This letter, written in mid-March, will be the only one that you will receive from us for these months of March and April. It should reach you while we are plunged into the unutterable mystery of Holy Week, when the liturgy invites us to penetrate again into the indescribable mystery of the Love of Christ for His Father. A mystery stressed by Christ when, moments before being arrested by the henchmen led by Judas, He clearly reiterated to His apostles His will to procure, by means of His death and resurrection, the glory of His Father and the salvation of souls. Death and Resurrection which, far from being contradictory as we unconsciously perceive them to be because of the weakness of our intelligence, are both the manifestation of the one and same mystery of Charity.
Dear friends and benefactors,
This letter, written in mid-March, will be the only one that you will receive from us for these months of March and April. It should reach you while we are plunged into the unutterable mystery of Holy Week, when the liturgy invites us to penetrate again into the indescribable mystery of the Love of Christ for His Father. A mystery stressed by Christ when, moments before being arrested by the henchmen led by Judas, He clearly reiterated to His apostles His will to procure, by means of His death and resurrection, the glory of His Father and the salvation of souls. Death and Resurrection which, far from being contradictory as we unconsciously perceive them to be because of the weakness of our intelligence, are both the manifestation of the one and same mystery of Charity.
Indeed, we usually find it difficult not to oppose Good Friday to Easter Sunday, the apparent defeat of dying on the Cross, expressed by the darkness of Good Friday, to the victory of the Resurrection, signified in a beautiful way by the resplendent sun of Easter Sunday. This slowness to understand – which unfortunately seems to characterize the apostles and of which Our Lord had already complained during His earthly life – prevents us from penetrating into the very heart of the Passion and Resurrection, because we are woefully lacking the divine perspective that presides over the economy of our Redemption. We do not grasp, alas, the unity of this mystery of Charity. And if we divide this single mystery into two distinct parts, we expose ourselves to fall into two equally dangerous errors, which could certainly lead us to our damnation.
Thus, when we separate the mystery of the Cross from that of the Resurrection we are likely to sink into the despair suffered by the apostles, which, pushed to the extreme, led Judas to his ruin. But if, on the other hand, we recoil with an instinctive horror from the unbearable spectacle of the sufferings of Christ on the Cross and linger only on the beauty and glory that radiate from the Resurrection, we disguise the price of the divine Sacrifice and remain foreigners to the mystery of the Cross of Christ, which is nonetheless the only way to salvation – and thus, strangers to the Cross and its mystery of life, we may soon become its fierce and irreducible enemies!
Let us keep the unity of this divine mystery in which the Passion and Resurrection are for Christ only the occasion “to do the will of His Father” to the detriment of His own will, as He forcefully said in His agony in the Garden of Olives. Christ wants only one thing: to act as Son and to manifest the Glory of His Father. One gaze enables Him to tower over the events and thus go up to Calvary with an assured step.
Some privileged souls, deeply seized by this divine perspective during their existence, knew how to remain faithful at the hour of the Passion and to rally around Christ, not hesitating to face the loud and threatening mob. They were – and also remain – few. In the forefront of these noble souls, we find, of course, Our Holy Mother. May She give us the grace “to do all that Her Son will say to us”. Isn’t this ardent invitation, fallen from Her maternal lips, an invitation to come before Christ, to be embraced by and to share His gaze, so that we may follow in His footsteps?
Alas! We are so slow to understand, so slow to penetrate the mysteries of Love. Blinded by our own pride, we do not see the light and our gaze curiously resembles that of a blind man who does not see the beauties that surround him and whose value he does not even suspect! We Catholics, baptized, favored by the multiple graces that Christ ceaselessly pours into our souls, we do little more than barely exist in the Kingdom of grace! Our gaze has not been seized yet by that of Christ, our will jealously remains ours and is not still sufficiently His. We diminish the greatness of the mystery of Divine Love to our own petty proportions.
Let the Passion come! Because in the hour of the Passion our too human perspectives have the grace to come before the Gaze of Christ and to be forever purified when we consent to be seized by His divine strength and beauty.
We have the proof in those two episodes – so painful and so different in their conclusion – that happened at the time of the Passion, namely, the treason of Judas and the denial of Peter. Painful episodes because we cannot deny that these two regrettable abandonments are the figure of all our own abandonments. In our times, when the Passion of Christ is renewed in the temporal realities and in the Holy Church, many souls disavow, ridicule or abandon the Savior. And we ourselves are to be counted among the number of these weak souls. To deny this would be pure illusion, as there are very few souls that are not grabbed by the world and that remain at the side of Christ. There was only a handful on Good Friday, gathered together around Our Lady. This handful is as rare as always when the storm rises – and today it rages and shakes the most solid trees.
The fall of the apostles is a lesson for us. First of all, they warn us that our falls are always possible: “Fratres: vigilate!,” as Holy Mother Church reminds us every evening in an urgent invitation. Let us remain vigilant, in the humble reality of our misery. In ourselves, in the depths of our wounded nature, resound unhealthy appeals which disturb us and exert a powerful attraction. Captivated by multiple temptations, our souls vacillate between two cruel treasons. Will we be Judas or Peter?
This question does not refer to the nature of the sins of Judas or Peter, nor to that of our own sins. Such a question would be idle, as in every sin there are some crumbs of satisfaction (those poor thirty coins which we so greedily seek!) and an abjuration of our baptismal vocation. The question does not refer to sin, but to Redemption! Both apostles parted with their Master: both betrayed Him. We have betrayed Him ourselves, and unfortunately more than one or three times! The only important question, the only one that ultimately interests us, is whether or not we will pay the necessary ransom. Do we agree to return to Christ to obtain forgiveness, while fighting against the turns and twists of our proud nature, which refuses to acknowledge its great misery? Will we finally consent to meet the eyes of Christ? Will we be as Judas, who thinks, as Cain, that “his sin is too great to be forgiven” and who, in his proud cowardice, escapes from the invitations of Love, his evasive gaze not allowing Christ to penetrate it and to touch his heart? Will we always imitate him? Or will we be a new Peter, who humbly agrees to be purified by the grace of the merciful look of Christ and who, radically modifying the prayer that he addressed to Him under the effect of his too natural ardor, requests now from Christ “to remain near him because he is only a sinner”?
This merciful look is not only that of Christ suffering and saving souls from their decadence, but also that of the Risen Christ elevating His apostle and confirming him in grace: “Pasce agnos meos. Pasce oves meas”.
As for us, in this blessed season during which is renewed this mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ, let us go to the confessional and imitate St. Peter by plunging our gaze into the Gaze of Christ. We will leave there not only reconciled, but vivified. The gaze of Christ purifies the soul and deposits in it a living force, that of His love for His Father.
May you have a good and holy Easter in the light of this divine glance, light and strength of our poor earthly lives.
In Christo Sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux