Vigils Reading – St John Vianney

THE CROSS IS THE LADDER TO HEAVEN

From the writings of St. John Vianney 6

◊◊◊

You must love while you’re suffering and suffer while you’re loving. On the road to the cross, it’s only the first few yards that hurt. Souls who give themselves completely to God in their suffering feel an extraordinary contentment. Vinegar will always be vinegar, but oil softens its sharpness so that you scarcely taste it.

There was a little boy, quite near here, in one of the neighboring parishes, who was lying in his bed a mass of sores, very sick and in great pain. I said to him: ‘My poor boy, you must be suffering!’ He replied: ‘No, Monsieur le Curé, today I don’t feel my pain of yesterday, and tomorrow I shan’t feel my pain of today.’ ‘But surely you’d like to get well?’ ‘No, I was bad before I was ill and I might become bad again. I’m all right as I am.’ There was vinegar there, sure enough, but the oil had drowned the taste of it…We don’t understand that, because we’re too earthly. Children in whom the Holy Spirit takes up His Home put us to shame.

The cross is the ladder to heaven. The crosses we meet on the road to heaven are like a fine stone bridge on which you can cross a river. Christians who don’t suffer cross this river on a shaky bridge that’s always in danger of giving way under their feet. Once they’ve been transformed in the flames of love, crosses are like a bundle of hawthorn that you throw on the fire and that the fire reduces to ashes. The hawthorn is thorny, but the ashes are soft. The hawthorn exudes balm and the cross exudes sweetness. But you’ve got to press the thorns in your hands and clasp the cross to your heart if you want them to distil the essence they contain.

Put a good bunch of grapes under the winepress, and a delicious juice will come out. Under the winepress of the cross our soul produces a juice which feeds and strengthens it. When we haven’t got any crosses, we are dry: if we carry them with resignation, what happiness, what sweetness we feel! The cross is the gift God makes to his friends. Contrarieties bring us to the foot of the cross and the cross to the gate of heaven