Note: Below is an extract from St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle or The Mansions with a few brief comments that we give afterwards.

In obedience to her superiors, St. Teresa wrote this book for her spiritual daughters in the convent.

Extract:

How good Thou art, O God!  All is done for us by Thee, Who dost but ask us to give our wills to Thee that we may be plastic as wax in Thy Hands.  You see, sisters, what God does to this soul [meaning the soul He is drawing to higher perfection] so that it may know that it is His.  He gives it something of His own – that which His Son possessed when  living on earth – He could bestow no greater gift on us.  Who could ever have longed more eagerly to leave this life than did Christ?

As He said at the Last Supper: “With desire have I desired” this.  O Lord! Does not that bitter death Thou are to undergo present itself before Thine eyes in all its pain and horror?  “No, for My ardent love and My desire to save souls are immeasurably stronger than the torments.  This deeper sorrow I have suffered and still suffer while living here on earth, makes other pain seem as nothing in comparison.”

I have often meditated on this and I know that the torture a friend of mine [this is really St. Teresa herself] has felt, and still feels, at seeing Our Lord sinned against is so unbearable that she would far rather die than continue in such anguish.  Then I thought that if a soul whose charity is so weak [viz., the soul to which she just referred] compared to that of Christ – indeed, in comparison with His, this charity might be said not to exist – experiences  this insufferable grief, what must have been the feelings of Our Lord Jesus Christ and what must His life have been?  For all things were present before His eyes and He was the constant witness of the great offences committed against His Father.  I believe without doubt that this pained Him far more than His most sacred Passion.  There, at least, He found the end of all His trials, while His agony was allayed by the consolation of gaining our salvation through His death and of proving how He loved His Father by suffering for Him.  Thus, people who, urged by fervent love, perform great penances hardly feel them but want to do still more and count even that as little.  What, then, must His Majesty have felt at thus publicly manifesting His perfect obedience to His Father and His love for His brethren?   What joy to suffer in doing God’s will!  Yet I think the constant sight of the many sins committed against God and of the numberless souls on their way to hell must have caused Him such anguish that, had He not been more than man, one day of such torment would have destroyed not only His life but many more lives, had they been His.[1]

Comments:

This extract is very striking for several reasons.  One does not often find books written about the Passion which dwell on the fact that Our Lord suffered primarily because the honor of His Father has been insulted by sin.  So many books focus on Our Lord suffering because He loves us.  The typical books on the Passion seem to ignore the fact that Our Lord loves His Father with an Infinite Love.  Instead, many books teach the perverse error that Our Lord died primarily for us because He loves us infinitely.[2]  Although Our Lord is infinite in His nature and all His perfections, yet His external effects in His creatures are not infinite.  Thus, Our Lord loves us with a finite love because we are finite beings, therefore, unworthy and unfit to be loved infinitely.

Thinking about how Our Lord, in His Divine Nature, loves His Father with an Infinite Love and wanted to show publicly how much He honored His Father adds such a deep dimension to one’s meditation on the Passion!  When we ponder all the physical pain of Our Lord, we must not forget to add to this the constant thought that He suffered even far greater mental anguish and spiritual pain because sin is such an enormous insult to His Heavenly Father – the Supreme Godhead.  Mankind has committed countless sins since the beginning of time and will continue until the end of time – and He suffered for every single sin!

St. Teresa also ties together for us the two anguishes Our Lord suffered, namely, the offenses to the Divine Majesty and the ingratitude of souls who damn themselves.  She strikingly reminds us that Our Lord wants to save souls from hell and He is sorely grieved when men reject His redemptive sacrifice and plunge themselves headlong into hell anyway.  Hence, she vividly demonstrates to us the hideousness of sin.

In this Lent and Passiontide, let us beg Our Lord to forgive us for our wretched sins which caused and continue to cause Him such bitter pain and mental anguish.  Let us also beg Him to help us penetrate and better understand His Infinite Love for His Father so we can learn to love Him more deeply and have an ever-increasing gratitude to Him for all He suffered.