DOMINUS FLEVIT SUPER ANIMAS NOSTRAS (THE LORD MAGICALLY CRIES OVER OUR SOULS)

 
JESUS ​​CHRIST CRIES OVER JERUSALEM

Saint Bernard tells us that there are three things capable of making us cry; but only one is capable of making our tears meritorious, that is, crying our sins or those of our brothers; all the rest are profane, criminal tears, or at least, fruitless to mourn the loss of an unjust lawsuit, or the death of a child: useless tears. Weeping to see ourselves deprived of a carnal pleasure: criminal tears. To cry because of a long illness: fruitless and useless tears. But to mourn the spiritual death of the soul, the estrangement from God, the loss of heaven: «¡Oh, precious tears, that great Saint tells us, but how rare you are!» And why this, HM, if not because you do not feel the magnitude of your misfortune, for time and for eternity?(How true these words are in today's world more than in the times of this great saint! Today few cry or lament many sins such as the detestable lovebird in the eyes of God who sees how they despise the sacrament of marriage and prefer to live at the enmity of God our supreme good.)

¡Oh! HM, it is the fear of that loss that has depopulated the world to fill the deserts and monasteries with so many penitent Christians; such understood much better than we that, by losing the soul, everything is lost, and that it must have been very precious when God himself held it in such esteem. Yes, HM, the saints accepted so much suffering, in order to keep their souls worthy of heaven. (¿Now where are those monks of the desert, where are those monasteries of penitents? Modernism as a spiritual cancer, which is the worst, ended with all of them to the detriment of the kingdom of God and the salvation of souls.)history offers us innumerable examples of this; I will remember one here, HM; if we do not have the courage to imitate him, we can at least bless God by admiring him.

We see in the life of Saint John Calybita, son of Constantinople, that this Saint from his childhood began to understand the nothingness of human things; and feel the taste of loneliness. A religious from a neighboring monastery, passing through Constantinople to go as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, stayed with the parents of that holy child, who always received pilgrims with great pleasure. The boy asked him what kind of life was led in his monastery. When narrating to him the holy and penitent life of the religious, the joy that they enjoyed there, separated from the world to maintain trade only with God, he received such a pleasant impression and conceived such a strong desire to leave the world to go and participate in that happiness, that the company of men never satisfied him. He told his parents not to think of accommodating him in the middle of the world, since God was calling him to end his days in retirement. His parents tried to make him change his mind; but everything was useless; for all inheritance he asked them for the book of the Holy Gospels, which he retained and guarded as a great treasure. To get rid of the insistent solicitations of his parents and to give himself entirely to God, he left his house, and went to knock at the door of a monastery, where he asked to be admitted. His parents made him search everywhere. Seeing that his inquiries were useless, they abandoned themselves to the bitterest tears. The holy young man spent six years in that retreat practicing all sorts of virtues and giving himself up to the penances that the love of God inspired him. After some time he had the idea of ​​going to see his parents, hoping that God would grant him the same grace as Saint Alejo,

As soon as he had left the monastery, he found a poor man, with whom he exchanged his habit, in order to avoid any possibility of being recognized; on the other hand, his great austerities and a serious illness that he had suffered, had completely disfigured him. When, in the distance, he saw his parents' house, he fell on his knees asking God not to abandon him in his company. Diego at night, and finding the door closed, spent the whole night with her. The next day the servants found him there and, taking pity on his misery, allowed him to enter a small room to remain in it. Only God knows what he had to suffer seeing his parents, who passed in front of him at all hours. him, weeping bitterly at the loss of the son who was all his consolation. His father, who was very charitable, he frequently sent her something to eat. But her mother could not approach him without her heart resisting, such was the repugnance that that poor thing of hers inspired in her. Had it not been her charity that led her to overcome her repugnance, she would have thrown him out of her house. She always immersed in her greatest sadness, she always shedding bitter tears, and all this in front of the one who could not remain insensitive to what constituted the greatest torment of her mother...

The Saint spent three years in that dwelling, dedicated solely to prayer and fasting, which he observed with great rigor; Tears continually streamed down his face. When God made him understand that he had finally arrived, he begged the butler of the house to do so that the lady would go to see him, since he wanted to speak with her. Upon receiving her message, even though she was used to visiting the sick, she was quite upset; She was so disgusted to visit him, that she had to do great violence to get to the door of the room where she was staying.

