HOLY WEEK I
Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.
S. Matt. XXVI, 56.
Through the intercession of the Holy Mother of God, accept, O Lord, our
prayers and save us.
May the Holy Mother of God and all the saints be our intercessors with
the Heavenly Father, that He may deign to be merciful to us, and in pity
save His creatures. Lord God all-powerful! save us and have mercy
upon us.
Through the intercession of the Holy Mother of God, the Immaculate
Mother of Thine only Son, and through the prayers of all the saints,
receive, O Lord, our supplications; hear us, O Lord, and have mercy upon
us; pardon us, bear with us, and blot out our sins, and make us worthy
to glorify Thee, together with Thy Son and the Holy Ghost, now and ever,
world without end. Amen.
Armenian.
We try to see our Lord's passion through the eyes of His Blessed
Mother. We feel that all through Holy Week she must have been in direct
touch with the experiences of our Lord. Her outlook would have been that
of the Apostolic circle the record of which we get in the Gospels. Our
Lord's ministry had showed a period of popularity during which it must
have seemed to those closest to Him that they were moving rapidly to
success; and then, after the day at Caeserea Phillipi, when His
Messianic claims had been acknowledged, they would have been filled with
enthusiasm for the mission the meaning of which was now defined. Then
came a period of disappointment. Our Lord declined to become a popular
leader, and by the nature of His preaching, the demands that He made
upon those who were inclined to support Him lost popularity till it was
a question to be considered whether the very Apostles would not desert
Him. Then came the flash of renewed enthusiasm which is evidenced by the
Palm Sunday entry, bringing, no doubt, renewed hopes to those nearest
our Lord who seem to have been utterly unable to accept the view of His
failure and death that He kept before them. But the hope vanished as
quickly as it was roused. In less than a week the rejoicing group of
Sunday followed Him from the Upper Chamber to the shades of Gethsemane.
The betrayal, the trial, the end, come quickly on.
This to S. Mary was the piercing of the sword through the very heart.
These were the days when the meaning of close association with Incarnate
God, with God Who was pursuing a mission of rescue, came out. The
mission of the Son for the Redemption of man meant submitting to the
extremity of insult and torture, and it meant that those who were
closest associated with Him should be caught into the circle of His
pain. As our Lord was displaying the best of which humanity is capable,
so was He calling out the worst of which it is capable. These last days
of the life of Jesus show where man can be led when he surrenders
himself to the dominion of the Power of Evil and becomes the servant of
sin. The triumph of demoniac malice through its instruments, the Roman
governor, the Jewish authorities, of necessity swept over all who were
related to our Lord. The storm scattered the Apostolic group and left
the Christ to face His trial alone. Yet not alone: He himself tells us
the truth. "Behold the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be
scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am
not alone, because the Father is with me." It was what the Prophet had
foreseen: "All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is
written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered."
We do not know where S. Mary was during these days, but we are sure that
she was as near our Lord as it was possible for her to be. We know that
her own thought would be of the possibility of ministering to Him. We
know that she would not have fled with the Apostles in their momentary
panic. She was at the Cross, and she was at the grave, and she would
have been as near Him in the agony and the trial as it was possible for
her to be. And she too was in agony. Every pang of our Lord found echo
in her. Every blow that fell upon His bleeding back, she too felt. Every
insult that the soldiers inflicted, hurt her. Our Lord in the
consciousness of His mission is constantly sustained by the thought that
His Passion and Death is an offering to the will of the Father,--an
offering even for these miserable men who are brutally treating a man
whom they know to be innocent. Her sorrow is the utter desolation of
seeing the One Whom she loves above all else suffer, while she can bear
Him no alleviation in His suffering, cannot so much as wipe the blood
from off His wounded brow, cannot even touch His hand, and look her love
into His eyes. She follows from place to place while our Lord is being
hustled from Caiaphas to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and back again;
from time to time hearing from some one who has succeeded in getting
nearer, how the trial is going on, what the accusation is, how Jesus is
bearing Himself, what answers He has made, what the authorities have
said. Once and again, it may be, catching a distant glimpse of Him as He
is led about by the guards, seeing Him always more worn and weary,
always nearer the point of collapse. Herself, too, nearer collapse; yet
going on still with that strength that love gives to mothers, determined
at the cost of any suffering to be near Him, as near as she can be, till
the very end. So we see her on that day in the streets of Jerusalem,
and think of the distance travelled since the morning when Gabriel said
to her, wondering: "Hail thou that art highly favoured.... Blessed art
thou among women."
