The Heart of My Shepherd
“It is impossible to think of anything more glorious, more noble, more honorable than participation in the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church. By it we are make members of one Body, are directed by one most holy Head, are filled with one and the same Divine Spirit. We are nourished during our earthly exile by one doctrine and by one Angelic Bread, until we all come to enjoy one eternal happiness in Heaven.”—Pope Pius XII Foreward
A few days before the beginning of Lent, 1962, I was kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament in the church of Monte Cistello, and thinking about the season soon to begin. In this musing, I came to reflect that Easter would be on April 22, and then, suddenly, my heart melted, for I realized that our Lord had done it again and, as usual, I was slow to catch on. Why hadn’t I realized sooner? I was only now waking up to the fact that when we made the Solemn Renewal of Baptismal Vows on the night of Holy Saturday, April 21, it would be--that very day--the Golden Anniversary of my own Baptism.
This meant, therefore, that the Lent of 1962 had a very special meaning for me and that I would have to direct it all in a special way towards the proper and fitting celebration of my anniversary. I recalled the words of Leviticus: “You shall sanctify the fiftieth year...for it is the year of jubilee.”
It was in considering ways and means of celebrating my jubilee that I decided to suspend temporarily my rule against writing about my own life, in order that I might say a few words in these pages about the mercies of the Lord, which in my case have been so very great. (Really, everyone must say the same thing. The mercies of the Lord are superabundant towards everyone.)
I justify myself from the words of the Archangel Raphael, whom I love so much and who tells us in the Book of Tobias: “It is good to hide the secret of a king, but honorable to reveal and confess the works of the Lord.” Time will not permit me to produce a polished work of any kind. The few friends for whom I am writing this will not mind anyway, if I give it to them just as it comes out of the typewriter, without any rewrite. I have only one intention in view: to glorify God and give Him due thanks for His loving care of my soul. You understand, too, that there is no intention to be complete but just to give a few reflections such as come to me at this time.
The First Dew on My Fleece
Try as I might, I have never been able to remember the slightest detail about the day of my Baptism. That is disgraceful, because the moment of our translation from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Kingdom of Light, the moment of our deliverance from the bondage of Satan and admission into the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the moment in which we are washed and made precious in the Blood of the Divine Redeemer, the moment when our souls are made whiter than snow and more brilliant than the sun, when we receive the infusion of sanctifying grace, the theological and moral virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the moment, above all, when the Father, Son and Holy Ghost come and begin to dwell intimately in our members, making us living sanctuaries, temples of God--that moment, I say, is the most important moment of a man’s life, at least in some respects, for it is the seed, the beginning, the door of everything else, including eternal glory in heaven.
My reflexes have always been slow. I’ve always been slow in grasping things and appreciating them. And so it was with Baptism. There is documentary evidence to prove that I was already two weeks old when I presented myself at the church of St. Paul on Jackson Street in Louisville. Then confronted with the evidence now, I am humiliated on two counts: first, that I waited so long to present myself (if I had to do it over, I’d be there on the first day) and, secondly, that even after I did present myself, I was so dull, so ungrateful and so unresponsive that it was years later before I began to realize what the Lord had done for me. Only then did I get around to thanking Him and begging His pardon. As I said, my reflexes have always been slow. It’s lucky for me that the patience and mercy of God are infinite!
I have no doubt that it is because of this dullness of mine that Jesus has often had recourse to special means of touching my heart on days of great grace in my life. I was born into His Church on Good Shepherd Sunday, and our Lord has always been for me just that--the loving Good Shepherd and Guardian of my soul, as St. Peter calls Him in the Epistle of the Mass on that day. I have often reflected with pleasure on the fact that it is precisely the lamb that gets confused and lost and famished and fatigued that ends up receiving special attention and love from the Master. It is only this sheep that gets laid on His sacred shoulders, and without having to move a muscle, it marches with Him at the head of the flock.
