We have now arrived at the close of the course of meditations written with a desire to familiarize us with the occupations, the sufferings, in a word, the whole Life of the Heart of Jesus during His abode at Nazareth. It remains for us but to consider the immense recompense destined for those who participate in that life according to their various conditions.
Let us, in the first place, recall briefly all we have meditated regarding our Lord in His Hidden Life. Let us, then, attach the eyes of our soul to our Divine Model, no longer, how- ever, toiling with Saint Joseph at Nazareth, but far away from the quiet spot where we have so long contemplated Him, face to face now with the ignominies, the outrages, the sufferings of every kind with which He was assailed in the bitter Passion that preceded His Death.
As we contemplate Him in the midst of those sufferings, which the Gospel has rendered familiar to us all, let us look back to the humiliations and other forms of sufferings, which we have seen Him silently supporting year after year at Nazareth, and let us thence learn how the reward of hidden suffering and interior virtue is reserved for occasions of extraordinary trial.
We behold our Blessed Lord "set at naught by Herod and all his army," and regarded as a fool; and yet for years, He, the Wisdom of the Father, had been accounted of no esteem at Nazareth. We see Him the object of the cruelty, the scorn, the derision of all the people, but His Heart had endured in silence for three-and-thirty years the same neglect, the same injustice, though in a less visible manner. The memory of Nazareth haunted Him amidst the noise and tumult of the Passion, and the secret humiliations and inward sufferings His Heart had supported there, met their recompense now in the peace, tranquillity, and joy with which it received or rather embraced every outrage.
So also will it be with us if we have striven to unite ourselves to our Lord, leading with Him a life hidden in God. When seasons of greater suffering shall come upon us, the virtues we have laboured to practise secretly, as it were, and without ostentation, the interior habits of sanctity and piety which we have acquired and persevered in, through union with our Lord, will then meet with their reward. They will be our support and our consolation, and the struggles we have sustained, without suspicion, perhaps, of others, the sufferings meekly accepted, and lovingly borne for long years when no one near us knew of them at all, or at least not in proportion to their extent, all these have merited for us special successes, special graces and consolations, which God, in His infinite goodness and in the delicacy of His love, reserved for us until those seasons of more than ordinary suffering should visit us.
Those, then, who have gone down into the secret humiliations of Nazareth, and have suffered silently and perseveringly, in union with the Hidden God, may confidently hope for grace to stand strong in faith beneath the Cross, amidst the more trying ignominies of the Passion.
It is, above all, the approach of death which will prove to us how good it has been to persevere in a hidden life. Let us contemplate our Blessed Lord in His agony on the Cross, and listen to His words there, which, as ever, indicate the occupation of His Sacred Heart. We shall find that they express the same sentiments, the same desires, the same character as those we have considered in Him at Nazareth.
"Father, forgive them;" these are the words we hear passing from His parched lips - the same prayer which had never ceased to ascend from His Heart, while He toiled in Joseph's workshop. Again, listen to Him as He promised Paradise to the penitent thief, true to the former spirit of His loving Heart, as busy occupying itself with others, as it is unmindful of its own bitter sufferings. In recommending His Blessed Mother to Saint John, and through him to us all, He does but reiterate in word the teaching He had given by example during the hidden years, devotion, namely, to our dearest Lady^ We hear Him announce the thirst that was consuming Him, the thirst for souls which had never ceased to consume His Heart, as He toiled and wept for them in the Holy House. It was His inward occupation also as He hung upon the Cross, and the very ardour of His thirst strengthened Him in His suffering. "My God," He cries, "My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" It is that old form of adoring love with which His Heart is so familiar, that Heart which we have seen enduring its secret agonies, its unknown trials at Nazareth; and by which it merited for us the grace to persevere in those seasons of especial difficulty when it should be given us to share in His dereliction.
"It is consummated," as He declared. The work of man's Redemption is finished, and the eye of the dying Victim, traversing the sorrow-laden years of His earthly career, pauses at Nazareth. How much of His work had not been accomplished there! And looking back on the secret trials of that long Hidden Life, He saw that no suffering had been spared for the full and perfect carrying out of the immense work which He had undertaken.
Lastly, we hear Him commending His Spirit into His Father's hands, even though that Father had seemed almost without mercy for this His only Son. Nevertheless, with the same confidence and love with which He pursued His hard, painful life at Nazareth, so now He yielded up His Spirit freely and readily. The same motives fired His Sacred Heart now as had animated it through His Life - the glory of His Father - the salvation of His brethren.
How many lessons may we not here draw for ourselves! First, the long accustomed habits of holy obedience, persevered in through life, will be our support and consolation not only in seasons of suffering, but also, and above all, at the hour of death - in our last agony. There is no reference here to sensible consolations, for it is possible that our Lord may ask us to share with Him in His bitter dereliction; but if we have previously cultivated an interior as well as an apostolic spirit, it will cling to us to the last; if we have habitually consecrated our sufferings and sorrows to the interests of the Heart of Jesus, the same spirit of loving self-sacrifice will abide with us, and the thought of Divine reparation, and the thirst for souls, will render our sufferings at the last awful moment not only endurable, but even sweet, inasmuch as we shall regard them as the supreme means of being united to the world's Victim in the consummation of that sacrifice by which He redeemed mankind.
Probably thousands have, in a secondary manner, owed their eternal salvation to the oblation offered by apostolic souls in their last agony. Thousands, also, have derived an inexhaustible source of strength for the supreme trial from the past exercise of their life-long apostolate.
We have alluded to this as the consolation reserved for those who have lived for and alone with the Heart of Jesus, because the union of our hearts with His at the hour of death will be close and strong in proportion to the union which they have acquired during life. This relation of our hearts to the Heart of our Saviour, this fusion of interests, at the critical moment which is to decide our eternity, will be our recompense for the secret sorrows we have lovingly borne, the temptations we have resisted, the struggles we have sustained, fully contented that God alone should see them.
The hour of death is the triumph of a hidden life, even as Jesus triumphed on the Cross. He who has lived alone with God in the midst of life, will not fear that awful solitude in which the soul must inevitably find itself at death. God has been all in all to it during life, and He will be the same to it in the tremendous hour of its departure. The day, therefore, of death is the commencement of recompense and of triumph for those who have reproduced in themselves the life of the Heart of Jesus of Nazareth. He will not, then, suffer to pass unrewarded any sorrows borne with Him in secret, by the souls for whom He has sufficed through long years of hidden suffering; and it will be given to them to know, in that hour, with an all-sufficient fullness of knowledge, how good it is to rest on the Heart of Jesus. Let us then entreat our Lord to teach us, during life, the secret of living hidden in His Heart, in order that it may be our resting-place at the hour of death.
- 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