Still, it must be admitted that, for the few occasions upon which Our Lord allowed Himself to adopt the pleasanter course, there are hundreds when He deliberately turned away from it in order to have what was hard. His Blessed Mother, who surely held a place quite unique in the love of His Sacred Heart, was, like Him, crushed and bruised and ground into the earth by a load of sorrow. The same is true of His saints. To some of these were given long years of physical torture which kept them nailed to the Cross. Others were victims of mental anguish, racked with scruples, abandoned by friends, humiliated by disgrace, contradicted and thwarted in their undertakings, distrusted, misrepresented, misinterpreted.
Strangest anomaly of all, over and above these trials so diverse and so painful, these friends of God actually sought out other sufferings, inflicted very severe penances on their innocent bodies, and often broke out in complaint to God, not when He sent them the Cross, but when He seemed to be sparing them!
And let me observe, too, that there is nothing gloomy about this attitude towards suffering. "Superabundo!" cries out St. Paul. "I am filled with comfort; I exceedingly abound with joy in all our tribulation." St. John of the Cross, after ten months of torture and imprisonment, declared that in that time he experienced such ecstasy of happiness that even one minute of it would be cheaply bought with a hundred years of such ill treatment. No, there is nothing glum about genuine sanctity, nothing sanctimonious or long-faced, but a deep joyousness of soul which only love of the Cross can impart.
Many reasons might be put forward to account for this apparent anomaly. The basis of all these reasons is love — ardent, devoted love of God seeking to express itself in the language of every true lover, the language of sacrifice. The loving soul is haunted by the thought spoken by its God. "Hear, O ye heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken: I have brought up children and have exalted them, but they have despised Me ..." Thus Isaias; and Jeremias adds: "My people have done Me two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water."
The echo of these complaints is heard only too clearly today. And why? The root evil is the neglect of the principle which should govern our use of the things that give us natural pleasure. Sin is a turning away from God, the supreme Good, and a turning towards the finite good in order to rest in it and make it our god. A man who comes regularly to this place of prayer and, under the influence of grace, tries to see life through the eyes of Christ, cannot fail to realize how sadly men have strayed from God, precisely because they set up the creature in His place.
What then? The generous soul tells Him: "I will strive to curtail my use, even though the use be quite legitimate, of pleasurable things, because so many misuse them and make them occasions of sin. I will seek to subtract rather than add, in a spirit of reparation to Your Sacred Heart."
Moreover, the soul is well aware that, in our fallen state, naturally pleasurable things are only too prone to overstep the limits they should keep. Every normal person is violently inclined to grasp at pleasure, and the earnest soul, in order to be the more secure, will incline towards less rather than more.
All this is unintelligible except in the light of love. Because the soul loves, it grieves that so many others fail to love, and it strives to make reparation. Because the soul loves, it is fearful of any encroachment on the territory won by the Blood of Christ, and so it insists that creatures should be pushed back even behind the spaces they might legitimately occupy.
"Let everyone reflect seriously on this truth," writes St. Ignatius, "that his advance in all spiritual things will be in direct proportion to the thoroughness with which he divests himself of love of self, love of having his own way, and love of those things that minister to his natural comfort."
Perhaps, in the light of these truths, the attitude of the saints, first
set before them by the divine Model, is not such an enigma after all. The
lightheartedness they maintain, their unalterable serenity in face of all
sorts of trials, is certainly not the reaction of mere nature. It is due
to the power of supernatural grace, poured generously by a divine Lover
into a soul that is cleansed of sin and affection to sin and purified in
the crucible of suffering.
"To Those Who Love ... 3.