It entered into the designs of our Blessed Lord that His Hidden Life should be perpetuated, not only in His own Divine Person upon the altar, but also by a portion of the members forming His Mystic Body - the Church.
That there are hidden souls in every state and condition of life cannot be doubted. Of these, indiscriminately, we shall not treat in the following meditation, but confine ourselves at present to the consideration of the perpetual memorial of the Life in the Holy House as presented to us by the Contemplative Orders in the Church.
It is well known that the utility of those Religious Orders which are not devoted to active works of charity is a point much contested, even by good practical Catholics. Any doubt, however, as to their utility ought to be removed from the minds of those who have at any time made the Life of our Lord at Nazareth the subject of meditation. It would be needless to repeat here what has been stated in the preceding meditations, not only as to the manner of life led by our Lord during the hidden years, but likewise as to His interior occupation, which was the life of His Heart. It will be necessary but to keep in mind that the period passed at Nazareth was not simply a time of waiting and delay until the hour had arrived for commencing the actual work of our Lord's life. The truth is that our Lord would not have anticipated, by a single instant, the time fixed in the eternal decree for entering on His Public Ministry. Nevertheless, through the long years in which He was apparently doing nothing towards the end for which He came upon earth, His work was before Him, and He was all the time unceasingly and most effectually engaged upon it. He thus affords us an incontestable proof of the utility of a life passed in prayer and penance. Would He, the Incarnate Wisdom, have spent the whole of His life on earth save the three last years in a manner which was not conducive, in an eminent degree, to the glory of! God and the interests of mankind?
It was in the solitude of Nazareth that the great Apostleship of Prayer commenced. We have seen what Jesus did in that blessed sanctuary. We have watched His exterior employment, and have observed that it was both laborious and commonplace, such as would be the occupation of any poor artisan. Fatigue and weariness, the ordinary accompaniments of continuous hard work, pressed no less heavily upon the Son of God in His Human Flesh than upon any of His creatures, for He would lay nothing upon them, the burden and weight of which He had not first borne Himself.
His labours and His every action were, moreover, regulated by obedience, and this not simply during His childhood and youth, but equally in the maturity of His manhood. Each outward action He performed, each work He wrought, however ordinary in itself, was of infinite value as a prayer, as well as an act of reparation and expiation; yet these were not the principal occupation of His Hidden Life, nor the most important part of its teaching for ourselves.
In the Seventh Meditation of the present work we have meditated upon our Lord's ceaseless Prayer. This was the great work - the work of God - opus Dei - to which He entirely consecrated thirty years of His life, the means by which He negotiated the salvation of the world, and converted souls, no less than by the brilliant works He wrought during His three years' ministry, the eloquent words that fell from His Sacred Lips, or the sufferings of His Passion. The virtue of those secret supplications which ascended from His Sacred. Heart in the silence of Nazareth is being felt throughout the world now, and will continue to be felt until the end of time, and its fruits will remain for eternity. No age, no tribe, no people, no individual soul has been excluded from its embrace, neither has there been any sorrow for which it has not won consolation, nor any temptation which it has not merited grace to overcome. Souls who will not pray for themselves, who stand on the verge of eternal ruin, are snatched from the edge of the precipice by the graces that they owe to the prayer which the Divine Solitary of Nazareth offered up for them, whilst the sweat ran down His face as He toiled, or as He knelt through the silence of the night, praying with "a strong cry and tears, and was heard for His reverence." (Hebrews 5:7)
The fact seems generally lost sight of that the Contemplative Orders have been instituted for a definite end and purpose recognized by the Church, and are prized by it on that very account.
Their object is not exclusively the sanctification of their own individual members. Such sanctification itself has a further definite object, and it is this last which is so constantly ignored by the world at large.
That object generally is synonymous with the one which our Lord Himself had at heart - namely, a desire to restore to God the homage of adoration and reparation of which He has been so sadly defrauded, and to promote the salvation of the world and the spiritual interests of souls. We have seen that the great means by which Jesus attained this end was prayer, along with interior and exterior mortification, and self-denial. Now, this is the thought with which the Holy Spirit has inspired the mind of the Church, and from it have sprung forth those Contemplative Orders wherein the Life of our Lord at Nazareth is reproduced and perpetuated. Can it then with justice be alleged that the abiding memorial of a life so efficacious for the interests of the Church and of mankind is useless or supererogatory? Is not the imita- tion of it the highest homage that can be paid to that portion of our Lord's Life which He passed in obscurity, and, is it not at the same time, the most convincing acknowledgment of its utility?
