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THE
SECOND DOLOR
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
THE Flight into Egypt has always been a
fountain of poetry and art in the Church at large, while it has been a
source of tears and of rich contemplation to religious souls. It is not
only that the mystery is so exceedingly beautiful in itself; but the
Gentiles have loved to regard it as, after the Epiphany, the beginning
of our Lord's dealings with them. He flies from His own people to take
refuge in a heathen land. He consecrates by His presence that very land
which had been the great historical enemy of the chosen people, and
which was, as it were, the express type of all heathen darkness. Amid
those benighted Gentiles He finds a peaceful home, where no
persecutions trouble the even tenor of His childish life. The idols
fall from their niches as He moves. A power goes out into the rich
Nile-valley, nay, overflows it, and runs far into the yellow sands of
the desert, sanctifying and setting apart the whole region as a future
Church, as a blossoming wilderness, as a barren mystical paradise
populous with saints. The fathers of the desert are to pass into a
Christian proverb throughout the magnificent West, a phenomenon which
men will never be weary of admiring, a living discipline, an enduring
academy, in which all future generations of catholic saints are to be
brought up and to take their degrees. Thus the Gentile West has loved
to accumulate traditions about the Flight into Egypt, the Sojourn
there, and the Return.
If there is not peace in sequestered Nazareth, where shall we find it?
Can the eye of jealous power, quickened by the acute discernment of
selfish fear, find out the Holy Child amid the many children of that
retired village? The evil one will see to that, we may be sure. Peace
is not the inheritance either of Jesus or Mary. It is true that he is
the Prince of Peace, but not of such peace as earth dreams of. Mary has
but lately reached her home. Her heart is broken. She needs rest. It
shall come to her in the time of rest, but otherwise than might have
been expected. In the dead of night the Lord appeared in sleep to
Joseph, the keeper of heaven's best treasures on earth, and bade him
rise, and take the Child and His Mother, and fly into Egypt. The three
kings had gone back to the east without letting Herod know whether they
had found the newborn king, and who He was. Herod had bidden them
return to him; but Scripture does not tell us that they had promised to
do so; or if they had, the commandment of God, which came to them in a
dream, superseded the promise they had made. Tyranny was not, however,
to be so balked, and, lest it should miss its aim, involved all
Bethlehem in blood by the massacre of the Innocents. Oh, Mary! see what
a stern sister thou hast been to those poor mothers of Bethlehem, who
saw thee on Christmas Eve wandering homeless through their streets,
they perhaps fondling their little ones at their doors! What a
concourse of wailing sounds rose to heaven from that narrow hilltop,
while the gutters of the steep streets ran down with blood! It was the
law of the Incarnation, the law that was round the gentle Jesus, which
was beginning to work. Dearest Lord! His great love of us had already
broken His Mother's heart. It was now desolating the happy hearths of
Bethlehem, and staining its inhospitable door posts with blood. And all
to keep Himself for Calvary, where He was to shed with a thousandfold
more cruel suffering His Precious Blood for us!
The night was dark and tranquil over the little town of Nazareth, when
Joseph went forth. No commandment of God ever found such promptitude in
highest Saint or readiest Angel as this one had found in Mary. She
heard Joseph's words, and she smiled on him in silence as he spoke.
There was no perturbation, no hurry, although there was all a mother's
fear. She took up her treasure, as He slept, and went forth with Joseph
into the cold starlight; for poverty has few preparations to make. She
was leaving home again. Terror and hardship, the wilderness and
heathendom, were before her; and she confronted all with the calm
anguish of an already broken heart. Here and there the night wind
stirred in the leafless fig trees, making their bare branches nod
against the bright sky, and now and then a watch-dog bayed, not because
it heard them, but from the mere nocturnal restlessness of animals. But
as Jesus had come like God, so He went like God, unnoticed and
unmissed. No one is ever less missed on earth than He on whom it all
depends.
The path they took was not the one which human prudence would have
pointed out to them. They returned upon the Jerusalem road they had so
lately trodden. But, avoiding the Holy City, they passed near
Bethlehem, as if His neighborhood should give a blessing to those
unconscious Babes that were still nestling warmly in their mothers'
arms. Thus they fell into the road which leads into the wilderness,
and, Joseph going before, like the shadow of the Eternal Father, they
crossed the frontier of the promised land far on until they were lost
to the eye, like specks on the desert sand. Two creatures had carried
the Creator into the wilderness, and were taking care of Him there amid
the stony sands of the unwatered gullies. Sunrise and sunset, the
glittering noon and the purple midnight, the round moon and the colored
haze, came to them in the desert for many a day.
Still they traveled on. They had cold to bear by night, and a sun from
which there was no escape by day. They had scanty food, and frequent
thirst. They knew whom they were carrying, and looked not for miracles
to lighten the load they bore.
Old tradition said that one night they rested in a robber's cave. They
were received there with rough but kind hospitality by the wife of the
captain of the band. Perhaps it was her sorrow that made her kind; for
it is often so with women. Her sorrow was a great one. She had a fair
child, the life of her soul, the one gentle, spotless thing amid all
the lawlessness and savage life around. Alas! it was too fair to look
at; for it was white with leprosy. But she loved it the more, and
pressed it the more fondly to her bosom, as mothers are wont to do. It
was more than ever her life and light now, because of its misfortune.
Mary and Jesus, the robber's wife and the leprous child, together in
the cave at nightfall I how fitting a place for the Redeemer! How sweet
a type of the Church which He has founded! Mary asked for water, that
she might wash our Blessed Lord, and the robber's wife brought it to
her, and Jesus was washed therein. Kindness, when it opens the heart,
opens the eyes of the mind likewise. The robber's wife perceived
something remarkable about her guests. Whether it was that there was a
light round the head of Jesus, or that the Holy Spirit spoke in the
tones of Mary, or that the mere vicinity of so much holiness strangely
affected her, we know not: but, in much love and with some sort of
faith, the mother's heart divined;---earth knows  that maternal
divination well. She took away the water Mary had used in washing
Jesus, and washed her little leprous Dismas in it, and straightway his
flesh became rosy and beautiful as mother's eye could long to see it.
Long years passed. The child outgrew its mother's arms. It did feats of
boyish daring on the sands of the wilderness. At last Dismas was old
enough to join the band; and though it seems he had to the last
somewhat of his mother's heart about him, he led a life of violence and
crime, and at length Jerusalem saw him brought within her gates a
captive. When he hung upon the cross, burning with fever, parched with
agony, he was bad enough to speak words of scorn to the harmless
Sufferer by his side. The Sufferer was silent, and Dismas looked at
Him. He saw something heavenly, something unlike a criminal, about Him,
such perhaps as his mother had seen in the cave three-and-thirty years
ago. It was the Child in the water of whose bath his leprosy had been
healed. Poor Dismas! thou hast a worse leprosy now, that will need
blood instead of water! Faith was swift in its work. Perhaps his heart
was like his mother's, and faith a half-natural growth in it. He takes
in the scene of the Crucifixion, the taunts, the outrages, the
blasphemies, the silence, the prayer for their pardon, the wishful look
cast upon himself by the dying Jesus. It is enough. Then and there he
must profess his faith; for the Mother's prayers are rising from
beneath, and the sinner is being enveloped in a very cloud of mercy.
Lord! remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom! See how quickly he
had outrun even some of the Apostles. He was fastened to the cross to
die, and he knew it was no earthly kingdom in which he could be
remembered. This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise for thy cave's
hospitality, poor young robber! And Jesus died, and the spear opened
His heart, and the red stream sprang like a fresh fountain over the
limbs of the dying robber, and though his mother from the cave was not
there, his new Mother was beneath the cross, and she sent him after her
Firstborn into paradise, the first of that countless family of sons who
through that dear Blood should enter into glory.
Ages ago the Jewish people, after their deliverance from Egypt, had
wandered over that desert. Its gray sands, its ruddy rocks, its stone
strewn plains, its regions of scant verdure, its seacoast, and its
wells of pastoral renown, had been the scenes of such wonders as the
world had not beheld before. Never had the Creator interfered so
visibly, or for so long a time together, in favor of His creatures. The
whole camp, with its cloud and fire, its cruciform march, with Ephraim,
Benjamin, and Manasses, bearing the relics of Joseph, its moving church
beautified with the spoils of Egypt, was a standing miracle. In Sinai
God had thundered from the heights, pouring through that wandering
Hebrew people over the whole world the glorious light and transcending
faith of the Unity of God, a doctrine that came to the world most fitly
from the austere grandeur of a wilderness. There had those commandments
of heavenly morality been given, under which we are living at the
present day, and which shall be men's rule of life until the doom, the
Judge's rule in fixing the doom of each. In our Christian childhood we
have wandered with the Jews over that silent wilderness, learning the
fear of God. In their pilgrimage we have seen a type of our own. In
their vicissitudes we seemed almost to take part ourselves. The very
names of the wells and halting-places sound like old songs in our ears,
songs so early learned that they can never be forgotten. Here now was
the very Creator Himself, in the reality of human childhood, wandering
over that historic wilderness, reversing the Exodus, going to make
Egypt His home, driven out of the delectable land of the old Canaanites
by the very people whom He had led thither by a pillar of light, whose
battles He had fought, whose victories He had gained, and whose tribes
He had established, each in its characteristic and suitable allotment.
There was Mary with her Magnificat, instead of Miriam and her glorious
seaside song; and another Joseph, greater and dearer far than that
saintly patriarch of old, who had saved the lives of men by husbanding
the bread of Egypt, whereas this new Joseph was to guard in the same
Egypt the living Bread of everlasting life. And that very wilderness
both the Josephs had crossed.
