THE APOSTLE'S GRIEF
"Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is scandalised, and I am not on fire?" - 2 COR. xi. 29.
THERE are many sufferings in life; I mean, many veins of suffering, along which pain wells from and back to the human heart. But there is one agony distinct from all the rest, which, when felt, gives one a totally new idea of the suffering of the Heart of Christ Our Lord.
It is the suffering, the peculiar agonising void, the torture that makes moaning no relief, nor motion of the body any change, which one feels when one watches a soul one dearly loves deliberately exchanging good for evil.
A soul comes across our path; in a very little time we see it to be transparent as crystal, a thing of real beauty, all the more beautiful because it does not know it itself. We revel in the sunshine of its presence, the thought of evil is banished when it is there, at the sight of it, at the thought of it, we thank God that He has made man.
Delicate and perfect it has grown up out of and amidst the evil that lies wallowing around it, and by its mere presence there we know that all the rest is worth while....
[continued tomorrow]
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From The School of Love and Other Essays
by The Most Reverend Alban Goodier, S.J.
Burns, Oates, & Washburn, Ltd. 1918
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