If our Lord had not known the efficiency of such institutions, and if they had not been very pleasing to Him, certainly He would not have inspired His saints to found them, and His Church to approve them. Have we of the nineteenth century attained to greater sanctity than the saints of other ages, or to a higher wisdom than the Church of God possesses, wherein His Spirit of Truth so abides as to preserve her from all error?
In order to assure ourselves of the soundness of the statement made as to the fidelity of the cloistered Orders in representing the Hidden Life of our Lord, we have but to inform ourselves of the manner of life which is led by them. It is no unfrequent idea that monastic life is a species of luxurious idleness, and that persons holding somewhat sentimental views of spirituality, may there find every facility for indulging their peculiar tendencies. But, in fact, precisely the contrary is the real truth. In the religious life every moment of the day is filled up. Each hour has its allotted duty, and in those Orders which most closely resemble the House of Nazareth, these duties may be summed up in two words - prayer and labour, as a good authority tells us, though even, whilst they are at work, they cease not from mental prayer. The interests of the Divine Heart of Jesus form the object towards which all their prayer, and labour, and penance tend; these being the triumph of the Church, the salvation of souls and of nations, and the propagation of truth and faith throughout the world. Ceaselessly, in those new Nazareths so ignored by the world, the very prayer of our Lord Himself mounts to Heaven: "That they may know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." (John 17:3) Had we intended to treat definitely of the work of the Contemplative Orders, much more might have been said to show forth, in its full light, all that the Church so justly appreciates in them with relation to her own interests, as well as all that society in general owes to them in respect of the good that they have done. The present chapter aims simply at showing the analogy which exists between the Hidden Life of our Lord and that led in the Religious Orders, however depreciated by a world that cannot enter into their principles of action or their useful works. Sufficient has already been said for this purpose. We have but to add a few words in reference to another part of the design, which it would seem our Lord had before Him in willing to raise up Religious Orders in His Church, which should in a special manner reproduce His own Hidden Life.
The "Spirit breathes where He wills," giving to each soul the vocation best suited to conduct it to its own sanctification and to the accomplishment of the mission for which it is here upon earth. Now, there are souls who have become enamoured of Jesus for His own sake, the yearning of whose hearts explains itself in a perpetual and secret murmur to the Sacred Heart: That I may know Thee more. This seems to be the centre around which all their other aspirations revolve. They catch glimpses of His beauty in meditation. Now and then the Gospel narratives become illuminated to their eyes, but all too quickly the flash of light is gone, and they long in vain for it again. The world has claims upon them and they must go back to its noise and its turmoil, and its folly; and the memory of that ray of light in their meditation haunts them, and they pine for solitude, that they may be alone with Him and learn to know Him better. Is this selfishness? Is this sentimentality? Oh! do not say so. It is the whisper of the Spirit; it is the invitation of Jesus to the marriage supper; it is He Himself leading the soul into solitude, that there He may speak to her and make all His beauty known to her. This, however, is not all He wills. When souls who are thus called to the contemplative life, increase in the love of God, there springs up spontaneously within their breast a desire to promote His interests, and then it is that the memory of Nazareth sheds itself over them as a ray of light, indicating the infallible means by which alone they can attain the end desired.
Prayer and Penance, the daily mortification of a common life, subject to all kinds of restraint and subjection, a life wherein self-will can have no part - such are the arms whereby contemplatives fight the battles of the Lord, battles ignored indeed by the world, but well known to God and to His angels.
It was then a loving design of His Providence by which God provided for the souls, above described, a means by which they could at once follow the tendency He Himself had given them towards solitude passed in His Presence, and in labour for the interests of His glory. Happy, then, are those Religious, set apart from all others for the mission of prayer and reparation, to whom has also been given a particular drawing towards meditation on the Hidden Life of Jesus. It will present to them a mirror wherein they may behold the characteristic features of their own daily life in the perfection to which it was raised in Jesus. They will have but to turn their mental vision to Nazareth in order to correct what is defective in their own reproduction of the Life spent in the Holy House. It will be for them a beacon light in seasons of darkness and desolation, a place of rest in the weariness of temptation, and a tranquil haven of peace and consolation in the endurance of every form of suffering.
- 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