Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

Part Three is here.

by Father Daniel A. Lord, 1950’s

The Heart of His Mother

Christ understands. He read, we must remember, the story of all womankind in the life of His own mother. She was the perfect woman, and to her came whatever a woman can experience except original and personal sin.

Had He known her alone, He would still have known womankind. Because from the moment of conception Christ was in full possession of consciousness, because He combined the vision of God with the acquired experience of a man, He read the heart of His mother with perfect clearness.

In her story was, we may almost say, the story of womankind. Mary, on the threshold of womanhood, faced marriage hesitantly. The love of virginity was uppermost in her soul, and she prized that above all else. Yet in the mystery of the Incarnation the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity smiled approvingly and gave her the joy of motherhood with the preservation of her cherished virginity.

He was present at the almost overwhelming joy that flooded her soul when her fears, holy and maidenly, were swept aside and she knew that she carried in her womb the Child who was her son and the Son of God.

Christ alone of all mankind shared with a mother the secret, unspoken happiness of the months of waiting. He alone knew the eagerness, the dreads, the beautiful dreams with which mothers wrap round their unborn sons.

He experienced her anguish of soul when because of Him she bent silently before the questioning, hurt eyes of Joseph. I

n the thrilling moment when she held her first-born in her arms, He alone of all the sons of women had a conscious part.

For the rest of mankind the beautiful joys and consuming worries that surround the first years of childhood are a secret they never share. Jesus knew them, experienced them with His mother, felt their poignant reactions on her heart.

The poverty that forced her to use her veil for His baby clothes and a manger for His crib, that made her house a place of small economies and hard labor which roughened her hands and the hands of her growing boy, was His deliberate choice.

By her side He stood when Joseph died and the shadow of that death was flung over the little home. His heart was torn as hers was with the breaking of those ties that fastened Him to the house in Nazareth, for He foresaw more clearly than she possibly could the loneliness of the evenings when, after He had begun His public life, she must sit alone at the evening meal, face His empty chair, and know that He would never sit in it again.

When she stood at His torturing deathbed, He bore her sorrow added to His own pain; and in the midst of physical torture and mental agony He remembered her and cared for her.

His own rejection by His people was hard; far harder was the anguish He knew she felt when she realized that the world regarded her boy as a cheat and a failure.

No phase of woman’s life, then, was hidden from this Son, who learned all women’s joy and sorrow in the person of the one woman whose life was an epitome of every happiness and grief that women, since the world began, have ever experienced.

He Is Lonely Too

And if the heart of woman is so often lonely, surely the heart of Christ knew unspeakable loneliness too.

He walked the earth and no one except a woman, His mother, seemed to understand Him. His disciples never caught His plans, never dreamed His dreams, for up to the very moment of Pentecost, while He dreamed of a spiritual kingdom, they talked of thrones and armies and the restored kingdom of Israel. Surely nothing makes one so utterly lonely as the feeling that no one understands the things nearest to one’s heart.

Christ walked alone, talking of His hopes to people who laughed at them or misinterpreted them or turned them into new reasons for His death.

When He promised them the thing that was to prove His continued love for the world, the Blessed Sacrament, many used it as a pretext for leaving Him forever. And He followed their departure with hurt, disappointed eye.

The cry “Behold the heart that has loved men so much and has been loved so little in return,” that comes forth from the tabernacle, sounds very much like a cry of loneliness from the Eucharistic Christ.

With love squandered on everything and so little of it for Him, with throngs pouring down the city streets and lone worshipers before the altar, with the theaters crowded and the churches so often empty, it would be strange if the Christ upon our altars did not know loneliness.

Surely we sympathize most easily with the thing we ourselves know. Women are lonely? So was Christ. So, in a sense, is Christ. If lonely souls, when they find each other, cling together, surely women will cling to Christ. If the surest cure for loneliness is unselfishness to others, women have the cure for their own loneliness in devotion to the lonely Christ.

