The Sisters Of the Visitation of Tyringham

Live + Jesus

HEART TO HEART WITH THE CRUCIFIED

by Sister Joan Bernadette

April 2009

Printer safe version

Dear Friends of the Heart of Christ,

As Holy Week draws near, my consciousness becomes filled with memories and impressions. As a little girl in the pre-Vatican II setting, I remember quite well the purple covered statues, the church filled with people on Friday afternoons to attend the Stations of the Cross, the somberness of sacrifice that filled the air like incense. I remember myself watched by my mother so that I would not misbehave and respond appropriately to all the rubrics that had to be attended to and mostly so I wouldn't start a fight with my twin sister who sat beside me. All these fragments come to mind as I begin to anticipate another Holy Week in my life and reflect on where God has brought me from and where I'm supposed to be going. I realize now more than ever that my experiences, as personal as they might be, are joined to so many others' experiences, to each of yours and even to the whole world's because Christ came to redeem us and heal our brokenness.
As a very young person it may not have dawned on me that what I was experiencing during the Holy Week services was not just a narration of pain and sacrifice, but a testimony of real love and the extremes that authentic love will go to. Jesus was not just showing us how to endure pain, but was coming to give us an example so that we too might learn how to live on the face of this earth. So often I think, there is a separation between our honoring and remembering the Passion and Death of Jesus and the understanding that we too must be personally drawn into the paschal mystery. We are called not merely to observe but to be participators on the Via Dolorosa. To remember the beautiful attributes of self-sacrifice and mercy and forgiveness that Jesus modeled for us is a wonderful thing, but to actually appropriate them into everyday life is far more demanding. Our holy foundress Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, in her direct and forthright way, bids us to consider that "we have not done anything until we have stamped Jesus Christ crucified on our hearts." Her spiritual counsel makes for a wise meditation: Do not concern yourselves with your pains or confusion, nor with the dismay or terror that this  may cause you although they feel violent or frightening. Instead look to God patiently and let it be. Remain steadfast in suffering without giving it attention...you have only from time to time to say a few words, especially these which are and ought to be your only words: My God, into yourands I commend my spirit, or better: my spirit is in your hands, I no longer see what goes on there, but I leave all to your care, I no longer desire to give my attention to anything except you alone...
To properly understand the meaning of these words, it is helpful to know that the writer was someone who had experienced great suffering in her own life, through the tragic death of her husband, through difficult choices made in the raising of her children, through her own soul-searching and discernment of God's will. In many ways, the details of her life could easily mirror a contemporary person's. Life dealt her hard blows, but she was able to anchor her faith in God and look toward the cross of Christ for meaning and strength. In so doing, she extracted from the Cross an amazing suppleness of heart that let her transform the hurts and losses of life into encounters with her Beloved Lord. She was not the stoic who refused to enter fully into the circumstances of life. Rather she embraced unconditionally the true lesson of her Crucified: that we do not suffer to become other than we are, but to become what latently lies within our hearts. To find hope and joy in the midst of suffering, rather than despair or passive indifference, is a grace given to the believing, trusting heart. Jane de Chantal's heart pushed the very limits of what it meant to believe and trust and her words invite her listeners to do the same: "Yield fully to God and you will find out!

 
The image of Jesus crucified gave meaning to every event of her life. Nothing was to distract her from the One whom she kept her eyes upon and her advice to others is that they focus their concentration only on what is essential..."fix your gaze upon Jesus crucified...lose yourself in God...do this before all else."

 
The simplicity of her approach is disarming. We as citizens of the world of mass communication look so often for verbal solutions to life's enigmas. We seek words of inspiration, consolation, confirmation, clarification in a search for what is most true. We weigh each other's words and allow these words to be our guide and source of direction. But there is a limit to the power of words to touch the human heart. In my own reflections on the Passion narratives, I have been struck how Jesus' final moments were moments spent in silence, without recourse to long exhortations. God's presence overshadowed the need for eloquent discourse or even lofty reflection and only allowed for the language of the heart to prevail. That is why Saint Jane de Chantal (and so many other holy ones) chose the starkness of the Cross for their portion. They understood that ultimately the silent, loving dialogue of the heart mattered most.

 
She also advocates trust; the kind of trust that the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar meant when he wrote: "The greatness of a person who trusts is that he/she goes on trusting even when he knows that his task is beyond him." Stamping the Crucified One upon our hearts implies that we wish not just to follow the Lord, but much, much more...it means that we wish to surrender and even plunge ourselves into the heart of the paschal mystery...into the realm of love and mercy. In such a state, even our failures, confusion, handicaps, shortcomings, flaws, and foibles become fuel for the fire of divine intervention upon the world. They become the unconventional channels that bring us to the vantage point of Jesus on the cross where paradoxes abound, where grief turns to glory, abandonment to presence, death to fullness of life.
If we consciously choose to "stamp" Jesus crucified on our hearts, then let us be prepared to share in the "piercing of hearts' that God permits for those who give him the totality of their love. Consider...throughout Lent we have listened to scripture stories of God's direct intervention in history. God does not turn a deaf ear to the Israelites but offers immediate resolutions to their human dilemmas and gives guidelines to follow to insure abundant blessings. Employing vivid imagery the Hebrew writers paint a picture of God releasing his people from the grip of slavery and bondage, liberating them from the hands of oppressors, giving them freedom to live their lives in security and peace. Yahweh is a great deliverer, intervening directly and concretely in the lives of his people: "He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm, with terrifying power, with signs and wonders; and brings us into this country, he gives us this land flowing with milk and honey." God will reward the faithful and just with the blessings of harmony and prosperity. God is the great emancipator from pain, sorrow, oppression, enslavement, everything undesirable on the face of the earth. Clearly, as we absorb the meaning of what has been presented to us in the ongoing Lenten readings, we are made aware that God is the Lord of history and the giver of all good things. There does not seem to be much mystery in understanding this, it is clear-cut, foundational and straight forward.

