In the exquisite prayer which our Lord made to His Eternal Father, on the night before He died, He exclaims: "Father, the hour is come.... I have glorified Thee on earth; I have finished the work which Thou gave Me to do. And now glorify Thou Me, O Father, with Thyself, with the glory which I had before the world was, with Thee." (John 17:1,4,5) It would seem as if the thought of His near return to the Bosom of the Father, and to that glory which He had possessed with Him before the world was, brought to Him a rest and a balm which His Human Nature needed on that awful night, seeing that its agonies were so fast approaching. Was it the first time, within the three-and-thirty years, that the vision of His eternal beatitude with the Father flooded His Soul with joy, and formed the consolation of His Sacred Heart, or was this not rather the abiding sunlight which ever illuminated the shadows of His earthly sojourn?
Our Lord, speaking by the mouth of David, said: "I thought upon the days of old, and I had in my mind the eternal years... and I was comforted." (Psalm 76:16) How deep becomes the sense of those words when applied to our Divine Lord! He bore in His remembrance the glory which He had with the Father before the world was. It was with Him, no speculative supposition regarding the magnitude or the kind of blessedness which would be His, when His exile should have ended. It would be but a return to the bosom of His Father, whom He had left only to accomplish the mission for which that Father had sent Him upon earth; a re-entrance into that glorious Kingdom, that beautiful Paradise which was His by right, but which He had taught us, in His Humanity, was to be gained only by suffering. Yes, He had in His mind the eternal years, even whilst He toiled in Joseph's workshop, and whilst the sweat stood out upon His brow, and whilst His Heart was pierced through with the vision of sin which, as we have seen, was ever stretched out before Him; and the memory of that glory He bad with the Father before the world was, and to the re-possession of which He was now each day drawing nearer, flooded His Soul with a joy, which it is not given to us to comprehend.
Some of the saints, as well as other holy persons, have had a special attraction for meditating on the eternal life of God before Creation. Such meditation, where there is a drawing towards it, is likely to have a very marked hallowing influence upon the soul; and the entire character of the spiritual life of the person so drawn towards it might and very probably would be formed upon its lines. The intellect occupied with such a subject would pass over unnoticed many a material object, which to another would be a source of fretfulness and embarrassment, and thus an impediment to its spiritual advancement. The thought of that tranquil self-sufficing Life "before the world was," before the angelic host was yet created to adore the Triune God, the thought of the Eternal Decrees reaching from end to end 9 and ordering all things even to the Day of Doom, would communicate a marvelous reverence to the soul for the least appointments of the Divine Will, Wisdom, and Love whence they emanate. Such a soul would not, and could not satisfy, its eye with secondary causes; it would involuntarily take its flight to the eternal years before Creation, and would trace back to those sublime heights the cause of all things ordained or permitted.
Lastly, it would possess within it the sanctifying yearning for those eternal years when time shall be no more, when the Eternal Decrees upon which it had so loved to meditate on earth shall have been entirely accomplished, and Heaven itself shall burst upon his enraptured vision in all its splendour. Little would such a soul be allured by the transient and empty joys or splendours of earth. The habitual thought of the eternal years would have rendered all these insipid and worthless, and though life should be overshadowed with darkest clouds of sorrow, there would still be deep within the soul that we have been depicting, a well-spring of hallowed joy which nothing could exhaust.
Now, if it is thus with those to whom God has given this attraction, what must have been the effects of the remembrance of the Eternal Years in the Sacred Heart of Him, who was at once both God and Man? In consequence of His union with the Word, His knowledge, we know, was infinite. From thence, what floods of light, of joy, of beatitude inundated His Holy Soul amidst the sorrows and toils of His exile? Above all, in the stillness and monotony of His life at Nazareth, when His outward actions seem least in harmony with the immense work that lay before Him - -least in accordance, too, with the dignity of His Person and the sublimity of His mission - we love to penetrate by meditation and prayer into His interior, and contemplate His mind occupied with the thought of Eternity. What was not comprised in that thought within the mind of Jesus, while we listen to the throbbing of His Sacred Heart, as it thrilled with the joy which the thought of Eternity conveyed to it!
If it is given but to a few to delight in meditation on the Eternal Life of God, if none among us can participate in the knowledge which conveyed such joy to the Human Heart of Jesus, there is no one who may not at least share His joy in anticipating His return to the Father's bosom, to His own beautiful Paradise which He had left but for the sake of us.
Although, unlike our Divine Lord, that Paradise is not ours by right - although, unlike Him, we have no foreknowledge of what is there reserved for us, yet this we do know infallibly, that Heaven is the assemblage of all good without any admixture of evil, that there we shall possess God without any fear of ever losing Him, and that consequently nothing which the human heart can desire, or the human mind conceive, will there be left unsatisfied.
Why is it, that with this faith living within us, and with the hope animating us, that we shall obtain what our faith teaches us to look forward to, we are yet so chained down either by the cares and sorrows of this life, or by its delusive pleasures, that we seem unable to lift up our hearts to those eternal mansions which our Lord, nevertheless, assures us He went to prepare for us? Is it not that charity is languishing within us, and that, the object of our desires not being in Heaven above, our minds but seldom ascend thither, for "where our treasure is, there will our heart be also."
We do not in any way mean to advance that the desire of an eternal reward should be the chief motive prompting us to support the miseries of this life cheerfully; but rather that our hearts, if they are in any way like the Heart of Him on whom we are meditating, will involuntarily mount up, like His, to the bosom of His Father and our Father, because there will be the term of all we hope for - the Eternal Home, the Everlasting Rest, the only ideal of perfect happiness - because there, and there only, will be the satiety of our love.
To the mourner then, whose heart, it seems, will never again be healed; to the souls, struggling with and almost succumbing beneath long temptations and desolating trials in their spiritual life; to those bereft of all that can render this life in any way enjoyable, we would whisper the word that resounds in our ears daily from the altar - Sursum corda. This invites us to forget earth's shadows, and mount up, in spirit, to the Eternal Sanctuary into which our great High Priest has entered, and where He is preparing a mansion for each one of us. How healing a balm is conveyed, in those two little words, to the soul of the believer, especially when sorrow has wrought in him its blessed chastening work of detachment; so that his thoughts have begun already to be cast in a heavenly mould, and each one to share in the involuntary yearning of his entire being for his Everlasting Home.
Let us think often - nay, if it could be incessantly - upon the Eternal Years, on the mansion which Jesus is preparing for us, on our endless rest in thq bosom of the Father. Let this remembrance be our solace, our soul's rest, our heart's joy, even as the same thought formed the abiding joy of the Heart of Jesus, amidst the toils and sufferings of His long Hidden Years 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