162. Seventh Sunday of Easter

Meditations no. 208 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Keeping our hearts wholly for God.

Consolator optime, / dulcis hospes animae, / dulce refrigerium: You, of comforters the best; you, the soul’s most welcome guest; sweet refreshment here below. Because God himself dwells in our soul through grace, being recollected has nothing to do with being alone. It means putting St Paul’s advice into practice: May our conversation be in heaven. We have been made in order to love. When we gave ourselves to God, far from renouncing love, we chose the path of the greatest and most ardent love.

We rise up to Christ with our heart, St Augustine reminds us. When the promised day comes, we will follow him with our body too. Of all the consolations that the human heart can receive, none can compare with those given by the Holy Spirit, the Counsellor, when we give him everything, wholeheartedly and without hesitation. Self-giving is the first step along the road of sacrifice, joy; love, union with God. And thus, a whole life is filled with a holy madness which makes us encounter happiness where human logic would only see denial, suffering, pain. On the other hand, if we were to seek other consolations at the same time, we would only find sadness, restlessness and lack of peace.

We must be forewarned, for, when we are faced with the demands of the love of God, it can happen that the old nature, which is corrupted through deceitful lusts, goes after vain and deceptive consolations. Even though our heart is made to love God, we cannot forget we have within us a source of opposition and resistance to grace. We carry the wounds of original sin, heightened perhaps by our personal sins. My child, your desires for sanctity will be opposed first by laziness, the first front on which you must fight; then by rebelliousness, the refusal to shoulder Christ’s sweet yoke, a mad longing, not for true freedom, but for doing whatever you want to; then by sensuality; and, at all times (and more surreptitiously as the years go by), by pride. Finally there is a whole string of evil inclinations, because our weaknesses never come alone.

Not taking this fact into account would be to expose ourselves to one surprise after another. To avoid this we have often meditated on our Father’s advice:

Remember that the heart is a traitor. Keep it locked with seven bolts. If we were to neglect to watch over it, our heart would start seeking human comforts. If at any time we should feel these natural inclinations, let us react immediately, remembering that in giving ourselves to God we have not renounced love, but on the contrary, we have opted for its fullest expression. Let us raise up our hearts which should be immersed in the Lord.

Guard of the heart means not looking for consolations.

False compassion for ourselves sometimes leads us to seek consolations and pleasures which trouble our heart and cause our interior life to stagnate, and obstruct our total self-giving to Christ. It’s natural, however, that we should feel the attraction, not so much of sin, but of those human things which are noble in themselves, but which we have left for the love of Jesus Christ - though without losing our inclination to them. Precisely because we had these tendencies, what each one of us gave was the gift of self, which was a truly generous and detached act on our part. And because we preserve that self-giving, our fidelity is a continuous offering: a continuous act of love and generosity and magnanimity, which is not just the result of inertia. St Thomas says: eiusdem est autem aliquid constituere, et constitutum conservare (establishing something and preserving it once it is established have the same cause). What gave rise to your self-giving in the first place, my son, also has to maintain it.

We have to keep alive this detachment from self in order to preserve our whole heart for God, with constant vigilance. Every soul in a state of grace is a temple of the Holy Spirit, but he dwells more easily in those who give themselves to him completely. This incomparable good would be tarnished by any kind of consolation-seeking, if we were not to react in time. The Holy Spirit would cease to be the soul’s most welcome guest and would become instead an unwelcome squatter.

Do you want to see God? Listen: blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. First of all be intent on purifying your heart: get rid of whatever you see in it which is displeasing to God. The moment we look back at what we freely abandoned, our soul will have halted on its way to the Kingdom of Heaven.

We know very well that the greatest danger to holy purity is for our ardent love for Jesus Christ to die out.

To ensure that this never occurs, we must stand guard over our heart firmly and prudently. We ask the Holy Spirit therefore: Lava quod est sordidum, / riga quod est aridum, / sana quod est saucium: Heal our wounds, our strength renew; on our dryness pour your dew; wash the stains of guilt away. Flecte quod est rigidum, / fove quod est frigidum, / rege quod est devium: Bend the stubborn heart and will; melt the frozen, warm the chill; guide the steps that go astray.

God more than satisfies all the desires of the human heart.

As the Holy Spirit wins over our heart with his inspirations, we begin to appreciate how much he is dulce refrigerium, the sweetest refreshment imaginable. Of you my heart has spoken: “Seek his face.” It is your face, O Lord, that I seek. O Lord, hide not your face. God is faithful to his promise, and if we try to be faithful too, even though we believe we are still far from our goal, the seed which has been planted will produce fruit, whether we are asleep or awake. All we need to do is make sure that we do not let ourselves be ruled by the whims of our hearts, which so often go after the wrong things.

The giving of one’s self, the obedience and meekness of a Christian, are born of love and lead to love. And love leads to a personal relationship, to conversation and friendship. Christian life requires a constant dialogue with God, one in three Persons, and it is to this intimacy that the Holy Spirit leads us. For who among men knows the things of a man save the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, the things of God no one knows but the Spirit of God. If we have a constant relationship with the Holy Spirit, we will become spiritual ourselves, we will realize that we are Christ’s brothers and children of God, and we will not hesitate to call upon our Father at any time.

Let us acquire the habit of conversation with the Holy Spirit, who is the one who will make us holy. Let us trust in him and ask his help and feel his closeness to us. In this way our poor heart will grow; we will have a greater desire to love God and to love all creatures for God’s sake. And our lives will reproduce that final vision of the Apocalypse: the Spirit and the Spouse, the Holy Spirit and the Church - and every Christian - calling on Jesus Christ to come and be with us for ever.

This shows us how much we need to have a generous heart if we are to develop a priestly soul. We then begin to feel the concern which constantly kept St Paul on his guard: Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant? And we understand why the Apostle considers separation from God harder to bear than scourgings, persecutions, shipwrecks, imprisonment and endless labours. We also acquire a special sensitivity for recognizing and unmasking the disordered movements of our heart, and we make a special effort to flee from occasions of attachment. While we are grateful for people’s affection from the bottom of our heart, our gratitude goes first to Christ. Our Lord also teaches us, in a spirit of greater generosity, to do without small consolations which in the long run are not worth the peace and union that they cause us to lose.

Purity of heart gives joy, confidence, compunction, repentance, tears of sorrow, knowledge of ourselves and our sins, a reminder of death, true humility, a great love of God as well as of men: it puts divine love in the heart. The more clearly we are aware of the heart’s role in the interior life, the sooner our feelings will be ruled by the incomparable presence of our Blessed Lady, Mother of Fair Love, as we like to call her.