The Clean of Heart (after Edward Leen)
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
There is no experience so bitter for the generous and the high-minded as that of being misunderstood.
There is nothing which is so wounding to the sensitive heart as having the purest, noblest, most unselfish efforts towards good, not only not appreciated, but even misjudged and regarded with suspicion by those in whose interests these efforts have been expended.
This is the experience which invariably falls to the lot of God in His dealings with souls. God is the Great Misunderstood.
And this is His fate, not only with regard to those of His creatures who are plunged into the darkness of infidelity and unbelief, but even in His dealings with those who, as objects of His special predilection, have had lavished on them all the gifts conferred by the call to the Christian life.
In His relations with us God is animated by one sole desire—has only one ambition, if one may be allowed to use the term. The ambition of God with regard to us is to make us happy in the whole course of our existence—not only hereafter, but here and now, in this present life.
He is Happiness Itself. He, therefore, is the unique source of happiness, as the sun is the unique source of light.
Outside of Him, there is no order, no beauty, no harmony, no repose. God is not only infinitely happy, He is infinitely loving, and therefore yearns with all the yearning of God to make us taste of that unending and abounding joy which is His.
God being the source of happiness, alone knows the conditions which are demanded for its realization. In conceiving the natures of the reasonable creatures that have issued from His creative hands, He had clearly before His mind what was needed on the part of these creatures in order that the fullness of life and bliss might be theirs. In other words, He holds, as for Himself as also for them, the secret of happiness.
God has planned each human life, and He alone is aware of the use to which it is to be put, in order that the usage may yield the full satisfaction of the human heart.
He alone understands what must be effected in us through life’s process in order that we may shake ourselves free from the restlessness and fret of discontent, and the sense of futility with which we are perpetually tortured.
In a word, it is He who has made man and the life of man, and therefore it is only He who understands how man’s life is to be lived. He knows to what plan it is to be made to conform in the exercise of its activity if the happiness for which He has created us, and to which He invites us, is to result from our efforts.
If man conforms his views to those of God and shapes his life to the divine plan of living, happiness will issue from his life as a natural flowering. The flower is that in which the vital energy of the plant finds its true and gracious expression. If we live our lives as God planned them to be lived, we shall find happiness in so living, and in that way alone is it to be found.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing else than the revelation of man to man of this divine secret of pure gladness. In what was almost His first public utterance—certainly in what was His first important utterance—Our Lord offered to men the happiness they craved for and unfolded to them the conditions by which it was to be attained.
These conditions were not the arbitrary imposition of the Savior’s will. They were not laid down by Him as tests of moral hardihood and courage. They emerged of themselves from the state of soul in which man found himself after the Fall.
The cleansing of heart, the painful process of purification which we must pass through in order to enjoy the sweetness and joy of life, is something that is necessitated by what is of man’s own—namely, the perversion wrought in our nature by personal and original sin.
Christ outlined His program of life as a means to happiness, taking full account of the actual condition of mankind and shaping His plan according to the exigencies of that condition. He yearned to make us happy, and from the outset, strove to make us understand how we might become so.
And what was man’s answer to these overtures on the part of his God?
Man, ignorant of himself and ignorant of God, thought he knew more than God, thought he knew better than God, what made for his own well-being, his own bliss. God was misunderstood.
Instead of being considered (as He truly was) the bountiful and generous source of happiness, God was regarded by His creature as the great obstacle to it.
Men turned a deaf ear to His message and rejected it with disdain. He who had made him was judged to be ignorant of man’s ways, man’s needs, man’s requirements. He was swept aside.
His theory of happiness was scouted, and man elected to carve for himself his own destiny, to achieve his bliss by means that recommended themselves to his own reason.
The Creator was regarded as the great killjoy in the world of His rational creatures. He was, and is, regarded as the hateful sentinel that stands guard at every gate which opens on what gives promise of the experience of the joy of life—behind whose bars men fancy they glimpse those fruits, the taste of which will satisfy their craving.
They do not believe that poison lurks for them in what God withholds from them. They bid Him stand aside, and fling themselves into the pursuit of everything that flatters pride and sensuality. They hide from Him in their laughter, fearing lest His Presence should freeze it on their lips.
In their follies and dissipations they mock at Him. In their sorrows, miseries, and disillusionments they surlily turn their back on Him, and hug themselves close in a monstrous self-pity, to enjoy the luxury of grieving without God.
In their despair they rail at Him and His laws, even though the experience of life has taught them that all human misery springs from the non-observance of those laws.
God has created human life and, being wise and good, did not create it to be a thing of reckless abandonment to the satisfaction of every desire. He, having made it, flung around it those barriers and protections that keep its waters in their proper channel and prevent them from overflowing and carrying devastation in their passage.
The restraints that God flings around the use of human liberty are for the purpose of preserving its dignity and securing its perfect exercise. He has set up around our human life only those restrictions that are needed if it is to remain truly human.
