Convictions

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July - September 2006, No. 5
 
Editorial
Christ Within Us
By Rev. Fr. Patrick Girouard SSPX


Dear readers,

Fr. Patrick Girouard

 

It is Saturday. You are driving home after some shopping. It is a nice day, and you just wish to arrive home, put your feet on the table (so to speak), and relax. Your three older kids in the back seat are tired too.   Your promise of ice cream has worn off and they have resumed fighting and yelling. Now YOU yell they can forget about ice cream, “for now and forever!” They stop for about… one long minute. Sixty seconds of peace… But you knew already it was not going to last. You continue driving, trying to tune them out. After a while, you see other drivers acting strangely. What the hey? Suddenly, you have to push hard on the brakes. The kids fall silent. Now you can hear it! The siren, and the honk! Wheee! Wheee! Wheee! Honk! Honk! Honk! It must be a fire truck. Where is it coming from? Oh! Yes! From the right! Soon, like a flame chased by the wind, the big red vehicle flashes past the intersection, and you can resume going on your way. At that point, you realize you forgot the cake for your mother-in-law’s birthday. Oh! Shoot! You’re saying to yourself: “She’s going to kill me!”, because the cake was the main reason your wife sent you shopping. It’s the kids’ fault of course; what with all their excitement in the Mall… You’re angry… At the kids… At your wife who can’t even make a cake… At yourself for not being firm enough… Your kids turn silent again, because you just shouted: “I should have become a monk!” They look at each other, puzzled. They chuckle. Then they lose it, and start laughing their heads off. You think: “I wish I would not have to endure all this anymore!” …Five seconds later, your wish has come true… For as you are going under an overpass, a huge segment of bridge falls and flattens your car…

As you were heading towards that overpass, you were far from knowing that each turn of the wheels was bringing you closer to your last moment on this earth. Under the bridge, you didn’t even realize what was happening to you and your kids.  You didn’t know it that afternoon, but God had summoned you and your kids for judgment. If there would have been no fire truck obliging you to stop a few moments before, you would have made it! You would have passed safely under the bridge before it collapsed! But there was a fire truck… Because, you see? God had scheduled a meeting with some people, including you and your kids. Terrible? Not if you were prepared, in the state of grace… Otherwise, my guess is you will miss your country’s winters!

Oh! Father! How can you joke about that? Didn’t you hear it happened for real in Montreal on September 30th? I know! I know! And I also know of similar tragedies happening everyday all over the world! It gives us so many reasons to think… It could happen to any one of us. In fact, we probably all know somebody who died unexpectedly. It is a fact of life. Our Lord warned us: “See to it that you watch and pray. Because you know not when the time is.” (Mark, 13,33). This advice was given us many times by Our Lord in the Gospel. But what should we do in order to be pleasing to God at the time of our death? This is the true question. The problem, at least for Traditional Catholics, should not be to avoid Hell. It should be: How can I really do the will of God? What is God’s plan for me?

The answer to that most important of questions depends on a wonderful, but often forgotten fact: God inhabits our soul! We have received sanctifying grace at Baptism! We have the sacraments to help us keep it, increase it, or receive it back! Our Lord Himself revealed us: “If someone loves Me, he will keep my teachings, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we will establish our home in him.” (Jn 14, 23). We are indeed living members of the Mystical Body of Christ. He is our Head. He is the Vine, we are the branches, and without Him we can do nothing worthy for Heaven. In his book ‘Christ the Ideal of the Priest’, Dom Columba Marmion, OSB, explains this inhabitation of Christ in us.  He says Christ acts in us and through us. He quotes St. Augustine who talks about the union of Christ to His Mystical Body, the Church: “They are two in one flesh; why could they not be two in one voice? …It is the Church that intercedes in Christ, and Christ who intercedes in the Church; the Body is one with the Head, and the Head is one with the Body.” The Benedictine Abbot continues by saying that, while Christ’s satisfaction was and will always remain superabundant to expiate all sins, nevertheless, it is His will that His Mystical Body should share in this expiation, as St. Paul declared: “I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up those things that are wanting in the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for His Body, which is the Church.” (Col. 1,24). Dom Marmion adds: “What is true for the expiation, is true also for our obligation to adore, praise, and thank God. We have to prolong and to ‘fill up the praises Christ was rendering the Father’”. This is the will of God: That we become good instruments of Christ, so that He can continue to suffer, expiate, adore, thank, ask, by us and through us. There is such a union between the soul in the state of grace and Christ that, whenever that soul prays and merits, she does it through Our Lord: “Per Christum Dominum Nostrum”. St. Paul tells us it is the Holy Ghost in her that moves her to prayer, to good works, and to a greater union with God: “And because you are sons, God hath sent the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father!” (Eph. 3, 14). To realize that we are so intimately united to God by Grace makes us kneel down and adore His Love and Mercy!