However, we know that there is more to this story that only unfolds as we continue in our journey towards Easter. We finally reach the point where we are standing at the foot of the Cross looking into the face of a just, honest, good, and upright man. We do not see prosperity, honor, happiness, but degradation and sorrow. Why wasn't this good man delivered? Why didn't God reward him for all the good he had done in this life? Where is God's intervention now? Our faith grounded in the proclamation of the New Testament writings tells us that we must be prepared for a new understanding of redemption, one fraught with mystery...for God is not so much intent on delivering us from pain, as showing us that our deliverance or redemption is achieved through pain. The words of Saint Paul dramatically illustrate this: "We hold this treasure in earthen vessels that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body (2 Corinthians 4)." Actually Paul is so convinced that God is so present in our pain that he asserts that nothing can separate us from God's love. Afflictions and trials, neither death nor life, angels...powers...height nor depth...absolutely nothing can deter God from delivering us into what we are made for...love and union with Him.

 
Knowing this perhaps will give us a great sense of peace. Experiencing it will test us to the very core because as humans we recoil at the slightest prospects of suffering. A contemporary spiritual author has reflected: "Anyone who attempts to find some sort of answer to the eternal ‘why' of suffering must face the fact that theories, even profoundly held beliefs, easily break down when we are confronted with suffering in our own lives. The natural human impulse is to fly from trouble, and when we realize there is no escape we are tempted to despair" (from Mary Craig, English journalist). Somehow the very redemptive power of pain comes from our acceptance of it in a way that transforms us to a new level of being.

 
In our tradition of Sacred Heart spirituality, we see our sister and saint Margaret Mary's love for the Crucified One. Sufferings and setbacks only intensified the love which shone from her inner soul. Although she was aided by the light of divine revelation, she, like the rest of creation, needed to make an interior resolution to trust in the mysterious unfolding of God's plan in her life. As with all saints, her holiness deepened to the degree
of her total trust and confidence and surrender. Interiorly, the relationship of love and intimacy which Margaret Mary developed with her God helped her through the challenges that life brought her way. Her troubles did not magically cease as this relationship deepened, but her inner being understood that with God's guidance no obstacles of whatever magnitude could separate her from the Heart of God. Today her legacy of love communicates a similar message to us. Turning to the Heart of Christ won't guarantee that our perplexing problems will fade away, or that we will accrue big dividends in the bank of this world's goods. We are just not promised these things by the Lord and ultimately, they are empty treasure. In the end the Heart of Christ prepares our hearts to receive that peace which surpasses all human understanding. This is the great gift of Easter, because within this peace are the seeds of contemplative vision, enabling us to see beneath the surface of events, to see through the illusion and false claims of merely human systems, to see beyond the immediate and transient into the
depths of reality. It allows us to see with the eyes and heart of God: truthfully and lovingly. One writer calls it "a love not sentimental or naive; but one which undermines oppression and burns away illusion and falsehood, a love which has been through the fire, a love which has been purified by struggle. It is a love which has known solitude and despair." And strangely, we might add, it is a love that triumphs, like the crucified love of Jesus Christ.

 
In the Russian classic The Brothers Karamazov, we are given a sampling of what this kind of love is like:

"At some ideas you stand perplexed, especially at the sight of men's sins, uncertain whether
to combat it by force or by humble love. Always decide, ‘I will combat it by humble love.'
If you make up your mind about that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world.
Loving humbly is a terrible force; it is the strongest of all and there is nothing like it."

Because our human capacities are limited we often seek ways to quiet our insecurities, becoming easy prey to the false guides of this world. Christ invites us to come and learn from his gentle and humble heart, and to experience a force that nothing and no one in this world can conquer. It is the force of God's enlightenment and wisdom waiting to be given to those who seek it in earnest. The prophet Jeremiah's words "you will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart" are worth pondering. If we truly believe in the promise of Christ to give us the living waters of his merciful heart, then we have the assurance of his own words to Saint Margaret Mary that we will witness the tremendous power of that Sacred Heart, bringing us and our world back into closer proximity to the source of all goodness. +

This presentation was given at the Monastery of the Visitation of Tyringham, MA on Sunday April 5, 2009

God be Praised