Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [207]
Our community with God is not yet a definitive one but still an object of hope. We are still, as it were, running for a prize. For those who love God, this implies suffering. “Blessed are they that mourn”: they, that is to say, who feel the gravity of our terrestrial situation, are aware of the abyss between our status finalis and our status viae, and consciously bear the cross which lies in the fact that our union with God cannot on earth be a definitive and indestructible one.
Mourning has value as a sign of our love of God
This sorrow is precious in the eyes of God: for it proves, on the one hand, that our vision is adjusted to the perspective of truth and guided by supernatural light—that our faith is a living one; and reveals, on the other hand, a glowing love of God in our soul which prevents us from being satisfied by anything less than the sight of God and an eternal, indestructible community with Him. What, after all, should we think of a lover who endures without grief a separation from his beloved—no matter how sure he is of her love?
Mourning is appropriate because of mankind’s failure to love God
For one more reason is sorrow a mark of the elect of God. Blessed are those who suffer from the multitude of insults to God: the fact that “Love is so little loved.” Whoever truly loves God and his neighbor cannot without suffering know that “the world knew him not” (John 1:10); that so many men “remain in the shadow of death” and, “not knowing what they do” (Luke 23:34), jeopardize their salvation. The more our hearts are filled with a holy joy about the magnalia Dei (“the splendid works of God”), the more we shall bemoan the ingratitude of the world and the folly of those who reach for stones while spurning the bread of eternal life.
But then, do we not deny Christ again and again; do we not fail seven and seventy times a day? Was Christ not crucified by our sins, too? When Christ’s word on the cross “I thirst” (John 19:28), penetrates into our heart; when we perceive the call of the God-Man who wills to be loved by us; when the inconceivable mercy of God impels us to fall on our knees in adoration—how should our hearts not bleed at the thought that we respond to that call so sluggishly and that it evokes so little response in the world; that there are so many who forfeit their salvation! All saints were filled with this sorrow; St. Francis walked, weeping, through the woods because “Love was so little loved”: “My love is crucified.”
The man who, knowing nothing but joy on this very earth, does not suffer from the terrible disharmony of the fallen world, loves neither God nor his neighbor truly. He “abides,” as it were, “in death.”
Sorrow in this sense is inseparably linked with hunger and thirst for justice. Those referred to in the words, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill” must mourn in this world, where Christ is daily nailed to the cross anew.
We should mourn because of the suffering Jesus endured
In the measure in which a Christian lives by his ties with the supernatural, he will sorrow, above all, over the sorrows of Christ. The words: “My heart hath expected reproach and misery: and I looked for one that would grieve together with me, but there was none” (Ps. 68:20b), will pierce his heart. With the blessed Jacopone da Todi he will exclaim: “Mother, fount of love the purest, make me feel all the anguish thou endurest, to mourn with thee” (Stabat Mater).
However felicitous one may be in one’s personal life, this pain must never be allowed to die away. How could we forget—though the joys we experience be ever so genuine and ever so great—the suffering of the “Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world”: the suffering which has redeemed us and is the key of our eternal happiness? Far from it. He who is wounded by the love of Christ will pray: “Let me be wounded by his wounds, let me become inebriated