The King of Hearts

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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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.

Every man is passionately fond of liberty. But there’s one thing he craves even more. And without which existence and even liberty is painful. And that is happiness. It’s one of the greatest of life’s paradoxes that as much as a man seeks to be free, he still wishes to be a slave. Not a slave in the sense that his liberty is denied him. But in the sense that he yearns for something he can worship. Something which will solicit his will, pull at his heart strings, tempt his energies, and command his affections. He wants to be free to choose between the various kinds of happiness. But he does not want to be free from happiness. He wishes to be its slave.

There are two ways of responding to this soul hunger and this heart thirst. One is the way of the world. The other is the way of Christ. The difference between the two is that before we have the pleasures of the world, they seem desirable and all we need to make us happy. But after we have them, they are disappointing and sometimes even disgusting. The contrary is true of the pleasures of Christ. Before we have them, they are hard, unattractive, and even repulsive. But after we have them, they’re satisfying and all our heart could ever crave. The problem then is this. Will the heart seek its happiness in the pleasures of the world or will it seek them in the kingship of Christ?

I would plead for the kingship of Christ by showing in the language of Francis Thompson first how the pleasures of the world fail and secondly how the kingship of Christ pleases. What kind of happiness is offered by the world? What solution does it give to the problem of joy?

Happiness as the world is to be found in the pursuit of three things. Humanism, sex, and science. The first panacea is humanism or the sufficiency of man without God. In this theory man finds satisfaction in his own mind without the aid of faith, and in his own will without the aid of grace. There is no need according to this philosophy to seek a God outside of man, but only the man inside himself with his thoughts and imaginings. And the humanist in the language of Thompson says the escape from God is in the joys of one’s own mind, in psychology, in human emotions, in sentiments, in natural mysticisms. Through these it hopes to escape the call of the great king Christ and the sound of his footfall of peace.

I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years. I fled him down the labyrinth ways of my own mind and in the midst of tears I hid from him and under running laughter up visaged hopes I sped. And shot precipitated adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears from those strong feet that followed followed after.

And yet humanism is not a success but a failure. For a man cannot live by himself anymore than he can lift himself by his own bootstraps or live on his own fat. He has a soul as well as a body. And the spirit clamors for its food more unhesitatingly than the stomach. As there floats over his soul the truth that perhaps there is a God outside of and beyond man, he hears the beat of the feet of God whom he was told he would never need. But with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy, they beat. And a voice beat more instant than the feet. All things betray you who betray me.

Driven from self, the modern man next flies to the Freudian philosophy of sex. Opening the little casements of the heart so narrow and tiny, which contrast with the great wide portals through which divine love enters. Influenced by the economic order in which he lives, he begins to judge love like gold. And hence feels the more tempestuous and violent it is, the more real it is. He feels the need of religion. And since he would starve his soul, he makes a religion out of the instincts which he has in common with the beasts of the field. Pleading outlaw-wise as one cut off from human sympathy, he drinks of flesh which makes hungry where most it satisfies. Somehow deep in his heart, he knows that God is pursuing and will enter if he can. But his weak soul is afraid that if he admits the spirit he will have no room left for the flesh. So forgetful that if he has the flame he can forget the spark.

I pleaded outlaw-wise. By many a hearted casement curtained red, trellised with intertwining charities, for though I knew his love who followed, yet was I sore adread lest having him I must have naught beside. But if one little casement parted wide, the gust of his approach would clash it to. Fear wist not to evade as love wist to pursue.

Finally, the modern man finding that humanism and sex both fail to satisfy, he seeks his happiness in science as he becomes enthralled by the glory of the midday sun, the soft beauty of the moon, the splendor of a thousand stars. Since earth fails, he will play truant to earth, slips through the gate of fancy into the very meadows of the skies. The beauties of the planets dazzle him as he runs wild over the fields of ether. Science it seems is the only thing which will answer his call to happiness and be more than an echo dying on the winds. More than that it will explain the universe without that tremendous lover who is God. So he cries, across the margins of the world I fled, and troubled the gold gateways of the stars, smiting for shelter on their clanging bars, I said to dawn be sudden, to eve be soon. With your young sky blossoms heap me over from this tremendous lover. Draw the bolt of nature’s secrecies, I knew all the swift importings on the willful face of skies. I was heavy with the even, when she lit her glimmering tapers, round the day’s dead sanctities. I laughed in the morning’s eyes, I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, heaven and I wept together. And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine. Against the red throb of its sunset heart, I laid my own to beat and share commingling heat.

