The ending of the joyful mysteries is the ending of the childhood of the soul. From the sweet and honest industries of Nazareth, it is flung into the furnace of manhood. The angel that once announced to us new life, now cries in our ears a sterner message: Viriliter agite — be a man — if indeed you would be the hidden child of God. With short interval for placid service, for any of those agreeable activities which our comfortable self-indulgence calls "life," the secret passionate and dolorous mysteries of Divine humanity begin.
In our childhood we asked for knowledge, little knowing what we sought. Now knowledge is indeed to come to us; knowledge by union, direct and poignant, by participation in the passion of our Incarnate God. The soul who has experienced the joys of the first dawning, the birth and the nurture, of her hidden life, finds that the next stage of her progress shall be an actual sharing in the redemptive pains of Christ. How, indeed, should it be otherwise? What other solution could our love endure? Si nihil contrarium vis pati, quomodo eris amicus Christi?
| "If thou art willing to suffer no opposition, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?" (De Imitatione Christi, L. II., cap. i.) |
It is a forced option; to suffer either the loss of His friendship or the burden of His griefs. We cannot hesitate in this decision. No second choice competes with this great honour of following in His footsteps if we can. All else — all success or joy or service — is but a shadow-show: a children’s game.
"When I became a man," says Paul, "I put away childish things." The intellectual subtleties, the "religious ideas" pondered and played with at the feet of Gamaliel, crumbled to dust at the sight of Stephen’s joy and agony. Then "God was pleased to reveal His Son in me," the light "shone out of darkness," the latent spark flamed up. Then Paul, made ardent by the fire of love, suddenly initiated into the mystery of life, went out into that world to which he was crucified; from glory to glory advancing, yet so as by suffering shame and death. "Troubled on every side," he went, "yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body."
As the Church in her year-long drama turns from the Crib to begin at once her journey to the Cross, and puts on the royal purple of penance as Epiphany draws to a close: so it is in the intimate drama of that growing and ascending soul in whom "the life of Jesus shall be made manifest." The slow growing up of the Divine within it, the radiant pressure of an Immanent Love transforming the workshop and the home, comes to its term. "Thou hast been too long a child at the breast, a spoiled child," said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso. Spoiled indeed, and lapped too deep in comfort, if we cannot hear in the inexorable voice that calls us from the nursery, the very accents of industrious and courageous love.
It is out in the open, away from all protection, in a moment of effort, of deliberate choice, that the mysterious transfusion of man’s spirit by the more living spirit of Christ — His transcendent Manhood entincturing it — is first to be felt and recognised. "Our wills are ours to make them Thine": this is the meaning of man’s liberty, the secret spring of the process which takes him back to God. "Be it unto me according to Thy word," said the soul at her amazing initiation into the new life; "Not my will, but Thine, be done," says the Godward-tending spirit that was born of her, at the moment in which a new stage of life’s ascent must be attacked. The sanctified will, the attention orientated to the great interests of Reality, never to the fears and anguish of the Self; this primal necessity of all transcendence is brought home to us at each crisis in the history of the soul.
These crises, these sudden and terrible declarations of our freedom, and of the price that freedom exacts — the making of a voluntary choice — always come upon the spirit in an hour in which it is turned towards Reality: in an hour, that is to say, of actual, if not of conscious prayer. Mary’s surrender to Life’s inflow; the temptation of Jesus, His crucial choice between power and humble love; now the agony in this garden of olives. Here the soul has come, perhaps, to seek its opportunity of utmost joy and of profound communion in the whispering darkness, that dim "place where lovers lose themselves"; with drawing a space from all others, the better to talk with Him alone. It looks for its Love, awaits the glimmering light, the touch, the heavenly silence: and suddenly it is face to face with the unseen Event towards which it has been growing — the Choice, the dreadful prerogative of the free. Not the primary choice of the temptation in the wilderness, between ambition and service, between power and love; but the final choice, as it seems, between life and death, success and failure, when the Cup of Tribulation is offered by the gentle yet unfaltering Hand of God.
That first great choice of adult spirit was made in the solitudes, amongst wide spaces and austere. Then, by a merciful dispensation, all the complexities of life and growth were cleared away; and the three mighty possibilities of all-powerful yet ill-directed will, were set against the arid background of things. It was the choice between the Divine slavery of the consecrated heart and the human liberty of self-sufficient mind: between the Suffering Servant of the old prophet and the Superman of the new.
