In order to realize the marvelous example of this virtue which our Divine Lord affords us in the Hidden Life at Nazareth, it will be necessary to recall much that has been considered in the preceding meditations.
The virtue of mortification forms a vital part of the spiritual life, inasmuch as no other virtue can habitually reside in the soul, or be perseveringly practised, without it. By this it will be seen that we are not here speaking simply, or even chiefly, of exterior mortification, but more especially of that of the heart, whence it exercises its influence over every faculty and every sense, interior and exterior.
We not unfrequently hear pious persons speaking of mortification as if it were something altogether exterior, and as if its degree in each soul could be infallibly measured by external appearances. That this is a very great error is proved by the fact that the mortification of the individual soul can be estimated only by a knowledge of its peculiar character, its tastes, capacities, and many other circumstances which are as numerous as the different members of the human race.
There is but one Being of whose mortifications we can form to ourselves anything approaching a just estimate, and we can do this only by reminding ourselves that that one was God Incarnate, that His Kingdom was from everlasting, that His ministers were the angels and the earth His footstool, that the human Heart which He had taken was the purest, the most sensitive that could be formed, His human Soul the most clear in its perceptions, the most noble in all its faculties. When we have striven to realize all this, and then meditated on the circumstances attending our Lord's sojourn upon earth, and in particular His monotonous life at Nazareth, we may form some faint conjecture of what must have been the mortification which He practised in every moment of that marvelous life.
If His infinite love of the Eternal Father caused Him to find a hidden sweetness in the continual exercise of that painful obedience of which He gives us so rare a model, inasmuch as it enabled Him to repair the outrages which the disobedience of men offer to the Divine Majesty, yet it must not be for a moment forgotten that such obedience was most painful. It necessitated the ceaseless subjection of His human will, and here we must recall what has been considered in the meditation on His obedience, where we have dwelt on the circumstances which rendered it a marvel of interior mortification.
The silence which during His Hidden Life He had imposed upon Himself, although so sweet to Him, yet had in its continued exercise its side of mortification on account of the burning zeal which consumed Him. He knew each error that was being propagated around Him; He knew each soul that was wandering away from the Light through want of a voice to tell it of the truth; yet He, the Living Truth, kept silence because His hour for speaking was not yet come. Was there no mortification here?
As with His obedience, so with the humiliations of His Hidden Life. In order to conjecture the extent of them, we must remember His infinite knowledge of all things, in consequence of His hypostatic union with the Word, as well as the dignity of His Person and all that resulted from it. Yet we have seen Him condescending - without the appearance of condescension - to be taught the most common-place labour, to be reproved for His want of skill, and to be regarded with contempt, even perhaps by the gross and ignorant Nazarenes themselves, as "the Son of the carpenter."
How His Soul, so delicate in its perceptions, so refined and perfect in all its faculties, must have shrunk from much that He heard and saw around Him! Outside the Holy House how out of harmony must everything have been with the beautiful Paradise He had left! Yet nothing of this appeared in His exterior. Was there no mortification here?
His life at Nazareth, although one of seclusion, was nevertheless essentially a common life. Marvelous as was the sanctity of the sacred inmates of the Holy House, yet in nothing did the least shadow of singularity or exclusiveness haunt them. Thus was Jesus open to the contact, at least at times, of the rough and gross, not only in manners, but in nature. And after all, if we reflect upon it, what companionship could Jesus, the Son of God, find in the most perfect amongst us, were He to regard us in ourselves and destitute of His grace?
We have meditated the deep sources of suffering in the Heart of Jesus, its burning love, its quenchless zeal, its thirst for men's salvation. We have seen, moreover, that it was alone in its sorrows, as no human heart ever was or could be. Nevertheless, year after year Jesus remained at Nazareth, because it was the Father's will, and remained there with His sorrow ever before Him, toiling patiently in Saint Joseph's workshop, as if those humble labours were His only work on earth, being the true model, as long as the world shall last, of long-suffering and of perseverance.
Can we contemplate the Divine Solitary of Nazareth without convincing ourselves that mortification is a deeper thing than we, perhaps, have ever realized - a virtue without which none other can become a habit in the soul? Let the Religious, who finds the exercise of obedience difficult to nature, ask himself whether he has light or knowledge like that of Jesus of Nazareth to bring into subjection - whether he has His greatness to abase, and whether the points on which he is obedient are less in harmony with his talents and his dignity than they were in Jesus while at work in the carpenter's shop, though possessed of all His Majesty as the Son of God. If he finds that holy silence which his Rule enjoins difficult to observe, or if a too eager zeal draws him into the imagination that he cannot refrain from speaking, let him consider whether he has the motives which may have influenced Jesus in laying aside the long silence that He had imposed upon Himself. If he is reprehended for works which are thought to be done amiss, if he is passed over as one unworthy of esteem or notice, if humiliating circumstances crowd upon him, let him call to mind the Hidden God of Nazareth, and he will surely blush to compare his humiliations, whatever they may be, with those which He who was both Great and Hidden supported so gently, unknown to all around Him save Mary and Joseph.
Nor let us forget that which we have meditated upon in the chapter treating of the loneliness of our Lord in His Hidden Life. Every pang, every suffering, whether interior or exterior, He bore alone, so far as the human sympathy or understanding of others went, and this we may say without any detriment to the intimate union of His Heart with that of His Immaculate Mother, or of His sweet communications both with her and with the gentle Saint Joseph. As for our Lady, we cannot doubt that she measured the extent of His inward sufferings, His humiliations and all that was involved in His obedience, as fully, as perfectly as any pure creature could possibly fathom them. But beneath, what fathomless depths which not even the Immaculate could sound, what horizons which not even her pure eyes could reach! The Psalms constantly prefigure to us in the person of David, the loneliness of our Lord amid His sorrows, loneliness, inasmuch as no sorrows ever equaled His, and no being upon earth could ever have measured their extent.
Now, to His Humanity, this isolation was a bitter suffering; yet who of those around Him - save the two of the Holy Family - suspected it for a moment? Ever sweet was He, ever gentle, ever shedding genial sunshine around Him, yet with His own sorrow ever before Him, carefully hidden within the cloister of His own Sacred Heart, whence it did not cast so much as a shade upon any one who approached Him. Oh! how sublime a lesson in one of the most difficult practices of mortification is here presented to us. Few are they who can support continual suffering without experiencing some craving, if not for outspoken sympathy, at least for a silent acknowledgment and manifestation of interest in those about them. Fewer still are they who do not reveal impatience of feeling, the irritation of self-love, when that manifestation is withheld. What is needed here to restrain the impulses of nature, but that interior self-discipline, that mortification, which, if practised under the genial influence of the Heart of Jesus, will soon prove efficacious in changing the desert into a fertile garden, wherein we may walk at liberty with the Spouse of our souls, and where, freed from the shackles that once enchained us, we shall soon learn how good it is to be alone with God in our sorrows. Thus it will be seen that for the exercise of all the virtues of a hidden life, mortification is essential. Let us then not proudly vaunt our readiness to stand beneath the Cross of Calvary and share in the torments of the Passion; let us not aspire to climb the mount and practise the austere mortifications required of us there, until we have first gone down to Nazareth, and in that home learnt from the Divine Solitary, the exercise of daily interior self-discipline, patient abnegation of our wills, and self-immolation in secret.
- 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