We are not at present going to study in detail the holy occupations of the Heart of our Lord, reserving such study for future consideration in separate meditations. We shall find that it affords much assistance in familiarizing us with the character of the Sacred Heart, its love, its sufferings, and its desires. It will enable us also to recognize how full of merit, how conducive to God's glory, and how helpful to the world at large is a hidden life provided it be modelled on the Hidden Life of Jesus.
The exterior life of Nazareth was, as we know, made up of the most ordinary works, the most commonplace actions. During those long years we find nothing apparently in due proportion to the sublime Mission which brought Him down from Heaven. Yet He was all the while negotiating the great affair of our redemption as truly as when we come to regard Him hanging on the Cross. Let us penetrate into His Heart, and we shall see that it was secretly consumed with love in the presence of the Majesty of God - His Father; and, since true love is ever active, with what energy must not the Divine flame have burnt within that living Furnace of Charity?
It was from this inexhaustible source of love that every act of His emanated, and these have merited the redemption of ten thousand worlds, and are pleading at this moment our cause in Heaven.
Behold the first great Master of the Divine Apostleship. Behold in Jesus of Nazareth the first apostle of prayer! This was the occupation of His Sacred Heart. He loved, He adored, He repaired, He prayed, He immolated Himself for the Father's glory, for the salvation of the universe. He traced out the Divine plan of His Church, according to the eternal design He had seen in the bosom of the Father, and as each stratagem of His enemy for the defeat of that plan and the overthrow of His Church passed before Him, He devised the infallible means by which the evil influence should be counteracted, and the cause of good should triumph.
Of what importance was it that the hands of Jesus did but plane wood in a carpenter's shop whilst His Heart was thus incessantly and divinely occupied? Could there really be monotony in such a life as this? Whatever may have been its exterior, the interior of that life was the most sublime that can be imagined.
Sublime also is the hidden life of those who have learnt to imitate Him, whose hearts, like His, are wholly occupied, as far as they can be in this life, with the interests of God and of souls; a life indeed which the wise ones of this world despise - which materialists scorn as useless. But in the great day of revelation they will be forced to exclaim: "We fools esteemed their life madness and their end without honour; behold how they are numbered among the children of God, and their lot is among the saints."
And now let us look into our own interior, and examine the thoughts and desires that succeed each other incessantly throughout the day. To whom, to what, do they relate? To Him who gave us understanding in order that we might know and contemplate Him, a heart but to love Him, faculties of soul and body but to serve Him with? Or do we not rather concentrate our thoughts, at least for the most part, on self, on our own personal interests, wishes, and affairs, or on those of the limited circle of beings who come within our sphere, and between whom and ourselves perhaps only natural ties exist? The trials of the Church, the loss of souls, the darkness in which the poor heathen are sitting for want of missioners to bear to them the light of truth, the revolt of nations from their allegiance to God and His Vicar, besides many other like interests all so intimately involving the glory of God, are these the objects which occupy our hearts and minds, which are so constituted that they must be incessantly occupied with something?
If the love of God is burning in our breasts, our hearts, as that of Jesus, will, in proportion to the strength of our love, be more or less occupied with His interests rather than with what pleases ourselves, and we shall find no cause to complain of the monotony of our lives, whatever may be the nature of our exterior employments. Oh, no! This hidden life proposed to us is not a dreamy inactivity, whether it be cultivated in the midst of the world, or embraced beneath the sacred shadow of the cloister. It is, on the contrary, full of life - the true life of the heart; and the more fully God and all that concerns Him occupy our hearts and minds, the wider, the more elevated will they become, and consequently more capable of attaining the noble end proposed to them, which is nothing less sublime than co-operation with the Divine Mission of the Incarnate Word.
In the hidden life thus regarded there is no selfishness, no egotism; it is essentially a life of generous devotedness. Thus we shall find herein an antidote for the two grievous evils of the present age - idleness of thought and frivolity of heart. In proportion as the soul is occupied with God and with His interests, will it be ever "giving of its substance," that is, immolating its natural inclinations on the altar of Divine love, for the glory of God and the good of souls. What is the secret source of the weariness, the discontent, the disquietude of innumerable souls who give themselves to piety, and who aspire to the interior life? It is that Jesus of Nazareth is not their model; it is that they have not suffered Him to be their Master, and His Sacred Heart their school; it is that they seek in piety their own satisfaction, their own interests, instead of making God and the advancement of His Kingdom the primary object of their thoughts and desires.
There can be for them no joy of spirit, no true peace of heart, because they are not accomplishing the work that was destined for them, the only work which can fill up and relieve the monotony of their life, for monotonous and wearisome it must be to those whose hearts do not beat in unison with the Heart of Jesus, and which are not occupied with the thoughts, the intentions, the aspirations of His Heart.
On the other hand, for those who live the life of the Heart of Jesus, who, in union with Him, exercise the Divine Apostleship, the hidden life presents no weariness, no tediousness. Their hearts, that were once perhaps filled with a thousand vain pre-occupations and desires, or dragged on a mere existence, devoid of any special aim, have at length begun to live. They have learnt to love God and therefore to think much of Him, to desire with ardour all that can glorify Him and enable the Passion and Death of His only Son to bear all their fruits. Their horizon has become more extended, their thoughts more elevated, their hearts have grown larger, the petty interests and trivial cares that once absorbed them have lost their charm for them, and their hold upon them; they can act and suffer now for a definite and noble end, and they have so much to think of in the cause of God and of souls that they have no time to spend in thinking about self. It is thus that lives become self-forgetting, devoted, according to the Heart of Jesus, and through union with Him are hidden in God.
- 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