Salesian Literature

A TREATISE ON THE LOVE OF GOD

Chapter 5  :  Disinterested love extends to everything

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Disinterestedness is to be shown in natural things, such as health, sickness, beauty, plainness, weakness, strength; in social life, such as honours, rank, or wealth; in the ebb and flow of the spiritual life, such as dryness, encouragement, enthusiasm, boredom; in activity, in suffering – in a word, whatever happens.

 

St. Paul exhorts us to complete disinterestedness in all things, to show that we are God’s true servants ... We have to show great patience, in times of affliction, of need, of difficulty; under the lash, in prison, in the midst of tumult’ when we are tired out, sleepless, and fasting.  We have to be pure-minded, enlightened, forgiving and gracious to others; we have to rely on the Holy Spirit, on unaffected love, on the truth of our message, on the power of God.  to right and to left we must be armed with innocence; now honoured, now slighted, now traduced, now flattered.  They call us deceivers, and we tell the truth; unknown, and we are fully acknowledged; dying men, and see, we live; punished, yes, but not doomed to die; sad men, that rejoice continually; beggars, that bring riches to many; disinherited, and the world is ours (2 Cor. 6:4-10).

 

I would have you notice, Theotimus, how distressing was the life of an apostle: physically, under the lash; socially, in prison, traduced.  Such men showed a disinterested love, God knows!  They were joyful in their sorrows, rich in their poverty; their deaths were life-giving, their disrepute a claim to renown.  They were glad to be sad, content to be poor, gained new life when death threatened, found fame in being slighted – for such was God’s will.  Because God’s will is more evident in suffering than in the practice of any other virtue, St. Paul gives patience the first place: We have to show great patience, in times of affliction, of need, of difficulty.  Only later does he go on to say: We have to be pure-minded, enlightened, forgiving and gracious to others.

 

Our Saviour too knew distress beyond compare in his social life on earth: he was condemned for treason against God an man; he was struck, scourged, mocked and tortured with unusual shame.  In his natural life he died under the cruellest, most agonizing punishment imaginable.  In his spiritual life he suffered sadness, fear, dismay, anguish, abandonment, weariness of soul – the like of which had never been known, nor will be again.  He experienced the full enjoyment of eternal glory in the highest part of his human soul, it is true; yet love barred this glory from shedding its delights over feelings, over imagination, over passions, thus leaving our Lord’s heart a prey to sorrow, to anguish.

 

Does it not seem as though our lord, lifted up between heaven and earth on the cross, were held in his Father’s hand by a single hair, by the apex of his soul, which alone knew the fullness of bliss?  Sadness and weariness engulfed the rest of his soul, so that he exclaimed: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Mt. 27:46)

 

When our Lord was submerged in a sea of passions, all his soul’s faculties were overwhelmed, buried in stormy waves of suffering – all except the soul’s highest point, trouble-free, bright, shining with bliss and glory.  Blessed, indeed, is charity; it reigns in the apex of any faithful soul submerged by the waves and breakers of inner trials.

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