We, too, follow. We have so often followed, with the Gospel in our
hands, and wondered at the method of God. We have tried hour after hour
to penetrate the meaning of the Passion, to find what personal message
it brings, to discover what light it throws on our own lives. We have
gone out into Gethsemane and placed ourselves with the three chosen
Apostles while our Lord went on to pray by Himself; and we have
discovered in ourselves the same weariness, the same tendency to sleep,
in the presence of what we tell ourselves is the most important of all
interests. We call up the scene under the olives, and find that we
wander and are inattentive and idle when we most want to be attentive
and alert. We place ourselves in the group that surrounds our Lord when
the soldiers, led by Judas, come, and ask ourselves shall I too run
away? And our memory flashes the answer: You have run away again and
again: you have in the face, not of grave dangers, but of insignificant
trifles--how insignificant they look now--for fear of criticism, for
fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly
companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again
you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were
present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect.
We follow out of the garden to the meeting-place of the Sanhedrin, to
the Judgment seat of Pilate, to the palace of Herod. Any impulse to
criticise S. Peter is speedily suppressed: we have denied so often under
such trifling provocation. S. Peter was frightened from participation in
the act of our Lord's sacrifice through mortal fear of his life. We have
stayed away from the offering of the Holy Sacrifice, how often! from
mere sloth, from disinclination to effort, from the fact that our
participation would prevent us from joining in some act of worldly
amusement. S. Peter, following to the high Priest's palace to see the
end, looks heroic beside our frivolity. We follow through the details of
the trial, we go to Herod's palace and see the brutal treatment of our
Lord, and we remember of these men that their conduct was founded in
ignorance. We do not for a moment believe that they would have spit upon
our Lord and buffeted Him, and crowned Him with a crown of thorns, if
they had believed that He was God. But we believe that He is God. Our
desertion of Him when we sin, our contempt of His expressed ideals when
we compromise with the world, our departure from His example when we
excuse ourselves on the ground of very minor inconveniences from keeping
some holy day or fasting day, are not founded in ignorance at all. They
can hardly be said to be founded in weakness, so slight is the
temptation that we do not resist. As we meditate on the Passion, as we
keep Good Friday, very pitiful all our idleness and subterfuges appear
to us. But we so easily shake off the effect! We emerge from our
meditation almost convinced that the stinging sense of the truth of our
conduct which we are experiencing is the equivalent of having reformed
it. We go out with a glow of virtue and by night realise that we have
sinned again!
It is no doubt well that we should not be permanently depressed about
our spiritual state, but only because we have taken all the pains we can
to heal the wounds of sin. There is no need that any one should abide in
a state of sin because there has been in the Precious Blood a fountain
opened for sin and for uncleanness, and by washing therein, though our
souls were as scarlet, they shall become white as snow. We have the
right to a certain optimism about ourselves if it be founded on actual
spiritual activity which ceaselessly tries to reproduce the
Christ-experience in us, even the experience of the Passion by the
voluntary self-discipline to which we subject ourselves. A brilliant
writer has spoken of those whose view of their lives is drawn from "that
fountain of all optimism--sloth." That is a true saying: our optimism is
often no more than an idle refusal to face facts; a quaint and
good-natured assumption that nothing very much matters and that
everything will be all right in the end!
This easy going optimism is commonly as far as possible from
representing any spiritual fact. If we are seeking any serious and
fruitful relation to the Passion of our Lord, we must seek it along the
Way of the Cross. To follow His example means to follow His experience,
to treat life as He treated it. The content of our lives is quite
different, but the treatment of the given fact must be essentially the
same. We need the same repulse of temptation, the same quiet disregard
of the appeals of the world, whether it offer the alleviation of
difficulty or the bestowal of pleasure as the reward of our allegiance.
