached the panegyric at the funeral of St. Charles Borromeo.

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