The period of our Lord's Life on earth which still remains least known even to many devout souls, is that which He spent in the retirement of Nazareth.
Devotion to the Sacred Passion, or even to the Divine Infancy is more or less prevalent, and yet it is too often only very superficially understood. But the mysteries of the Hidden Life, although it occupied the greater portion of the three-and-thirty years, is well-nigh a sealed book, or at least it is a volume of which the pages have scarcely been turned over. When we ask ourselves why it is so, the answer comes to us without much difficulty.
The generality of minds find nothing attractive in that which bears upon its surface the character of monotony, nothing great in that which fails to wear a brilliant appearance. Men will not take the trouble to seek a treasure which is hidden beneath a common-place exterior, and hence the Hidden Life of Nazareth, putting forward no brilliant show, marked by no externally striking incidents, has but little attraction for those who know not how to recognize grandeur in abasement, or who care not to seek what is supernatural and Divine when it is veiled under a common and every-day life appearance.
It is true that the natural craving of the human heart seeks to attain to something great. In fact the misapplication of this imperious necessity is that which causes the fearful state of the world at the present day. Many a fall has doubtless begun in the yearning of the heart after some apparently greater work than that which lay within its grasp. False lights have been followed, and souls, losing in those cases the right track, have drifted away and been shipwrecked on the rocks of pride and infidelity. Whereas others, directed by a similar yearning, have followed the true light, and have found in the imitation of the Life of Jesus Christ the real greatness which their souls were seeking. Many a high vocation has probably been abandoned because the soul did not grasp the truth that the humility, obedience, and self-annihilation which were demanded of it placed within its reach the very means requisite for attaining the most sublime of all ends that it could propose to itself.
This seems to have been the thought of Saint Ignatius, when, in the striking contemplation of "The Kingdom of Christ," which has inspired countless souls with contempt for the world, and has led them to enroll themselves under the only banner worthy of their nobility as brethren and co-heirs with Christ, he remarks that everything in the enterprise to which we are invited is great. The same may be said of the Hidden Life, that school wherein we learn to become truly great, inasmuch as it constantly places before us in our Lord the most perfect end to aim at in all our actions, and the highest of all examples to guide our interior intentions.
The Model proposed to us is the Incarnate Wisdom Himself; the means for attaining our end is the practice of the virtues and the adoption of the aspirations and desires of His Sacred Heart; the end itself is the same as that which brought Him down from Heaven, for which He lived and died; our companions should be the saints of every age for whom Nazareth has ever been at once a school and a dwelling of predilection for their souls.
The very limited attention, then, which even the greater number of pious persons give to this portion of our Lord's Life must be attributed to the absence of that spirit of faith which enables us to pierce the veils and to discern true greatness beneath what in the eyes of human wisdom appears contemptible.
This same absence of attraction may be accounted for by the monotonous character which each year externally presents. The restless thirst for something exciting and "sensational" which now penetrates even into matters of religion, here finds no satisfaction. Hence it is that the name of Nazareth, which to souls who have dwelt much in thought and affection with Jesus in His years of solitude awakens such thrilling memories, and elicits such burning acts of love, falls coldly and without significance on the ears of many, for whose sake, nevertheless, He chose to bear that title, at once so despised and so glorious: Jesus Nazarenus, Jesus of Nazareth.
We must, then, in order to give ourselves efficaciously to the meditation of the Hidden Life of Jesus, in the first place disabuse our minds of that false judgment which would lead us to esteem only that which displays its utility and its greatness upon the surface. In the next place we must remember that the life of Jesus at Nazareth is, in more senses than one, His Hidden Life. It is pre-eminently His interior life there that we wish to study - the life of His Sacred Heart; and it is precisely in that light that it forms a fitting subject for the closest attention of all those who claim to be numbered amongst the lovers of the Sacred Heart, and whose desire it is to know it more profoundly, in order that they may love it more intensely.
It is not sufficient to read of the exterior actions which our Blessed Lord performed, or of the exterior sufferings to which He submitted. These are, it is true, the outward expressions of the love which inwardly consumed Him. But a far more perfect knowledge of the character of Jesus will be obtained by him who through prayer and meditation shall penetrate into the source within, whence flowed every action He wrought and every word He uttered, than can ever be reached by the soul which regards only the exterior - however full of meaning and expression as in the Person of our Lord that exterior may have been.
There were those who, while He was on earth, beheld His works and heard His words, and were in no way touched by them. The thoughts and intentions which moved Him in acting, speaking, and suffering remained hidden from them, their ignorance being in great measure an effect of their willful blindness, as it is written: "If you will not believe, you shall not understand." (Isaias 7:9, Septuagint Version.)
The same may be said of a number of persons at the present day. The outward expression of the humility, patience, obedience, and other virtues of our Lord, together with that of His love for His Heavenly Father and for men, makes little impression upon us, because we are, through our own indifference, strangers to the living furnace of love within His breast. Thus we fail to recognize in what we read of Jesus the true character of His words and actions, the manifestation of His inmost desires and yearnings - the throbbing of His Heart for us.
All that has been said applies in a special manner to the portion of our Lord's Life which He passed at Nazareth. The very monotony, the daily round of commonplace duties and ordinary actions necessitates our penetrating into the hidden source, wherein is to be found the motive for the prolonged hidden life of One who had such a stupendous work before Him to accomplish on earth, and who allowed Himself so short a space in which to fulfill it.
Let us, then, in our love towards the Sacred Heart, endeavour to become more intimately acquainted with its life at Nazareth, so that, charmed with the marvels we shall there discover, we may be filled with desire to act and suffer with the same motives and intentions that led to the actions and sufferings of Jesus, and thus arrive in time at a more just appreciation of the true character and blessed fruits of a life formed on the model of the Hidden Life at Nazareth.
- text taken from the 1906 edition of The Heart of Jesus of Nazareth - Meditations on the Hidden Life; it has the Imprimatur if Bishop John Baptist Butt, Diocese of Southwark, England, 5 February 1890