This is not a new doctrine. Already, in the 17th century, the holy Cardinal de Bérulle, was teaching that Christ’s presence in us enables us to fulfill our duties towards God. He is the one perfect Worshipper and Mediator, and it is only by and through Him that our prayer, adoration, love, thanksgiving, and petitions are pleasing to the Divinity. We understand, now, that the inhabitation of God in our soul implies a two-fold reality: 1-Our Lord Jesus Christ, Perfect Mediator and Worshipper in Heaven and in the Blessed Sacrament, is also such through us, in us, and by us. 2-It is only by Him, with Him, and in Him, that we can render our duties towards God (“Per Ipsum, et cum Ipso, et in Ipso…”). Therefore we must eliminate from our life, heart, and mind, every obstacle to the action of Christ in and through us. We have to cling to Him, to know and imitate His virtues, to make Him pray and work through us. What a great source of motivation and consolation! When we offer Mass with the priest, when we pray, when we meditate, when we visit the lonely, when we give alms, when we suffer, when we forgive, etc, Christ is doing these things by us, through us, and with us! Everything takes on a new signification! We are never alone, provided we are in the state of grace! Now we understand why we must really pay attention to what we do: We must do our best to let Christ shine through us! We must say, with St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (Jn 3,30). We must strive to make Christ reign in our whole person… In other words, we must “seek first the Kingdom of God and his Justice” (Mt. 6,25). This is the will of God: That His kingdom may come, in our hearts.

But this inhabitation and action of Christ in us is not the only thing! Indeed, God’s greatest wish is to grant us the grace of union with Him! St. John of the Cross explains how this can be achieved: If we are entirely detached, at least in our hearts, from anything that is not God, then He will unite Himself to our soul, so as to almost become one with it. This will be very close to the Beatific Vision. This is what we call a ‘mystical marriage’. Unfortunately, this most loving God finds only a few who consent to leave the creatures behind, and to give themselves up to Him without restraint. In his ‘Ardent Flame’, the great Carmelite Doctor teaches, about God abiding in the souls: “…in some souls he is alone, and in others he is not; in a few he remains willingly, and in others unwillingly; in a few He stays like in his own house, governing and ordering everything, et in others he is like a stranger into someone else’s house, where he has no authority to command or do anything. The soul where fewer appetites and less self-love remain is the one where God stays more alone, and more willingly, like in His own house, governing and directing it.” Let us therefore tidy up our souls, and practice detachment, so as to offer God a house of His own, where He will stay more willingly. Let us beg Him to take full command of our lives!

Woe to us if we refuse, or even neglect to accept, this marriage proposal from our most loving God! Woe to us if we hinder the great work of Our Lord in us and through us! Woe to us if, because of our laziness and attachment to creatures, we do not let Christ adore, thank, ask, suffer, help, through us! Woe to us, if we do not learn to recognize this work of God in and through others! The greatest suffering in Purgatory must be to realize we have not fulfilled that wonderful destiny of being fully united to God… My dear friends, let us ask Our Lady to obtain for us the special grace of keeping these truths in mind, and of acting accordingly. May we live in such a way as to be able to say with the great Apostle Paul: “And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me.” (Gal. 2,20).

Some News:

  1. As most of you probably know already, the General Chapter went well, and H.E. Bishop Fellay has been reelected General Superior. Two new General Assistants have been named: Rev. Frs. Alain Nély and Nicklaus Pfluger. Father Jean Violette left Canada, and is now Pastor of St. Vincent Parish, in Kansas City, Missouri. We thank him for his zeal and for his pastoral care. Father Violette has been replaced by Rev. Father Arnaud Rostand, from France. We wish here to welcome him and to assure him of the support of all the Canadian faithful.
  2. We congratulate Rev. Father Dominic May, from Calgary, who was ordained last June in Winona, and who is now posted in Toronto. Rev. Fr. Dominique Boulet is now the Prior in Shawinigan, and he has been replaced in Vernon by Rev. Fr. Loren Gerspacher, a son of British Columbia. We wish them all the best.
  3. Our Canadian vocations in training: Pierre Roy (Écône, 2nd year); Jonathan Prescott, Laurence G. Barrett, and Gary Moore (All of them:Winona, 1st year); Marc Potvin (Winona, Year of Humanities). Pray for them!

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