Meditation for March 21, Your Crucifix

"Wear your crucifix with reflection," St. Andre-Hubert Fournet, "this other Cure of Ars" as he was so fittingly called, used to say to the Daughters of the Cross.

He meant that your devotion to Jesus of Calvary should be a thoughtful and conscious devotion, whose sublime reality you have discovered and not merely an exterior, mechanical, unreal devotion.

"Wear your crucifix more interiorly than exteriorly." That was but another form of the same pressing injunction. Why display Christ crucified on your breast if the cross is not planted in your heart, if Calvary is not a reality for you, an existing atrocity, something so real that the blood spurting forth under the ham­mers splashes you every minute...and incites you to fervent generosity.

Jesus Himself explained to Angela of Foligno, "I have not loved you in jest; my love for you is no trifling thing."

Here is the account of the entire revelation:

"Holy Thursday I was meditating on the death of the Incarnate Son of God and was trying to rid my mind of every other thought in order that I might be better able to recollect my soul in the Passion and Death of the Son of God. I sought earnestly to know how I would be better able to free my heart of all that filled it, so that I could better con­template the Passion, when suddenly these divine words were heard in my soul, 'I have not loved you in jest.'

"These words were as a stroke of mortal sorrow to me."

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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)