Men chafe against these restrictions as though they were a galling chain fettering their liberty. They fling them off in order to give free rein to every instinct, no matter how irrational, that they feel rising in them.
Men are tempted to think that they cannot taste of real life unless they are free to abandon themselves to the satisfaction of every caprice. Men and women would taste of every experience life offers and resent God’s dissuasion as one resents the warnings of a harsh, unreasonable, and unsympathetic monitor.
In all this I am not speaking of times remote and past. I am but analyzing and revealing what is passing through the soul of many a man and many a woman born in Catholicity and living in our land at the present moment; I am but giving expression to what is implied in their restless chafing at and subdued rebellion against the wise and salutary laws with which our Holy Mother the Church safeguards the sanctity and dignity of human life.
To one who casts seeing eyes on the “world of Christianity” today, what picture is presented? Notice, I do not say the Christian world, for can what is around us be so described?
One sees a picture of shreds and tatters of Christianity sewn on to a ground of paganism and masquerading as the nuptial robe with which Christ clothes His followers. The beauty, harmony, reserve, dignity, sublimity of Christianity all submerged, all disappearing in the mad pursuit of inane and degrading pleasure.
God does not count, and therefore He is no longer sought by Christians. How many, even in our own land, make God the law of life?—and yet there can be no other end set to a life that is Christian. The old terms of our faith remain, we still use the same phrases and the same words, but have they for us the full content of meaning they had of old?
The Cross still remains, but remains as a memorial, not as a reminder. It has become a monument reared to commemorate a historic and tragic event that took place many centuries ago and is not, as it should be, a living, speaking thing, setting before us the only true theory of life.
It tells us of something that has happened to someone else and which wrought His death. It does not arouse in us a consciousness of what should take place in us, in order that we may live.
Practices have replaced principles; observances tend to replace the true worship of God; the real reason of religion is being buried under a demon of formalism; and true devotion to God — that is, devotedness to God — is being swept away in a tide of soulless devotions.
The spirit of sacrifice—the essential spirit of religion and therefore the essential spirit of Christianity—tends to disappear from our midst. Who speaks of sacrifice now? Who understands what the term implies?
To the average Christian it means the surrender, through liberality, of what he would be perfectly entitled to hold, not the renouncement to which he is absolutely obliged if he is to attain the end for which life is given him.
From the consoling, pathetic, and (should be) inspiring truth that “Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8), the pleasure-loving Christian derives the comfortable illusion that he is dispensed from the unpleasant necessity of dying for himself and dying to himself. Yet it was precisely to encourage him to face that death to self, and to make that death to self fructify in life, that Christ surrendered His life on the Cross.
What part has the Cross in our lives today? What lesson does Christ preach to us from it? Is it the doctrine that Christians may freely indulge in all that their blunted, and often false, consciences tell them is ‘no harm,’ in all that they do not regard as positive mortal sin?
Does the Book of the Cross teach us how, by skillful casuistry, to hug with security the confines of mortal sin and escape shipwreck? Does the Cross convey the lesson that the life-effort of the Christian consists in ‘not doing wrong’ rather than in ‘doing right’? Does it encourage the utmost self-indulgence that can be conceded to oneself with safety? Is the Christian ideal merely that of ‘safety first’ in the moral sphere? Can that be called Christianity?
To all warnings against courses and fashions that are at variance with the spirit of Christianity, does the Christian make a valid defense when he can say there is no harm in them?
Alas! What deterioration of manners that has taken place through the wide acceptance among Christians of the baneful principle of conduct implied in the phrase, “there’s no harm in it.” …
We must deny ourselves — that is, we must die to our evil selves — if we are to be happy; and it is this truth that Christ, having first preached to us by word in the Sermon on the Mount, drives home to us by dying on the Cross.
Our Divine Lord was not lifted up on the Cross in order to secure for us a life of wild dissipation here, to be conveniently closed by a final absolution, and to be followed by unending bliss hereafter.
Christ’s blood was not poured forth in order that Christians, trading on its purifying powers, might freely give themselves up to a life which in all its external social features bears a not too unfaithful resemblance to paganism. This word is constantly on the lips of our preachers, stigmatizing the tendencies they observe in the Christians to whom their words are addressed.
In fact, it is an insult to paganism to describe what we see around us by that name. This masquerading Christianity is worse than paganism. Paganism passes frankly for what it is—the false worship of false gods. It has that much truth in it—the truth of being what it is.
Falsehood is not as false a thing as truth perverted and corrupted. … Such Christians (and they are now many) turn the truth of God into a lie, and that is the great crime. The negation of truth, which is falsehood, is not so baneful a thing as the perversion of truth—the living truth of God—and making it a lie.
Why is it that for us the road to happiness—to the blessedness to which Christ summons us, even here in this world—is the way of the Cross and of death to self?
