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When I see my Saviour on the Mount of Olives with his
soul sorrowful even unto death: - Ah! Lord Jesus, say
I, what can have brought the sorrows of death into
the soul of life except love, which, exciting
commiseration, drew thereby our miseries into thy
sovereign heart?Now a devout soul, seeing this
abyss of heaviness and distress in this divine lover,
how can she be without a holily loving sorrow? But
considering, on the other hand, that all the
afflictions of her well-beloved proceed from no
imperfection or want of strength, but from the
greatness of his dearest love, she cannot but melt
away with a holy sorrowful love. So that she cries: I
am black with sorrow by compassion, but beautiful
with love by complacency; the anguish of my
well-beloved has changed nay colour: for how could a
faithful lover behold such torments in him whom she
loves more than her life, without swooning away and
becoming all wan and wasted with grief.
The tents of nomads, perpetually exposed to the
injuries of weather and war, are almost always ragged
and covered with dust; and I, ever exposed to the
griefs which by condolence I receive from the
immeasurable travails of my divine Saviour, I am all
covered with distress, and rent with sorrow. But
because the pains of him I love come from his love,
in what measure they afflict me by compassion, they
delight me by complacency; for how could a faithful
lover not take an extreme content to see herself so
loved by her heavenly spouse?
Wherefore the beauty of love is in the ill-favour
of sorrow. And if I wear mourning for the passion and
death of my King, all swarthy and black with grief, I
cease not to have an incomparable sweetness in seeing
the excess of his love amid his travails and his
sorrows; and the tents of Solomon, all embroidered
and worked in an admirable variety of decorations,
were never so lovely as I am content, and,
consequently, sweet, amiable and agreeable, in the
variety of the sentiments of love which I have amid
those griefs.
Love equalizes lovers; Ah! I see him, this dear
lover - he is a fire of love burning in a thorny bush
of sorrow, and I am the same: I am all inflamed with
love amid the thorny bushes of my griefs, I am a lily
among thorns. Ah! do not even look at the horrors of
my poignant sorrows, but see the beauty of my
agreeable love. Alas! he suffers insupportable pains,
this well-beloved divine lover: it is this which
grieves me and makes me faint with anguish; but he
takes pleasure in suffering, he loves his torments,
and dies with joy at dying with pain for me:
wherefore as I am sorrowing over his pains, so I am
all ravished with joy at his love; not only do I
grieve with him, but I glorify myself in him.
It was this love, Theotimus, which brought upon the
seraphic S. Francis the stigmata, and upon the loving
angelic S. Catharine of Siena the burning wounds of
the Saviour, amorous complacency having sharpened the
points of dolorous compassion; as honey makes more
penetrating and sensible the bitterness of wormwood,
whilst on the contrary the sweet smell of roses is
intensified by the neighbourhood of garlic planted
near the trees.
For, in the same way, the loving complacency we
have taken in the love of our Saviour makes the
compassion we feel for his pains infinitely stronger:
as reciprocally, passing back from the compassion for
his pains to complacency in love, the pleasure of
this is far more ardent and exalted. Then are
practised pain in love and love in pain; then amorous
condolence and dolorous complacency, as another Esau
and another Jacob, struggling as to which shall make
the greater effort, put the soul in incredible
convulsions and agonies, and there takes place an
ecstasy lovingly sorrowful and sorrowfully loving.
So those great souls of S. Francis and S.
Catharine felt matchless love in their pains, and
incomparable pains in their love, when they were
stigmatized, relishing that joyous love of suffering
for a beloved one, which their Saviour exercised in
the supreme degree on the tree of the cross. Thus is
born the precious union of our heart with its God,
which, like a mystical Benjamin, is the child of pain
and joy both together.
It cannot be declared, Theotimus, how strongly the
Saviour desires to enter into our souls by this love
of sorrowing complacency. Ah! says he, Open to me, my
sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; for my head
is, full of dew, and my locks of the drops of the
night.(1) What is this dew, and what are the drops of
the night but the afflictions and pains of his
passion? Pearls, in sooth (as we have said often
enough), are nothing but drops of dew, which the
freshness of night rains over the face of the sea,
received into the shells of oysters or pearl-mothers.
Ah! this divine lover of the soul would say, I am
laden with the pains and sweats of my passion, almost
all of which passed either in the darkness of the
night, or in the night of the darkness which the
obscured sun made in the very brightness of its noon.
Open then thy heart towards me as the pearl-mothers
open their shells towards the sky, and I will shed
upon thee the dew of my passion, which will be
changed into pearls of consolation.
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