How wonderful must have been the thoughts of Jesus and Mary as they
wandered over those scenes of God's past mercies, past judgments, past
grandeurs! We may reverently follow them in our meditations, but it
would be hardly. reverent to write our guesses down. It was a journey
of hardship and fatigue. At last they reached the shores of the Red
Sea, and saw the waters that lay between Egypt and themselves. We can
hardly conceive that they did not as it were reconsecrate by their
presence the exact scene of the Exodus, wherever it was. Thence it
would be most likely that they would follow the coast, and round the
gulf by Suez, and so pass on to Heliopolis, now truly, for some years
to come, to be the City of the Sun. Tradition speaks of trees that
bowed down their leafy heads, inclining their branchless stems, to
shade with their fanlike plumes the Mother and the Child. It speaks
also of the uncouth images of the heathen gods which tumbled, like
Dagon, from their pedestals, when the True God went by. There, on the
banks of that old river where Moses wrought his miracles, amid crowds
of benighted idolaters, and in all the straitnesses of poverty, the
Hebrew strangers dwell, for seven years, for five years, or for two
years and a half, as different authorities maintain. Joseph pursued his
trade of carpenter, and Mary doubtless contributed to the support of
Paradise! Paradise for thy cave's hospitality, poor young robber! And
Jesus died, and the spear opened His heart, and the red stream sprang
like a fresh fountain over the limbs of the dying robber, and though
his mother from the cave was not there, his new Mother was beneath the
cross, and she sent him after her Firstborn into paradise, the first of
that countless family of sons who through that dear Blood should enter
into glory.
During those years that Egyptian city was the centre of the world. The
garden of Eden was as nothing to it in beauty or in gifts. Thither were
the angels gathered in multitudes to wonder and adore. Thither, though
men knew it not, went all the world's prayers, its sighs, its secret
expectations. Thither also went the voices of pain and sorrow in
Heliopolis itself, into God's ear, and that a human ear, in the next
street or in the selfsame house. Supernatural actions of consummate
sanctity, and of infinite value, were pouring forth day and night from
the Human Soul of Jesus in more abundant volume than the Nile-flood at
Its highest, meriting graces which should carry fertility over the
whole wilderness of a fallen; world. Beautiful also was the heart of
Mary during those years. Her holiness was rising perpetually, her union
with God, the closeness of which was already far beyond what any
technical term in mystical theology can express, grew closer and
closer; so that the Mother seemed to be well-nigh identified with the
Son, in spite of that whole infinity which always lay between them, as
between the Creator and the creature. Her sorrows grew as well. There
was still the lifelong sorrow of the first dolor at her heart; and to
this were superadded the many new sorrows which this second dolor, this
Flight into Egypt, had of necessity brought with it. Did dark Egypt
know of the great light which was shining on the banks of its famous
river? Did the priests, in spite of themselves, offer sacrifice to the
sun with less faith, no", that He was close at hand, smelling the
sacrificial odors, and in hearing of the wild worship, who invented the
sun, called it out of nothing, gifted it with all its occult
influences, set it up as a hearth at which the golden ether should
kindle itself into heat and light, and made it the centre of such vast
outlying regions of life and such magnificent far-stretching phenomena.
right away beyond still undiscovered planets, and all out of His own
unimaginable wisdom? Did no misgivings come across the more thoughtful
in the multitude, when they joined in the undignified rites of their
debasing animal-worship, now that the Eternal had assumed a created
nature, and was to be seen and heard in their land? Some truth, some
sweet gracious trouble in many souls, must surely have stolen like an
infection from the nearness of Jesus and Mary. For are they ever near,
and some benediction does not follow? But all these things, all the
secrets of this Egyptian life, are hidden in Divine concealment.
So the appointed years ran out; and, when Herod was dead, an Angel of
the Lord appeared to Joseph in sleep, saying, Arise, and take the Child
and His Mother, and go into the land of Israel. For they are dead that
sought the life of the Child. Joseph arose with the same promptitude as
of old. There was no delay. No one at Heliopolis would care to detain
them. They were too obscure. They were free to come and go as they
pleased. The stars of night were still standing tremulously like thin
shafts of light in the breast of the Nile, when they began their
homeward wanderings. Once more they saw the waters of the Red Sea. Once
more the weary night wind of the wilderness sighed round them as they
sank to rest upon the sands. Once more the hills and the vineyard walls
of Southern Judah greeted their eyes, the welcome land which God had
chosen. But the cross was not to be removed all at once. The temple at
Jerusalem was their natural attraction. But Joseph knew the value of
that treasure he was set to guard; and, when he heard that Archelaus
reigned in the room of his father, he was afraid to go there. In his
fear he doubtless sought light in prayer, and again a supernatural
warning came to him in his sleep, and he was bidden to retire into the
quarters of Galilee. So the long journey was made longer, until at
length the old home at Nazareth received the three.
Such was the mystery of the second dolor. It extended over an uncertain
length of time, for we must not confine the dolor to the Flight only.
Epiphanius thought that our Lord was two years old when He fled, and
remained in Egypt two. Nicephorus fixed the duration of the sojourn at
three years. Barradius calls it five or six, Ammonius of Alexandria
seven. Maldonatus fixes it at not more than seven, nor less than four.
Baronius gathers from a variety of considerations that our Lord fled in
His first year, and returned in His ninth, thus giving at least seven
full years to Egypt: to this Suarez also inclines, though he says that
nothing positive can be decided about it. Seven years is also the most
commonly accepted time among the faithful. This dolor presents three
different objects of devotion to us: the Flight, with all its fears,
its hardships, and fatigues, the Sojourn, with its sense of exile and
its companionship with the idolaters, and the Return, with those
peculiarities which followed from the increased age and size of Jesus.
Some writers dwell on one or other of these in preference to the rest.
Pious contemplation may shift from one to another according to its
mood. But to comprehend the dolor in its unity, we must consider it as
a drama in three acts, the Flight, the' Sojourn, and the Return, by
which, as we shall see presently, it is made a double dolor. We may now
therefore pass from the narrative of the mystery to a consideration of
the peculiarities of this dolor.
The first thing to be noticed is, that as Simeon was the instrument of
the first dolor, so Joseph was the instrument of this. There was much
in this to the loving heart of Mary. There is a certain appearance of
cruelty in sending sorrow through those we love. Shakespeare says that
the first bringer of unwelcome news has but a losing office. Thus it
was at once a sorrow to Joseph to convey fresh sadness to Mary, and to
her to receive it from him. The world has often been glorified by
heroic examples of conjugal affection. Many have been recorded in
history as notable phenomena, which were too precious for the wisdom
and the solace of mankind to be forgotten. In the deeper depths of
private life it is a pure fire which is burning ever more. But never
did
marriage throw its Divine sanctions round a conjugal love so pure, so
true, so intense as that which existed between Joseph and Mary. Never
was there such oneness, such identity, such living out of self and in
each other, as was in them. It was the very perfection of natural love.
Next to her natural love for Jesus, earth has never seen such another
love as that between Joseph and herself, unless it were also Joseph's
love for the Holy Child. But added to this natural love there was so
much that: was supernatural; and supernatural love is not only deeper,
but more tender, than natural love. It brings out the
capabilities and depths of the human heart far more than natural
affection can do. Joseph was to Mary the shadow of the Eternal Father,
the representative of her Heavenly Spouse, the Holy Ghost.  In him she saw with
awful clearness and most reverential tenderness two Persons of the Most
Holy Trinity. When she saw Jesus in his arms, it was a mystery to her
too deep for words. Tears only could express it. Then the exceeding
sanctity of Joseph was continually before her, and she was privy to
operations of grace within his soul, which probably surpassed those of
any other Saint. For they were the graces of him who was the master of
God's household. While then it was an exercise of obedience to him as
her appointed master, it was also no slight aggravation of Mary's
sorrow, that this time it should come to her through Joseph.
There was a further aggravation in the fact that her suffering seemed
to come less directly from God, and more from the wickedness of men,
than was the case in the first dolor. There it was prophecy, God's
disclosure of the future, and His infusion of a vivid vision of it to
be her perpetual companion. But now the hand of sinful man was actually
upon her. She was in contact with the violence of which Jesus was to be
the victim. Here was the first touch of Calvary: and it chilled her to
the heart. In our own limited sphere of endurance, we must surely all
have felt that there is an additional difficulty in receiving a cross
when it comes to us, not directly from God, but through the hands of
our fellow creatures. But not only is it an additional difficulty: it
often seems to be the peculiar difficulty. We fancy, doubtless not
infrequently deceiving ourselves, that we could have borne it patiently
and cheerfully if it had come at once from Him. But there is something
which dishonors the cross in its transmission through the hands of
others. Thus it is a trial, not to our patience only, but also to our
humility. There is nothing humbling in having the weight of God's
omnipotence simply laid upon us by Himself, with the intervention only
of inanimate secondary causes. There is nothing humiliating in the
death of a dear child, or the taking away of a beloved sister, or in
the breaking up of a household by death, or in the desolation of home
by some terrific accident. Humility is not exactly or immediately the
virtue which Divine catastrophes elicit from the soul. But when God
punishes us through the injustice of men, through the base jealousies
of others, through the unworthy suspicions of unbelieving friends,
through the ingratitude of those we have benefited, or through
unrequited love of any sort, then the bravest natures will shrink back
and decline the cross if they can. It is true that reason tells them
God is really the fountain of sorrow. It comes from Him, even though it
flows through others. But nothing except an unusual humility will make
this dictate of reason a practical conviction. Even with inanimate
causes there is something of this reluctance in submission to sorrow.
If a mother hears of the death of her son, her soul is full of
bitterness, yet, if she be a real Christian, full of resignation too.
But fuller tidings come. It was a mere accident. The slightest change
in the circumstances, and he would have been saved. If it had not
happened when it did and where it did, it could not have happened at
all. Take away a little inculpable negligence, or imagine the least
little common foresight, and her son might this hour have been in her
arms in the flush of youth. His death was so exceptional, that
circumstances rarely ever combine as they combined then. They seem to
have combined, like a fate, on purpose to destroy him. Ah! and is not
this veil thin enough for a Christian eye to discern our heavenly
Father through it? Does it not give a softening sweetness to the death,
that it was brought about with such a manifest gentle purpose? Look at
that Christian mother, and see. Her resignation has almost disappeared.
Hard faith is all that is left to sustain her in her sorrow. The tears
have gushed out afresh. She has broken silence, and grieved out loud.
She has wrung her hands, and given up her work, and sits by the wayside
weeping. She has told the stars so often that it has grown into her
mind. Each time she told it the slightest tint of exaggeration entered
in, until now the death of her son has become to her own self a painful
mystery, an un- accountable injustice, a blow which will not allow
itself to be borne, but is manifestly unendurable. So bitter, so trebly
bitter, does the action of creatures render the fountains of our
sorrow.
