Consoling Our Lord
Mar 21, 2019 11:34:03 GMT
Post by Admin on Mar 21, 2019 11:34:03 GMT
Consoling Our Lord
“And I looked for one that would grieve with me, but there was none: and for one that would console me, and I found none”. In the present time of the Church’s Passion, Our Lord renews this complaint from Psalm 68 (verse 21). However, how can Our Lord, Who is gloriously reigning in Heaven, be sad and ask for consolers?
Saint Thomas Aquinas provides the answer when he explains the following expression of Saint Paul: “Sadden not the Holy Ghost” (Eph. 4: 30):
“How can this be said, since the Holy Ghost, being God Himself, cannot possess any passion (that is, emotion) or suffer sadness? Answer: The Holy Ghost is “saddened” when the person in whom He dwells is afflicted, according to the words of Our Lord: “He who despises you, despises Me” (Luke 10:16). Also, one can say that it is a metaphorical expression, as when one speaks of God’s “anger” in order to designate His avenging justice, which [for God] is not a passion (as it is in us), but a virtue. Thus, it is said that God is saddened, when He withdraws from the sinner, as a saddened man takes leave of the person who has afflicted him. As a result, the expression “sadden not the Holy Ghost” signifies: do not drive Him out of your soul by sin.”
Accordingly, we can say that Our Lord Jesus Christ is saddened insofar as the members of His Mystical Body are afflicted, as is presently the case of so many Catholics being persecuted under Islamic, Communist, and Hindu regimes.
Secondly, Our Divine Lord is saddened in the sense that the sins of men cause Him to turn away. In the prayer of the Act of Contrition, do we not say that sin offends God, or displeases Him? It is a way of saying that God acts toward the sinner in the same manner as someone who, upon receiving an offense, suffers grief and separates from the person who has given the offense.
Furthermore, Father Garrigou-Lagrange explains:
“If this is true of God considered in His Divine and purely spiritual nature, it is even truer when speaking of Christ’s holy soul […]: His soul in fact is capable of feeling, and therefore Jesus is truly sensitive to the love which is due to Him, but which many refuse to give.” [Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, in the preface to Élévations sur la prière au Cœur Eucharistique de Jésus – Elevations on the Prayer to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.]
Thus, because Our Lord Jesus Christ is “the Word made flesh” (something which cannot be said of the Father or the Holy Ghost), there is a third reason for His sadness: while He was on earth, particularly during His agony in the Garden of Olives, Our Lord experienced a veritable sorrow: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death (Mt 26:38)”. Now, Our Lord was grieved by the sins of all men, including those being committed today. Our Lord had a perfect knowledge of all these sins thanks to the “beatific vision” which He possessed from the moment of His conception.
When Our Lord asks us to console Him, He is asking us to comfort Him with respect to this triple sadness: that of His Mystical Body, by consoling persecuted Christians; the metaphorical sorrow of His Divinity offended by our sins, by doing penance; and that of His Sacred Humanity, by sharing in the pains of His agony, especially through the practice of Holy Hours, but also through the meditation of the Rosary, attending Mass, and receiving Holy Communion in reparation: “Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Make reparation for their crimes, and console your God” (the angel to the three children of Fatima in 1916).
“We do not console someone effectively unless we participate in his sufferings; thereby taking a portion of them upon ourselves. It is certainly an admirable and touching condescendence of Almighty God – the God of all consolation, entirely sufficient to Himself – to want to be in need of us, the same as He chose to be in need of the consoling angel at Gethsemane. This implies that we must have our share in the sufferings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, participating, in a certain measure, in the sorrowful life that He led on earth, before we partake of His glorious life in heaven.” [Garrigou-Lagrange, work cited above, page 14.]
This was well understood by little Francisco of Fatima. Sister Lucy wrote of him as “having no other thought than to console Our Lord and Our Lady, after seeing how sad they were in the visions.” Sister Lucy writes further:
“One day, I asked him, ‘Francisco, what would you rather do: console Our Lord, or convert sinners so that there will be no more souls going to hell?’ He answered, ‘I prefer to console Our Lord. Didn’t you see how Our Lady looked so sad last month when she told us that no one should offend Our Lord anymore, because He has already been offended too much? I would like to console Our Lord and then afterwards convert sinners so that they will no longer offend Him’” (see the Sel de la Terre, #53, pp.232-233).
Today, more than ever, Our Lord is saddened: by the persecution of Catholics everywhere in the world ─ including the more hidden, subtle persecution taking place in our formerly Christian nations, carried out by secularist propaganda, whose program is to instill atheism in the souls of men; and by the worldwide revolt “against God and against His Anointed One” (Psalm 2:2) ─ including in His Church, where the modernists “prefer the fables of men” (2 Tim. 4:4) rather than Tradition.
Let us console Our Lord by our efforts to live a truly Catholic life, for example, by not wasting our time with audio-visual entertainments, or with other useless amusements, by fleeing excessive modern-day comforts that only make us soft and lazy, by reading a good catechism or other edifying books, etc.
Taken from the Dominicans of Avrille.