Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

We, too, follow. We have so often followed, with the Gospel in our hands, and wondered at the method of God. We have tried hour after hour to penetrate the meaning of the Passion, to find what personal message it brings, to discover what light it throws on our own lives. We have gone out into Gethsemane and placed ourselves with the three chosen Apostles while our Lord went on to pray by Himself; and we have discovered in ourselves the same weariness, the same tendency to sleep, in the presence of what we tell ourselves is the most important of all interests. We call up the scene under the olives, and find that we wander and are inattentive and idle when we most want to be attentive and alert. We place ourselves in the group that surrounds our Lord when the soldiers, led by Judas, come, and ask ourselves shall I too run away? And our memory flashes the answer: You have run away again and again: you have in the face, not of grave dangers, but of insignificant trifles--how insignificant they look now--for fear of criticism, for fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect.

We follow out of the garden to the meeting-place of the Sanhedrin, to the Judgment seat of Pilate, to the palace of Herod. Any impulse to criticise S. Peter is speedily suppressed: we have denied so often under such trifling provocation. S. Peter was frightened from participation in the act of our Lord's sacrifice through mortal fear of his life. We have stayed away from the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, how often! from mere sloth, from disinclination to effort, from the fact that our participation would prevent us from joining in some act of worldly amusement. S. Peter, following to the high Priest's palace to see the end, looks heroic beside our frivolity. We follow through the details of the trial, we go to Herod's palace and see the brutal treatment of our Lord, and we remember of these men that their conduct was founded in ignorance. We do not for a moment believe that they would have spit upon our Lord and buffeted Him, and crowned Him with a crown of thorns, if they had believed that He was God. But we believe that He is God. Our desertion of Him when we sin, our contempt of His expressed ideals when we compromise with the world, our departure from His example when we excuse ourselves on the ground of very minor inconveniences from keeping some holy day or fasting day, are not founded in ignorance at all. They can hardly be said to be founded in weakness, so slight is the temptation that we do not resist. As we meditate on the Passion, as we keep Good Friday, very pitiful all our idleness and subterfuges appear to us. But we so easily shake off the effect! We emerge from our meditation almost convinced that the stinging sense of the truth of our conduct which we are experiencing is the equivalent of having reformed it. We go out with a glow of virtue and by night realise that we have sinned again!

It is no doubt well that we should not be permanently depressed about our spiritual state, but only because we have taken all the pains we can to heal the wounds of sin. There is no need that any one should abide in a state of sin because there has been in the Precious Blood a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and by washing therein, though our souls were as scarlet, they shall become white as snow. We have the right to a certain optimism about ourselves if it be founded on actual spiritual activity which ceaselessly tries to reproduce the Christ-experience in us, even the experience of the Passion by the voluntary self-discipline to which we subject ourselves. A brilliant writer has spoken of those whose view of their lives is drawn from "that fountain of all optimism--sloth." That is a true saying: our optimism is often no more than an idle refusal to face facts; a quaint and good-natured assumption that nothing very much matters and that everything will be all right in the end!

This easy going optimism is commonly as far as possible from representing any spiritual fact. If we are seeking any serious and fruitful relation to the Passion of our Lord, we must seek it along the Way of the Cross. To follow His example means to follow His experience, to treat life as He treated it. The content of our lives is quite different, but the treatment of the given fact must be essentially the same. We need the same repulse of temptation, the same quiet disregard of the appeals of the world, whether it offer the alleviation of difficulty or the bestowal of pleasure as the reward of our allegiance. And we, sinners in so manifold ways, need what our Lord did not need, repulsion from our sins as the necessary preliminary to forgiveness.

My experience makes me feel very strongly that we are apt to be deficient in the first step in repentance--contrition. As we follow the Way of Sorrows we know that our Lord is suffering for us; and we feel that the starting point of our repentance must lie in our success in making that a personal matter. In our self examination, in our approach to the sacrament of penance, we are compelled to ask ourselves, Am I in fact sorry for my sins? It surely is not enough that we fear the results of sin, or that we are ashamed at our failure. This really is not repentance but a sort of pride. There must, I feel, be sorrow after a godly sort. That is, true contrition, true sorrow for sin, is the sort of sorrow which is born of the Vision of God; it has its origin in love. I have found in our Lord love giving itself to me, and I must find in myself love giving itself to Him. To my forgiveness it is not enough that God loves me. I know that He loves me and will love me to the end, whether I repent or not; but the possibility of forgiveness lies in my love of Him, whether it takes such hold on me as actually to stimulate me to forsake sin. I shall never really forsake sin through shame or fear; one gets used to those emotions after a little and disregards them. But one does not get used to love; it grows to be an increasing force in life, and so masters us as to draw us away from sin.

