L'ordinaire

It is the First Friday of Lent, and a moment of exaltation encourages me to write, though I feel nothing needs expressing. Youtube has recently published videos about the experience of crucifixion and the anatomical details of it.

The Lord may move and inspiration holds a moment of exaltation, which is otherwise unwarranted at the moment. I am nothing and amount to nothing more than that, so God can can write as He pleases through me without fear of being tainted by my selfulness.

I need to take care because the words are His, and the meaning must be revealed to whomever reads what I say. Light accompanies His words, and joy inhabits His exaltation.

This is different from what He experienced on Golgotha, where no one was listening to what He had to say. A man crucified with Him asks Jesus to forgive Him his sins, and Jesus assures him he will be with Him in paradise that day. We must remember that the man was reputed to be a thief, hence his end was not a swift removal of is head, but a slow and miserable death of crucifixion.

We must take care to hold His words close to our hearts, because they can be the cause of our encountering Him spirit to Spirit in ecstasy, and if so, then He is dealing with us not as criminals, but children, sometimes sinners, sometimes little ones who need to cuddle up.

Yet you might wonder how a person can see Christ's bleeding nails and hands and feet and feel  like cuddling at all. He felt love for all on earth in all of time in the moments He hung from the nails of the cross. He hastens to draw us close as possible  in a spare moment of love, obviously from God, and we may wonder why we should deserve it at all.

Certainly St. Padre Pio wondered, for he was pierced by nails in the hands and feet, and most especially in His side, replicating how He could be alive and pierced with nails in His Body at the same time. We can only tremble at the love still hidden which propelled the saint into the heart of the miracle of accepting His gift.

From the moment it happened, history was changed, and hearts opened to an unaccustomed love, gazing on the compliant one who walked his convent with crucified feet and side, which, during the elevation of the Mass was stretched and constrained in such a way as to hurt to the fullest extent endurable.

Padre Pio, miraculously in my opinion, simply saw his role as to be in love with God and His children and an ordinary man in every respect, who fell into an abyss of hurt and pain shared by every human being on earth. It was a shared agony, part Jesus, part ordinary persons, yet the miseries endured by so many is very similar to the imposition of the cross on the shoulders of the condemned to die by crucifixion.

So, how, without the pain and bleeding wounds, does an ordinary man who nonetheless suffers  according to the canonical seasons, manage to suffer as much as he can, yet be as plain and ordinary?

It is given as a gift, like all His gifts, enabled by His grace and Will, so that it is no difficulty to suffer as if nailed to the cross. In an eclipse, a man stands in darkness as the heavens arrange themselves for a time so that in certain places the sun's light hidden by the moon in its passage around the world. As He lives in us each, a life is lived together with us, Christ's life, from conception to the laying in the tomb, with everything that was lived in His time.

He lives in us each, in every little moment and every event so that our life and His passion are woven together in a marvellous way, so that if consecrated by our desire that it should be converted by the Lord for us, may be an act of forgiveness and healing and entrance into heaven at a last moment.

A hermit lives very consciously overshadowed by the Lord, and sometimes even in a solitary moment, exalted, lifted deliberately above the ordinary, he might be offered by that same Lord to the Father for us all. There was very certainly a blending of the natural and supernatural in the life of Padre Pio, who was so often quite accessible to the ordinary anonymous person who encountered him. In the hermit, as a temple in which to pray, praise and adore, on occasion abided together with what can be seen by no man, yet might still be encountered like a great warmth unexpectedly, to touch a life so that it is no longer the same any more.

A hermit prays, and works and on occasion might encounter others so their spiritual needs coincide, and some one observing from outside, might not notice anything at all the least different at all. Yet the very pain he might endure and might desire can be a consolation and a blessed encounter of joy to the man or woman whom God called to be together with Him, hermit, hermitess or whatever reality He might wish to impose.

The man's life goes on as it did for St. Padre Pio, consecrated to an ordinary life and the extrardinary life of priest and monk and hermit all at once, so that the summation of it all is only possible and visible, when Christ chooses to reveal it.

There is no need for us beyond these truths to be made an obvious kind of relic or sacramental. Yet, as surely as my holy water vial, I contain much that He has not yet revealed, for if He had, I might not have committed the sins I did in my weakness and stupidity. Mea maxima culpa. Seeing what I do see, already I weep before Him whose love I did not recognize. 

May you not need to be crucified in order to see theses realities in your own life, and my He be lavish with His consolations, for He is willing to pamper and indulge us in His holy Will, so that we might be glad to forget everything in order to be immersed in Him alone forever.