But there is something more than this in our impatience at the
intervention of creatures in our misfortunes. It is a deep- lying trust
in the justice of God, which is far down in our souls, and the
foundation of all that is most manly in our lives. It seems to be our
nature to bear blows from Him; nay, there is something comforting in
the sense of His nearness to us which the act of punishment discloses.
Our whole being believes in the infallibility of His love, and so is
quiet even when it is not content. No idea of cruelty hangs round our
conception of God, even though we know that He has created hell. But
every created face has a look of cruelty in it. There is something in
every eye which warns us not to trust it infinitely; greatly, perhaps,
we may trust it, but not to the uttermost. It is the feeling of being
at the mercy of this cruelty which makes us shrink from sorrows that
come as if directly from the hands of creatures. Our sense of security
is gone. We do not know how far things will go. Strange to say, it
seems as if we knew all when we are in the grasp of the inscrutable
God, but that, when creatures have got their hands upon us, there are
dreadful things in the background, undiscovered worlds of wrong,
subterranean pitfalls, dismal possibilities of injustice, magnified
like shadows, and to appearance inexhaustible. There is the same
difference between our feelings in misfortunes coming straight from God
and misfortunes that come through men that there is between the
feelings of an unpopular criminal hearing the wild yells of the
multitude that seek his blood through the thick walls of his prison,
which he knows to be impregnable, and his terror when he is exposed to
the people in the street, with their fierce eyes glaring on him, and a
feeble guard that must give way at the first onset. In the one case he
has to confront the considerate tranquility of justice, in the other to
face the indefinite barbarity of savages. Even David, whose heart was
after God's own heart, felt this deeply. When God gives him his choice
of punishments, after he had numbered the people, he answers, I am in a
great strait: but it is better that I should fall into the hands of the
Lord, for His mercies are many, than into the hands of men. And so he
chose the pestilence. Who is there that does not feel that the
immutable God is more easy to persuade than the hearts of flesh in our
fellow-sinners? He will change His purpose sooner than a man. When God
stands between us and the unkind world, we feel secure and grieve
quietly, our head leaning on His feet even while we sit desolate upon
the ground. But when the merciless world itself is down upon us, no
shorn sheep on the wide treeless wold, with the icy north wind sweeping
over it, is in more pitiable plight than we. This was what Mary felt.
The partition was wearing away. The wall was sinking that had stood
between the world's actual rudeness and her broken heart. Her martyrdom
grows more grievous as it grows less placid, notwithstanding that the
current of her inward tranquility flows unquickened still.
So much for the manner in which this dolor came to her. But St.
Joseph's share in it is by no means exhausted there. He is a new
ingredient throughout all the years over which this sorrow extends. He
was old, and his years had need of rest. He dwelt forever in an
atmosphere of calmness, which seemed to suit his graces best, and in
which they developed freely, like the magnificent foliage we read of in
almost windless islands. His life had been a life of outward
tranquility as well as inward. Haste, precipitation, and unsettlement
were foreign to him. He combined virginal meekness with the most
fervent love. He was simple like Jacob, meditative like Isaac, living a
deep life of faith, far beneath the surface of the soul's storms, like
Abraham. He was like,---at least the thought comes natural,---like the
gentle gifted Adam, full of soft sanctities and placid familiarity with
God, before he fell. He seemed rather a flower to blossom somewhere
just outside the earth, or to be caught up and planted inside that old
hidden Eden of man's innocence. Oh, how Mary's heart was poured out in
love and admiration upon this trophy of God's sweetest, gentlest
graces! But she was to drag him out into the storm. She was to throw
him into life's rude, rough, swift, jostling, inconsiderate crowd, and
see his meek spirit bruised, wounded, and outworn with the struggle. At
his age how unbecoming the cold and heat, the wind and wet, of that
houseless wilderness! How his eye shrank from the wild fiery faces of
the Arabs and the dark expression of those keen Egyptians, and how
strangely his voice sounded as it mixed with theirs! Mary felt in her
heart everyone of these things, and many more, many worse, of which we
know nothing, but may surmise much. It was only the sight of Jesus,
only the thought of the Child's peril, which enabled her to bear it.
And then, like a transplanted flower in a new climate, Joseph gave out
such new light, such fresh fragrance, such altered blossoms, such
different fruits. His soul was more beautiful than ever, and with the
brightness of its beauty grew the intensity of Mary's love, and, with
that love, each trial, each grief, each incommodity of his winning old
age, was a keener sorrow and a deeper grief than it was before.
But she was positively encircled with objects of sorrow. From Joseph
she looked to Jesus. Her nearness to Him became a supernatural habit
full of consequences to her soul. It brought with it swift growths of
sanctity. It adorned her with extraordinary perfections. It was a
perpetual process of what the hard style of mystical theology calls
deific transformation. We can form no just idea of what it was. But
there are moments when we get a transient glimpse in our own souls of
what the habitual nearness of the Blessed Sacrament has done for us. We
perceive that it has not only done something to each virtue and grace
God may have given us, but that it has changed us, that it has done a
work in our nature, that it has impregnated us with feelings and
instincts which are not of this world, and that it has called up or
created new faculties to which we cannot give a name or define their
functions. The way in which a priest says office, or the strange
swiftness of his Mass, is a puzzle to those who are outside the Church.
They are quite unable to understand the reality of the view of God
which a Catholic gets from the Blessed Sacrament, and how that to him
slowness, and manner, and effect, whether they be to tell on others or
admonish self, are, in fact, a simple forgetfulness of God, and the
manifest unfrightedness of a creature who has for the moment forgotten
Him, and His terrible nearness on the altar. From this experience we
may obtain an indistinct conception of what the nearness of Jesus had
done in Mary. How much more sensitive, therefore, did she become about
His sufferings! The change which His presence wrought in herself would
be daily adding new susceptibilities to her sorrow. She saw trials to
Him in little things, which yesterday, perhaps, she had scarcely
discerned. For if her love grew, her discernment must have grown also;
in Divine things light and love are coequal and inseparable. Just as in
our small measure our tenderness and perception about the offended
majesty of God grow with our advance in holiness and our more. refined
sensibilities of conscience, so in an astonishing degree Mary's
capabilities of wounded feeling about Jesus were daily being augmented.
But this was not all. There was a change in Him, as well as in her; and
it also, like the other, went as another spring to feed the stream of
her sorrows. He was not a stationary vision, just as we all know how
the Blessed Sacrament is not a stationary presence, but one which
lives, acts, grows, puts out attractions, makes manifestations, and is
as immutably changeful as the worship of Heaven, which never wearies
even the vast intelligences of Angels. Thus the Holy Child was
constantly giving out fresh light and beauty. He was an inexhaustible
treasure of supernatural loveliness. It always seemed as if at once she
knew Him so well, and yet was but just beginning to know Him at all.
There was a mixture of custom and surprise in her love of Him, which
was like no earthly affection. For, while she felt instinctively as if
she could prophesy how He would act in given circumstances, she was
quite sure there would be some Divine novelty in the action when it
came, which would take her unawares. Thus the delight of wonder forever
mingled with the delight of habit. Her powers of observation, and the
completeness of her intelligence, must also have been quickened by the
velocity and expansion of her love. Nothing escaped her. Nothing was
without its significance. If there were unfathomable depths, at least
she was becoming more and more expert in fathoming them. Jesus was a
revelation, and therefore called out science as well as faith. Even to
us, to learn our Blessed Lord is a different thing from believing in
Him. Such a lesson it is,---with Himself as the professor to teach it,
divided into a million sciences, eternity the university to learn it
in, where the best of us will never finish the course, never take our
degree? Mary was learning it, as even the angels in heaven cannot learn
it. So infinite was the worth of the grace our Lord was disclosing, so
infinite the value of His manifold daily actions, so infinite the
satisfaction of each of His least sufferings, that in this one dolor
Mary had what with so many infinities may well be called three
eternities in which to learn His loveliness and raise her own love to
the mark of her learning. There was first the wilderness, and then
Egypt, and then the wilderness again. And all these accumulated lights,
sensibilities, beauties, graces, attractions, increments of love, were
but so many fresh edges put on Simeon's sword. The result of each, the
result of all, the product of their combination, was simply an
immensity of sorrow.
There are two ways of doing battle with grief. One is in the privacy of
our own homes, in the secrecy of our suffering hearts, with the
undistracted presence of God round about us. But under the most
favorable circumstances it is no easy task. The common round of indoor
duties is heavy and irksome; and somehow, though if sorrow had chosen
its own accidents it would not have made itself more endurable, the
cross seems always as if it never fitted, as if there were peculiar
aggravations in our own case to justify at least some measure of
impatience. But the fight is much harder when we have to go forth to
meet the enemy, not only before the faces and among the voices of men
in an unsparing publicity, but to receive our sorrow at their hands,
and to feel the pressure of their unkindliness upon us. In this case it
is not that external work is an unwelcome distraction to our sorrow; it
is not merely that grief gives us a feeling of right to be dispensed
from the actual conflict of work; but our very external work is our
sorrow. We go out to sorrow. We pass from the shelter of home on
purpose to meet our grief. We do our best to let suffering take us at a
disadvantage, and off our guard, amid a multiplicity of things to do,
and having to look many ways at once. Neither is this our own choice.
It is simple necessity. Of the two battles with sorrow, this is far the
hardest to fight, and the unlikeliest to win. In passing from the first
dolor to the second, our Lady's sorrow shifted from the easier battle
to the harder one, if battle is a right word to use of such a supreme
tranquility as hers. Her new sorrow called for actual outward
obedience, not the mere assent of an inward generosity. She had
suffered in the sanctuary of her own soul before; now personal toil,
external privation, rough work, enter into her sorrow. They who
appreciate rightly the shyness of extreme sanctity will have some idea
of what this change, in itself, and considered apart from other
aggravating circumstances, inflicted upon the delicate nature of our
Blessed Mother.