On the day of my simple profession, which was June 4, 1944, Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, there was a sermon in Chapter, and the preacher quoted those words of St. Paul which are so appropriate for me: “See your vocation...The foolish things of the world has God chosen, that He may confound the wise; and the weak things...that He may confound the strong; and the base things...and the things that are contemptible has God chosen, and things that are not, that He might bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in His sight.”
As I said, therefore, out of consideration for my dullness and weakness God has been at pains to arrange nearly all the great days of grace in my life in such a way that, by added and accidental circumstances, He might hope to reach my heart a little more surely. There is in fact one thing which I think I have come to be fairly responsive to and grateful for, and that is this delicate thoughtfulness of God in my regard on such occasions. You will recall that with the Little Flower it was quite different. Her days of grace did not occur on great feasts. She was a strong and responsive soul and had no need of such things. Neither do most people, for that matter.
Our Lord initiated this pattern in my life by decreeing that I should appear on the earth, a few hours before dawn, Easter Sunday, 1912. At the moment when I came into the world, the monks of Gethsemani, sixty miles away, were singing the Alleluias of the Easter nocturns.
As I said, I didn’t show up for Baptism until two weeks later, but when I did it was Good Shepherd Sunday. Now the symbol of the Good Shepherd was the equivalent in the primitive Church of the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart. It expresses and represents God’s tender compassion and love for us. The first word of the Introit of the Mass is Misericordia: “The earth is full of the mercy of the Lord.” And the words, “I am the good shepherd; and I know my sheep and mine know me” occur three times in this proper.
Good Shepherd Sunday is therefore a kind of Feast of the Sacred Heart and since I had unwittingly chosen this day for my entrance into the Church, the Lord in His mercy decreed to keep me under this symbol for the rest of my life. Accordingly, He arranged that my First Holy Communion should take place on another feast of His Sacred Heart, which was Holy Thursday, April 17, 1919. I am happy to say that after seven years of grace, I was by this time a little more responsive to the gifts and advances of God’s love, and so the day of my First Holy Communion was sufficiently important to me that I have a distinct memory of it and of some of the graces I received around that time, including the moment on Easter Sunday, April 20, three days after my First Holy Communion, when I knelt before the Bishop and was signed with the sign of the Cross and confirmed with the chrism of salvation.
The following year my family took me to Tampa, Florida, and there we lived near a Jesuit church dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Here I attended daily Mass and received Holy Communion with enthusiasm. Here also our Lord deigned to give me graces of faith and fervor which I can still remember, and which I was sometimes to miss in the years following, after we returned to Kentucky and I was no longer able to go to daily Communion, at least in the winter time because one had to get up very early and my health did not permit it in the Kentucky climate.
I should like to mention that as I grew older and reached high school and college level, I did not have much conscious devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as such, although God always preserved to me by His grace a special devotion to the Mass and to His person present in the tabernacle. These have been the joy and the support of my whole life and I cannot imagine what I should have done without them. Life would have been simply unendurable.
By the time I graduated from college, explicit devotion to the Sacred Heart had faded so far into the background and I had so little understanding of what it meant, that I regarded it as sentimental and paid little attention to it. I first began to have a new attitude and interest in it in the spring of 1938, when my friend, Aileen O’Brien, was about to sail for Spain. She was anxious to arrive in time for the celebration of the Feast of the Sacred Heart there, and she described the enthusiasm with which the Spanish celebrated it. This impressed me a great deal, partly because Aileen herself was an “intellectual,” and partly because I had a great admiration for the Catholic instinct of the Spanish. I recalled, too, how at the outbreak of the Civil War, which was then still raging in Spain, the Leftists had sent a firing squad to officially “execute” the statue of the Sacred Heart, which stood on the geographical center of Spain in Madrid. I did not then know it, but it was before this statue that Father Mateo, in the presence of the king and the ministers of government, had twenty years before officially consecrated Spain to His Sacred Heart.
From this time on I began to have conscious interest in the Sacred Heart devotion, but as yet I was without any real light or understanding. I simply began to be aware that there was more to it than I had realized.
The Shepherd Gathers His Lamb
My vocation to be a monk was the result of a gradual growth and, with my usual slowness, it took me a long while to realize where our Lord was leading me. Other people knew that I had a vocation of some kind before I did.