The Perfect Man

So, into the ancient world that had treated women so badly walked the lovely figure of the God-Man. He did not come as Adam came, in the full vigor of maturity, but as a baby born of a woman, the guise that must make the strongest appeal to a woman’s tenderness.

From the crib He stretches out His baby arms asking for affection and care. Can any woman be lonely when she takes a baby to her breast?

Then, as an attractive boy, He spent those early years in intimate association with a woman, sharing the burdens of her house-hold, helping her as a devoted son helps the mother he loves.

With Joseph dead, the task of providing for her became His own. His labor in the carpenter shop was what earned the food for her table, the linen for her bed, the clothes she wore.

Grown to full maturity, He walked the highways of His mission while this mother, first with pride, then with a sense of His doom, knew His greatness and His divinity.

She had experienced herself the gentleness and strength of His soul that made women follow Him devotedly, open the doors of their homes to welcome Him, stay near Him on the cross and before His tomb, faithful when all others had fled.

He, who had cared for her need, sought out the needy women of the towns. Because He was so pure, she saw sinful women for the first time in their sad history looking into the eyes of a man strong yet pitying, sinless yet infinitely forgiving.

There were lonely women’s hearts before Christ came. There need be no loneliness in the world’s most forgotten woman if she looks upon Jesus, loves Him, and asks for His sympathy and understanding.

The beautiful companionship which Jesus gave to His mother, to Martha and Mary, to the women saints of the Church, the understanding forgiveness that He showed to Magdalen and to the sinful women who turned to Him, the strength for their weakness and sympathy for their sorrows, the gentleness for their need that He gave to the women of that ancient world and to every woman who seeks Him in the Blessed Sacrament, He holds out to the women of today.

In Jesus Christ they find the ideal of their dreaming, the realization of their hopes, the man who fulfills their highest desires, the only one who never disappoints.

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The saints assure us that simplicity is the virtue most likely to draw us closer to God and make us more like Him.

No wonder Jesus praised the little children and the pure of heart! In them, He recognized the goodness that arises from an untroubled simplicity of life, a simplicity which in the saints is completely focused on its true center, God.

That’s easy to know, simple to say, but hard to achieve.

For our lives are complicated and our personalities too. (We even make our prayers and devotions more complicated than they need be!)

In these pages, Fr. Raoul Plus provides a remedy for the even the most tangled lives.

 

Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

by Father Daniel A. Lord, 1950’s

Women Around the Cross

From the vantage point of the cross He looked over the world to see who really loved Him. Among all those faces that He saw snarling up at Him and spitting upon Him the venom of their hatred, His gaze rested on the young face of St. John, the brave, tearless face of His mother, the sorrowing faces of the holy women and, pressed against the foot of His cross, the agonized face of Magdalen who had been the sinner.

One man, and the rest faithful women, daring the fury of a mob to be near Him as He died.

No wonder that, when Easter dawned, immemorial legend tells us He first appeared to a woman, His mother, and the Gospels tell us that He showed Himself to the holy women who had been with Him on Calvary and to Magdalen weeping near His tomb.

Women had shared His ignominy; He made them the first to share His glory.

His Love Goes On

This, then, is the attitude toward women of the historic Christ. There have been heroes who won the love and loyalty of women. But even great heroes have often been cruel to the women who loved them, as Napoleon was to Josephine or Caesar to the women whose loves dotted his career.

There have been pure knights like Galahad and brave knights like Bayard, but women meant almost nothing to them. Philosophers sometimes talked rather beautifully of women, but they went home to quarrel furiously with their wives or they left their lofty lectures to soil women with impure lusts.

Women have envied Clare the sympathy and comradeship of Francis of Assisi as they envied Scholastica her brother Benedict and Queen Blanche her son St. Louis.

But before the coming of Jesus Christ, no man ever meant to womankind what He did. No man save the God-Man ever was at once so heroic and so tender. No man ever looked upon women with such gentle eyes, yet lifted her with such strong, pure hands. No man ever gave more to women and asked less from them.