And we, sinners in so manifold ways, need what our Lord did not need,
repulsion from our sins as the necessary preliminary to forgiveness.
My experience makes me feel very strongly that we are apt to be
deficient in the first step in repentance--contrition. As we follow the
Way of Sorrows we know that our Lord is suffering _for us_; and we feel
that the starting point of our repentance must lie in our success in
making that a personal matter. In our self examination, in our approach
to the sacrament of penance, we are compelled to ask ourselves, Am I in
fact sorry for my sins? It surely is not enough that we fear the results
of sin, or that we are ashamed at our failure. This really is not
repentance but a sort of pride. There must, I feel, be sorrow after a
godly sort. That is, true contrition, true sorrow for sin, is the sort
of sorrow which is born of the Vision of God; it has its origin in love.
I have found in our Lord love giving itself to me, and I must find in
myself love giving itself to Him. To my forgiveness it is not enough
that God loves me. I know that He loves me and will love me to the end,
whether I repent or not; but the possibility of forgiveness lies in my
love of Him, whether it takes such hold on me as actually to stimulate
me to forsake sin. I shall never really forsake sin through shame or
fear; one gets used to those emotions after a little and disregards
them. But one does not get used to love; it grows to be an increasing
force in life, and so masters us as to draw us away from sin.
Contrition then will be the offspring of love. It will be born when we
follow Christ Jesus out on the Sorrowful Way and understand that He is
going out for us. Then we want to get as near Him as possible: we want
to take His Hand and go by His side. We want to stand by Him in His
trial and share His condemnation. We want constantly to tell Him how
sorry we are that we have brought Him here. We shall not be content that
He feel all the pain. We are convinced that we ought to share in the
pain as we share in the results of the Passion. When we have achieved
this point of view we shall feel that our approach to Him to ask His
forgiveness needs, it may be, much more care than we have hitherto
bestowed upon it. We have thought of penance as forgiveness; now we
begin to see how much the attitude which precedes our entrance to the
confessional counts, and that we must value the gift of God enough to
have made sure that we are ready to receive it. We kneel down,
therefore, and look at our crucifix, and say: "This hast Thou done for
me," and make our act of love in which we join ourselves to the Cross of
Jesus. We tell ourselves that love is the beginning and end of our
relation to Him.
It is to be urged that every Christian should be utterly familiar with
the life of our Lord, and should spend time regularly in meditation upon
His life, and especially upon His Passion. Love is the constant
counteractive of familiarity; and it is kept fresh in our souls by the
contemplation of what our Lord has actually done for us. A general
recalling of what He has done has not the same stimulating force as the
vivid placing before us of the actual details of His work. To most of us
visible aids to the realisation of our Lord's action for us are most
helpful. A crucifix on the wall of one's room before which one can say
one's prayers, and before which also we stop for a moment time and again
in the course of the day, just to say a few words, to make an act of
love, of contrition, or of union, keeps the thought of the Passion
fresh. We gain in freshness and variety of prayer by the use of such
devotions as the litany of the Passion or the Way of the Cross. A set of
cards of the Stations help us to say them in our homes. It is much to be
desired that we accustom ourselves to devotional helps of all sorts. We
are quite too much inclined to think that there is something of
spiritual superiority in the attempt to conduct our devotional life
without any of the helps which centuries of Christian experience have
provided. It is the same sort of feeling that makes other Christians
assume that there is a superiority in spiritual attainment evidenced by
their dispensing with "forms," especially with printed prayers. It is
just as well to remember that we did not originate the Christian
Religion, but inherited it; and that the practices of devotion that have
been found helpful by generations of saints, and after full trial have
retained the approval of the greater part of Christendom, can hardly be
treated as valueless, much less as superstitious. The fact that saints
have found them valuable and one has not, may possibly not be a
criticism of the saints.
