Thought for the Day – 30 January – Meditations on the Hidden Life: From the 1906 Edition of The Heart of Jesus of Nazareth; it has the Imprimatur of Bishop John Baptist Butt, Diocese of Southwark, England, 5 February 1890. Author’s name known simply as Author of “The Voice of the Sacred Heart.”
(We return to Fr Clarke for February with his Meditations on The Great Truths.)
Meditation 6:
The Occupation of the Heart of Jesus in the Hidden Life
We are not at present going to study. in detail. the holy occupations of the Heart of our Lord, reserving such study for future consideration in separate meditations.
We shall find that it affords much assistance, in familiarising us, with the character of the Sacred Heart, its love, its sufferings and its desires. It will enable us also to recognise how full of merit, how conducive to God’s glory and, how helpful to the world at large, is a hidden life, provided it be modelled on the Hidden Life of Jesus.
The exterior life of Nazareth was, as we know, made up of the most ordinary works, the most commonplace actions. During those long years, we find nothing apparently, in due proportion, to the sublime Mission which brought Him down from Heaven.
Yet, He was all the while negotiating the great affair of our Redemption, as truly as when we come to regard Him hanging on the Cross.
Let us penetrate into His Heart and we shall see that it was secretly consumed with Love in the Presence of the Majesty of God, His Father and, since true love is ever active, with what energy must not the Divine Flame have burnt, within that living Furnace of Charity?
It was from this inexhaustible source of Love that His every act emanated and, these have merited the redemption of ten thousand worlds and are pleading, our cause in Heaven. at this moment!
Behold ~ the first great Master of the Divine Apostleship. Behold ~ in Jesus of Nazareth, the first Apostle of Prayer! This was the occupation of His Sacred Heart.
He loved, He adored, He repaired, He prayed, He immolated Himself for the Father’s glory, for the salvation of the universe.
He traced out the Divine plan of His Church, according to the eternal design He had seen in the bosom of the Father and, as each stratagem of His enemy for the defeat of that plan and the overthrow of His Church passed before Him, He devised the infallible means by which the evil influence should be counteracted and, the cause of good, should triumph.
Of what importance was it that the Hands of Jesus did but plane wood in a carpenter’s shop whilst His Heart was thus incessantly and divinely occupied? Could there really be monotony in such a Life as this? Whatever may have been its exterior, the interior of that Life was the most sublime which can be imagined.
Sublime also is the hidden life of those who have learnt to imitate Him, whose hearts, like His, are wholly occupied, as far as they can be in this life, with the interests of God and of souls; a life indeed which the wise ones of this world despise – which materialists scorn as useless. But in the great day of revelation, they will be forced to exclaim: “We fools esteemed their life madness and their end without honour; behold how they are numbered among the children of God and their lot is among the Saints.”
AnaStpaul 