HOLY INDIFFERENCE EXTENDS TO EVERYTHING
Disinterestedness is to be practised in natural things such as health, sickness, beauty, ugliness, weakness, strength; in all things that concern civil life such as honours, ranks and wealth; in various aspects of spiritual life such as dryness, consolation, taste, boredom; in activity, in suffering, in a word, in all sorts of events.
Job, in his natural life, was struck with the most horrible sores that one had ever seen. As regards his social life he was mocked, scoffed at, despised even by those who were closest to him. In his spiritual life, he was crushed by fatigue, exhaustion, turmoil, anguish, darkness and every kind of intolerable interior sorrow as his complaints and lamentations testify. The great Apostle [St Paul] exhorts us to complete disinterestedness in all things as true servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness ofspirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see — we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. (2 Cor. 6: 4-10).
Take note, I beg you, Theotimus, how distressing was the life of the Apostles. They were physically wounded, in the heart full of anguish, in the world ill famed and imprisoned. Amidst such things, O God, what a disinterested love! They were joyful in their sorrows, rich in their poverty, their deaths were life-giving and their disrepute hononorable. That is to say, they were glad to be sad, content with being poor, strengthened for life amidst the risks of death and glorious at being dishonoured because such was the will of God. Since God’s will is more obvious in suffering than in the practice of any other virtues, St Paul gives patience the first place saying: In all things let us show ourselves as servants of God in much patience, in tribulations, in hardships, in anguish and later he says: in chastity, in prudence and in graciousness.
Our divine Saviour in the same way was beset with incomparable distress in his social life on earth. He was condemned for treason against God and humans. He was struck, scourged, mocked and tortured with unusual shame. In his earthly life he died in the most cruel, most agonising torments one can imagine. In his spiritual life he suffered sadness, fear, terrors, anguish, abandonment, interior dejection the like of which was never experienced nor will be again. He had the full enjoyment of eternal glory in the highest point of his soul. However love prevented this glory from spreading its delights over his feelings, imagination and lower reason. Thus his entire heart was left open to sorrow and anguish.
Ezechiel saw the likeness of a hand which caught him by a single lock of the hair of his head lifted him up between heaven and earth (Ex. 8:3). Our Lord was also lifted up between heaven and earth on the cross, was held by his Father’s hand as it were by a single hair by the apex of his soul. This highest point touching the gentle hand of his eternal father received the fullness of bliss. Sadness and grief enveloped all the rest of his being. Hence he cried out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Mt 27:46).
It is said that amidst violent tempests a fish called “sea-lantern" thrusts its tongue above the waves. This tongue is so luminous, bright and clear that it serves as light and beacon for sailors. So also our Lord was crushed in the sea of suffering. All his soul’s faculties were overwhelmed, swallowed up and buried as it were in the storm of pain. His soul’s highest point, freed from all suffering, was bright, shining with glory and happiness. Oh how blessed indeed is the love that reigns in the faithful at the summit of their spirit while they are amidst the surging waves of inner trials.