On several occasions during my youth I had given serious consideration to the question of whether or not I ought to be a priest or a religious, and the answer always seemed to be clearly--no! I was called to be a good Catholic, nothing more, and this was my habitual state of mind. The first suspicion and fear that our Lord might some day ask more of me arose in 1935, when I was twenty-three years old. A year before this I had graduated from Xavier University and, as the depression was on, I was not able to fulfill my desire of going to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. I returned to Louisville, worked for my father in the daytime and attended the Jefferson School of Law at night. This law school was the first non-Catholic school I had ever attended. I was appalled at the paganism of some of the professors and students, as well as at the low intellectual and ethical standards of the legal profession in my state. Since law school had been a second choice for me anyway, I decided at the end of the first year not to go on. I planned to go to the graduate school of St. Louis University and get an M.A. in English, which would qualify me to teach in a Catholic college. The University offered me a Fellowship and I had a few hundred dollars in the bank--just barely enough, I calculated, to enable me to get my degree. In these plans, however, I was careful to consult our Lord and to ask His help. Interiorly, I felt somehow that I was doing violence to His plans, but I was determined to go ahead. I contented myself with praying that, if it were not His will for me to go to St. Louis, he would turn me aside from it “by a bolt of lightning if necessary.” He took me at my word.
At the beginning of August I made a weekend trip to Cincinnati to visit friends and former classmates there. We had a glorious time swimming, riding, and the like. Then on Monday morning, before I could get to the train, the “bolt of lightning” fell. I was taken down with a sudden attack of acute appendicitis. The doctor refused to let me fly home saying I would have to be operated on right away in Cincinnati. This meant double expense as the doctor’s fee, the hospital charges and all the other expenses were just about twice what they would have been in my home city. My bank account was wiped out.
This obvious intervention of God had a sobering effect and made me more attentive thereafter to His interior guidance. As I lay in my hospital bed, I could look out the window and see a life-size statue of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani. I told our Lord that from now on I was going to take literally the words which occur in one of the Sunday Gospels at that time of year: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, all the rest will be added unto you.” I told Him that from now on I would be careful not to resist His will or plans regarding my life (a promise I didn’t always keep), but would leave everything in His hands in a spirit of trust. I told Him also that if He wanted, I would even be willing to be a priest, though I hoped He wouldn’t ask that of me, and I still wanted to go to the foreign service. Looking out of my hospital window at the figure of Jesus in Gethsemani, I understood clearly that this statue was a symbol, a clue to my future. I tried to penetrate the mystery of just how or why this was true, but our Lord in His mercy would not lift the veil just yet. My soul was still too weak and I was still too much attached to the things of this world. I think I should have been very much depressed if I had learned at that time that I was destined to become a Trappist monk. I scarcely knew what the Trappists were, but one thing I did know: I didn’t want to be one. And if I had gone to St. Louis, my whole life would have been different and I probably would never have become a monk at all. I thank God now for His loving care of me.
In the fall of 1935 I returned to law school and continued to live at home. Meanwhile, Father Pitt, superintendant of the Catholic schools, had founded the Thomas More Society, a group of young Catholic college graduates, whom he brought together. He was the president and I became the secretary. This was the beginning of seven years of close association with this lovable man, whose wide interests and contacts also helped to make life interesting.
The first project of the Thomas More Society was to sponsor a lecture by Christopher Hollis, the English writer and author of a life of St. Thomas More, who had just been canonized.
Hollis spent two or three days with us and as a part of the entertainment program, Father Pitt and Mr. Reenan of the American Book Company arranged to drive him down to the Abbey of Gethsemani. They invited me to go along and as I had never been there and was curious about the place, I gladly accepted. I was on the way to finding my vocation but didn’t know it. I fell in love with Gethsemani and the monks at once, and as I walked through the church for the first time I remember looking at the choir stalls and saying to myself: “I wish I could have a vocation to this life, but it’s too hard for me. I am sorry I can’t be a monk.”
This was the first time in my life that I had experienced a positive and genuine attraction to a supernatural vocation of any kind.