But the second, deeper choice that comes on us now — the choice between life and death, success and failure — comes out of the very heart of growing, fertile life. Not as servants but as sons we make it: for the days of our bondage are over, and Christ has made us free. It comes at the end of those joyful mysteries which have assured us of our powers. Much was then given us: now much shall be asked of us again. It shall be made in the midst of a garden, among delicate and lovely living things; radiant now to our exalted consciousness with a transcendent beauty "of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower" and shining on us through the night which veils our anguish from the world. It shall be made lying prostrate on the kindly turf, pushing to our clenched hands the little hidden flowers, those royal things that need not toil or spin, cease not in their quiet maternal tasks. All about us stand the trees, our silent comrades; vibrant with the upward-pulsing sap, budding in every twig with a life that shall carry on the mystery of creation when we have gone down into the terrible and destined grave. At such an hour the flaming course of spirit seems poor beside the steady march of life.
Yet because here is natural life, undeflected by our petty wilfulness, by the twisting, crooked action of our thought, these things among which we suffer seem to help us. The self-giving that we strive for is natural too; it is the very crown of life, the goal of created things. All life, then, is with us as we try to turn to God: for the earnest expectation of the creature waits for the manifestation of His sons. These our companions have their being in Him: their delicate magic falls as clearly within the circle of His will as the difficult growth to which our tortured spirits must conform. So the murmurous voices of the night speak to us of a certain consolation; and our Mother Earth is with us, as she was with our Forerunner, in our prayer. "How beautiful are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts!" How beautiful the starry tent enverdured with wild olive, where we meet Thy angel in the night!
"Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent;
Into the woods my Master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him;
The little grey leaves were kind to Him.
The thorn tree had a mind to Him When into the woods He came.
Out of the woods my Master went,
And He was well content;
Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When death and shame would woo Him last
From under the trees they drew Him last:
’Twas on a Tree they slew Him last
When out of the woods He came."
What, then, is the true nature of this trial that initiates us into the sublime mysteries of sorrow? It is not hardship that we fear, the laborious life of service; for love is always industrious, though it be not always brave. But frustration, failure, death — this is the Cup offered to us: the horrible verdict of futility, uttered as it seems in the deeps of our spirits, the mocking response of an inimical universe to our tentative declarations of new life. To lead other men to the high pastures of holiness and peace, to continue in that ministry of healing confided to the illuminated soul: or else, to go down alone to the encounter of utmost humiliation, surrendering, as it seems, all hope of helping those who depended on us, that so as by fire we may save them in the end — this is the alternative of Gethsemane, and so bitter it is that even our divine Companion can only cry, "Father, let this Cup pass!"
It is an alternative that none are strong enough to encounter, unless defended by the heavenly armour of utmost acquiescence in the will of God. The Christ within here cries to Christ without for succour. The soul turns in horror from this destiny of frustration; seeing before it so many possibilities of happy service, feeling and knowing its power to help and heal. But human efficiency, well loved of the short-sighted creature, is not here the Creator’s promise to His sons. There is indeed no "promise," no "covenant"; only a demand upon our trust and courage. A self-donation that seems useless is asked of us: a self-donation not inspired by any foresight of the bliss that tribulation may win for us, any commercial scheme of salvation bought at a price, but by an utterly surrendered love, a naughting of the separated will. "Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done"; annihilation itself, so it please Thee.
Yet there is for the Christian soul an ecstasy even in this torment. Quando ad hoc veneris, quod tribulatio tibi dulcis est, et sapit pro Christo; tunc bene tecum esse æstima, quia invenisti paradisum in terra.
| "When thou shalt come to this state, that tribulation is sweet to thee, and thou dost relish it for Christ’s sake: then think it to be well with thee, for thou hast found Paradise on earth." (Ibid., L. IL, cap. 12.) |
All the Spirits of God are about it; leaning out from that Paradise of theirs, dark to it now, yet in which that soul also has its place. The joyful song of the exultant angels rejoicing in the upward march of life, supports it in its agony: penetrating grief and calming fear. And here once more in the darkness of the garden, just because of this renewed receptiveness, this acceptance of the chalice of pain, grace is veritably poured in on it, as in the first feeble hours of its new life. No more "as small rain upon the tender grass" it comes, but as the hard and drenching showers which hurt to heal — an extra dower of vitality, given at the beginning of sorrows; lest, deprived of that heavenly viaticum, man should faint and fall by the way.
"Soul of the acorn buried in the sod,
Lord of high trees and sunset-haunted hills,
Planter of primroses and very God
Of the bright daffodils,
Pity the weakness of the growing grain,
And drench our fields with rain!"
