Wound in the Heart

Today I was at her grave and in the Office of Readings for the door found a moving reading from St Columban, Abbot.

He says: "My brethren, let us follow this call. We are called to the source and fountain of life, by the Life who is not just the fountain of living water but also the fountain of eternal life, the fountain of light, the fountain and source of glory. From this Life comes everything: wisdom, life, eternal light. The Creator of life is the fountain from which life springs; the Creator of light is the fountain of light. So let us leave this world of visible things. Let us leave this world of time and head for the heavens. Like fish seeking water, like wise and rational fish let us seek the fountain of light, the fountain of life, the fountain of living water. Let us swim in, let us drink from the water of the spring welling up into eternal life ..."

I read this and was even so feeling such a sense of emptiness and hopelessness. I was looking at her grave and feeling like my heart would burst ... and then read St Columban's prayer to Our Lord Jesus Christ:

"Therefore we beg you that we should come to full knowledge of the thing that we love; for we pray to be given nothing other than you yourself. You are everything to us, our light, our light, our health and strength, our food, our drink, our God. Jesus, our Jesus, I beg you to fill our hearts with the breath of your Spirit. Pierce our souls with the sword of your love so that each of us can say truthfully in his heart, 'Show me the one with whom my soul is in love, for by love I am wounded.' Lord, let me bear such wounds in my soul. Blessed is the soul that is wounded by such love and, thus wounded, seeks the fountain and drinks, thirsts even while it drinks: it seeks by loving, and the very wound of love brings it healing. May Jesus Christ, our righteous God and Lord, our true and healing doctor, deign to wound our innermost hearts with that healing wound. With the Father and the Holy Spirit he is one, for ever and for ever. Amen."

What a wonderful privilege to be given such a Wound in the Heart. St John of the Cross speaks of the same Wound and so does the Song of Solomon.

Don't get me wrong, I am definitely not a big fan of pain. Yet if the pain comes from love, what can it be but the Gift of God, an Image (Icon) of the Pain in His Own Sacred Heart, Pierced by the Spear as He hung on the Cross.

Later on today, after afternoon Mass, I went back to her grave to pray Evening Prayer from the Office for the Dead, and felt that same pang, horrible in one sense, but such a Gift in another: the Image of the Pierced Sacred Heart of Christ. What could be better?

And here my mother is teaching me yet one more lesson from her grave ... "sic transit gloria mundi" ... and as St Paul says, perhaps feeling that Wound in his own great heart, "Far be it from me to glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which I have been Crucified to this World."

What to do then but ... if crucified to this World ... Follow Christ Crucified ... and pray "Lead Kindly Light" as He Goes before us ...

In Christ,

Charles Delacroix