The meditation upon the Way of the Cross, the vision of Jesus scourged,
spitted upon, crowned with thorns, may well give us some searchings of
heart in regard to our own easy-going, luxurious life. Nothing seems to
disturb the modern person so much as the suggestion that the chief
business of the Christian Religion is not to look after their comfort.
They hold, it would appear, to the pre-Christian notion that prosperity
is an obvious mark of God's favour, and that by the accumulation of
wealth they are giving indisputable evidence of piety. It is well to
recall that there is no such dangerous path as that of continual
success. I do not in the least mean to imply that success is sinful or
indicates the existence of sin, but I do mean to insist very strongly
that the successful man needs to be a very spiritually watchful man. He
is quite apt to think that he may take all sorts of liberties with the
laws of God. There are, no doubt, evident dangers to the unsuccessful
man, but the Holy Scriptures have not thought it worth while to spend
much time in denouncing him. It has a good deal to say of the danger,
not so much of wealth, as of prosperity in general: "Behold, this was
the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and
prosperous ease were in her." When we find ourselves in a satisfied and
comfortable home life, so comfortable that we find it difficult to get
up to a week-day Mass, and disinclined to go out to a service after
dinner, we need watching.
And the best watchman is oneself; and the best method of
self-examination is by the Cross. Is there any sense in which we can be
said to be following our Lord on the Sorrowful Way? Have we taken up the
Cross to go after Him, or are we assuming that we can just as well drift
along with the crowd of those who only look on? We all need from time to
time to consider the Catholic teaching as to mortification and
self-discipline. I am quite aware that to insist on this is not the way
of popularity, but nevertheless I learned a long time ago that about the
only way that a priest can take if he wishes to be saved is the way of
unpopularity. And therefore I am going to insist that the practice of
rigorous self-discipline is essential to any healthy Christian life. We
cannot dispense ourselves from this, for the mere fact that we are
dispensing ourselves is the proof that we need that upon which we are
turning our back. Briefly, what I mean is that the assumption of the
Cross by a Christian means that he is taking into his life, voluntarily,
personal acts of self-sacrifice which he offers to our Lord as the
evidence and the means of his own Cross-bearing.
The unruliness of our nature can only be kept in order by continual acts
of self-discipline. We, no doubt, recognise the need of the discipline
of the passions, but our theory, so far as we can be said to have one,
would seem to be that the discipline of the passions means resistence to
special temptations as they arise. We may no doubt sin through the
passions, and therefore we need a minimum of watchfulness to meet
temptations which come our way. I submit that such a way of conducting
life is quite sufficient to account for the vast amount of failure we
witness or, perhaps, experience. When from time to time the country gets
alarmed about its health, when it is threatened with some epidemic such
as influenza, the papers are full of medical advice the sum of which is
you cannot dodge all the disease germs that are in the air, but you can
by a vigorous course of exercise and by careful diet, keep yourself in a
state of such physical soundness that the chances are altogether
favourable for your withstanding the assaults of disease. No doubt the
vast majority of people prefer not to follow this advice. A considerable
number of them resort to various magic cults, such as letting sudden
drafts of cold air in upon the inoffensive bystander with a view to
exorcising the germs. But it remains that the medical advice is sound:
it amounts to saying, "Keep yourself in the best physical condition
possible and you will run the minimum chance of being ill."
The Catholic treatment of life and its recommendation of discipline and
mortification has precisely the same basis as the physical advice--an
ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. We are exposed to
temptation constantly, and we need to recognise the fact and prepare
ourselves to meet it; and the best preparation is the preparation of
self-discipline for the purpose of keeping rebellious nature under
control. Good farming does not consist in pulling up weeds; it consists
in the choice and preparation of the ground in which the seed is to be
sown; it looks primarily to the growth of the seed and not to the
elimination of the weeds. Our nature is a field in which the Word of God
is sown; its preparation and care is what we need to focus attention on,
not the weeds.