It not infrequently happens that persons beginning in holiness feel,
almost in spite of themselves, a kind of disesteem for the outward
observances of religion. They may be too well instructed to fall into
any erroneous opinion on the subject; but, for all that, the feeling is
upon them, and will show itself for a while in many little ways. Habits
of interior piety are comparatively new to them, and, with the fresh
feeling of how little outward devotion is worth without the inward,
they exaggerate the importance of interior things, and look at them in
too exclusive a light. There is something so delicious---there is no
other word for it---in the first experiences of communion with our
Blessed Lord down in our own hearts, that faith, for want of practice,
does not see Him, as it will one day, in the commonest ordinances and
most formal ceremonies of the Church. But, as the soul grows in
holiness, a reverse process goes on. Vocal prayer reassumes its proper
importance. Sacraments are seen to be interior things. The calendar of
the Church leaves a deeper impress on our devotion. Beads, scapulars,
indulgences, and confraternities work ascetically in our souls,---a
deep work, an interior work. At last, to high sanctity outward things
are simply the brimming vases in which Jesus has turned the water into
wine, and out of which He is pouring it continually into the soul. To a
Saint a single rubric has life enough in it to throw him into an
ecstasy, or to transform him by a solitary touch into a higher kind of
Saint than he is now. [We may instance the conduct of St. Andrew
Avellino in Holy Week.] To an inexperienced beginner there is nothing
perhaps in St. Teresa less intelligible than her devotion to holy
water. They can understand her doctrine of the prayer of quiet more
readily than her continual reference to holy water, and the great
things she says of it. From all this it comes to pass that there was
one peculiarity of this dolor of our Lady, into which none can enter
fully but a saint, indeed even a saint not fully; for we must remember
that it is of Mary we are speaking. This was the deprivation of
spiritual advantages in the wilderness and in Egypt. There was no
temple, probably no synagogue. There were no sacrifices but such as
were abominations and horrors to her soul. There was not the nameless
atmosphere of tile true religion round about her but on the contrary
the repulsive darkness and the depressing associations of the most
abandoned misbelief and degrading worship of the inferior animals. To
her this was a fearful desolation. Her height of sanctity did not lead
her to dispense with! the commonest assistances of grace, but on the
contrary to cling to them with a more intelligent appreciation. It did
not teach her to stand and walk merely resting or guiding herself by
outward ordinances, but rather to lean her whole weight upon them more
than ever. She felt less able to dispense with little things, because
she was so richly endowed with great things. She had reached to that
wide view of saintly minds, and to her it was wider and more distinct,
that in spiritual things one grace never supersedes another, never does
the work of another, never stands in the stead of another. Less
intelligent piety mistakes succeeding for superseding, and so loses in
reverence, while it misses what is Divine. As the loftiest
contemplation works its way back again through the accumulated
paraphernalia of meditation almost to the indistinct simplicity of the
kneeling child's first prayer, so is it wonderful in all things else to
see how the saints in their sublimities are forever returning to the
wise littleness and childlike commonplaces of their first beginnings.
The puzzles of spirituality are only the symptoms of imperfection. We
are fording the river to reach Canaan; The water is shallow when we
first begin; it deepens as we advance; but it gets shallow again near
to the other side, and shelves quite gently up to the heavenly shore.
Hence it was doubtless a keen suffering to Mary to be deprived of the
outward ordinances of her religion. Her spirit pined for the courts of
the temple, with its crowds of worshippers, for the old feasts as they
came round, for the stirring and the soothing show of the ceremonial of
the law, and for the sound of the old Hebrew Scriptures from the
reader's desk within the synagogue. The presence of
Jesus, instead of being to her in lieu of these things and superseding
them, would only make her crave for all those sacred things, which He,
long years before He was her Babe, had Himself devised and ordered from
out of Sinai. We shall not do justice to this peculiar grief of hers;
but we must remember it. We shall not do justice to it, because we have
no such acute sensibilities, no such excessive hunger for the things of
God, no such visible presence of Jesus to turn that hunger into
downright famine.
It happened once to a traveler who had been long among the sights and
sounds of Asiatic life, in whose ears the musical wailing of the
muezzin's voice from the gallery of the minaret over the nightly city
or amid the bustle of the day had almost effaced I the remembrance of
Christian bells, that from the Black Sea passed up the Danube and
landed nowhere till he reached the frontier of Transylvania. He
landed in a straggling village, and heard the bells jangling with a
sound of strange familiarity and very barbarous singing; and he saw a
cleric, with a Crucifix glittering in the sun, and some rude banners,
and girls in white with tapers, and a pleasant rabble of
Christian-faced boys, with boughs of Hawthorn or some white-flowering
tree in their hands; and then a priest, in poorest cope and under
humblest canopy, bearing Jesus with him, to bless the village streets
on Corpus Christi. And there came a light, and a feeling, and an
agitation, and a most keen, most sweet pain in the traveler's heart,
which gave him a surmise far off from! the real truth---but still a
surmise-of what Mary felt in Egypt. Such to him was the first sight of
holy things at the gate of Christendom when he passed out of the
influence of the strange imagery of the Mohammedan law. He only saw
what he had lost; she realized what she was losing.
But it was not only her own religious feelings which were wounded by
the false and loathsome worship round her. She mourned for the souls it
was destroying; souls that knew no wiser wisdom, and so their ignorance
at least was innocent, but in whom it was deadening the moral sense,
vitiating the conscience, making its judgments false, and corrupting
its integrity. It was a system of wild enchantment, which held that
ancient people as in a net, entangling them in its iniquities so that
they could not escape. It was a vast, complete, national organization.
They were going down upon the silent sweep of its stream into
everlasting darkness as irresistingly as a log goes down the Nile. Oh,
how much glorious understanding gleamed out of the dark faces of many
of them! What hidden sweetness, what possibilities of gentleness and
goodness, almost trembled in the voices of many! And she all the while
holding Jesus in her arms on the riverside, the Saviour of the world,
the fondest lover of souls, who would have drunk the whole river of
souls dry if they would have let Him! Why should He not preach to them
at once, He whose mind knew no growth but the knowing, by acquisition,
what He knew otherwise before? Why should He not let His light shine on
them at once? Was there not something cruel in the delay, something
perplexing, like the slowness of the Church in converting the heathen?
And it was not only all those Egyptian souls which lay on her heart
like an oppression in a dream, but there was the glory of God also. One
word from Jesus would repair it all; but that word was not spoken. It
was not hard for her to bear precisely because it was so strange a will
of God. She had too often adored the four thousand Decembers, in which
Jesus had not come, not to comprehend the mystery of the delays of God.
But it was hard to bear, because of the destiny of that land which
swarmed with souls, the multitudes which the Nile mud was feeding and
fattening for so insecure an end.
Great things look little by the side of things which are inordinately
greater than themselves. So it is with many of the items in Mary's
sorrows. Things, each one of which would make a very romance of
misfortune in the commoner lots of men, gather in almost imperceptible
numbers round those tall griefs of our Blessed Mother which pierce the
storm clouds and go up out of our sight. Yet they must not be
forgotten. We must let them accumulate, even as they accumulated in the
actual mystery. There are many sufferings in exile, on which we need
not dwell here. They are sufferings which make the heart very sick, and
a burden which grows heavier as each year that lapses adds its weight
to those that have gone before. There is no getting used to exile. It
becomes less of a habit daily. The iron is always in the soul. It is
always hot, always burning. It makes terrible wounds, whose lips cannot
reach over, and will not heal. Poverty is hard to bear everywhere, but
it is hardest of all in a foreign land, where we have no rights,
scarcely the right to sympathy. The land bears us because we put our
feet on it and tread there. But this is all it does. It bears us as a
camel bears its load, because it is more trouble to throw it off than
to carry it. It is only because the soil is more merciful than men that
a foreign land does not fling the alien and the mendicant impatiently
from its corn-bearing fields. There was something also inexpressibly
dismal in Mary's utter loneliness amid her own sex. She was far more
lonely in the crowds of Heliopolis than the penitent Thais or Mary of
Egypt could have been in the savagest sequestration of the voiceless
Thebaid. And she, too, so frail, so helpless, so unknown; such a
girlish mother, such a delicate flower, that the rude wind ought hardly
to blow upon! It is fearful to think of. But God was with her. Yes! but
look at Him; less than His young mother, more helpless even than
herself. And Joseph; his very meekness was against him, and so old, so
infirm, so uncomplaining; what protection was he against the pressure
of those wild-faced Egyptians? The prophet wept over the vineyard of
Zion, because its hedge was broken down. But what Edens were these that
were left unsheltered in Egypt, and so unsheltered!
But we must pass on to greater things. There seems nothing contrary to
our Blessed Lady's perfections to suppose that in this dolor the fear
which belongs to human nature, and which even our Lord felt in His most
holy Soul, was allowed to exercise sway over her. If such were not the
case, we should then have to put her before ourselves as a creature
apart, not belonging to the angelic family on the one hand, nor to the
human family on the other, but as a glory of God, not singular only, as
in her office and her sanctity she truly is, but removed also from the
sphere of humanity. We should have to imagine that her gifts did for
her what His Divine Nature even did not do for our Lord, that they
should make her cease to be woman, while it left Him true Man. She
would then be no example to us, and the idea of sorrow in her would be
so strange and unsphered a thing, that it would seem fictitious and
unreal, a merely symbolical doctrine. or a beautiful allegory of the
Incarnation. There can, therefore. be little doubt but that fear was
one of the chief sufferings of this Flight into Egypt. There is perhaps
hardly a passion which exercises a more tyrannical sway over the soul
than fear, or any mental impression more closely connected with
physical pain. It comes over us like a spirit from without, leaping
upon us from some unsuspected cavern we know not where or how. We
cannot prepare for its coming, for we know not when to expect it. We
cannot resist it when it comes, for its touch is possession, and its
mere advent is already victory. It brings a shadow over skies where
there are no clouds, and turns the very sunshine into beams of frost.
It breathes through us like a wind, searching everywhere, and chilling
our most vital faculties. It goes near to paralyzing our powers of
action, so that we are like men who can see and hear without being able
either to speak or move. If it were not eminently a transient passion,
ever flowing by the law of its own restlessness, we should lose first
of all the freedom of our will, and then the light of our reason.
Meanwhile its presence in the soul is accompanied, one while by a
disquietude which is worse than suffering, and the continuance of which
it seems to us would be incompatible with life, and then another while
by a sharpness of anguish which is always on the very point of being
literally unendurable. It is not pain, it is torture. How seldom have
we ever found the reality of an evil so insufferable as the terrified
expectation which preceded it! Earth does not grow a sorrow, human
justice has not devised a punishment, of which this is not true.
