Vigils Reading – St Rafael Arnaiz Baron

THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE

a reflection from St Rafael Arnaiz5

The other day, everything seemed dark to me. My somber life, locked up in the infirmary, no sunshine, no light, or anything else that might help me bear the weight that God has thrown down upon my shoulders… Illness, silence, abandonment… My soul was suffering a great deal. Memories of the world and my freedom overwhelmed me… My thoughts were sad and gloomy. I felt no love for God, and I felt forgotten by human beings, with neither faith nor light. My habit weighed upon me… The darkness of the church saddened me… I looked up at the tabernacle, and it had nothing to say to me. I felt dead though alive, trapped within the monastery like a dead man in his grave… worse than that, because at least there’s rest in the grave…

Such was the state of my soul when I went up to receive the Lord. I had just knelt down and was about to ask Jesus to put my spirit to rest when I felt this very great fervor and immense love for Jesus, and completely forgot about everything I’d been thinking about before, because I remembered these words that I believe Jesus gave me at that moment: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”

Why attempt to put my soul’s consolation into words?! I nearly wept for joy, finding myself at the feet of Jesus… My hands gripped the crucifix, and my heart longed for death again, but this time for love of Jesus, for love of true life and true freedom… I wanted to die on my knees, embracing the cross, loving God’s will… loving my illness, my confinement, my silence, my darkness, my loneliness.

Loving my sufferings, which in a moment of light, with a little spark of love for God… are so quickly forgotten.

…And so everything began to fade away in the light of the infinite goodness of a God who would lean down toward me to say, “Why are you suffering?… I am your health… I am the Life… What are you searching for here?” Oh, good Jesus… if only people knew what it means to love You on the cross!… If only they had any idea what it means to renounce everything for Your sake! What a joy it is to live without a will of one’s own. What a great treasure it is to be no one and nothing… to be the very last… What a great treasure Jesus’ cross is, and how wonderful it is to live in its embrace… Lord, I want to love Your cross madly… do not permit me to be parted from it.

This is my life as a Cistercian oblate… to suffer, to endure, and to love with abandon everything that God in His infinite goodness wishes to send me… He is the one who is doing it, and if my consolation comes from Him… so too does my pain… How could we not love the one who does it all for our own good? How could we not go mad with joy upon realizing that God is the one who sends us our cross? How could we not adore that blessed cross until our dying day, knowing that it is our only health, resurrection, and life?… All I can say is that I have found true happiness in loving the cross of Christ. I am happy, completely happy, more than anyone could ever imagine, when I embrace the bloodstained cross and realize that Jesus loves me despite my misery, my negligence, and my sins, as does Mary. But I am of no importance… God alone