Self-discipline is the preparation of nature, the discipline of the
powers of the spiritual life with a view to what they have to do. And
one of the important phases of our preparation is to teach our passions
obedience, to subject them to the control of the enlightened will. If
they are accustomed to obey they are not very likely to get out of hand
in some time of crisis. If they are broken in to the dominion of
spiritual motive, they will instinctively seek that motive whenever they
are incited to act. Hence the immense spiritual value of the habitual
denial to ourselves of indulgence in various innocent kinds of activity.
I do not at all mean that we are never to have innocent indulgences: I
do mean that the declining of them occasionally for the purpose of
self-discipline is a most wholesome practice. How frequently it is
desirable must be determined by the individual circumstances. It is
utterly disastrous to permit a child to have everything it wants because
there is sufficient money to spend, to permit it to run to soda
fountains or go to the picture houses as it desires. Any sane person
recognises that; but does the same person recognise the sane principle
as applying in his own life? Does he feel the value of going without
something for a day or two, or staying from places of amusement for a
time, or of abandoning for a while this or that luxury?
The principle is of course the ascetic principle of self-mastery. It is
best brought before us by the familiar practice of fasting, which is
very mildly recommended to us in its lowest terms in the table in the
Book of Common Prayer. Naturally, its value is not the value of going
without this or that, but the value of self-mastery. The very fact that
our appetites rebel at the notion shows their undisciplined character.
The child at the table begins to ask, not for a sensible meal founded on
sound reasons of hygiene, but for various things that are an immediate
temptation to the appetite. The adult is not markedly different save
that he preserves a certain order in indulgence. The principle of
fasting is that he should from time to cut across the inclination of
appetite, and either go without a meal altogether, or select such food
as will maintain health without delighting appetite. So man gains the
mastery over the animal side of his nature and shows himself the
child of God.
The actual practice of the ascetic life really carries us much farther
than these surface matters of a physical nature that have been cited. It
applies in particular to the disposition of time and the ruling of daily
actions. The introduction of a definite order into the day actually
seems to increase the time at one's disposal. I know, I can hear you
saying: "If you were the head of a family, and had children to look
after, you would not talk that way. You would know something of the
practical difficulties of life." But indeed I am quite familiar with the
situation. And if I were so situated I am certain that I should feel
all the more need of order. Families are disorderly because we let them
be; because we do not face the initial trouble of making them orderly. A
school or a factory would be still more disorderly than a family if it
were permitted to be. Any piece of human mechanism will get out of order
if you will let it. That is precisely the reason for the insistence on
the ascetic principle--this tendency of life to get out of order; that
is the meaning of all that I have been saying, of the whole Catholic
insistence on discipline. Time can be controlled; and, notwithstanding
American experience, children can be controlled; and control means the
rescuing of the life from disorder and sin, and the lifting it to a
level of order and sanity and possible sanctity.
We cannot hope to meet successfully the common temptations of life
except we be prepared to meet them, except there be in our life an
element of foresight. An undisciplined and untried strength is an
unknown quantity. The man who expects to meet temptation when it occurs
without any preparation is in fact preparing for failure. I do not
believe that there is any other so great a source of spiritual weakness
and disaster as the going out to meet life without preceding discipline,
thus subjecting the powers of our nature to trials for which we have not
fitted them. Self-control, self-discipline, ascetic practice, are
indispensible to a successful Christian life.
O STAR of starrès, with thy streamès clear,
Star of the Sea, to shipman Light or Guide,
O lusty Living, most pleasant t'appear,
Whose brightè beames the cloudès may not hide:
O Way of Life to them that go or ride,
Haven from tempest, surest up t'arrive,
O me have mercy for thy Joyès five.
* * * * *
O goodly Gladded, when that Gabriel
With joy thee gret that may not be numb'rèd,
Or half the bliss who couldè write or tell,
When th' Holy Ghost to thee was obumbrèd,
Wherethrough the fiendès were utterly encombrèd?
O wemless Maid, embellished in his birth,
That man and angel thereof hadden mirth.
John Lydgate of Bury,
XV Cent.
From Chaucerian and Other
Poems, edited by W. W. Skeat,
1894.
PART TWO