Now, we have to imagine the operation of this passion among the
indescribable sensibilities of our Lady's soul, and at the same time in
the midst of her incomparable holiness. There is ever the union with
God unbroken; there is ever the tranquility which comes of that union
undisturbed. The sanctuary is assailed, but it is not desecrated. Fear
dwells within the precincts, but the cloister is not forced. She knew
full well that Calvary was to come, and she knew how far off it was.
Hence, she could have no doubt that her Child was not now to perish by
the hand of Herod. Yet fear, without obscuring her mental vision, might
destroy her feeling of security. For thoughts in fear may be just and
judicious in themselves, but they dwell alone; they are barren; they
have no conclusions. Is not that just what the book of Wisdom says of
fears, [Chp. xvii] that it is "nothing else but a yielding up of the
succors from thought, and, while there is less expectation from within,
the greater doth it count the ignorance of that cause which bringeth
the torment"? Besides, our Lord may have veiled His Heart from her
then. True, He was not to die; but what other abysses of misery might
not be yawning invisibly at her very feet? There are many things short
of death which are worse than death. Possible sufferings are
inexhaustible, even within the limited lot of man. She might be
separated from Him. Herod might give Him to another to nurse, under his
own eye. What Egyptian darkness would be like that? The eclipse on
Calvary would be comfort and sunshine in the face of such a woeful
separation as that. Her foresight did not cover every I thing with its
wide field of vision, or, if it did, she might not be sure that it did.
There might be depths which she had to come upon unawares, like the
Three Days' Loss. Might she not be coming on some now?
What were the extremities to which a sanctity like hers could suffer
panic? Would she start at the forms of robbers, as they distantly
scoured the wilderness? Where the uneasy night wind awoke suddenly in
the muttering palm-tops, or in the tresses of the pensile acacia, like
indistinguishable human whispers, was she afraid? Did the dark eyes of
the Egyptians frighten her when their gaze was fixed inquiringly upon
the Child? Did fear spur her footsteps, deceive her eyesight, play
cruelly with her suspicious hearing? Did she every now and then clasp
her babe witb a more tremulous firmness, and inwardly vow she would
never part with Him without laying down her life? Did the ears of her
informed spirit ringing with the lamentations of Bethlehem's mothers,
or
the heart-rending trebles of the little ones fly after her on the winds
of the desert? Thou knowest, Mother! We must not dare to say. But who
can doubt that fear inflicted upon her the most awful sufferings,
making both the wilderness and Egypt a Gethsemane of years? Truly it
was the shadow of an Egyptian darkness that fell upon her; and although
with her we cannot take to the letter what Scripture says of that old
Egyptian darkness, yet there is much in it which will help us to that
vague and indefinable view of what our Lady suffered, which alone it is
desirable or reverent to take. "During that night, in which nothing
could be done, and which came upon them from the lowest and deepest
hell, they were sometimes molested with the fear of monsters; sometimes
fainted away, their soul failing them, for a sudden and unlooked for
fear was come down upon them. Moreover, if any of them had fallen down,
he was kept shut up in prison without irons. For if anyone were a
husbandman, or a shepherd, or a laborer in the field, and was suddenly
overtaken, he endured a necessity from which he could not fly. For they
were all bound together with one chain of darkness. Whether it were a
whistling wind, or the melodious voices of birds among the spreading
branches of trees, or a fall of water running down with violence, or
the mighty noise of stones tumbling down, or the running that could not
be seen of beasts playing together, or the roaring voice of wild
beasts, or a rebounding echo from the highest mountains,---these things
made them to swoon for fear. For the whole world ,vas enlightened with
a clear light, and none were hindered in their labors: but over them
was spread a heavy night, an image of that darkness which was to come
upon them. But they were to themselves more grievous than the
darkness." [Wisd., Chp. xvii, 13-20]
But the most grievous part of this dolor remains to be told, and there
is no one who can tell it as it should be told. We should understand
it, if we had a revelation of Mary's heart; but even then we could not
translate it into words. It was a mixture of sharpest pain, wounded
feeling, distress so great as to seem un- expected, horror that yearned
to disbelieve what it saw, a cruel crushing together of all the loves
of her immaculate heart. It arose from the vision of men's hatred of
Jesus, made visible in this dolor. Beautiful Child! wonderfully
sheathing the keen grandeurs of Godhead in that scabbard of true
infant's flesh! Was there ever any thing so winning, ever any thing so
hateless, as that blessed Child? Why should men turn against Him thus?
Why should the eyes of kings pierce the shrouds of His innocuous
obscurity, like wild lynxes, and why thirst for the little shallow
stream of His blood, as if He were a tempting prey for savage natures?
Harmless, helpless, silent, pleading, beautiful! and men drive Him from
their haunts as if He were a monster, heartless, tyrannical,
bloodstained, with all the repulsion of great iniquity and dark secret
crime about Him! And she knew how beautiful He was, and therefore how
unutterable was the sacrilege of that cruel exile, of that murderous
pursuit, which only ended in exile, because God would not let it go
further, and balked ferocity of its victim. She knew too that He was
God, the Creator come among His creatures; and although He has not
interfered with them yet, has not even spoken to them, but has only
looked at them with His sweet Face, they are tormented with
restlessness, feel Him a burden, though she who carried Him all over
the
desert can testify that He is lighter than a feather, or at least seems
so to her maternal love, and finally make Him fly before them even
before He can walk. This was the welcome God has been waiting for, now
these four thousand years! Merciful heavens! is not Divine Love a thing
simply incredible?
All the loves in her heart were crushed. Jesus was hated. Had men
simply avoided Him and got out of His way, it would have been an
intolerable sorrow. Had they gone by Him with indifference as if He was
no concern of theirs, but just a living man, as their senses told them,
who increased by one the population of the world, and was otherwise
poor and commonplace, even that would have been acutest grief. For men
to ignore, to misapprehend, to disappreciate Jesus would have been a
lifelong thorn in her heart, which nothing could have extracted. But He
was hated. And there He was flitting like a speck over the wilderness
out of sight of the people, whom He loved the most of all those He came
to save. She loved Him with many loves, because by many rights, and
under many titles. She was wounded separately and bitterly in every one
of these loves. She was His creature and His mother. She loved Him with
the in tensest natural affection as having borne Him. Her love was
marvelously grown with His growing beauty and her increasing
experience of Him. She loved Him with supernatural love because of His
holiness, and her own which was attracted by His. She loved Him as the
Saviour and Redeemer of the world. She loved with perfect adoration His
Divine Nature, and the Person of the Eternal Word. Beyond this, where
could love go? Whither could it reach? But she loved also, and with an
enthusiasm which was like a second life to her, the glory of God, His
exaltation by His creatures, and the honor of the Divine Majesty. She
loved the Most Holy Trinity with all the loves the Saints have ever
known, with complacency, congratulation, desire, condolence, imitation.
esteem. Now Jesus was the very end at which all these glories of God
aimed, the very monument on which they were all hung, the very fountain
out of which they all came, the very food by which alone they were all
to be satisfied, the very price which was equal to their value, the
very means, the only means, by which Mary could love them as she
desired. There was not one thing about which God is tender, which was
not outraged and wounded in this attempt upon the life of Jesus, in
this hatred of His Son whom He had sent. And fearfully, like stigmata
upon the saints, upon Mary's ardent love passed the many wounds of the
Eternal Object of her love.
This was not all. She loved men. Their own wives and mothers never
loved them as she did. No missionary ever burned for souls as she
burned. She had all their interests at heart, and the interests of
every one of them. She would have died to save the lowest of them, if
the limited sacrifice of a mere creature could have merited their
salvation. She would have suffered tortures to hinder any of them from
a single sin, for their own sake as well as God's. But what need of
more words? She was going to give them Jesus. She had made up her mind
to it. Nay, virtually she had done it. Oh, how men wounded her now in
this love of hers, unrequited, disdained, as it were thrown back upon
her! She shuddered at the abysses of darkness, the capabilities of
separation from God, which this hatred of Jesus disclosed; and a sort
of sacred horror passed upon her, when she perceived in it such a
terrible manifestation of the power and malice of the evil spirits.
They did not yet know that Jesus was God, but their instincts drew them
round His grace and holiness by a sort of attraction which they did not
understand, but which nevertheless rendered them furious. And men, men
whose nature the Word had assumed, men for whom Jesus was to die, men
whose mother she was to be, even the chosen tribes of Israel, were
almost possessed by these evil spirits, were following their leading,
doing their bidding, without knowing how terrible were the things that
they were doing. Oh, can we not conceive how out of the most broken of
all broken hearts the Mother of mercy would forestall that sweet
omnipotent prayer of her Child, Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do?
Now this second dolor, as has been already said, was not a transient
mystery. It was not a complete action, done, and over at once. It
spread itself over a long time. It endured for years. For all those
years Mary had to suffer all these sorrows. Besides the seven years'
sojourn in Egypt, which opened the wound wider in the exiled heart day
by day, this dolor was a double dolor. It had an echo for it; for the
Return was a sort of echo to the Flight. There was the same weary way
to travel, the same fatigues, the same privations, and many of the same
dangers. The fear, however, was less, or rather it had sunk into
anxiety about the great object, the Child's life; though it had still
many lesser objects by the way. There were, however, some aggravating
circumstances in the Return, by which it is distinguished from the
Flight. The age of Jesus presented a peculiar difficulty to their
poverty. He was in His eighth year,---too young to walk, too old and
heavy for His Mother's arms. Either it would entail upon them the cost
of some beast of burden, which would also materially increase the toils
of St. Joseph in the wilderness, or they must have borne their precious
Burden by turns, when He had allowed the natural consequences of
weariness, or the soreness caused by the burning sand and prickly
sand plants, to work their will upon Him and make it impossible for Him
to walk farther. The increased age of St. Joseph was also a feature in
the Return which Mary never for a single hour forgot. Labor had bent
him, and years---years especially of recent disquietude---had left
their furrows on his holy face. He was easily tired; for his strength
was soon spent; and Jesus helps less with their cross those that are
near Him than those who are farther off. The age of Jesus also brought
to Mary, as usual, fresh reasons for loving Him, and ceaseless
augmentations of the old love; and all this heightened the pangs she
was enduring. Moreover, she and He were now upon the road to Calvary;
their faces turned right toward it. Can that thought ever have left her
through the whole Return? And on the frontiers of the Holy Land fear
met them again, and turned them away from Zion, and sent them back to
the seclusion of Nazareth. Scripture says, "There is no peace for the
wicked." Alas! when we look at the world we are tempted to cry out that
it is rather for the good that there is no peace!
