How Profitable and Pleasing to God Is Meditation on the Passion of Christ. Our Redeemer

THE blessed St. Augustine says: ‘There is nothing so wholesome and profitable for us as the daily thought and consideration of what the Son of God has suffered on our account.” And St. Bernard: “There is nothing so efficacious for the healing of the wounds of our conscience and the purification and perfection of our soul as frequent and continued meditation on the wounds of Christ and on His death and Passion.” For all temptations, and especially for those against purity, the saints say that the remedy of remedies is to have recourse to the thought of the Passion of Christ, and hide ourselves in His wounds. In short, we shall find in the Passion of Christ a universal remedy and aid. St. Augustine says: “In all circumstances I have found no remedy so efficacious as this.” And St. Bonaventure: ‘He who exercises himself devoutly on the most holy life and Passion of the Lord will find there abundantly all that he requires and have no need to seek anything beyond Jesus.” So we see that the saints and servants of God have practised this exercise continually, and have thereby arrived at great holiness and perfection.

Though there were nothing else in this exercise beyond merely remembering God and calling to mind the benefits that we have received at His hand, it would be a thing very precious and valuable in the eyes of the Lord. It is the way of love to make the lover desire and set great store by the loved one’s often remembering him, and thinking frequently of the kindnesses that he has received from him, and often speaking of the same. Whoever loves in earnest is much more pleased and delighted at this than he would be if the person he loves were to send him many presents and gifts out of his property. Let us take the case of a mother, a lady of high station and wealth, who bears a great love to her absent son. Let her be told that the boy remembers her and often refers to her, that he is continually talking of the comforts in which she reared him, and of the benefits and kind turns which she has ever done him and the labors she has undergone for him, and she will value this more and take more delight and satisfaction in hearing this of her boy than if he sent her many pieces of silk and trinkets of gold without remembering her in any such way. In like manner, then, God our Lord, Who in all other things observes the proprieties and laws of love, observes them in this also, which is a propriety of lovers who love deeply. So He desires, and sets great store by it, that we should ever remember Him and think of Him and of the benefits and marvels that He has wrought for us— especially seeing that, if we exercise ourselves in the memory of these benefits, before long they will awaken in our hearts a desire of serving the Lord earnestly for them.

Blosius relates of the holy virgin Gertrude that she learned from the Lord that every time that one looks with devotion at a figure of Christ crucified, he himself is looked upon with mercy by the most bounteous mercy of God. Let us, then, at least gather this lesson, that, as He did not take it amiss to suffer for our love, so we should not take it amiss to remember what He has suffered for us. It is related of St. Francis that once, when he was going to Our Lady of Portiuncula hard by, weeping and lamenting with loud cries, a man happened to pass that way, a servant of God who knew him; he, seeing the saint so sad and tearful, thought that he had met with some misfortune and trouble, and went up to him and asked him what it was that occasioned his grief. The saint answered with many tears and sobs: “I am grieving and weeping for the great torments and pains which they gave my Lord Jesus Christ, so entirely without fault of His, and to see how we men forget such a high favor, though it is we who have been the cause of His suffering.”