Passion Sunday

Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk 
22nd March 2015

The remembrance of death must be a notable feature in the spiritual life, for it is a great help against sin and an aid to holiness. Death is not unfrequently a secret chamber in which God appoints a private and special interview with his failing creature. Sometimes it is praise, and cheer, and to give us an assurance and a foretaste of our bliss. Sometimes it is to punish, mercifully, very mercifully, yet also, considering time and place, very severely, as if he partially judged us before the time, that he might punish us on this side of the grave. He has perhaps been offended with particular acts of our past life, and he has said nothing, but waited till now, and now he punishes.

There some who are sent death from violent pain. Each man probably has a special dread of some particular disease; and this dread is not unfrequently a prophecy of its fixing upon him at the last. While we shrink from all great pain, we are all most anxious to choose the kind of pain which is to be inevitable to ourselves. When we have fallen into power of a pain which we especially shun, we are like men whom a wild beast is holding down. There is a sort of despairing horror which it is hard to change into a religious disposition. Indeed, it is true of all pain that it is more often a distraction from God than a memento of him. Those things which make God most indispensable to us are far from being the things which most successfully drive us into the arms of God. Love has always been a completer instrument than fear.

To be sanctified by illness is quite one of the rarest phenomena of the spiritual life. It is only high holiness which is not distracted, lowered, and made animal by pain. A death from violent pain, therefore, will only sanctify those who have a previously formed interior spirit, which will enable them to bear it rightly. While it is a terrible affliction to the bystander, it is often a mark of divine love. We may also believe that it frequently stands in the stead of purgatory. In experience we see that it is frequently accompanied by an unusual gift of contrition, which is one of the clearest signs of predestination. It is sometimes also the lot of those who in lifetime have been too easy with themselves in the matter of bodily penance; and then it comes to them partly as a punishment, but much more as a merciful opportunity making up in its single self for many neglected opportunities. Those also who have wanted that gentleness, childlikeness, and considerate affection which weak health and constant bodily pain are made by grace to produce are sometimes visited by this kind of death, in order that it may produce a change in their souls corresponding to those qualities. The most we can say of such a death is that it is a grand, but most difficult, opportunity of sanctification.