After a recent hospital stay with a
brain bleed and recovery I am finally, by grace, back to writing and it is an
added blessing to be writing on the final words of the Little Mandate: I WILL
BE YOUR REST.
http://www.madonnahouse.org/mandate/
These words are rooted in: “Come to
Me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke
upon you and learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will
find rest for yourselves.” [Mt. 11;28,29]
They are simultaneously words of
intimacy and promise, a gift of the now and the not yet for the ultimate gift
of rest is within the Trinity, in and through Jesus, the embrace of
resurrection, while here on our earthly pilgrimage, the fulfillment of the
promised rest is temporary, even often experienced as fleeting. Still, it is
the intimacy between us and our Beloved, for even a moment of rest in the arms
of the One who loves us is a tremendous gift.
Just glance at any baby resting in the
arms of an adult, the smile of the child, the relaxed expression of the adult
says it all.
This final line of the Mandate is a
directive as well as an invitation: Come to Me takes us back to the
first word of the mandate: Arise- go!
As St. Matthew the poor teaches us: God’s
directions to us are most often given through the reading and hearing of the
Gospel and when we are in a state of humility and when we pray with an open
heart. [1]
In his homily on the Story of the woman
at the well [Jn.54-5:42]St. Augustine connects the ‘water’ Jesus offers with
St. Matthew’s words of Jesus inviting us to come to Him and rest.
Part of our labour is the demand of our
particular vocation, for example parents labour outside the home to have money
for bread and other items to care for the family, then they labour in the home
to feed and otherwise care for their children, and labour to sustain their
sacred vocation as spouses.
All of us labour in embracing the daily
cross of the times and society in which we live, therein to fulfill our
baptismal vocation to become saints. It is obvious that humanity is facing
many problems, will have to face many more, and that these problems are deeply
disturbing the souls of all men. It is just as certain that we cannot, must
not, reject the new, strange, adventuresome, frightening world that is opening
before us…..that is already with us. Especially we Christians cannot do this
because Christ has inserted Himself into this world and we are His people, His
body. [2] With the war in Ukraine raging now, with no end in sight to the
brutality of same, there is the danger of a 3rd world war looming,
feels a lot like those stygian dark days of October 1962.
Part of the labour of living out our
baptismal vocation as faithful disciples is to humbly embrace our emotional
wounds and struggles against sin, both of which require asking the needed grace
and cooperating with same, this is our own encounter with Jesus at the well, a
place to experience His gift of rest, such a place also is in the depths of the
Jesus Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a
sinner, as well as daily praying of the Divine Mercy Chaplet trusting these
words of Jesus, revealing the extent of His merciful love, when St. Faustina
was herself worn out Jesus told her and tells us: My mercy is greater than
your sins and those of the whole world. [3]
Ultimately it is to enter the silence
of God, to be as trustingly still as St. John at the last supper: One of
them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to Him. Simon Peter
motioned to this disciple and said, "Ask Him which one He means."
Leaning back against Jesus,….
[Jn.13:23-25] Part of the tragedy of modernist approaches to
translating Sacred Scripture is to excise and sanitize the texts, hence the
modern translation: …. was reclining at Jesus’ side modernists
are obsessed with cleaving the so-called ‘historical’ Jesus, from the Jesus of
faith-truth passed down for millennia, hence removing in the text cited the
intimacy. These poison ideas of modernism and relativism have infected
Christianity because we reject the humility and ardent faith portrayed in the
painting of the Angelus by Jean-Francois Millet or the humble trust of the
children of Fatima, in the vision of and words of Our Blessed Mother. If the
Church…is viewed as a human construction, the product of our own efforts, even
the contents of the faith end up assuming an arbitrary character: the faith, in
fact, no longer as an authentic, guaranteed instrument through which to express
itself. Thus, without a view of the mystery of the Church that is also supernatural
and not only sociological, Christology itself loses its reference to the
divine….the Gospel becomes the Jesus-project, the social-liberation
project or other merely historical, immanent projects that can seem religious
in appearance, but which are atheistic in substance. [4]
Most of us are familiar with images of
the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and with contemplative visualization, being
silent at prayer in secret, in the garden enclosed of our heart, where Jesus
tells us: But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray
to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
[Mt. 6:5], so as we visualize Jesus, like St. John we can lean upon His
chest, listening to the beating of His Most Sacred Heart, and more, as His
Heart has been pierced open for us, we may enter and rest, embraced by the
flames of His Divine, Merciful Heart’s love for us. ….in prayer man
converses with God, he enters, through grace, into communion with Him, and
lives in God. [5] to be in communion of
love with God is to live in the heart of the Holy Trinity, it is to
experience the rest pro-offered to us by Jesus.
With humility and self- truth-speaking,
we will embrace the gift of “I WILL BE YOUR REST.”, if we embrace the reality
of the human condition: for now we realize that we are all “alienated”, in
need of redemption. Now we realize that we are all in need of the gift of God’s
redeeming love, so that we too can become “lovers” in our own turn. Now we
realize that we always need God, who makes Himself our neighbour so that we can
become neighbours. [6] And as such, truly loving one another, sharing with
each other the gift of His rest.
The greatest of all graces is to love
the Lord with a heart fully conscious of what it is about; to love not only
“our dear Saviour” in the impersonal sense which the phrase so often has, but
Christ himself, corporally and spiritually, as one loves an irreplaceable
person to whom one is bound through thick and thin. The conviction that this
person is simultaneously the eternal Logos, Son of the Living God and Saviour
of mankind is grace unspeakable. [7]
this brings to mind with clarity the words George Bernanos places on the lips
of the dying priest, in his novel DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST: “All is grace.”
Requiescat in Pace, first recoded on tombstones in the 8th
century, it was common on tombstones when I was a boy and many today use the
initials R.I.P., almost off handily when skyping or emailing or posting on the
web the death of a friend or someone deemed to be important.
To
Rest In Peace [ the English translation of the Latin ] is a
prayer that when we die, in the state of grace, we will enter the eternity of
Christ’s invitation promise: “Come to me, all you who labour and are
burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me,
for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.” [Mt.
11;28,29]
Italics and highlights in quotes are
mine.
[1] THE COMMUNION OF LOVE, by Matthew
the Poor, p.37; St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 19[2] POUSYINIA, Catherin d
Hueck Doherty, Madonna House Publication, p.26; 1993 edition.
[3] DIARY, St. Maria Faustina Kowalska;
p. 523; Marians of the Immaculate Conception; 2003
[4] JOSEPH RATZINGER, Life in the
Church and Living Theology; Maximilian Heinrich Heim; pp.266.67; Ignatius
Press; 2007
[5] POPE BENEDICT XVI, JESUS of
Nazareth; p.201; 2007 Doubleday
[6] St. Theophan the Recluse, from THE
ART OF PRAYER, p. 51; Faber & Faber, 1985
[7] THE LORD, Romano Guardini, p. 190;
Henry Regnery Company 1954
© 2022 Fr. Arthur Joseph
