The great concern of our life is to love God and to be loved by Him. Life is either a love affair with God or else it is distorted and wasted and finally destroyed. If we do not receive and foster eternal life in ourselves, the life we have is almost an illusion. So it is not only a great joy, but also a very necessary habit we should acquire, to use all the means we can to increase and make deeper and firmer that love affair with God that we were created and re-created for.
. . . Two things should be in our hearts and minds as we think of God in the context of our love affair with Him: firstly His power and majesty, the greatness of God which inspires a holy fear or awe in us, or ought to, and secondly, the gift to us of His love, which ought to inspire absolute confidence and great joy in us. . .
. . . The Holy Name of Jesus, at which we bow our heads in awe and reverence, is an amalgam of the majesty of God and of His merciful gift to us. God is God, but He is with us. Think, if you can, what that really means, what God means, what with us means. It is a very startling thought. Jesus really is God-with-us. We are the Bride of God, the Bride of Christ. We have the privileges, the rights, the joys, and the rewards of a Bride of God because His name has been poured out for us. God almost melts into us. Whenever you think of the Holy Name of Jesus, see God poured out most sweetly into your soul. The Name of Jesus is very powerful and effective and very gentle and comforting. His Name is an oil poured out, a very fragrant oil. It is poured out into our souls and makes them fragrant. The Name of Jesus sweetens our lives interiorly.
. . . Whenever we see the Sanctuary Lamp and the oil on which it feeds we can think of this. The Name of Jesus feeds the flame, nourishes the body and relieves pain. It is light, food, and medicine. Of course, in our devotion to the Holy Name, we are not making an absolute distinction between the actual Name of Jesus and His Person. Whenever you say “Jesus”, He Himself is there. . .
Let us look at the threefold symbolism of oil, as we have used it, to tell us something that is beyond speech about Our Lord. Light, food, medicine. He is all three. First of all, light. Our Lord is the Light of the world, and He has told us so. If He is not present, there is no light, no matter how much men may think otherwise. And you and I ought to feel in the dark whenever this precious oil of the Name of Jesus is absent from what we are thinking or doing or hearing in some way. We must live in His light all the time, and we ought to feel the darkness when anything enters our hearing or our mind from which Jesus is excluded. Everything Christian contains this fragrant oil of the Name of Jesus that has been poured out over all creation and is only eradicated by the malice of wicked men.
This is our Lord’s world, and everything within it is His, and “He is the true light that enlightens every man who comes into this world.” But some men prefer darkness because their deeds are evil, as Jesus said. This must not be true of us. Whenever we see any sign of darkness, let us call on the Name of Jesus in our hearts, so that the oil poured out may fill us with God’s light, kindling the Sanctuary Lamp within our souls, or rather making our enlightened souls themselves signs of God’s presence. If we have any interests that we cannot engage in without feeling uneasy at the thought of Jesus, then for us those interests are a source of darkness, and we must decide what is part of God’s plan and what things concern His Kingdom by reference to the faith we have received in Jesus Christ. We must firmly extract and discard the worldly ideals and judgments that come to us from the world that surrounds us and from its so-called experts in one field or another of human conduct or purpose.
We have all felt the difference between a dull winter’s day and a bright spring morning. The light of the sun cheers us up no matter how we are feeling. Jesus is the Sun of our souls. When we feel depressed or miserable and everything seems dull and heavy, think of that oil poured out; think of the Name of Jesus. Be like the Bride in the Song of Songs, and call your Bridegroom to your heart by name. If you do this reverently and with all the love you can summon, the Sun will come out, and there will be light in your heart, flaring up through the outpouring of that fragrant oil that is the Name of Jesus. Light in our darkness, warmth in our coldness, joy in our sadness comes to us as we call our Lord Jesus by His Holy Name into the depths of our heart. This can, when God wills it, make us feel quite different from the way we felt only a few moments before. We had forgotten our Bridegroom, and now we have remembered Him again. Let us hold on to Him and never let Him go! . . .
. . . Everything should be sweetened by the name of Jesus. Saint Bernard says, and he meant it, “Every food of the mind is dry if it is not dipped in that oil; it is tasteless if not seasoned with that salt. Write what you will, I shall not relish it unless it tells of Jesus. Talk or argue about what you will, I shall not relish it if you exclude the Name of Jesus. Jesus is to me honey in the mouth, music in the ear, a song in the heart.” . . .
Oil is also used for anointing, for healing; it is medicine. It smooths things over when they grate or jar. This divine oil that we are thinking about is poured out to heal us. It heals all real ills. Let me quote Saint Bernard once again on this subject: “Does one of us feel sad? Let the Name of Jesus come into his heart; from there let it spring to his mouth, so that shining like the dawn it may dispel all darkness and make a cloudless sky. Does someone fall into sin? Does his despair even urge him to suicide? Let him but invoke this life-giving Name, and his will to live will be at once renewed. The hardness of heart that is our common experience, the apathy bred by indolence, bitterness of mind, repugnance for the things of the spirit—have they ever failed to yield in the presence of that saving Name? The tears dammed up by the barrier of our pride—how have they not burst forth again with sweeter abundance at the thought of Jesus’ Name? And where is the man who, terrified and trembling before impending peril has not been suddenly filled with courage and rid of fear by calling on the strength of that Name? Where is the man who, tossed on the rolling seas of doubt, did not quickly find certitude by recourse to the clarity of Jesus’ Name? Was ever a man so discouraged, so beaten down by afflictions, to whom the sound of this name did not bring new resolve? In short, for all ills and disorders to which flesh is heir, this Name is medicine.”
There are many degrees of prayer, many levels and depths to our inner communion with God. No two people who really love God love Him in exactly the same way, for we are all different, and each of us is a unique Bride of Christ. The spiritual marriage in our hearts is very personal and intimate and secret. But we only become aware of it and make it grow more intense by receiving that oil poured out, which is the Holy Name of Jesus
|
