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JMJ
JMJ
Third Sunday after Easter
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| A little while, and now you shall not see Me; and again, a little while... I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice... |
Today's liturgy begins to direct our thoughts toward the coming Ascension of Jesus: A little while, and now you shall not see Me... because I go to the Father...
The Holy Gospel (Jn. 16.16-22) which relates this passage is taken from
the discourse that Our Lord made to the Apostles at the Last Supper. His
purpose was to prepare them for His departure, before He went to His
Passion and Death; but the Church presents to us Our Lord's farewell
today, before His Ascension.
Having accomplished His mission,
Jesus must return to the Father Who sent Him and Whom Our Lord bid
farewell. And see how His farewell to His Father meant the deepest sorrow and the
greatest pain - the cost of what it takes to love God and us for God's
sake. Now, the Beloved warns us so that we shall not be scandalized when He would leave us for a little while: You shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice.
A little while
..., that is, our short lifetime. We only have a short lifetime but
"this life is as precious as it is short," says St. Aphonsus Liguori,
for, in every moment, if we spend it well in a greater and therefore a
more perfect "communion of life" with Him through prayer (nourished by orthodox spiritual reading and
moments of recollection), penance and mortification, worthy reception of
the Sacraments - most especially Holy Communion, and a life of virtue -
governed by the truths of our Faith and crowned with charity - then we
will have proved to Our Beloved how dear He truly is in our
hearts. That all these efforts were but our dear tokens of restlessness
until that day, in the evening of our lives, when He comes, to examine
us in love, that we shall see Him "face to face" for the reward.
You shall lament and weep, for to enter more and more into a perfect "communion of life" with Our Beloved Crucified
it must be by God's ways, not our ways. In God's short sensible
'absence', He has determined how are we to "walk securely [as we]
journey through this dark night" (St. John of the Cross, "Ascent of Mt.
Carmel," II, 6). Accordingly, we are "not [to be] united with God in
this life through understanding, or through enjoyment, or through
imagination, [or through feeling], or through any other sense," says our
holy father John of the Cross, "but only faith, hope, and charity..."
(ibid.).
God shall deprive us then of all our too familiar human
ways of seeing ourselves, others, and the world around us. God shall
'blind' us, so to speak, and blind us completely for "those who are not
yet entirely blind will not allow a good guide to lead them," explains
St. John of the Cross (II, 4). "Still able to perceive a little,"
continues the same Doctor of Teresian Carmel, "they think
that the road they see is the best, for they are unable to see other
and better ones" (ibid.). The light of the Faith must, according to our
holy father John of the Cross, "[nullify] the light of the intellect...
[which] knows only in the natural way, that is, by [the very limited]
means of the senses " (II, 3).
God shall also "draw [us] away from
[all the imaginary] props and boundaries" (III, 16) by which we "evoke
and fashion" (ibid.) a 'form' of the incomprehensible God. God must
shatter that form which is not of Him, which the modern world delusively
hoped for - if, after all, it can never escape the fact of God's
existence - so that it may be able to live the way it pleases without
anybody 'moralizing' over it, and which the Vatican of New 'Catholic'
Orientation uses in presenting a 'relevant' Catholicism for its
ecumenical overtures (cf., our post "The Ultimate Delusion of Vatican II 'Catholicism'"). And how truly they, who would rather be so deluded,
shall lament and weep on the appointed day while calling to the mountains, fall upon us, and to the hills: cover us (Lk. 23.30) when the true God shall come upon them as the terrible God of wrath!
And
God shall annihilate all the affections even to the deepest recessions
of the heart that are not of Him. And the chief of these affections are
those ephemeral 'joys' based as they are on insecure foundations (as the
passing goods that the world can offer and the pleasures of the flesh).
God must so scrape off all these hardened dross that our hearts may
beat only the beatings of His Heart (in Scholastic theological parlance,
our "human and lowly will... changed into the divine will, made
identical with the will of God" - St. John of the Cross, III, 16). What a
Cross shall this entail, the Crucified shows us (cf., "Christian Love: Love of the Cross").
But the world shall rejoice. The world
(cf., our post "Catholic Unity...") rejoices and wants to rejoice at any cost, because it is immersed in
the pleasures of this life, with no thought of what awaits it beyond -
which even tries to repudiate this beyond. If it cannot escape the
inevitable sufferings of life, it tries to stifle its sorrow in
pleasure, by contriving to extract from every fleeting moment all the
enjoyment possible. And since there is at the moment a seeming absence
of God, a seeming internally-induced destruction of that Order
constituted under the dominion of Christ the King - as the continual sacrifice (Dan. 12.11), upon which this divine Order rests, has been taken away (ibid.) and replaced by the abomination of desolation (Mt. 24.15) to be the "norm" in the holy place (Mt. 24.15: 1 Machabees; cf., also "The Catholic Sanctuary Prefigured in OT, II" ) - this world is boasting: "We have at last broken
the bonds of the traditional Catholic Order asunder: and we have cast
away its yoke from us" (cf., Ps. 2.3). Why doth the way of the wicked prosper: why is it well with all them that transgress, and do wickedly? Thou hast planted them, and they have taken root... (Jer. 12.1,2).
Then, as Our Lord said:
So also you now indeed have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your
heart shall rejoice; and your joy no man shall take from you.
"O my Delight, Lord of all creatures and my God!
How long must I languish for Your presence?
O tedious, O painful, O dying life!
What lonely, hopeless solitude!
What then, O Lord, when , when....
What shall I do, my Sovereign Good. What shall I do?
... Ah! My God and Creator,
You wound and do heal;
You strike but leave no wound;
You kill to give more life!
... Let it be so, my God, because it is Your will;
I have no other will than to love You....
O my soul, submit to the will of Your God; it is best for you.
Serve Him and trust in His mercy;
when by penance you have won some little claim to pardon for your sins,
He will ease your pain.
Do not try to rejoice until you have suffered."
- St. Teresa of Jesus
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