The following spring I graduated from law school, took the bar examination and was licensed to practice in the state of Kentucky. But I had no intention of doing so. Meanwhile the Jesuits in their new college at West Baden Springs offered me a job doing editorial and clerical work. It didn’t pay much, but the atmosphere and the work were most agreeable to me, and seeing that it would be good for my soul to live in such a place and to be associated with the Fathers, I accepted. I was consciously keeping my resolution of a year before to seek first the kingdom of God, regardless of material considerations.
I went to West Baden at the beginning of July, just as the Spanish Civil was was about to begin. Around the feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, I found the autobiography of St. Therese of the Child Jesus in the library and began to read it. The decisive moment of my life had come. The Little Flower understood the ways of love and spoke the language of love. She won me completely. When I had finished the book I knew that I would have to become a monk at any cost. My thoughts turned to Gethsemani, and on the feast of St. Bernard, I wrote a letter to Dom Frederic Dunne, whom I had met the previous December when Father Pitt had taken me to the monastery. I also wrote to the Carmelite Sisters in Louisville, begging their prayers. In the Providence of God, their devoted prayers and friendship became invaluable to me and have remained so to this day.
During the Thanksgiving holidays of November, 1936, I went to make a retreat at Gethsemani and discuss the question of my vocation. Happily for me the retreat master was the saintly Father Augustine Arcand of Three Rivers, Canada, who had become a monk at Gethsemani at the age of sixty in order to avoid being made a bishop. This learned and prudent man told me that I had a genuine vocation, but counselled me to wait. This pleased me a great deal and was a great relief, because although I felt attracted to the life, I was also still very much attached to the world, and the thought of entering filled me with dread. It would take several more years before I would be sufficiently mature spiritually, and sufficiently detached from the things of this world to be able to enter the monastery with joy and enthusiasm. During these years I came to know and love the Rule of St. Benedict and some of the writings of St. Bernard, who attracted me powerfully. Having returned to Louisville in the spring of 1937, I found eventually an excellent director in the Prior of the Dominicans, Father John B. Walsh, who gave me the writings of Abbot Vonier and other good books to read. By the time I did enter Gethsemani in April, 1942, my vocation rested on deep and solid convictions and I had sufficient knowledge of prayer and the spiritual life to be able to avoid being crushed or driven away by the trials which awaited me. We can do nothing without God’s grace and, in times of adversity, we have to be able to keep our equanimity and continue to use with faith, intelligence and perseverance the means of grace. After I entered Gethsemani, I saw that my preparation had been providential and necessary.
The day I arrived at the monastery I was ushered into the church where the monks were singing the conventual High Mass. As I sat in a bench in the transept I looked up at the big stained glass window on the other side of the transept. It was a life-size picture of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemani, and was exactly like the statue which I had seen from my hospital window in August of 1935...
On the Good Shepher’s Shoulders, Listening to His Heart
In his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Pope Pius XII explains very beautifully the solid doctrinal basis of this devotion. It is not only not sentimental when properly understood but, as another Pope said, it is the “quintessence of religion.”
Since the time of the Incarnation, God has loved us with three different kinds of love. All three of these come to us through, and are symbolized in, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These loves are, first, His infinite, eternal love; secondly, the infused, supernatural created love in the soul of Jesus; and finally, the natural, human love of the God-Man.
It is one thing, however, to know the theology of the Sacred Heart and another thing to understand the loves which that Heart symbolizes. There is a passage somewhere in Pius XII’s encyclical to which I should like to call attention. He says that no one can make substantial progress in the spiritual life unless he be admitted into the mystical secrets of the Sacred Heart. It is these secrets which are often little known to learned theologians, and on the other hand, so very well know to souls who, perhaps, could not express the theology of the Sacred Heart. Best of all, of course, is to know both the theology and the secrets, as Father Mateo did, or Father Pichon.
Father Mateo used to say that for him, devotion to the Sacred Heart meant first of all devotion to the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament. This is a practical directive. It means, too, that anyone who has these Eucharistic devotions has also a devotion to the Sacred Heart, whether he knows it or not.