Fortunately for womankind the historic Christ lives on in His Church, and His attitude toward women remains unchanged. We are inclined to be almost astonished at the wonderful tenderness and affection He has shown to the women saints, almost as though He found in their devotion a love that made up, at least in part, for the love denied Him by a selfish world.

The mystic espousals in which Christ placed on the finger of St. Catherine His wedding ring were a symbol of the union that has joined Him to the souls of all religious women from the days of Rome’s first consecrated virgins to the days of the last young novice pronouncing her vows.

The stigmata that He pressed upon the hands and hearts of women saints are just the continued sharing of His Passion with women as He first shared it with the Mater Dolorosa and the women who stood near the cross.

So often in history He has entrusted some mission of special importance to women. His bride St. Catherine walked to Avignon and brought back His Popes from their Babylonian captivity.

St. Brigid of Ireland shared with St. Patrick the glory of making the isle Catholic.

The revelation of Lourdes was made to a little girl kneeling in prayer.

St. Joan of Arc, St. Theresa, St. Scholastica, the great women founders of religious orders, seem specially commissioned by Him for great, noble purposes. Certainly no hero in all the world has won such loyalty and faithful service as women have given to Christ.

In His name and for His love they have served the poor, taught little children, nursed the sick, made their houses like the Holy House of Nazareth, taken penitents in their protecting arms, kept devotion to Him flaming high in convents and in private homes.

Modern history is lighted  by the glowing lives of women kindled with a spark of the love of Christ.

The Revelation of Love

Then, when the greatest revelation of modern times, the revelation of the love of the Sacred Heart, was to be made to the world, we can hardly fail to see a significance in the fact that though one of His priests, Claude de la Colombiere, was commissioned to preach the devotion, the actual revelation, with its vision of the thorn-circled, flaming heart which has become the very symbol of Christ’s love for mankind, was made, not to a man, but to a woman, St. Margaret Mary, kneeling in her Visitation convent.

Once more a work of love and a special mark of love was given by Christ to a woman.

He Is Unchanged

The heart of woman can be as lonely now as it was when Christ first looked over the desolate ancient world. Her heart still needs strength with security, understanding without presumption, gentleness that is unselfish.

If, then, the women of the present age looked back twenty centuries and saw how the women of one small nation during a few years had the blessed privilege of knowing this perfect Man and feeling His sympathy, if they thought that His kindliness was restricted after that to a few unusual souls blooming in occasional convents or pious villages, they would be justified in feeling a quite natural twinge of discontent.

Surely women need Him today as much as ever they did. Surely their hearts cry out for all that He can mean to women as truly as did women’s hearts in Jerusalem or Siena or Assisi or Paray le Monial.

Because this is true, Christ, the perfect man, still offers womankind a friendship, loving yet trustworthy, gentle yet strong, sympathetic yet infinitely holy.

Christ, ever present in the Blessed Sacrament, looks down with infinite understanding upon the world of women and every day in the year fills the loneliness of women’s hearts.

The Madonnas of the world bring Him their little ones and He blesses them and their children approvingly.

The Magdalens deep in despair kneel before Him; He touches their souls with gentle, healing tenderness, and lifts them from sin to sanctity, from darkness to light.

The widow raises her eyes to plead for her son long dead in sin, and Christ touches the boy and gives him back to his mother.

The little bride, fearing that the joy of her marriage feast is fast slipping into hopeless ruin, flies to Him, and He calms her fears and gives her once more the joy of her wedding day.

The modern Mary and Martha offer Him, exiled in a world that denies the very fact of the Eucharist, the hospitality of their warm, loving hearts, and He comes to dwell with them in Holy Communion as once He dwelt in the little house of Bethany.

No wonder, then, that our Catholic churches are always filled by the girls and women who day and night flock to Christ in the tabernacle.

Girls slip away from their offices, and wives from their homes, and mothers from their nurseries, and teachers from their classrooms, to find the sympathy and understanding offered to their hearts by this perfect Man.

For Christ in the tabernacle, as Christ walking the earth, knows best a woman’s joys and sorrows. He is the only one who really understands.

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