It is simply because from the beginning, in our pride and insubordination, we tore down the barriers and restraints which kept us true to our own nature and made us the recipients of that life and gladness which flowed from God, the source of happiness, to us.Man would not seek God; he would seek himself, and through himself find happiness. …
The inordinate pursuit of pleasure dries up and destroys in the heart every noble instinct. Men and women who live for their own satisfaction become, as St. Paul says, “without affection, without fidelity, without mercy” (Rom. 1:31).
How can they have affection for others, whose affections are wholly concentrated on their own ego? How can they have fidelity, who are faithful only to the promptings of their own self-seeking? How can they have mercy, who are driven to use callously all things that come their way for their own self-satisfaction?
The world that does not accept the Cross is bound to be a world without affection, without fidelity, without mercy, without happiness.
In deciding not to believe in God’s theory of happiness, and in choosing our own theory instead, we tear down the barriers that preserve human life and give it its dignity and its worth. Jesus Christ came to restore those safeguards, to re-establish human life in its pristine dignity, and to point out to us all, by His example, how human life was to be lived in order that it should issue in happiness.
Jesus is the Only True Man: all others are men, in the true sense, to the extent in which they are like Him. He alone is perfectly human. And in being humanly perfect, with the perfection that God ordained for man, He is perfectly happy. He sees God and He serves God with all His heart and soul, and He is in consequence supremely, intensely, quasi-infinitely happy.
He is humanly happy—with the happiness by which man is made, with the happiness by which alone men can be happy. This happiness, given by the way of Jesus as being that by which alone men can be happy, is human happiness, albeit ultimately it proves to be a superhuman beatitude. Should man rebel because his human happiness turns out to be a superhuman happiness?
And in the actual order of things—that is, owing to the fact of original sin — his life on earth, in its subjection to God, in its denial of self, in its mortifications, its self-abnegation is the only kind of life which will reveal God to men, reveal man to himself, and in this dual revelation make him truly happy and master of the earth.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the land” (Matt. 5:4). Christ saw God every single instant of His existence, and from that sight derived intense happiness. Christ lived for God, and after the plan arranged by God, and He was happy with the happiness that is for man.
Those to whom Christ preaches from the Cross reject this way of peace and fling themselves after what this life can give them. They make what this earth can guarantee to them their goal, their aim, the end of their lives, and do they taste happiness? Can we trace happiness in the eyes through which look souls that have lost the spirit of Christianity?
Are those Christians happy who have made of their lives an absurd orchestra of jarring and discordant sounds, in which every note is heard except the sweet tones of Jesus Christ? Can they have rest and peace for their hearts, who refuse to accept the truth—that Jesus Christ’s life is the only way of human life, the only road to happiness?
We have believed in the words of God. We have heard His promise of happiness and have accepted the conditions that He has laid down for its attainment as being the only ones feasible.
We have refused to disbelieve with the world. We have rejected its conditions of happiness as being false and accepted Christ’s as being true.
In thus deciding, we have flung down a challenge to the world. We have to prove to it that we have discovered the secret of existence—namely, that by walking the hard road of the Cross, man is destined to find the secret of abounding joy.
God would spare us that rough road were it possible. He takes no pleasure in our pain. If He will have us suffer, it is only that we may be purified and that the obstacles in our way to happiness be cleared from our path.
Cleanse yourselves from earthly desires, purify your hearts, and what will you find? We will discover the truth of the words, “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9).
There is nothing so sweet, so thrilling, so beautifying, so happiness-giving as the love of Jesus Christ. It is a love that combines the love of human heart for human heart and the love of human heart for its God.
The practice of poverty, chastity, and humility purifies our hearts and renders them apt for this affection.
By detachment and poverty we scorn the things of this earth and place all our riches in the possession of God. By chastity we curb the waywardness of our hearts and school ourselves to concentrate all our affections on God alone. By humility we keep ourselves subject to God, and so dispose ourselves for the reception of His divine grace.
Jesus has given us the perfect example of the practice of these virtues. His life was the exemplification of them.
We need to fix our eyes on Him, to devote ourselves to acquiring a great knowledge and love of Him. In that love, we will find strength to fulfill this first and principal precept: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). And in the fulfillment of this commandment, we will find life and bliss; we will see God in every detail of our life.
If ever you have been so fortunate as to have gazed on the countenance of one who has in some measure fulfilled this precept, then you have beheld reflected on that countenance the happiness which radiates from a soul that is truly Christian.
The world is foolish; you are wise. We believe the words of Christ, “I am the Way” (John 14:6)—the Way that you must tread in order that you may walk in the light, in order that every desire of your human hearts may be fulfilled. Embrace this life with your whole heart. Live your life of poverty, chastity, and humility—that is, the life of Christ: that is the life of the Christian.
Live it, and you will merit to have those words addressed to you which were first spoken to the greatest woman who has lived on this earth: “Blessed are you for your believing, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to you by the Lord” (Luke 1:45).
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW
Based on The Voice of a Priest, “Sermon Six,” by Edward Leen, C.S.Sp. (Sheed & Ward, 1946).