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The love of the cross makes us undertake voluntary
afflictions, as for example, fasting, watching,
hair-shirts and other macerations of the flesh, and
makes us renounce pleasures, honours and riches: and
the love in these exercises is very delightful to the
beloved.
Yet it is still more so when we receive sweetly
and contentedly pains, torments and tribulations, by
reason of the Divine will which sends us them. But
love is then at its height when we not only receive
afflictions with patience and sweetness, but cherish,
love, and embrace them for the sake of the Divine
good-pleasure, whence they proceed.
Now of all the efforts of perfect love, that which
is made by acquiescence of spirit in spiritual
tribulations, is doubtless the purest and noblest.
The Blessed (S.) Angela of Foligno makes an
admirable description of the interior pangs which she
sometimes felt, saying that her soul was tortured
like to a man who being tied hand and foot, should be
hung by the neck without being strangled, and should
hang in this state betwixt life and death, without
hope of help, and unable to support himself by his
feet or assist himself with his hands, or to cry out,
or even to sigh or moan.
It is thus, Theotimus: the soul is sometimes so
overcharged with interior afflictions, that all her
faculties and powers are oppressed by the privation
of all that might relieve her, and by the
apprehension and feeling of all that can be grievous
to her. So that in imitation of her Saviour she
begins to be troubled, to fear, and to be dismayed,
and at length to sadden with a sadness like to that
of the dying. Whence she may rightly say: My soul is
sorrowful even unto death; and with the consent of
her whole interior, she desires, petitions,
supplicates, that, if it be possible, this chalice
may pass, having nothing left her save the very
supreme point of her spirit, which cleaving hard to
the divine will and good-pleasure, says in a most
sincere submission: O eternal Father, Ah! not mine
but thy will be done.
And the main point is that the soul makes this
resignation amidst such a world of troubles,
contradictions, repugnances that she hardly even
perceives that she makes it; at least it seems done
so coldly as not to be done from her heart nor
properly, since what then goes on for the divine
good-pleasure is not only done without delight and
contentment, but even against the pleasure and liking
of all the rest of the heart, which is permitted by
love to bemoan itself (if only for the reason that it
may not bemoan itself) and to sigh out all the
lamentations of Job and Jeremias, yet with the
condition that a sacred peace be still preserved in
the depths of the heart, in the highest and most
delicate point of the spirit.
But this submissive peace is not tender or sweet,
it is scarcely sensible, though sincere, strong,
unchangeable and full of love, and it seems to have
betaken itself to the very end of the spirit as into
the donjon-keep of the fort, where it remains in its
high courage, though all the rest be taken and
oppressed with sorrow: and in this case, the more
love is deprived of all helps, and cut off from the
aid of the powers and faculties of the soul, the more
it is to be esteemed for preserving its fidelity so
constantly.
This union or conformity with the divine
good-pleasure is made either by holy Resignation or
by most holy Indifference. Now resignation is
practised with a certain effort of submission: one
would willingly live instead of dying, yet since it
is God's pleasure that die we must, we yield to it.
We would willingly live, if it pleased God, yea,
further, we wish that it was his pleasure to let us
live: we die submissively, yet more willingly would
we live; we depart with a reasonably good will, yet
we have a still stronger inclination to stay. Job in
his afflictions made the act of resignation: If we
have received good things at the hand of God, said
he, why should we not receive the evil,(1) why not
sustain the pains and toils he sends us? Mark,
Theotimus, how he speaks of sustaining, supporting,
enduring; As it hath pleased the Lord so is it done:
blessed be the name of the Lord.(2) These are words
of resignation and acceptance, by way of suffering
and patience.
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