Contrition then will be the offspring of love. It will be born when we follow Christ Jesus out on the Sorrowful Way and understand that He is going out for us. Then we want to get as near Him as possible: we want to take His Hand and go by His side. We want to stand by Him in His trial and share His condemnation. We want constantly to tell Him how sorry we are that we have brought Him here. We shall not be content that He feel all the pain. We are convinced that we ought to share in the pain as we share in the results of the Passion. When we have achieved this point of view we shall feel that our approach to Him to ask His forgiveness needs, it may be, much more care than we have hitherto bestowed upon it. We have thought of penance as forgiveness; now we begin to see how much the attitude which precedes our entrance to the confessional counts, and that we must value the gift of God enough to have made sure that we are ready to receive it. We kneel down, therefore, and look at our crucifix, and say: "This hast Thou done for me," and make our act of love in which we join ourselves to the Cross of Jesus. We tell ourselves that love is the beginning and end of our relation to Him.

It is to be urged that every Christian should be utterly familiar with the life of our Lord, and should spend time regularly in meditation upon His life, and especially upon His Passion. Love is the constant counteractive of familiarity; and it is kept fresh in our souls by the contemplation of what our Lord has actually done for us. A general recalling of what He has done has not the same stimulating force as the vivid placing before us of the actual details of His work. To most of us visible aids to the realisation of our Lord's action for us are most helpful. A crucifix on the wall of one's room before which one can say one's prayers, and before which also we stop for a moment time and again in the course of the day, just to say a few words, to make an act of love, of contrition, or of union, keeps the thought of the Passion fresh. We gain in freshness and variety of prayer by the use of such devotions as the litany of the Passion or the Way of the Cross. A set of cards of the Stations help us to say them in our homes. It is much to be desired that we accustom ourselves to devotional helps of all sorts. We are quite too much inclined to think that there is something of spiritual superiority in the attempt to conduct our devotional life without any of the helps which centuries of Christian experience have provided. It is the same sort of feeling that makes other Christians assume that there is a superiority in spiritual attainment evidenced by their dispensing with "forms," especially with printed prayers. It is just as well to remember that we did not originate the Christian Religion, but inherited it; and that the practices of devotion that have been found helpful by generations of saints, and after full trial have retained the approval of the greater part of Christendom, can hardly be treated as valueless, much less as superstitious. The fact that saints have found them valuable and one has not, may possibly not be a criticism of the saints.

The meditation upon the Way of the Cross, the vision of Jesus scourged, spitted upon, crowned with thorns, may well give us some searchings of heart in regard to our own easy-going, luxurious life. Nothing seems to disturb the modern person so much as the suggestion that the chief business of the Christian Religion is not to look after their comfort. They hold, it would appear, to the pre-Christian notion that prosperity is an obvious mark of God's favour, and that by the accumulation of wealth they are giving indisputable evidence of piety. It is well to recall that there is no such dangerous path as that of continual success. I do not in the least mean to imply that success is sinful or indicates the existence of sin, but I do mean to insist very strongly that the successful man needs to be a very spiritually watchful man. He is quite apt to think that he may take all sorts of liberties with the laws of God. There are, no doubt, evident dangers to the unsuccessful man, but the Holy Scriptures have not thought it worth while to spend much time in denouncing him. It has a good deal to say of the danger, not so much of wealth, as of prosperity in general: "Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease were in her." When we find ourselves in a satisfied and comfortable home life, so comfortable that we find it difficult to get up to a week-day Mass, and disinclined to go out to a service after dinner, we need watching.

And the best watchman is oneself; and the best method of self-examination is by the Cross. Is there any sense in which we can be said to be following our Lord on the Sorrowful Way? Have we taken up the Cross to go after Him, or are we assuming that we can just as well drift along with the crowd of those who only look on? We all need from time to time to consider the Catholic teaching as to mortification and self-discipline. I am quite aware that to insist on this is not the way of popularity, but nevertheless I learned a long time ago that about the only way that a priest can take if he wishes to be saved is the way of unpopularity. And therefore I am going to insist that the practice of rigorous self-discipline is essential to any healthy Christian life. We cannot dispense ourselves from this, for the mere fact that we are dispensing ourselves is the proof that we need that upon which we are turning our back. Briefly, what I mean is that the assumption of the Cross by a Christian means that he is taking into his life, voluntarily, personal acts of self-sacrifice which he offers to our Lord as the evidence and the means of his own Cross-bearing.

The unruliness of our nature can only be kept in order by continual acts of self-discipline. We, no doubt, recognise the need of the discipline of the passions, but our theory, so far as we can be said to have one, would seem to be that the discipline of the passions means resistence to special temptations as they arise. We may no doubt sin through the passions, and therefore we need a minimum of watchfulness to meet temptations which come our way. I submit that such a way of conducting life is quite sufficient to account for the vast amount of failure we witness or, perhaps, experience. When from time to time the country gets alarmed about its health, when it is threatened with some epidemic such as influenza, the papers are full of medical advice the sum of which is you cannot dodge all the disease germs that are in the air, but you can by a vigorous course of exercise and by careful diet, keep yourself in a state of such physical soundness that the chances are altogether favourable for your withstanding the assaults of disease. No doubt the vast majority of people prefer not to follow this advice. A considerable number of them resort to various magic cults, such as letting sudden drafts of cold air in upon the inoffensive bystander with a view to exorcising the germs. But it remains that the medical advice is sound: it amounts to saying, "Keep yourself in the best physical condition possible and you will run the minimum chance of being ill."