The Sad Heart

I have great sadness and continual sorrow in my heart.

The Burden of Sorrow

The Cry for Consolation

“I have known great sorrow, real – not imagined, and the year just passed has been bitterly hard – a period, as some one has written, which you would have thought beforehand you could not bear and wonder when you look back how you ever did – a time to test faith and confidence and strength. And through it all outward cheerfulness to be maintained, but not a spark of it under the surface.”

The Lack of Consolers

Poor, aching heart! fountainhead of the world’s tears, silent sufferer in the world’s great hospital, stricken with a deep, gaping wound and inwardly bleeding to death. No one cares; no one knows; no one can know I Like the comedian in the story, you must laugh and make others laugh, and all the while a dear one is dead in your home. You must by assuming cheerful tones and affecting bright glances hang silver trinkets upon a coffin that is guarding death. No one suspects! It would take years with all their days and days with all twenty-four hours to tell the story, and what would avail the telling? The story is one that cannot be told; it must be felt; it must be lived.

The True Consoler

The music and laughter of this world have been registered by modern science upon rigid, unyielding records, and distant ears may enjoy, as often as they will, the harmony and song and mirth of the world. But how can one rehearse with sympathy the sorrows of men, how can one reproduce to oneself the heart-aches of others? It is utterly impossible, unless there is in existence something which can feel, as deeply and as delicately as you do, all your sorrows, aching heart, and can throb with as dull and persistent a pain as your heart does. Be consoled. Although infinite knowledge and infinite sympathy and infinite love are needed for such a purpose, in God’s great goodness we have them all. The Heart of the God-man knows and feels it all. The Heart of Christ is the balm for your aching heart.

The Sympathy of Saint Paul

Perhaps you have felt at times the effect of merely human kindness and have been relieved by slight attentions which were indications, like spars in the changing tides or straws in the shifting winds, of deeper and intenser movements. You forgot thus for a time your suffering. You will appreciate, then, the way Saint Paul felt for his brethren, and from the picture he draws of his heart in sorrow and from its undoubted power to relieve, you will know what powers a more tender, a more sorrowing Heart can have. Think then of these passages of the zealous Apostle. Recall his concern for the Jews whom he longed with a martyr’s longing to bring to Christ.

“I speak the truth in Christ; I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost that I have great sadness, and continual sorrow in my heart. For I wished myself to be anathema from Christ for my brethren, who are my kinsmen according to the flesh.”

The Sorrow of Saint Paul

You who suffer so much, will be surely touched at the devotion of one whose heart aches like yours and with an unselfish sorrow. Recall, too, how Saint Paul wrote a letter of reproof once to the Corinthians and then wrote again to console them after his severe reprehension. No doubt, you have had at rare intervals the letters of some friend who could make you forget your troubled heart for a long time. Then you will know that Saint Paul had his heart-aches, as many another has and knew how to console others, too.

“I determined this with myself,” he wrote, “not to come to you again in sorrow. For if I make you sorrowful, who is he then that can make me glad but the same who is made sorrowful by me? And I wrote this same to you that I may not, when I come, have sorrow upon sorrow from them of whom I ought to rejoice, having confidence in you all that my joy is the joy of you all. For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you with many tears, not that you should be made sorrowful, but that you might know the charity I have more abundantly towards you.”

Some of these words may not be fully understood without study, but one reading will afford you a glimpse deep down into the heart of Saint Paul, and will give you a view of another aching heart. That knowledge and that sight will help you and prepare you for the Heart of infinite sympathy and infinite sorrow.

The Multitude of Sad Hearts

Oh, aching heart, could you but take voice and speak, an inexpressible wail of anguish would rise and fill the homes of men and overflow into the ways and roll through the valleys and beat in its surging tide against all the hills the world around. Because you are everywhere, aching heart. The children feel you when their parents go or are such that they were better gone. The father knows you when his hope and pride leaves him in death or disgraces him. The bride or bridegroom suffers with your agony when orange blossoms yield with painful swiftness to the funeral flowers. But most of all, aching heart, your anguish abides within the mother’s breast, whether the little one dies in the coming or makes its going sadder because its short stay has made it more lovable, whether the father of her dear ones prove shamefully unworthy or the children themselves are wandering and lost upon sinful ways.