housed the poor The dying man thanked her warmly for the care he had taken for a miserable stranger, and assured her that he would pray much to God for her, so that he would reward him for all he had done for her. He also begged her to take care of her grave. After she had thus promised him, he presented her with the book of the Holy Gospels, which was very well bound. She was very surprised to see that a poor man had such a well-bound book; She then remembered the one she had once given to the son whose loss had cost her so many tears. That memory renewed her pain, and made her cry very afflicted. Those sighs and tears caught the attention of the father, who went there to find out the cause, and having examined the book with some care, He recognized that he was the same one who had delivered his son. Then he asked the dying man what had become of his son. The saint, who only had a breath of life left, responded with a sigh and tears in his eyes: «This book is the one you gave me ten years ago; I am the son whom you have sought so much and for whom you have shed so many tears». At these words, they were all stupefied, seeing that for so long they had with them the one they had searched so far away for; the emotion they experienced was life-threatening. But at the very moment when they embraced him lovingly in their arms, he raised his hands and his eyes to heaven and gave his beautiful soul to God, for the preservation of whose innocence he made so many sacrifices, so many penances, and so many tears he shed... Given this example, HM, we can very well say: that Christian had the happiness of knowing the greatness of her soul, and the care she deserved. Here you are, HM, a Christian who glorified God in all the acts of his life; here you have a soul that is now radiant with glory in heaven, where he blesses God for having given him the grace to overcome the world, flesh and blood. Oh! how happy is, even in the eyes of the world, such a death!

II. — We have said, in the second place, that, to know the price of our soul, we only have to consider what Jesus Christ did for it. Who of us, ¿HM, will ever be able to understand how much God loves our soul, since he has done everything for her that is possible for a God to procure the happiness of a creature? To feel more compelled to love her, he wanted to create her in her image and likeness; so that, looking at her, he could look at himself. That is why we see that he gives our soul the most tender names and the ones most capable of showing love to excess. he calls her his daughter, his sister, his beloved, his wife, his only one, his dove. But not everything is here yet: love is better manifested with acts than with words. Look at his diligence in coming down from heaven to take a body similar to ours; marrying our nature, he has married all our miseries, except sin; or rather, he wanted to take upon himself all the justice that his Father asked of us. Look at his annihilation in the mystery of the Incarnation; look at his poverty: for us he is born in a stable; contemplate the tears that she sheds on those straws, weeping in advance for our sins; behold the blood remains from his veins under the circumcision knife; see him fleeing to Egypt as a criminal; behold his humility, and his submission to his parents; look at him in the Garden of Olives, groaning, praying and shedding tears of blood; look at him imprisoned, tied and garrotted, thrown on the ground, mistreated with his feet and with sticks by his own children; behold him tied to the pillar, covered in blood; his poor body has received so many blows, the blood runs so abundantly, that their executioners are covered with it; behold the crown of thorns that pierces her holy and sacred head; look at him with the cross on his back walking towards the mountain of Calvary: each step, a fall; look at him nailed to the cross, on which he has stretched himself, without the slightest word of complaint coming out of his mouth. ¡Look at the tears of love, which she sheds in his agony, mingling with his adorable blood! It is truly, ¡HM, a love worthy of a God all love! With this he shows us, ¿HM, all the esteem in which he has our soul! Will all this be enough for us to understand what she is worth, and the care that we must have for her? ¡oh! ¿HM, if once in our lives we had the good fortune to fully penetrate the beauty and value of our soul, wouldn't we be willing, like Jesus, to suffer all the sacrifices to preserve it? ¡Oh! ¡how beautiful, how precious is a soul in the eyes of God himself! How is it possible that we hold her in such low esteem and treat her more harshly than the vilest of animals? What must the soul, knowing its beauty and its high qualities, think when it finds itself dragged into the clumsiness of sin? ¡oh! when we drag it through the mud of the dirtiest delights, let us feel, ¿HM, the horror that a soul must conceive of itself that sees no other being above it than God himself!... My God, is it possible that we do so little case of such a beauty? How is it possible that we hold her in such low esteem and treat her more harshly than the vilest of animals? What must the soul, knowing its beauty and its high qualities, think when it finds itself dragged into the clumsiness of sin? oh! when we drag it through the mud of the dirtiest delights, let us feel, HM, the horror that a soul must conceive of itself that sees no other being above it than God himself!... My God, is it possible that we do so little case of such a beauty? How is it possible that we hold her in such low esteem and treat her more harshly than the vilest of animals? What must the soul, knowing its beauty and its high qualities, think when it finds itself dragged into the clumsiness of sin? ¡oh! when we drag it through the mud of the dirtiest delights, let us feel, HM, ¡the horror that a soul must conceive of itself that sees no other being above it than God himself!... My God, is it possible that we do so little case of such a beauty?

Look, HM, what becomes of a soul that has the misfortune to fall into sin. When she is in the grace of God, we would take her for a divinity; ¡but when he is in sin!... The Lord allowed a prophet one day to see a soul in a state of sin, and he tells us that it looked like the corrupted corpse of a beast, after being dragged through the streets for eight days and exposed to the rigors of the sun. oh! now we can say, HM, with the prophet Jeremiah: "Babylon the great has fallen, and has become a den of demons" (i). ¡Oh! How beautiful is a soul when it has the joy of being in the grace of God! ¡Yes, yes, only God can know all its price and all its value!

SOURCE: Sermons of the holy Curé of Ars.