But science fails too. For it’s something more than a knowledge of matter the soul craves. There’s no room for beauty in that science which would botanize even on a mother’s grave. So the modern man after wandering over the universe with a telescope in his hand returns with bleeding feet and aching heart. The world has lied again. What it called the successful road to happiness was a failure. There wells up then from his heart the sad and painful truth that joy is not in nature. In vain my tears were wet on heaven’s grey cheek. For we know not what each other says. These things and I, in sound I speak, their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences. Nature poor step-dame cannot slake my drought, never did any milk of hers once bless my thirsting mouth. I tempted all his servitors, but to find my own betrayal in their constancy. In faith to him, their fickleness to me. Their traitorous trueness and their loyal deceit. To all swift things for swiftness did I sue. Clung to the whistling mane of every wind. But fear wist not to evade as love wist to pursue. Still with unhurrying chase, with unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy, came on the following feet, and a voice above their beat, naught shelters thee who wilt not shelter me.

This story is relived a thousand times, ten thousand lives. The soul craves happiness, the world says I have the successful secret. It is humanism, it is sex, it is science. And yet all these fail. Humanism is too inhuman, sex is too remorseful, science is too cold. Where then find happiness? Where find that one thing whose slave we love to be and yet be free? Who is it who calls to us after each of our failures? All things betray thee who betray me. Who is it who whispers to our heart after each sin? Lo, naught contents you who contents not me. Where seek that haunting voice which seems to call to us from every burning bush of earth’s foibles? May it not be that since the world does not give happiness, we must seek it in something unworldly? May it not be that since what the world calls successful failed, we must seek the successful in what the world calls failure? But there’s only one thing in all the world which is unworldly, unworldly enough to be divine. And only one thing which was a failure enough in the eyes of the world to be a success with God. That is the person who brought to this old earth of ours a love which cries out: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). That is Christ the King.

But did he ever call himself a king? Or call that terrible day which we call Good Friday, to mask its heinousness, to declare our felix culpa. Our Lord is led before the Roman Procurator in the name of Tiberius Caesar. To have some idea of Pilate’s personality and his vision of the world worldly, make a mental picture of him in terms of one of our modern intelligentsia, a reader of Mencken, Bertrand Russell and Shaw, with Swinburne and Wells on his bookshelves. One whose emotional life was dictated by Havelock Ellis, and his mental life by Julian Huxley. Who says there’s no such thing as truth. Standing between the pillars of his judgment seat, touched somewhat with the nobleness of the divine prisoner, Pilate asks with pitying wonder, are you a king? The very way he said it was meant to imply, are you whom the world receives not, who are a poor worn outcast, in this the hour of your bitter need, are you a king? Are you pale, lonely, friendless, wasted man in poor peasant garments and tied hands, are you a king? Are you who fled when the crowd attempted to make you a worldly king, and who only last Sabbath entered the palm-strewn streets of this city amidst pompous splendor, are you really a king? There came from that beaten figure rising to its full stature, expressing kingship in every gesture despite robes and chains: “You say that I am a king. My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my attendants would fight so that I would be handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here. For this I was born, for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (John 18:36–37).

As Pilate listened to this King of Truth, he felt rising within the impulse for higher things. But the thought of an unworldly king, the thought of an unworldly king was too much for him. And as the first pragmatist of Christian times, turning his back he sneered the question of the twentieth century: “What is truth?” (John 18:38). And with those momentous words, the worldly rejected the unworldly which is God. Thus, Christ became the only king in the whole history of the world who ever stumbled to his throne. The world was so certain that no king could be a success who was such a failure. But such are the ways of God. Many times during his public life he said that those who loved him would be hated by the world. That he would draw men to himself by being lifted up on a cross in seeming defeat. That the greatest love a man can show is to lay down his life for his sheep. Now the solemn hour had struck. The king was hanging on a peg. For a crown he wore a wreath of thorns, for a scepter an iron nail, for a throne a cross, for royal purple his own blood, for his army those who shouted, “If he is the King of Israel, let him come down from the cross” (Matt. 27:42). For his courtiers the outcasts of the hill of the skull, for his courtiers thieves, and for his battle cry, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

