It is narrated that our Blessed Lord once revealed to Saint Bernard how grateful to His Heart would be a loving commemoration by us of the Wound which He suffered in His sacred shoulder from the pressure of the Cross, "this being," He said, "unrecorded, because unknown to men." May we not believe that the consideration of His interior sufferings during His Hidden Life will be equally pleasing to Him? - for surely they also are too little known or thought of. These inward sufferings, then, on which all true lovers of His Heart should delight to dwell, will form the subject of the present, and of several meditations which follow.
Let us consider, in the first place, His sufferings in relation to His Eternal Father. In order to estimate their intensity, we must remember that His knowledge of God - of the Divine perfections - of the homage due to each and all of them from men, and of the terrible outrage offered to them by sin, was infinite.
On the other hand, not a sin that ever has or will be committed escaped His clear vision. Now, if it were possible to sum up together all the sins that are committed throughout the world in a single day, hour, or even minute, and to present them every one to our view, the sight of that enormous mass of crime would be more than we could support for an instant; the full knowledge of all that it involved against the Divine Majesty would fill with horror even hearts in which Divine love burnt but faintly. What, then, must have been the anguish wherewith the accumulated crimes of every age deluged the Heart of Jesus - each and all being offences against that Father for whose glory He was consumed with zeal! His knowledge therefore was the first source of His inward sufferings.
How inadequately we weigh the sorrows of His Heart if we confine our ideas of the lapse of time over which they extended to the short period of the Passion! His whole life was, in some degree, an agony - an inward passion by which He was repairing the Father's wrongs as efficaciously as when prostrate in Gethsemane, or hanging on the Cross.
What amount of concern do we feel for the outrages incessantly committed against God? Do we regard as an offence against the Divine Wisdom, the scorn, or the contempt of all authority with which the world abounds? Do we deplore the voluptuousness of our age as defiance offered to the Divine Beauty? Are our souls depressed at the sight of the general forgetfulness of God, at the knowledge of the terrible falls of which we hear from time to time, at the crimes whereby the creature casts away from him as worthless his Creator's eternal love? If our hearts were not filled with trifles light as air and passing with the hour, if they were less occupied with self - then the Heart of Jesus would shed its light into them, and enable us to see more clearly the wrongs of God, and to mourn more deeply over them.
The Heart of Jesus had not only to endure the sight of all the sins committed against His Father, but to feel as though they had been done by Himself. He had undertaken the office of atonement, and He must support the whole of its awful burden. "The reproaches of them that reproached Thee have fallen upon Me," and "the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." He was as the "emissary goat" bearing the sins of the whole world, and doing penance for them in the desert of Nazareth by the secret anguish which flooded His Heart.
We are prone to regard His Hidden Life as one of unruffled sweetness, interiorly at least. But what a different aspect it assumes when we penetrate into His Heart and behold the waves of sorrow with which it was inundated during those long silent years of inward crucifixion - of interior reparation of His Father's outraged glory.
What suffering is there so keen, so bitter as that caused by the sense of sinfulness, of our own unlikeness to God, and, if we must needs be tried so far, of our rejection by the Supreme object of our love? And yet the Heart of Jesus has drunk this chalice, long years before we hear Him asking in Gethsemane that it might pass from Him. Thus is He at Nazareth our model of interior reparation by inward suffering, just as in the Passion He presents to us the exterior reparation which the honour of His Father claimed.
Let us not be surprised, after giving ourselves up in a special manner to the service of God and His Church, after our view of His wrongs has grown clearer in the light of love, and our desire of repairing them become more ardent, if we are permitted to suffer in an increased degree, if we are required to pass through interior trials of every kind, and especially if we are overwhelmed with a sense of sinfulness sufficient to crush us beneath its weight. If we support this patiently and lovingly, in union with the Heart of Jesus, it will form our interior reparation, through our inward suffering, for the outrages committed daily, hourly, ceaselessly against God. Jesus of Nazareth will be at once our model and our strength. Let us then habituate ourselves to think often, to think deeply of the sufferings of His Sacred Heart during His Hidden Life.
- 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