Chapter 1

 

  

To The Lovers of The Divine Outcast

May the "Love of the Divine Outcast" help His chosen ones to realize a little better the hollowness of earth, the greatness of eternity, and how wonderful and sweet God is. May this love ever urge souls to go on striving to become a flame of love in an icy world, trying to make a return of love to the love of the Great Lover, Who has called them to leave all and follow Him. This is only another way of saying to each one: "You must never give up trying to be a Saint. Nothing else is worthy of your peerless position as Bride of Christ. Nothing short of this will ever satisfy your own heart or bring it to that fullness of peace and joy necessary for its happiness here as well as in the hereafter."

We Religious know that the secret of all happiness is Sanctity, just as we know the falling off from this shining ideal is the cause of all cloistered misery.

Though the task of becoming a Saint is not a very hard one, comparatively few souls attain it. Many imagine it to be an impossibility. Is not the end of Sanctity, its object and reward, intimacy with God? If we Religious were only brave enough and wise enough to pay half the price in trying to become saints, that, whether we like it or not, we must pay for living tepidly, the Cloisters of the earth would ring with the Joy Bells of Paradise. The giving up of this ideal, the aiming at a standard lower than heroic, in the end weaves for all its votaries a "Sorrow's crown of sorrow." But when life's day is over and the night closes darkly in, when the clock from the Eternal Shore chimes the midnight of our lives, then it will be too late to retrieve the lost and wounded past. Let us do so now.

Lovers of the Divine Outcast must not shrink from the things that wound, but rather, like the Victim of Calvary, embrace them. It is true that the embracing of the Nails more than half turns them to roses. For like earthly physicians, the divine Physician has His anesthetics, and whilst the Religious is, as St. Paul puts it, being conformed to the likeness of Christ, whilst the loved one is being transmuted into the image of the Divine Lover, whilst Love's Scourge and Thorn and Nail and Lance effect the Divine Conformity, the patient sleeps on in the Arms of Jesus. And the conformity fully effected―Calvary ―wakes up on the eternal Thabor. After this, it is peace and joy, rest and ecstasy for ever. Forge on, then, O Chosen One, Lover of the Divine Outcast, right on to the burning pinnacles of Sanctity; nothing else is wise, for life is very brief, Eternity is endless. Nothing else is worthy of the God whose Bride you are. He is Infinite Sanctity and the Bride shares in the Bridegroom's Life. He is very sweet, too, and His service is very easy, making earth an echo of Paradise. Indeed, for the Saints, the earthly one and the Heavenly one differ only in accidents, there is no essential difference; Death means simply "Crossing The Bar―walking from the veiled vision of here, to the unveiled vision of hereafter. And yet, in spite of this, how many of us Religious make a muddle of life! We begin well but, before the icy breath of the years, we freeze up. Only here and there is a soul Really in Love With Our Lord―All His Own. Be yours one of these!  

11/21/22

And this for love of the Outcast Divine, because of the way He is treated. Look around you and oh! the pity of it! millions of hearts taken up with earth's clayey and narrow love, scarce one with His Beautiful and Infinite Love. St. John is right. His cry is as true to-day as it was in that far off and dead day, when first he mournfully said: "He came unto His own and His own received Him not." "No room for Him" in the inns of our hearts to-day, as in the hearts dead now two thousand years. Listen to the talk of men, read their books and papers, observe their actions―and in all you will scarcely find a mention of Him, much less a sigh or a tear for Him, and so many of His very own not bothering that it is so, only just a little more loving, more attentive, but not so much more than those other blinded, passionate hearts.

We do good for souls, but is it not only a fraction of the good we could and should do? We fulfill our duties, carry out our assignments; but do these duties and assignments sanctify us? They are performed with care and precision―does the supernatural accompany them? We meet people of the world; we are in close contact with pupils and patients; our Sisters are ever with us,―yet, perhaps we inspire in them no eagerness for good. Our zeal gives out so little heat that those who meet us are not fired up to do great things for God. Our manners may savor a trifle of the world, robbing us of the refinement of cloistral beauty, hence our failure to attract souls to higher living. Eagerness to shine, hunger for applause, selfish aim and jealous intrigue may sap the well―springs of our life. Such faults mar the work entrusted to our keeping. Souls who look to us for strength and courage are harmed by these defects.

Continued Tomorrow.