From these peculiarities of the second dolor we may now pass to the
dispositions with which our Blessed Lady endured it. Much may be
gathered from what has been already said. But there are three points to
which our attention should be especially directed. The first is, her
unselfish absorption in the sufferings of others. It is as if her
heart was put out into the hearts of others, in order to feel, to love,
to suffer, to be tortured. As we pass in review the incidents of this
dolor, it never comes to us for a moment to think how cold she often
was, how hungry, how wind-burnt, how sleepless, how footsore. how
harassed in mind, how great her bodily fatigue, as if these were the
elements of her own sorrow. They were sufferings which we, her sons, do
not forget, and as sufferings they were part of her endurance. But as
subjects upon which she dwelt, or which she bewailed, or which she even
much adverted to, we should feel that we were dishonoring her if we put
them in the reckoning. Her sorrowful sympathies were all abroad. They
were lavished on Joseph, or they were centred in jesus. They covered
the whole majesty of God with their humblest condolence, or they went
out like a deluge over the entire earth, bathing all the souls of men
in every generation with her mournful pity and efficacious compassion.
They were everywhere but in her own miseries. They were for everyone
except herself. There seemed to be no effort about it. It was her way.
It came natural to her, because she behaved with grace as if it really
was a nature to her. As the moon reflects the light of the sun without
the least trouble to itself, and beautifies the earth without any
exertion, so Mary reflects God, and gives light, and shines, without
effort, almost unconsciously, as if it was simply her business to be
luminous and beautiful, and that there was no wonder in it at all.
Another disposition in this dolor was her keen sensitiveness about the
interests of God defrauded by sin. This is the new sense developed in
the soul by sanctity; and the more we grow in holiness the more keen
does this sense become. The range of its vision is wider, while, at the
same time, its perceptions are more accurate and minute. Its ardor
increases with the increase of grace, and, by a natural consequence,
its powers of making us suffer increase likewise. In the case of very
great Saints it becomes completely a passion, and, at last, possesses
itself of the whole life. There can, however, be hardly a comparison
between this sensitiveness, as developed in the highest Saints, and
the same feeling as it existed in the Mother of God. She was drawn
inside a Divine ring, and lived a Divine life. She had a sort of unity
with the Divine Majesty---a spiritual unity---which gave her a right to
share in the concerns of God; a right to be interested only in His
interests; a sort of actual participation in the sensibilities of His
glory, such as can belong to no other creature whatsoever. She is one
of the household, and, therefore, feels differently from one outside,
however dear a friend, however near a neighbor. Her prayer is not mere
intercession: there is in it a permitted jurisdiction over the Sacred
Heart and the Will of God, which renders it a different thing from the
intercession of the saints. All the elect work together with Jesus in
multiplying the fruit of His Passion; but there is allowed to her an
indefinable co-operation in the redemption of the world, to which the
co-operation of the Saints bears the same relation as their sympathy
with our Lord's Passion bears to our Lady's Compassion. If the
sufferings of St. Paul in his flesh[
Coloss., i. 24] "filled up those things that are
wanting of the sufferings of Christ for His Body, which is the Church,"
what must be said of Mary's dolors? These considerations, if they
cannot help our spiritual obtuseness to an adequate conception of our
Lady's sensitiveness for the glory of God, will at least enable us,
when we are astonished at the sublimity of this instinct in the saints,
to remember that hers was so much higher as to be out of sight of
theirs.
Even to us, down in the deep valleys where the merciful inquisitiveness
of grace has found us out, there is something inexpressibly mournful in
the way in which God is excluded from is Own creation. We are
considering now the mystery of the Creator's flight from His creatures.
Is there not also something quite as dreadful in the flight of the
creatures from their Creator, which we see going on all day? When faith
has opened our eyes, what a scene the world presents! Everywhere God,
with His omnipresent love, is pursuing His creatures. His guilty
creatures; but it is to save them, not to punish them. There is not a
recess of the world, not a retirement of poverty. not a haunt of sin,
not an unlikely or unbeseeming place for so vast a Majesty, where He is
not following His creatures and trying almost to force His great gifts
upon them. Swifter than the lightning. stronger than the ocean, more
universal than the air, is His glorious, many-sided compassion poured
out over the world which He has made. Everywhere are men flying from
this generous, this merciful, this tender pursuit. It seems as if the
grand object of their lives was to avoid God, as if time were a respite
from the necessity of God's presence in eternity, which it is unfair of
Him to interfere with, as if space were a convenience expressly
provided for creatures to get out of the way of their Creator. Little
boys even are flying from Him with all their might and main, as if they
understood the matter just as well as grown-up men, and had made up
their minds as determinedly about it. God speaks, entreats, pleads,
cries aloud; but still they run. He doubles His sunbeams upon them, to
win their hearts by the excess of His fatherly indulgence; but they
run. He throws shadows and darkness over them, to make them sober and
wise; but they run. He will
have them. Great graces go forth to their souls, like swift stones from
a sling, and they fall. But they are up again in a moment, and continue
their flight. Or if He gets up with them, because they are too much
hurt to rise on the instant, they only let Him wipe the blood and earth
from their wound and kiss them sweetly on the forehead, and they are
off again. He will not be baffled. He will hide Himself in the water of
a Sacrament, and make loving prey of infants before they have reached
the use of reason. It is well; but then He must slay them also if He
will keep them; for almost before they can walk they will run away from
Him. And what is this picture compared to the vision which was always
before our Blessed Mother's eyes?
But let us make the world stand still, and see how it looks. If our
common love of God, which is so poor, is irritated by the sight, what
must Mary have suffered? For what is irritation to our weakness to her
would be the most deep and transcending sorrow. God comes to His
creation. It does not stir. It cannot. It lies in the hollow beneath
Him, and has no escape. He comes in the beauty of a mercy, which is
almost incredible, because it is so beautiful. But seemingly it does
not attract the world. He draws nigh. Creation must do something now.
It freezes itself up before His eye. He may have other worlds, more
fertile, more accessible to Him, than this. In the spiritual tropics,
where the angels dwell, He may perhaps be welcome. But not here. This
is the North Pole of His universe. He shed His life's blood upon it,
and it would not thaw. It is unmanageable, unnavigable, uninhabitable,
for Him. He can do nothing at all with it, but let His sun make
resplendent colored lights in the icebergs, or bid the moon shine with
a wanner loveliness than elsewhere, or fill the long-night sky with the
streamers of the Aurora, which even the Esquimaux, burrowing in his
hut, will not go out to see. The only difference is that the material
pole understands its business, which is to make ice in all imaginable
shapes; whereas we men are so used to our own coldness, that we do not
know how cold we are, and imagine ourselves to be the temperate zone of
God's creation.
If God gets into His world, matters are not much mended. It is dismal
to think---would that it were also incredible---how much of the world
is tied up from Him, so as to render almost a miracle necessary in
order to insinuate grace into the soul. Look at whole regions of fair
beginnings, of good wishes, holy desires, struggling earnestness,
positive yearnings, and see how tyrannically the provisions of life
deal with all these interests of God. Here are souls tied up from God
by family arrangements. They have to live away from the means of grace,
or they are thrown among bad examples, or they are forced into
uncongenial dissipation, or they are put into the alternative of either
judging their parents or blunting their perceptions of God, or they are
entangled in unsuitable marriages, or they are forced into the
ambitious temptations of worldly positions, or their religious
vocations are rough-ridden. God is not to have His own way with them,
and will not have it. He on His side will not work miracles, and souls
are lost. How much again is tied up by money arrangements! The religion
of orphans is endangered by executors who have not the faith. Fortunes
are left under conditions which, without heroic grace, preclude
conversion. Place of abode is dictated by straitened circumstances, and
it so happens that spiritual disabilities come along with it. Questions
of education are unfavorably decided on pecuniary grounds, as also are
the choices of profession. Want of money is a bar to the liberty of
many souls, who, as far as we can judge, would use that liberty for
God. Even local arrangements tie up souls from God. There is a sort of
necessity of living for part of the year where regular sacraments are
not to be had, or where men must mix very much with people of another
creed, or must lay themselves out for political influence, or where
young people must break off habits of works of mercy only imperfectly
formed in the great city, which after all is a truer sanctuary of God
than the green, innocent country. How many also, without fault of their
own, or fault of anyone, are tied up from God by the temporal
consequences of some misfortune! Homes are broken up. Souls are
imprisoned in unsuitable occupations, and in un- favorable places; and
a host of religious inconveniences follow, from which there is
literally no escape. It may be said that, after all, the excellence of
religion is interior. But to how many is this interior spirit given?
Surely it is not one of God's ordinary graces. And how few really
interior persons are there, who are not visibly deteriorated when
their public supplies of grace are impoverished! Others again are tied
up from God by some irretrievable steps which they themselves have
taken, culpably or inculpably. It is as if an eternal fixity had
insinuated itself into some temporal decision. And no", souls are
helpless. They cannot be all for God, if they would, unless He
communicates to them some of the extraordinary graces of the mystical
saints. We have often need here to remember for our comfort, that, if
steps are irretrievable, nothing in the spiritual life is irremediable.
Who could believe the opposite doctrine, and then live? It is fearful
the power which men have to tie their fellow men up from God. What an
exercise it is for a hot temper, with a keen sense of injustice, and an
honest heartiness of love for God and souls, to have to work for souls
under the pressure of the great public system, organizations, and
institutions of a country which, has not the faith! To watch a soul
perilously balancing on the brink of the grand eternal question, and to
see plainly that the most ordinary fairness or the cheapest kindness
would save it, and not be able to command either,---it is a work of
knives in one's flesh, smarting unbearably. We have no right to demand
the fairness: indeed, the fairness is perhaps only visible from our our
point of view. We are more likely to get justice if we ask for it under
the title of privilege and by the name of kindness. For the sake of
Christ's poor, let us insist upon God's multiplying and prolonging our
patience! Thus, all the world over, in all classes, especially the
upper classes, creation is tied up as it were from God, and His
goodness has not fair play with it, unless He will break His own laws,
and throw Himself simply on His omnipotence. There is a tyranny of
circumstances, which does not seem far short of a necessity of sin. It
needs a definition of the faith to assure us that such a necessity is
happily an impossibility. We feel all this. It cuts to the quick. Now
it depresses, now it provokes, accordingly as it acts on the
inequalities of our little grace. Multiply it till the sum is beyond
figures, magnify it till its bulk fills space and hangs out beyond, and
then we shall have our Lady's sensitiveness about the honor of God's
majesty.