The Loneliness of Sad Hearts

“And the absence of relief and the loneliness of it all,” cries the aching heart. “There is no remedy from the whispers of praise or the touch of gold or the mocking laugh of dissipation. There is a slight help in the smile of friendship or murmur of sympathy or hand-clasp of love. These last indeed bring a message to me; they make the sluggish currents of sorrow sway; they stir the stagnant waters with healing movements; they are the angels that visit the pool of Bethsaida. They, however, lessen but do not remove my burden. It is still there when the friends have all gone, when the noises of life are hushed, when the lights are out and night with its terrors comes closing in. Then the pain throbs violently, then the ache burns; it is so intense, and I am alone, alone. No one there through all the dark hours as they pass slowly one after another, no one but I, the aching heart and my horror: my horror, disease; or my horror, temptation; or my horror, remorse; or my horror, ingratitude; or my horror, wrong; or my horror, despair. There I battle till faintness and weariness come upon me, and all the time I am alone, alone.”

The Burden Lightened

A Sadder Heart Is Near You

No, aching heart, you are not alone. Faith is not gone and that cries to you that God is in Heaven and all is right with the world. Hope is not gone, and its exultant tones are chanting: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away.” And most of all, the greatest of these, charity is not gone. Near you, aching heart, is the Heart of Christ, charity in charity’s sweetest form. His Heart ached in silence; His Heart was the only one that ever ached alone. Ten thousand black ingratitudes, ten thousand foulest wrongs assailed His Heart. Sin, too, fastened upon It but not His own sin.

A Sadder Heart Suffers for You

All the heart-aches of all mankind and your heart-ache among them, known better than you can know it, felt more keenly than you can feel it, are pressing the sharp points of their thorns forever into His exquisitely sensitive Heart. Does your heart- wound gape wide? Look at the gash in His Heart which shall be open for all eternity, wider and deeper than yours, because containing yours. Is your heart crushed beneath the pressure of grief? Mark the Cross planted deep in His Heart. It was not upon Calvary’s rocky ledges that the Cross was first erected, but upon the tender summit of His Heart. Nor could anyone know or possibly suspect the anguish of which His Heart was the centre. His Mother could dimly guess, and she was nearest of all to Him and had a heart that ached with His.

A Sadder Heart Suffers Because of You

Have you not, then, unselfishness enough to forget your scarcely perceptible twinge of pain when you bring it close to the fathomless, boundless, every way measureless heart-ache of Christ? Especially when you remember that through Him your grief blesses you and blesses others? Especially when you remember that you have helped to sharpen those thorns and to deepen that wound and weight that Cross, which are ever at work crucifying His Heart? Is it not a slight consolation that you may be, if you suffer with Him and for Him, a martyr whose bleeding heart is fruitful for the souls of men? Have you not at least the generosity of the thief? Can you not sincerely say from your little cross: “I indeed justly, for I receive the due reward for my deeds. But this man hath done no evil”?

A Sadder Heart Is Lonelier Than You

And you say you are alone? Indeed, sad heart, you are often so. But have you ever thought of the loneliness of Christ? You would not be lonely, if you could help it; He was lonely, though He could have had His Father and legions of angels. Does the night close in sadly upon you? Think of the bitter night-fall that darkened about the crucified Christ. Jerusalem had never witnessed in earth and sky a more fearful time. Yet within the Heart of Christ were darker shadows still. One by one all had left Him. He would die slowly; He would be tortured to death; He would not blunt any pain by taking it suddenly or with others. He sipped the chalice of His passion. His people left Him. The priests and Herod and Pilate went, and the spiritual and temporal powers went with them. Then His friends went, Judas and Peter dealing Him sad wounds as they departed. Saint John and His Blessed Mother were dismissed, and their kind sympathy which hitherto lightened the burden on His Heart, was now set aside forever. Christ would be solitary. “I have trodden the wine-press alone.” So last of all His heavenly Father leaves Him. The Heart of Christ is wrapped in black, impenetrable darkness. It is not despair, or He could not have said the moment after: “Into Thy hands I commend My spirit”; but it was a desolation, a heart-ache, which would have been despair in any other soul. The Heart of Christ faced Its horror, a divine abandonment, and faced it alone.

A Sadder Heart Consoles You

O sad heart of the world, when you taste again your sorrow, think of the tide of bitterness which rolled in upon the Heart of Christ. “The waters are come in even unto my soul. I stick fast in the mire of the deep, and there is no sure standing. I am come into the depth of the sea and a tempest hath overwhelmed me.” “And I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none; and for one that would comfort me, and I found none.” His Heart was alone, abandoned upon the wild waste of angry waters; nothing but blackness and death on all sides, and then that saddest of all cries that ever came from a human heart rose from the lonely Heart of Christ: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Christ need not have felt that sorrow, but He willingly did so because He would have you, aching heart, remember that He has made your hidden grief His, that He stood alone that you might never be alone. Whatever others may say or think or do, His Heart knows and His Heart cares, and the years to come, dear heart, must never be like the year just passed.