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Indifference is to be practised in things belonging
to the natural life, as in health, sickness, beauty,
deformity, weakness, strength: in the affairs of the
spiritual life, as in dryness, consolations, relish,
aridity; in actions, in sufferings, briefly, in all
sorts of events.
Job, in his natural life was struck with the most
horrible sores that ever eye beheld, in his civil
life he was scorned, reviled, contemned, and that by
his nearest friends; in his spiritual life he was
oppressed with languors, oppression, convulsions,
anguish, darkness, and with all kinds of intolerable
interior griefs, as his complaints and lamentations
bear witness.
The great Apostle proclaims to us a general
Indifference; to show ourselves the true servants of
God, in much patience, in tribulation, in
necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in prisons,
in seditions, in labours, in watchings, in fastings;
in chastity; in knowledge, in long-suffering, in
sweetness, in the Holy Ghost, in charity unfeigned,
in the word of truth, in the power of God; by the
armour of justice on the right hand and on the left,
through honour and dishonour, by evil report and good
report: as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown and
yet known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastised
and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing:
as needy, yet enriching many; as having nothing, and
possessing all things.(1)
Take notice, I pray you, Theotimus, how the life of
the Apostles was filled with afflictions: in the body
by wounds, in the heart by anguish, according to the
world by infamy and prisons, and in all these, - O
God! what Indifference they had! Their sorrow is
joyous, their poverty rich, their death life-giving,
their dishonour honourable, that is, they are joyful
for being sad, content to be poor, strengthened with
life amid the dangers of death, and glorious in being
made vile, because - such was the will of God. And
whereas the will of God was more recognized in
sufferings than in the actions of virtues, he ranks
the exercise of patience first, saying: But in all
things let us exhibit ourselves as the ministers of
God, in much patience, in tribulation, in
necessities, in distresses: and then, towards the
end, in chastity, in knowledge, in long-suffering.
In like manner our divine Saviour was incomparably
afflicted in his civil life, being condemned as
guilty of treason against God and man; beaten,
scourged, reviled, and tormented with extraordinary
ignominy; in his natural life, dying in the most
cruel and sensible torments that heart could
conceive; in his spiritual life enduring sorrows,
fears, terrors, anguish, abandonment, interior
oppressions, such as never had, nor shall have, their
like. For though the supreme portion of his soul did
sovereignly enjoy eternal glory, yet love hindered
this glory from spreading its delicious influence
into the feelings, or the imagination, or the
inferior reason, leaving thus his whole heart at the
mercy of sorrow and distress.
Ezechiel saw the likeness of a hand, which took him
by a single lock of the hairs of his head, lifting
him up between heaven and earth;(2) in like manner
our Saviour, lifted up on the cross between heaven
and earth, seemed to be held in his Father's hand
only by the very extremity of the spirit, and, as it
were, by one hair of his head, which, touching the
sweet hand of his eternal Father, received a
sovereign affluence of felicity, all the rest being
swallowed up in sorrow and grief: whereupon he cries
out: My God, why hast thou forsaken me?
They say that the fish termed lantern-of-the-sea
in the midst of the tempest thrusts out of the water
her tongue, which is so luminous, resplendent and
clear, that it serves as a light or beacon for
mariners. So in the sea of passions by which Our Lord
was overwhelmed, all the faculties of his soul were,
so to say, swallowed up and buried in the whirlpool
of so many pains, excepting only the point of his
spirit, which, exempt from all trouble, remained
bright and resplendent with glory and felicity.
Oh how blessed is the love which reigns in the
heights of the spirit of faithful souls, while they
are tossed upon the billows and waves of interior
tribulations!
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