There are two ways of understanding what is called a hidden life. From one point of view it is simply a life withdrawn from the busy world - from the society of men. In this sense it bears no essential sanctity, and is a mode of life chosen by many who have no acquaintance with the nature of holiness, such as the Pagan philosophers and others, who withdrew from the society of their fellow-men merely as the result of their own natural inclination, and in pursuit of a purely natural object. Under another point of view a hidden life means distinctly one led by each person in the solitude of. his own heart, and it is this alone which imparts sanctity and value to that external and material seclusion which, for the most part, the world understands by the term "hidden life."
It is under this second aspect that we are about to regard our Lord Jesus Christ in His solitude at Nazareth, learning of Him that the sanctity and merit of our whole outer life depends on the intentions, the motives - in a word, the life of the Sacred Heart itself. Have we ever asked ourselves, For what do I live f Placed as I am in the midst of society, have I at heart any higher aim, or any end more worthy of a Christian than the gratification of self, or the possession of some temporal interest?
If I am a Religious do I live for that which is the end and object of the Order to which I belong? - just as every aspiration, every beat of the Heart of Jesus was directed towards the object which brought Him down from Heaven. Or is it still - perhaps unconsciously - self that I am seeking under the mask of a religious life?
We know that the sole aim of our Lord in coming down upon earth was the reparation of the Divine glory and the salvation of the world. We can have no doubt as to the infallibility of the means He took for accomplishing this end. Nevertheless, it is with astonishment perhaps, that we behold Him passing nearly the whole of His mortal career in solitude, employed in the most ordinary occupations, and withholding the manifestation of any of those marvelous deeds which we should imagine could alone be in proportion to so sublime an end.
Jesus, the Eternal Wisdom, knew that the lives of the greater part of men would be passed in a routine of ordinary actions, according to their state, and He foresaw the necessity of teaching them how to sanctify this common life generally so little esteemed or understood, as well as of correcting in them the universal error which imagines that only those actions are meritorious or worthy of admiration which are great or brilliant in themselves.
Have we not been sometimes tempted to consider our state of life an excuse for doing nothing for God's glory or for the promotion of His interests? If we are in Religion, have we not deluded ourselves with the idea that the material and commonplace nature of the employments confided to us are an obstacle to our labouring for God, and to our union with Him by prayer and recollection? Let us fix our thoughts upon Jesus of Nazareth, and ask ourselves whether the uninteresting character of His Life in that obscure home was any impediment to the accomplishment of the one great work which He had ever in His Heart, or to the union of His Heart with that Eternal Father to whose love it ever corresponded.
- 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