A Year With the Mystics is your daily companion of prayer and meditation, offering one page of mystical wisdom for each day of the year. Read on for the mystics’ meditations on joyful suffering.
Happy Victim!
O My God! Will Your Justice alone find souls willing to immolate themselves as victims? Does not Your Merciful Love need them too? On every side this love is unknown, rejected; those hearts upon whom You would lavish it turn to creatures. . . . [They] do this instead of throwing themselves into Your arms and of accepting Your infinite Love.
O my God! Is Your disdained Love going to remain closed up within Your Heart? It seems to me that if You were to find souls offering themselves as victims of holocaust to Your Love, You would consume them rapidly; it seems to me, too, that You would be happy not to hold back the waves of infinite tenderness within You.
If Your Justice loves to release itself, this Justice which extends only over the earth, how much more does Your Merciful Love desire to set souls on fire since Your Mercy reaches to the heavens. O my Jesus, let me be this happy victim; consume Your holocaust with the fire of Your Divine Love! Lord, Jesus, make me the one. Help me help others to see Your thirst, too.
—Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul
Consideration
The love of God calls for this.
Prayer
Jesus, help me to desire what you desired: the Father’s will.
Why Good Friday Is Good
He could have redeemed us in a thousand other ways than that of His Son’s death. But He did not will to do so, for what may have been sufficient for our salvation was not sufficient for His love; and to show us how much He loved us, this divine Son died the cruelest and most ignominious of deaths, that of the Cross.
The implication in all this is clear: since He died of love for us, we also should die of love for Him; or, if we cannot die of love, at least we should live for Him alone. [2 Cor. 5:14-15] If we do not love Him and live for Him, we shall be the most disloyal, unfaithful and wretched creatures imaginable.
Such disloyalty is what the great St. Augustine complained about. “O Lord,” he said, “is it possible for man to know that You died for him and for him not to live for You?” And that great lover, St. Francis, sobbed, “Ah! You have died of love and no one loves You!” He died, then.
But although He died for us and was lifted up on the Cross, those who refuse to look upon Him will surely die, for there is no other redemption but in this Cross. O God, how spiritually beneficial and profitable is a consideration of Your Cross and Passion!
—Saint Francis de Sales, Sermon
Consideration
Do I love God in the way Augustine did? In the way Francis did? How can I grow in love?
Prayer
Jesus, we do not love you as we ought! Transform us to set the world aglow with the fire of faith which can be inextinguishable when our hearts are on fire with your life.
Joy in Suffering
By reason of its generous efforts never to deny God any type of sacrifice, the soul overflows with joy, after the fashion of St. Paul, in the midst of its sufferings. It realizes very well that by means of those sufferings it is purified of the stains of the flesh and the spirit and that, for the glory of God, it has begun to be adorned in the ornaments of the Spouse.
—Saint Catherine of Genoa, The Spiritual Dialogue
Consideration
Do I see God’s hand in my suffering, great and small?
Prayer
Father, I want to see your hand in the sufferings of my life. If they make me pure, if they prepare me for heaven, help me to be joyful about them. Help me to know them as great graces, not to be despised but matters for rejoicing. My human heart is weak, but you will make it strong.
ooo
This article is taken from a chapter in A Year With the Mystics by Kathryn Jean Lopez which is available from TAN Books.