Pius XII says in his encyclical that the Holy Spirit is the gift of the Sacred Heart. Therefore, this devotion is an excellent and pleasant way of obtaining an increase of the gifts of the Holy Spirit within ourselves. They are terribly needed and terribly neglected in these days of angst, these days of fear and spiritual pessimism, when everyone seems to think that the arm of the Lord has somehow been shortened. The infinite attributes of God are objective realities, they exist whether we understand them or not, and they are always at our disposal through prayer and the sacraments. It is the Sacred Heart of Jesus Who said: “All power in heaven and on earth is given to Me.” In Him, too, are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Why do we have so little faith?
It is not necessary to have a profound understanding of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in order to begin to draw profit from it. The first steps must always be made in darkness and in blind faith. He gives a little light. If you act on it, He gives a little more. Then if you act on that, He gives still more--and so on. It all comes about as a gradual growth, and then one day you wake up and realize that you have begun to understand a little something of God’s ways and God’s love. It seems to me that we fail too often to take those first steps. We want absolute proofs and guarantees in advance. We want to see. We forget that the whole of the present life is a time of trial and of faith. God tries our faith precisely in order that it might grow and increase, and bring forth more fruits of charity and patience and hope. But acting by faith often involves humiliation in the eyes of men, and that turns us back. If the blind man who kept crying out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” had yielded to human respect when he was rebuked by the crowd, he would have given up and our Lord would have passed him by, most likely. If the Chananite woman had folded up when Jesus humiliated her, if she had turned around and stalked away, her daughter would not have been delivered from the devil. Prayer and faith involve humiliation, and we are seldom willing to take it. I believe that is where our weak point lies, and that is why we don’t make progress in the mystical secrets of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. That’s why Judas failed. He didn’t like the idea of going around in public with a basket and picking up fragments of bread and fish. He yielded to his fears. He was overcome by angst. He was not willing to take the first steps of faith, trusting in the goodness and power of God. He felt he had to look out for his future, and his good name, and his old age....What a mess he made of things!
The climax of history was the moment when the Sacred Heart of Jesus was pieced by a lance on the cross. From creation to that moment was the morning of the world; from that moment to Judgment Day is the evening of the world. It can be shown, I think, that the whole of revelation and all the graces of redemption are summed up and contained in the central verse of all Scripture, which is “One of the soldiers with a spear opened His side, and immediately there came out blood and water.”
Conclusion: The Bonds of Love.
Perhaps this is fanciful, but I sometimes wonder if the grace of my vocation was not a reward for two pennies that I once gave our Lord.
One Sunday morning when I was eight years old, my father and I came out of the front door of the Sacred Heart Church at Tampa. The church was on a corner. We turned the corner and started walking along the side of the church towards home. When we passed a side door, I was seized by a sudden impulse of generosity and, bidding my astonished father to wait, I dashed through the door and emptied into the nearby poor box the contents of a make-believe purse which I was carrying. It contained only two cents, but I had given the Sacred Heart of Jesus everything I had, and He gives all for all.
When the time came for my Solemn Profession at Gethsemani, I had nothing to do with the choice of a date. Another young man from Louisville was to make profession with me. He had his heart set on the feast of the Sacred Heart as the date for the ceremony. That was most agreeable to me, but there was a difficulty in the way. In those days the Cistercians celebrated the Conventual High Mass of this feast before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. On this account, it was not customary to have professions on that day, as such ceremonies are not permitted when the Blessed Sacrament is in the monstrance. My companion asked Dom Frederic if this difficulty could not be overcome by putting a white veil in front of the monstrance during the profession ceremonies. This was licit, but he said no.
My companion and I then chose the feast of the Visitation. Not long after, however, Providence intervened. The Archbishop sent word to the Abbot that he would come to the monastery on Saturday, June 14, to confer Holy Orders. Since I lacked none of the requirements for ordination except solemn profession, and the only feast available before June 14 was the feast of the Sacred Heart, which occurred on June 13, Dom Frederic decided on his own accord that our profession would be on the latter day. He had a veil put in front of the monstrance, but it was a little low. Jesus appeared to be peeping at us over the top of the veil....
