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Page 34
THE FOURTH WORD
_My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_
Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross passes
gradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in the
outermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals with
the one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who were
always nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secret
of all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There is
no need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses.
I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus
Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the
Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the
Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalem
and Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with God_
and _the Word_ that _was God_. Next, that the eyes even of His Sacred
Humanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of God, since His
union with God was entire and complete: as He looked up into His
Mother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father;
as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His Sacred
Humanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary that
God had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermission
into the glory of heaven and saw His Father there.
Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry of
dereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first uttered
by David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritual
darkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together,
could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. For
of His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence which
He could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced and
saturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He held
firm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine and
Human Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the assaults of
every pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond our
power to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychology
of the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us.... Do we expect to
understand that?...
II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yet
corresponding to something which we know to be true, which throws some
faint glimmer of light upon this impenetrable darkness and seems to
extend Christ's experience upon the Cross so as to touch our own human
life. It is a phrase that describes a condition well known to spiritual
persons: "To leave God for God." (1) The simplest and lowest form of
this state is that condition in which we acquiesce with our will in the
withdrawal of ordinary spiritual consolation. Certainly it is an
inexplicable state, since both the ordinary aids to our will--our
understanding and our emotion--are, by the very nature of the case,
useless to it. Our heart revolts from that dereliction and our
understanding fails to comprehend the reasons for it. Yet we acquiesce,
or at least perceive that we ought to do so; and that by doing so--by
ceasing, that is, to grasp God's Presence any longer--we find it as
never before. We leave God in order to find Him.
(2) The second state is that in which we find ourselves when not only do
all consolations leave us, but the very grip of intelligent faith goes
too; when the very reasons for faithfulness appear to vanish. It is an
incalculably more bitter trial, and soul after soul fails under it and
must be comforted again by God in less august ways or perish altogether.
And yet this is not the extremest pitch even of human desolation.
(3) For there is a third of which the saints tell us in broken words and
images....
III. Our final point, for application to ourselves, is that dereliction
in some form or another is as much a stage in spiritual progress as
autumn and winter are seasons of the year. The beginners have to suffer
one degree, the illuminated another, and those that have approached a
real Union with God a third. But all must suffer it, and each in his
own degree, or progress is impossible.
Let us take courage therefore and face it, in the light of this Word.
For, as we can sanctify bodily pain by the memory of the nails, so too
can we sanctify spiritual pain by the memory of this darkness. If He Who
_never left the Father's side_ can suffer this in an unique and supreme
sense, how much more should we be content to suffer it in lower degrees,
who have so continually, since we came to the age of reason, been
leaving not His side only, but His very house.
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