When the king was enthroned, those who expected a worldly king and not an unworldly God who loves to the folly of dying, saw an inscription above the cross painted in huge red letters. It was written in three languages, of which at least one was known by every single man in that multitude. In the official Latin, the current Greek, the vernacular Hebrew, informing all that this man, whom the world rejected, who loves when hated, this man dying between two common thieves in the sight of the world was the king of the Jews. The mob rushed back to Pilate, swearing they would not have Christ rule over them. And they said to him, don’t write the king of the Jews, but he said I am the king of the Jews. Pilate’s courage which had oozed away so rapidly at the name of Caesar now revived, and the Procurator cut them short with the last words ever recorded of him: “What I have written I have written” (John 19:22). Pilate had written and it would stand. The royalty of Christ must be promulgated in the Hebrew, which is the language of the people of God. In Greek which is the language of the doctors of philosophy. And in Latin which is the language of the world. It was not the Christ who was unworthy of his kingdom, but the kingdom that was unworthy of the king.

When evening came and the scene was darkened, and the cry of thirst rang out over the hills, splitting the rocks and opening graves, its echo ran down the corridors of time. Until it comes knocking at the portals of our own heart in this very day and this very hour. He comes to the men of our day who have tried to be human without God and who found that if they live without God they are not men but beasts. He comes to the disillusioned bodies who made a religion out of flesh, and reminds them that the soul as well as the body must have its joys, its passionless passion and wild tranquilities. He comes to those whose religion is science and makes them shift uneasily as they try to explain law without a lawmaker, and order without mind, which is God. But it is one thing to recognize the insufficiency of the world and quite another thing to acknowledge that the king of hearts and wills and nations is one who brings a cross and the dull hard lesson of mortification. Face to face with one whose kingdom is within, the entrance to which can be gained only by carrying a cross like the king with a cross, there is a dreadful fear. Lest having him we can have nothing else. Can it be, we say to ourselves, that his love is a bitter weed which suffers no flower except its own to mount? Can we be courtiers at the service of a king who wears purple robes and is cypress-crowned? Must all harvest fields of love be dunged with rotten death? Must the charcoal of our lives pass through fire before he can trace his portrait on our soul? Must the sun spend itself to light a world, and the glory of the cloud die in passing showers before there can spring forth fruit or flowers? Must the sea die before it can bud forth light? And must the cross be the condition of the crown? And the three hours crucifixion with the king be the prelude to an eternal glory with him in heaven?

As we turn these questions over in our minds, there comes to us the voice of the king like the bursting sea. Lo all things fly thee for thou fliest me. Strange, piteous, futile thing. Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I makes much of naught. And human love needs human meriting. How have you merited, of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot? Alack thou knowest not. How little worthy of any love thou art. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee? Save me, save only me.

The human heart now begins to see the light. He is not just a king who failed. He is a king who failed in the eyes of the world to win eternal victory in the eyes of God. Hence if we are to reign with him in heaven, we must begin our reign with him on earth. As he began his, namely on a cross. It is the unworldly thing to do, yes. The world first feasts and then has its fast. It gluts itself and then loathes its excesses. It laughs and then weeps. But the king of the cross reverses the order. The poor shall not always be poor. The crucified shall not always be on a cross. The poor shall be rich, the lowly shall be exalted. Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Those who mourn shall be comforted. And those who suffer with Christ shall reign with him. The solution is clear. What we call pain, sorrow and crucifixion is but the shade of his hand outstretched caressingly. At last the soul is conquered by the beauty of the king, so lately known, so lately loved. As that divine king whispers gently the secret of his seemingly hard way with us. All which I took from you, I did but take not for your harms, but just that you might seek it in my arms. All which your child mistake fancies as lost, I have stored for you at home. Rise, clasp my hand, and come.

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