Next day the Archbishop came and ordained me a sub-deacon. But the Good Shepherd had arranged something else for that day, too. It happened to be the golden wedding anniversary of my parents. After the ceremonies were over, my parents and family and I all had dinner together at the gatehouse.
There is one thought I would like everyone to take from these pages:
The life of man upon earth is a love affair.
God loves every creature which He has made, and He is hungry for our love in return.
The Introit of the Mass for Ash Wednesday is taken from the Book of Wisdom, and is a revelation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus:
You have mercy on all, because you can do all things. You close your eyes to the sins of men, in order that they may repent. For you love everything that is, and hate none of the things which you have made, for if you had hated anything you would not have formed it....But you spare all, because they are yours, O Lord and lover of souls.
Notice the reasoning here. God has mercy on all because He is omnipotent. He spares all because He would not have made them in the first place if He had not loved them. He loves all because they are His. That is why God says in another place of Scripture: “Can a woman forget her infant...? But if she should forget, I will not forget you.”
A mother loves her own son more than any other child, even though her own may be the ugliest, the dumbest, or the meanest on the block. She loves him precisely because he is her boy. Now it is the same way with God. He loves us because we are His boys, His children. He is the Omnipotent One Who made us out of nothing. We were in His mind from all eternity and, being in love with the idea of use, He brought us into being according to His Plan.
God is, so to speak, a free artist. In His mind there is an infinite number of possible beings, most of whom will never know actual existence. Like a human artist who has many ideas in mind, but chooses only this one and that one to bring into existence, so with God. The very fact that you and I exist, therefore, is proof that God was in love with the idea of us. And if we allow Him, He will perfect the good work which He has begun in us.
The intimacy of the bond with our Creator is greater than we realize. It is true that God created our bodies only indirectly, using the instrumentality of creatures. But not so with our souls. They are spirits, and in creating them God could not employ any kind of creatures as an instrument or helper, not even an angel. The creation of a spirit is an act of pure creation so proper to the Omnipotent One that He must do it all by Himself. It requires a direct exercise of His infinite power; it is a personal and exclusive work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. How old are you? According to your age, you know that just so many years ago you came forth from the very bosom of God, and are meant to return to the same Bosom.
The soul is like a boomerang. Thrown out into time and space, it is meant to describe as it were a circle, and return to Him Who cast it. As the boomerang may strike an object and not return to the thrower, but fall to the ground, so a soul may fall into hell and not return to its Maker. But this never happens except through the soul’s own full and deliberate fault. For God wills all men to be saved, and every man has grace sufficient for his salvation. “Christ died for all.”
Which reminds me of another bond we have with God--one that is deeper, stronger, more intimate, more touching than the bond of creation. It would seem almost impossible that such a bond could exist, yet it does.
When Jesus was hanging on the Cross, His divinely enlightened intellect was able to look down through all the ages. He could see everyone of us, and every action of our lives, as clearly and distinctly as if He had nothing else before Him. This is a mystery which we will understand only in Heaven, but meanwhile we know it by faith and should never forget it for an instant. It is terribly important for us to realize the personal nature of the Redemption, the connection between Jesus on the Cross and my own life and cross; the confrontation between His Heart and my heart.
Physical sufferings have a limit. The senses will register just so much pain and no more. But the sufferings of a man’s mind and heart are almost without limit. Indeed, they are without limit when there is question of a God-Man. No matter how much He is suffering, He can still suffer more. His sufferings can always be increased. Now, Jesus on the Cross, seeing every sin of my life and seeing it as it is in the eyes of God, suffered an additional martyrdom, so to speak, for each one of those sins. He suffered certain things in His Mind and Heart that would not have been were it not for me. And these special sufferings were unspeakable. “He loved me, and delivered Himself for me.” He bought me at a great price. When He created me, it cost Him no effort, but when He redeemed me....Ah! He is anxious not to lose what has cost Him so much.
I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.
I am the Good Shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, even as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for my sheep.
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