Headed in the opposite direction, a train of pack animals from the City jingled slowly past him. The muleteers interrupted their talk for a moment and respectfully doffed their hats. Half blind, as he was, with too much straining over books and documents, the friar saw their gesture as a blur of movement against the sky. Recognizing its intention, he raised a hand in blessing; then went back once again to his orison.
In the form of prayer he was accustomed to use, an act of discursive meditation succeeded the preparatory exercises. Today the perfection he had chosen as his theme was love. Following the established order of his discourse, he addressed himself first of all to the consideration of God as the source of love.
Paternoster, qui es in cœlo. Qui es in cœlo. God, the eternal and Infinite Being. But when a finite being abandoned itself to the Infinite Being, Infinite Being was apprehended as Love.
Thus, Infinite Being was at the same time a loving Father-but of children so rebellious and ungrateful that they were for ever doing all in their power to shut themselves out from his love.
They shut themselves out from his love and, by that act, to cut themselves off from their own happiness and salvation. ‘All manner of virtue and goodness,’ the Capuchin repeated in a whisper, ‘and even that Eternal Good which is God himself, can never make a man virtuous, good, or happy, so long as it is outside the soul.’
He raised his head for a moment. In the blue gap of rainwashed sky between the clouds, the sun was gloriously bright.
But if one chose to drop one’s eyelids against the light, so why, then one was blind, one walked in darkness. God was love; but the fact could be fully known only to one who himself loved God.
This thought served as a bridge between the first stage of his meditation and the second, between God as the source of love and his own shortcomings as a lover’ of God. He loved God insufficiently because he was insufficiently detached from the world of creatures in which he had to do his work. “Factus est in pac; locus ejus.4 ” God can be perfectly loved only by a heart that has been sanctified by the divine presence; and God is present only in a heart at peace. He is excluded by anxiety, even when that anxiety is a concern about the works of God. God’s work must be done; but if it is not done in the peace of perfect detachment, it will take the soul away from God.
He himself had come nearest to that perfect detachment in the days when he had worked at preaching and spiritual instruction. But now God had called him to these more difficult tasks in the world of great events, and the peace of detachment had become increasingly difficult of achievement. To dwell in the essential will of God while one was negotiating with the Duke of Lerma, say, or the Prince of Condé -that was hard indeed. And yet those negotiations had to be undertaken; they were a duty, and to do them was God’s exterior will. There could be no shrinking from such tasks. If peace eluded him while he undertook them, it was because of his own weakness and imperfection.
That highest degree of orison-the active annihilation of self and all creatures in the essential will of God-was still beyond him. There was no remedy but God’s grace, and no way to earn God’s grace but through constant prayer, constant humility, constant love. ‘Only so could God’s kingdom come in him, God’s will be done.
It was time to pass to. the third phase of his meditation-reflection on the Saviour’s acts and sufferings as related to the love of God. Fiat voluntas tua.5 Once in the world’s history God’s will had been done, fully and completely; for God had been loved and worshipped by one who, being himself divine, was able to give a devotion commensurate with its object.
The image of Calvary rose up before the friar’s mind-the image that had haunted him ever since, as a tiny child, he had first been told of what wicked men had done to Jesus. He held the picture in his imagination, and it was more real, more vivid than what he actually saw of the road at his feet. ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Pity and love and adoration suffused his whole being, as with a sensible warmth that was at the same time a kind of pain. Deliberately, he averted the eyes of his mind. The time had not yet come for such an act of affection and will.
He had still to consider, discursively, the ends for which the Saviour had thus suffered. He thought of the world’s sins, his own among them, and how he had helped to hew the cross and forge the nails, to plait the scourge and the crown of thorns, to whet the spear and dig the sepulchre. And yet, in spite of it, the Saviour loved him and, loving, had suffered, suffered, suffered. Had suffered that the price of Adam’s sin might be paid. Had suffered that, through his example, Adam’s children might learn how to conquer evil in themselves. ‘Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.’ Loving, one was forgiven; forgiven, one became capable of forgiving; forgiving, one could open one’s soul to God; opening one’s soul to God, one could love yet more intensely and so the soul could climb a little higher on the ascending spiral that led towards perfect union.
Ama et Jae quod vis. ‘Let there be love,’ he repeated, modulating his orison out of Meditation into Affection, transforming it from an act of the discursive intellect into an act of loving, self-renouncing will ‘Let there be love. And taking his own lovelessness, taking the malignantly active nothing that was himself, he offered it up as a sacrifice, as a burnt offering to be consumed in the fire of God’s love.
Lose life to save it. Die, that life may be hid with Christ in God. Die, die, die. Die on the cross of mortification, die in the continuous and voluntary self-noughting of passive and active annihilation.
Die, die, die, die .
In an act of pure contrition he begged God’s forgiveness for being still himself, Joseph of Paris, and not yet wholly the instrument of the divine will, at peace even in action, detached even in the turmoil of business.
Die, help me to die, help me to love so that I may be helped to die. He laid lovelessness upon an inward altar and prayed that it might be consumed, prayed that from its ashes might arise a new birth of love.
Trotting up from behind, came a young horseman, gaily plumed, with a silver-studded saddle and the damascened butts of two fine pistols in his holsters. He interrupted his whistling to shout a friendly good-day. The other did not answer, did not even raise his bowed head.
‘What, is he deaf?’ cried the horseman, as he drew up level with the friar. Then, for the first time, he saw the face under the grey hood. The spectacle of those lowered lids, those lips almost imperceptibly moving in prayer, that expression of intense and focussed calm, abashed the young man into silence.
He mumbled a word of apology, raised his hat, as though to the image in a wayside shrine, and crossed himself; then set spurs to his horse and cantered away, leaving the friar to perfect his act of self-immolation undisturbed.
How delicately the sacrifice had to be performed. How subtly, effortlessly, unabruptly ! There were occasions when violence might be used to take the Kingdom of Heaven; but this was not one of them. Violent annihilation of the self would defeat its own purpose; for such violence belonged to the merely human will, and to make use of it would only strengthen that will against the will of God. In this act of self-abnegation, a man must somehow operate without effort; or rather he must permit himself to be operated, passively, by the divine will …
In the matter of the Valtelline, of course, His Holiness had more reason to fear the union between Spain and Austria than to be angry with the French for ousting a papal garrison.
The Cardinal Nephew would probably. The friar became aware, once again, that concern with God’s work had drifted like a dark eclipsing cloud between himself and God. Checking his first movement towards a passionate self-reproach that would only have made the eclipse completer, he gently changed the focus of his inner vision, looking past the Cardinal Nephew, past the Valtelline and Spain and France towards the pure will of God beyond and above and within them. The cloud drifted away; he was exposed once more to the light. Patiently, delicately, he opened himself to its purifying and transforming radiance.
Time passed, and a moment came at length when it seemed to him that he was fit to go on to the next stage of contemplation. The mirror of his soul was cleansed; the dust and vapours that ordinarily intervened between the mirror and that which it was to reflect had been laid to rest or dissolved. If he now turned his soul to Christ, the divine form would be reflected clearly and without blasphemous distortion; the image of the crucified Saviour