There is still another disposition in our Lady to which our
attention must be called. Her charity for sinners was proportioned to
her horror of sin. While on the one hand she mourned over the slighted
love of God and the scant harvest of His glory, she had no feeling of
bitterness against sinners. She was not angry with their guilt, but
unhappy for their sakes, because of the consequences of their guilt. It
was not in her heart to condemn them, only to pity them. To her eyes
sin came out clear and hideous when seen against the honor of God, but
when seen in the sinner the horror melted away in the flood of
compassion. Her zeal was not anxious to avenge the outrage on the
Divine Majesty by startling judgments and condign penalties. It sought
rather to repair the outrage by the conversion of the sinner. She
thought herself best consulting the interests of God's justice by
wishing well to His mercy. There is, in truth, a sort of reverence due
to sinners, when we look at them, not as in their sins, but simply as
having sinned, and being the objects of a Divine yearning. It is the
manifestation of this feeling in apostolic men which lures sinners to
them, and so leads to their conversion. The devotedness of our Blessed
Lord to sinners transfers a peculiar feeling to the hearts of His
servants. And, when the offenders come to repent, the mark of Divine
predilection in the great grace they are receiving is a thing more to
admire, and revere, and love, than the sin is a thing to hate in
connection with the sinner. In all reformatory institutions it is the
want of a supernatural respect for sinners which is the cause of
failure, the abundance of it which is the cause of success. When our
Lord strove to convert, it was always by kind looks, by loving words,
by an indulgence which appeared to border upon laxity. He did not
convert by rebuking. He rebuked Herod and the Pharisees just because He
did not vouchsafe to try to convert them. Because He let them alone,
therefore he spoke sharply to them. Such were the feelings of our
Blessed Lady in the view of sin, which this dolor brought before her.
She was not angry with men. She loved them, and was in her heart
so pitiful to them that she seemed rather to think their lot a hard one
than a guilty one. Her love for them rose with the measure of their
sins, just as the fulness of our Lord's time seems to have been the
fulness of the world's iniquity. However much their sins widened, her
love was always wider. There is scarcely any thing in which the
instincts of sanctity are more peculiar than the view which a holy
heart takes of sinners. It testifies more unerringly than any thing
else to secret communion with Jesus, to deep, tender union with God,
and to the right apprehension as well as the happy infection of the
Sacred Heart. It is always the contemplative saints who have loved
sinners best, even more than the active saints who were wearing out
their lives to convert them. Is this the reason why the contemplative
element is an essential ingredient in a complete apostle?
But this dolor contains also many lessons for ourselves. In fact, the
Residence in Egypt is a complete picture of the way in which God, our
Blessed Lord, the Blessed Sacrament, the faith, and the saints, are in
the world. There is the life of common things made wonderful by an
interior spirit. There is the company of Mary and Joseph. There are the
three evangelical sisters, labor, poverty, and detachment. There is the
mysterious hiddenness, with apparently nothing to hide under. There is
the exile, and an Egyptian exile. There is the love of God in supreme
sovereignty. And finally, there is our Lord in the world as a little
Child; and so is the invisible God, despite the blaze of His
perfections, in His own creation; and so is our Lord also still, in His
Church and Holy See, despite of all its triumphs; and so is the Blessed
Sacrament, notwithstanding all the luminous theology which has been
written about it, and so is the faith, in the jostling interests and
grandeurs of modern civilization, despite of its old historic conquests
and its present daily propagation; and so are the saints, down in the
hollows of life, where publicity cannot find them out, despite the
miracles they work. They are all in the world as little children. We,
too, are part of the picture. There is the mighty Nile, "lasping
through old hushed Egypt like a dream." There are the pyramids, the
monuments of pagan greatness. There are the sandy wilds, the rich loamy
fields, which the inundation annually renews, the palm-groves, and the
many-colored life of the Oriental bazaar, and Jesus, Mary, Joseph,
somewhere. The allegory is complete. Such is the world, such is our
native land, to us. God is hidden in it. All is awkward and foreign to
us, though it is native; for grace has made aliens of us after a
strange fashion. Patiently we wait to do God's work, counting the
years. One will come which will be the last. It will bear us home, and
drop us at His feet; and as we have been all for God in our exile, so
God will be all to us in our eternal home. Blessed be His mercy! it was
unloving to say that; for is He not all to us already?
But, besides the lesson which the allegory itself contains, there are
others which we must lay to heart. We must learn first of all to
sympathize with Jesus, especially in the sufferings which we ourselves
have caused Him. Religion is a personal love of God, the sincerity of
which is attested by our obedience. It is the love which is the soul,
the value, the significance of it all. To be truly religious, our souls
must live in a peculiar atmosphere of their own, a charmed atmosphere,
which the world cannot breathe in and therefore cannot break through.
We must be unable to breathe out of an atmosphere of prayer. The soul
must have a world of hopes and fears of its own, its own set of tastes
and sympathies, instincts and forebodings of its own, its own
gravitations and repulsions. It will not do merely to believe a number
of doctrines, or to keep certain commandments. These things are
essential; but they do not make up the whole. They are the flesh and
the blood, but the soul is love. Now, the chief way in which we create
this charmed atmosphere around ourselves is by devotion to the
mysteries of our Blessed Lord. Mary sanctified herself in this dolor by
sympathy with Jesus. The venerable Joanna of Jesus and Mary, a
Franciscaness, when she was meditating on our Lord's Flight into Egypt,
suddenly heard a great noise, like the running and clashing of armed
men pursuing some one, and presently she saw a beautiful little boy,
panting with fatigue, and running up to her at the top of his speed,
crying, O Joanna! help Me and hide Me. I am Jesus of Nazareth, flying
from sinners, who wish to kill Me, and who persecute Me as Herod did; I
beseech you, save Me! The grand thing at which we must aim is to bring
it to pass that our Lord's mysteries, His Passion and Childhood
especially, should be continually in our thoughts. They should not be
in the least like some past history, about which we may feel poetical
or sentimental, or have favorite views. But they should be as if they
were living, contemporaneous, going on perpetually before our eyes, and
in which we ourselves are actors. This is the difference between the
mysteries of the Incarnate Word in the New Testament and the glorious
manifestations of God in the Old Testament. These last are our lessons;
the first are our life. They do not simply remain written there and
shine. They live, they put forth attractions, they give power, they
hold grace, they transform. The vitality of the Incarnation. has gone
into them. Here is the secret reason of the preference of the Old
Testament over the New, which is so congenial to the temper of heresy.
They, who have no Blessed Sacrament, and have dethroned Mary, have lost
the meaning of the Incarnation. The Gospels are beautiful history to
them, and little else. But the Exodus is far more romantic, more
stirring, more glorious. and so is the conquest of Canaan, and the
reign of David, and the lofty patriotism of the Prophets. Hence, the
enthusiasm which Catholics feel for the Gospel incidents heretics feel
in the Old Testament history. But with the former it is more than
enthusiasm. It is the life of their religion, the breath of their
sanctity, the endless Presence and Vision of their Beloved. So by
assiduous meditation, by sorrowing love or by rejoicing love, must we
wear our way into the mysteries of Jesus, assimilating them to
ourselves, living in them, feeling with them, until their mere
character of history has added to itself the reality of a worship, and
His Heart, as it were, beats in ours, as another, better, and
supernatural life.
A further lesson, which this dolor teaches us, is that suffering, when
it is God's will, is better than external spiritual advantages. The
Blessed Veronica of Binasco, an Augustinianess, was permitted in spirit
to accompany Jesus and Mary in their Flight into Egypt, and, when it
was over, our Lord said to her, "My daughter, thou hast. seen through
what fatigues we have reached this country. Learn, from this, that no
one receives graces except he suffers." This we can better understand;
but when suffering is pitted against the means of grace, when its
presence involves the loss of our external spiritual advantages, it
might have seemed otherwise. To submit joyously to suffering under
these circumstances involves something more than ordinary submission.
To believe that, because it is our Lord's will, suffering is therefore
better for us than even the continuation of those advantages, requires
a large exercise of faith. The question of being religious is the
question of our eternal salvation. Experience has amply disclosed to us
how much depends on regularity in our spiritual exercises. A day for
God, what else is it but the legitimate conclusion from a morning with
God? Many a man leans his whole life on his daily mass, and it bears
him well through to the end. Is there a more helpless being on earth
than the soul, long used to frequent communion, and then suddenly and
for a length of time deprived of it? Besides, how many people do we see
who are the better for suffering? Does it not harden many? Guillore
says sickness unsanctifies more than it sanctifies. This is a hard
saying. Let us make abatements from it. There is enough truth left to
make us exceedingly melancholy. Cardinal de Berulle, speaking of
interior sufferings and trials of spirit, said he had known many
eminent souls in them, and he had only seen one who had not retrograded
under their influence. He was not a man who exaggerated. And yet, in
spite of all these terrible sayings and experiences, we are to welcome
suffering from God as better than hours of prayer, or the daily
sacrifices, or heavenly sacraments. We may look back wistfully upon
those things, but not unconformedly. It is a hard lesson to learn. Who
does not remember the first time he had to learn it? How disquieting it
seemed! Common things looked unintelligible. Conscience had to
rearrange itself on a great number of questions. Never was more
spiritual direction wanted than now, when least of it was to be had.
