Catholic during the Great Apostasy

The sight of God’s perfections must plunge man into humility, must bring him to the deep conviction that God is everything – and man is nothing.
Humility requires knowledge of God and oneself.
To know God is to know the Supreme Good, to love and adore Him with all one’s heart. And to know oneself – is to look into the eyes of impotence and nothingness dependent entirely on the Creator.

Humility cannot be only in theory – for to be real, it must encompass the whole being and all human authorities.

The Lord Jesus, though God Incarnate, was the most perfect model of humility; after all, He Himself acknowledged it, since He said to those who love Him: “Learn from me that I am meek and humble of heart.”
Christ’s humility is manifested first and foremost in His taking upon Himself the wretchedness of human nature. The very fact of Jesus-Child’s coming into the world would have been His humility atoned for the sins of human pride.

But Jesus’ love was not enough of that; He longed in human flesh to live with us through the years of exile, giving up for us to His Father all that man can have in this world.

Being the Lord of heaven and earth – Jesus voluntarily became an infirm Child, dependent on human care

Being the Creator, clothing the lilies of the field, feeding the birds of heaven, hitherto rising from the earth, He sometimes had nothing to satisfy hunger and thirst.

Being Himself a righteous Judge – He had to listen to false accusation and accept the judgments of the heathen.

Finally, being the Lord of life and death – the eternal Being, He allowed the executioners to deprive themselves of life on the shameful tree of the cross, and all this – to give us an example: exemplum dedi vobis….

MYSTICAL DOCTOR

He understood this profound teaching from the Incarnation and the life of the Savior, the mystical Doctor of the Church, St. John of the Cross.
He was one of God’s most humble servants.
In childhood, his great love for God and the Blessed Mother was already born in his heart. Nurtured by an innocent child and then a chaste young man, it quickly developed to enormous proportions.

The result of this love of God, was deep humility, “which is the daughter of love” (St. John of the Cross).Already at a young age, he nurtures and enriches the later Doctor of the Church with this virtue.
Working in the hospital, he fulfills the lowest, most distasteful ministries with relish. Gazing constantly at God, while reflecting on his misery and imperfection at every turn, he sinks deeper and deeper into humility. Like all who grow in perfection, St. John of the Cross, he resents what he does and, being increasingly dissatisfied with himself, considers others to be far better and more pleasing to God than he.

Such conviction in truly humble souls is quite sincere and understandable. They see, through constant prayer and learning about God in meditation, how much they owe to God and how immeasurably small is what they are capable of doing for Him. Thus, they value neither themselves nor their work, and wish that the others also do not value them very much even despise them.

Such was the sincere humility of the great saint of Carmel when, following his vocation, he became a religious.

He had nothing for himself and everything he did for God; the relaxed rule did not satisfy his desire for sacrifice, and even practiced, with the permission of his superiors, the original strict rule of Carmel was not enough for him. He carried the thought of going to the Carthusians. However, God destined the humble servant for another great work of reforming the Carmelite order.
We know how much misery, affliction and persecution St. John of the Cross suffered since his first tiny foundation in Duruelo. As is evident from the entire life of this great figure in the history of the Order, the Lord Jesus took a special liking to the faithful servant and gave him constant humiliations and sufferings.

 

It was necessary that St. John should suffer all this, that he should destroy his body and soul for the sake of Divine love, and that this soul of his, emptied of everything earthly, should be laid as the foundation for an eternal work. It was not reason with which St. John shone, not outward zeal and work, but complete emptiness that became the deepest source of reform.
The holiness that St. John of the Cross brought to his order has caused the Reformed Order of Carmel to produce a whole series of great holy figures, and to this day it continues to struggle most successfully for holiness, which it bases, after St. John, on humility and self-abnegation.

“It is necessary for the spiritual man to know that the more he destroys himself for God in his dual nature: sensual and spiritual, the more closely he unites himself to God and the greater the deed he completes. It is only in the deepest humility that this union with God, which is the highest and loftiest state, can be fulfilled, and the way to it leads through a living death on the cross and an internal and external spiritual death”.  (St. John of the Cross)

 

MAN OF TODAY

How far the world today is from these theories of St. John.
It would like to do great works, it would like to reform everything so far, it seeks great thoughts, ideals, slogans – and it does not understand that it will not achieve anything without true humility.

Even among believers we encounter the absence of this conviction, that purely human forces in the field of inner, full humanity, nothing can be done. Here only fruitful is God’s action, is the grace that God gives to humble souls.

Nothing is more opposed to today’s spirit of the times than humility and devotion, because this virtue, most pleasing to God, is most opposed to Satan.

We are all talking about neo-paganism, Satan’s clear struggle against God. We want earnestly to help good to win, but we cling to false methods: instead of starting with oneself, with grounding oneself in humility, with emptying one’s self, as St. John of the Cross did, following the example of the Divine Child. John of the Cross, when he was reforming the Order, we start and… end our spirited work with the utterance of a few sentences full of indignation, trepidation, warning, against those who hound the world, or, at best, we end our work with proclamations and gathering signatures. And evil spreads and Satan gathers triumphs more and more, because we lack the chosen children of the church, humility.

This one thing was needed for the salvation of men, and therefore the Savior was born as a humble, weak Child, – this is also what is needed most today, because we by other means cannot apostolize as Christ did.

Working on this grounding of the inner man on the principles of humility, is the greatest and most urgent Catholic action.

We will not give the church anything if we do not give human souls God, and we will not possess God if we seek ourselves in everything.

Only humility and self-exaltation of individuals can bring peace and salvation to the world today. For, as St. John of the Cross instructs:

“In complete self-emptying the spirit finds its peace and rest; for when it desires nothing – nothing picks it up and nothing pushes it down, for it finds itself in the center of its humility.

Such peace was brought to earth by the Child of God, when over the poor stable of Bethlehem , choirs of angels sang : “Peace on earth to men of good will”.

With Christ’s humiliation, peace descended on earth, and nowhere is it to be found than in following Jesus in his complete profound self-abnegation out of love for his Heavenly Father.

There is no humility without love, for true “humility is the daughter of love and light.” (St. John of the Cross).

 

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Voice of Carmel. R.13 no.1. 1939.