Welcome to the fourth issue of the Fit Shepherd’s newsletter. Today is Good Friday. Today, whenever we look at the cross, we see self sacrifice. We see love. We also understand the price Christ paid for our sins. What lessons do this day hold for us? Listen to the audio above, by Fr. Mike Schmitz, a priest who frequently posts videos on YouTube. He talks about how the power and wisdom on the cross is the answer to win back our souls. It’s only six minutes and 45 seconds long.
Whenever there is silence around me
By day or by night —
I am startled by a cry.
It came down from the cross —
The first time I heard it,
I went out and searched —
And found a man in the throes of crucifixion
And I said, “I will take you down.”
And I tried to take the nails out of His feet.
But He said, “Let them be,
For I cannot be taken down
Until every man, every woman, and every child
Come together to take me down.”
And I said, “But I cannot bear your cry.
What can I do?”
And He said, “Go about the world —
Tell every one that you meet —
That there is a man on the cross.”
The following was written by the the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who is on the path to be canonized as a saint one day:
Love is the soul of sacrifice. Everything in nature testifies to this: the deer that fights for her fawn, the bird that toils for her nestlings, the spider that would die rather than drop her bag of eggs: all these know that love is not worth calling love unless it can dare and suffer for the one it loves.
That, too, is why I believe that we always speak of arrows and darts of love — something that wounds. The day that man forgets that love is identical with sacrifice, he will ask how a God of love could demand mortification and self-denial. As a matter of fact, the most intense human sufferings and the bitterest arrows of outrageous fortune become softened and sometimes sweetened when they are borne in love for another.
A mother keeps vigil by the bedside of her fever-stricken child; neighbors call it sacrifice, but she calls it love. The hero rushes into lapping tongues of fire to rescue his friend; onlookers call it sacrifice, but he calls it love. The lover gives to his beloved a ring, not of tin or straw, but of diamonds and platinum; acquaintances call it sacrifice, but he calls it love.
And finally, our blessed Lord empties Himself of His heavenly glory, puts on the cloak of mortality, and goes down to the horrible red death of a crucifixion; we call it sacrifice, but He calls it love: “Greater love than this no man hath: that he lay down his life for his friends.”
Hence, whenever and wherever there is an intense and passionate love of Christ and Him crucified, sacrifice involved in crushing anything that keeps one away from Him is not felt as pain but the sweetest kind of love, for what is pain but sacrifice without love? The saint does not view sacrifice as an executioner with a sword who will take away his life, but as a yoke that is sweet and a burden that is light. The devout do not hate life because life hates them or because they have drunk of its dregs and found them bitter, but because they love God more, and in loving God more, they dislike anything that would tear Him away.
Oh, could the world but realize that the love of Christ crucified so possesses thousands and tens of thousands of souls that they would rather lose all the world and the riches thereof than one second of intimacy with Him at the foot of the Cross! Could it but sense the passionless passion and wild tranquility with which such souls each morning rush to Communion to enjoy intimate union with their changeless and understanding Friend, Jesus in the Eucharist! Could it but dimly guess how these Christ-loving hearts rejoice in carrying a cross, in order that, by sharing in His death, they might also share in His Resurrection!
Sacrifice for them is not a loss, but an exchange; not a suffering, but a dedication; not a foregoing of the enjoyable, but a conversion of passing pleasures into an eternal and unchangeable joy. Sacrifice for them is not pain, but love.
Their only pain, in fact, is their inability to do more for their Beloved. Like ships, which never know the full joy and the great glory for which they are made until they are unmoored from port and given over to the high seas and strong winds, so neither do souls know the full joy of their life until they, too, are unmoored from the port of all worldly attachments and, following the words of our blessed Lord: “Launch out into the deep.”
Like coals, conscious of their own blackness, they cast themselves into the fire of sacrifice, there to become Christlike in flaming brilliance. Like the logs of the forest, these souls, once in the consuming fire of the love of the Cross, sing their song, for the log sings its song only in the fires that consume.
Possessed with the desire to be like their Christ, none of them will come down from the Calvary of this world with hands unscarred and white. They are like other Sauls made Pauls by their intense love of the Savior, and there floats up like burning incense from their fiery hearts the following words:
“Who, then, shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulations? Or distress? Or famine? Or nakedness? Or danger? Or persecution? Or the sword? I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
HAPPY EASTER!