Say our suffering was illness. How much did pain dispense us from, and
what pain was great enough to dispense us from anything? There were
more trials, more demands upon us, because of our suffering, and
apparently less means of grace to keep up the interior supply. A great
many things which had seemed fair and strong in health were now tried
in us, stretched and let go again, and proved in a variety of ways. Not
a few of them broke down altogether. It was a hard time. Sorrows always
rush upon a sorrowful man, like cowardly beasts who dare not attack
their prey till it is wounded. So we had more to bear then, when we had
less strength to bear it. It was a vexatious lesson, learned in dread
and insecurity, fruitful of annoyance and tears. But for the time it
was learned; and, if the remembrance now is all blotted and blurred by
the tiresome venial sins which disfigure it all over, nevertheless
self-distrust was deepened; we got nearer to God; we had grown in the
inner man; we were more real, because we were more interior; and we
were conscious of additional power, because grace was more at home in
us.
Our Lady's conduct in this dolor teaches us the additional lesson that
we must aim most at compassion for others, when we are suffering most
ourselves. This is the way to gain the peculiar graces of suffering.
Grace and nature are almost always at cross- purposes. Because Moses
had the hastiest of tempers, he became the meekest of men. So sorrow
naturally shuts us up in ourselves, and concentrates us upon itself,
while grace forces us to become more considerate because we are
suffering, and to go out of ourselves, and to pour out upon others, as
a libation before God, all that tenderness and pity which nature would
make us lavish upon ourselves. There is something in diverting
ourselves from ourselves when we are in grief, which has a peculiar
effect of enlarging the heart, and swelling the dimensions of the whole
character, and something also so particularly pleasing to God, that,
when it is done from a supernatural motive and in imitation of our
Lord, He seems to recompense it instantly by the most magnificent
graces. To sit by the bedside of a poor invalid, when we are ourselves
inwardly prostrated by illness, and our pulses are throbbing, and our
head beats all over, and through pain our words a little wander,
as if we were inattentive,---or again to listen by the hour to the
little complaints of a heart ill at ease, while we ourselves are
secretly groaning under a still heavier load,---or to throw out joy and
light by tone, by look, by manner, by smile, over a circle dependent
upon us, when uneasy cares are secretly gnawing at our hearts, and
comfortless
expectations, and perturbing foresights, and suspicions are haunting us
like ghosts,---these are the grand ventures in the commerce of grace.
These bring the galleons from the heavenly Indies safe into port with
untold wealth and foreign rarities. One hour of such work as that is
often worth a month of prayer; and who does not know the enormous value
of a month of prayer? Moreover, it is the want of this forcible
unselfishness which makes sorrow generally so much less sanctifying
than Christian principles would lead us to expect. We almost look upon
suffering as a sort of dispensation from charity. We deem it to be a
time when we may lawfully love ourselves. By the very touch of
affliction God draws us, as we suppose, for a while out of the calls
upon our brotherly affection which surround us on every side. We are to
receive now, rather than to give. But in reality there is no time when
we may lawfully love ourselves; for, as St. Paul says, "Christ pleased
not Himself." If there be a moment in which it might be lawful to feel
no love for others, it would be the act of dying, because in that
moment all our love is due to God. Self has no place anywhere in love.
When love touches self, it either becomes a duty, or is an
unworthiness. It is true also that sorrow draws us into solitude, but
not an uncharitable, selfish solitude. It guides us gently away from
the world as a theatre of worldliness, but not from the world as a
field of mutual and self-sacrificing love. When the Saints keep their
sorrows secret, it is no doubt mainly because love is fond of secrets,
which none but its object and itself shall know, and Divine love is the
shyest, the most secret-loving, of all loves. The Saints fear lest God
should not prize what others know, because of His dear jealousy, and
lest the sympathy of others should take off that heavenly bloom which a
sorrow keeps only so long as it is untold. But, besides this, we may be
sure that unselfishness was another reason for their secrecy. They
would not spread sorrow in the world. There was too much of it already.
They would not swell the contagion. If suffering was harder to bear
untold than told, were they not ambitious to love suffering? Anyhow, if
they could help it, their particular griefs should never unwreathe a
single smile from any face on earth. The tired pedestrian sighs when he
sees a steep and rugged hill to climb, and he is already fit to faint
from weariness: so is it with the poor mourner, bent beneath his
burden, when he is shown Jesus and Mary in their woes, and is told that
as they sorrowed, so must he. But how else can it be? Our sorrow must
be measured by our sympathy with others. Our active, cheerful, quiet,
unobtrusive ministries to others must be the invariable index of the
keenness of our martyrdom.
We learn also from the Flight into Egypt that we must not question the
ways of God, either in our own sufferings, or in the griefs of those we
love. God might have spared Mary in many ways. Almost every
circumstance of this dolor seems unnecessarily aggravated. Even without
miracle how many alleviations might have been contrived. But, beyond
that, would it have surprised us if Omnipotence had stepped in to work
miracles in such a case as this? There is something not uncommon about
religious people which it is very difficult to define, but which looks
like irreverence. Of course, it is not so. But persons who have habits
of prayer, and do not with sufficient exactness and recollection extend
those habits into the actions of the rest of the day, and so saturate
them with the spirit of prayer, unintentionally acquire a sort of
familiarity with God which is not altogether respectful to Him. They
think that if they pray more to God than others they must necessarily
know more of God than others. This, however, is by no means the case.
Prayer is not the whole of
spirituality, neither is it in itself
the most solid part of devotion. It wants ulterior processes to make it
solid. There are some good men in whom prayer is really the least solid
part of their spirituality. There are exercises more interior than
prayer, in which the soul learns more of God, and learns it faster. Not
that these things can exist without prayer, or will survive its
discontinuance. Only they are not prayer. Then these men, whose almost
exclusive spiritual practice is prayer, put themselves upon intimate
terms with God, and, especially if their prayer is the prayer of
sentiment, acquire a habit of thinking of God and themselves, not of
God alone,---of God in them, rather than of God in Himself. The results
of this betray themselves in times of sorrow, and particularly of
interior trials. The submission of such men is not instantaneous. They
would fain talk to God about it, and, if they cannot persuade Him, at
least let Him persuade them. To this extent He must flatter them. They
will accept the cross directly God and they conjointly agree to put it
on self; but not if it is His act, done without consulting them. Or at
least they will satisfy nature, by dignifiedly complaining to God of
what He has done, and insisting somewhat freely and untimorously on the
additional graces by which He is to compensate them for this new
burden. In fact, they question the ways of God, and so lose the
childlike spirit of sanctity. Men may not assail God, even with the
impetuosity of their prayers: their business is to adore. Otherwise,
the gracefulness of submission is gone. The right to more intimate
union with God is forfeited. The waters of grace in their soul become
shallow, and their spirit of prayer thin, peevish, vexed, and wailing.
All this is because, in their prayer, they have had the habit of being
something before God, instead of being nothing. It is melancholy to see
how apt spiritual persons are to be impertinent to God. Perhaps the
fewness of the saints is attributable to this.
But there is comfort even here. God knows our weakness. We think no one
can enter into it as we do. But He knows it infinitely better. He
practises the most incredible forbearance toward us. He makes the most
unimaginable allowances. Woe unto us if we should venture to make
excuses for ourselves, if it were but the thousandth part of the
excuses He makes for us! But we have yet another lesson to learn. We
spend the most of our lives in the Holy Land, in quietness and at home.
Either we are in the Holy City, with the courts of the temple
conveniently at hand, or in the unworldly sequestration of Nazareth, Or
by the blue water flapping on the shore of the calm Gennesareth. But
sometimes we have to go down into Egypt to buy the wholesome corn of
tribulation, the best sustenance of our souls. Sometimes we have to fly
thither from before the face of men or the machinations of the devils.
Now, the lesson is that, whatever and wherever we are, we always have
Jesus with us. No time is inconvenient for Him, no place unlikely.
There is no darkness but He is the light, no light but its best light
is He. Alas that a truth so sweet to be remembered should so easily be
forgotten! Yet who does not forget it? Who is not always for- getting
it? Could Mary forget Him when she bore Him in her arms? Why should we?
Why distract ourselves from such a companion? How be so near Him, yet
so seldom advert to Him? There are many heavy weights which the thought
of Him would make lighter. There is a self-willed liberty, which
displeases self and leaves dejection after it, which would be sweetly
taken captive if His arms were felt twining round our necks. There are
chills in the heart, which we should not feel if He were nestling
warmly against it. There is a loneliness which beckons temptation to
come and people its wilderness, which the company of Jesus would turn
into blameless talk, and song, and gladness. It is easy to leave Jesus,
if we let Him run by our side over the sands, and forget His presence;
but if we carry Him in our arms, as love and Mary do, it requires much
evil courage to lay our Burden down upon the sand and wilfully walk
away. He is ever with us; and He is with us ever as a Child: partly
that the burden may be lighter, partly that love may come more easily,
partly because His littleness better suits our own. There is but one
true symbol of the Christian soul. We must never paint it otherwise
before our mind's eye. In the dark and in the bright, by dear Jordan or
by dark Nile, it is truly, and forever, a Madonna and Child. Such is
the second dolor, the Flight into Egypt. Who has not been devoted to it
from his childhood upward? With how many early pious imaginings has it
not been interwoven! It has been a type of life to us. It was a poetry
with prayer in it,---a prayer whose reality was enhanced by its poetry.
Ah! it wakes old years, and old tears as well; for it seems to wake
those who have long been dead. Childish memories,---early beginnings of
which God has taken care,---flowers, that have borne fruits in
grace,---a Divine love, sometimes obscured but never lost, and distinct
steps. taken in the knowledge of Jesus,---all these things, with the
soft light of an unremorseful childhood over them, come sweetly out of
this beautiful mystery of Jesus and Mary. Times come back when it
looks, in the distance, as if He and we had been but one then, and His
Mother and our own blend indistinctly into one shape, and speak with
one kind of voice. And there is the sunset in the wilderness, the great
orb flashing on the rim of the desert horizon, its light reflected in
Joseph's eyes; and then there is Jesus sleeping on His Mother's lap,
and the round moon above, and the glittering well, and the whispering
palm, and night breathing heavily over the yellow sands. But the dead
do not come back again. There were figures in the picture once which
are missing now. The years rob us as they pass. One by one, men and
things are missing. God alone is never missing.
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VIEW THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY OF
SORROWS, VERY LARGE, PLAIN
 
HOME--------SEVEN
SORROWS DEVOTION--------THE PASSION
www.catholictradition.org/Passion/dolor2.htm
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