When we think of saints like Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, we think of the stigmata which were a manifestation in his flesh of the sacrificial mercy of Jesus realized in a very high way in him. Each and every one of us is also called to bear the marks of Christ in our body and soul. The stigmata by which we, as ordinary Christians, manifest the sacrificial mercy of Christ in the flesh is our compassion for those who suffer, our joyful readiness to bear suffering ourselves, and our joyful readiness to come to the service of others in need. This is how we bear the wounds of Christ. This is how Jesus’ redemptive suffering continues vicariously through us.
When Jesus invites us to take up our cross daily to follow him (Matthew 16:24-26), he invites us to share in his ongoing redemptive suffering for sin, participating in his ongoing evangelical mission of drawing souls to his Father as adopted children and heirs of God. Whan I engage in self-sacrificial loving service I bear the wounds of Christ and, as St. Paul says, “fill up in [my own] flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the Church.” (Colossians 1:24) And it is thus that I, like St. Paul
and Padre Pio, “bear the marks of Jesus on my body.” It is thus that I become a channel for the healing flood of grace and mercy which flows forth from Jesus’ glorified wounds to flow into the world. Whenever I perform an act of mercy, a self-sacrificial deed of charity, an act of forgiveness, I touch the wounds of Christ, and I gain the healing grace that pours forth from his wounds not only for myself, but for others as well, because I am in that moment an earthbound channel of the heavenly channel of his wounds.
My sacrificial works of charity are carried out not in order to get me into heaven, but my works of loving service are the means by which heaven gets into me, who am a member of a “suffering world hidden in God”. This is a mystery that Henri Nouwen articulated so profoundly (Christ of the Americas): “We have come to the inner knowledge that the agony of the world is God’s agony. The agony of women, men and children during the ages reveals to us the inexhaustible depth of God’s agony that we glimpsed in the garden of Gethsemane. The deepest meaning of human history is the gradual unfolding of the suffering of Christ. As long as there is human history, the story of Christ’s suffering has not yet been fully told. Every time we hear more about the way human beings are in pain, we come to know more about the immensity of God’s love, who did not want to exclude anything human from his experience of being God. . .The more we try to enter into this mystery the more we will come to see the suffering world as a world hidden in God” - hidden in the womb of God.
The wounds of Jesus are an opening in creation to the heart of God. They are an opening to touch the heart of Jesus, and thereby to touch the heart of God. The wound in Jesus' side is an opening to a most intimate heart-touching-heart relationship between God and human beings. Whenever I put my hand into the side of Christ, reaching with the hand of charity, to touch his heart, the water and blood of grace and mercy flow through me into the world. In contemplating the wounds of Christ, I can see how, with a lance, a human being opened up the passageway between time and eternity; how, with a lance, a human being pierced the divine heart of love, piercing the heart of a man nailed to a cross, that the water of divine holiness and the blood of divine goodness and love may flow forth from the divine heart of love of the Father, through the wound in the heart of a human being, into men and women to sanctify them quicken them with true and eternal life.
Thus, my works of charity guarantee that my heart dwells in heaven even while my body and mind dwell on earth engaged in the business of the world, making the business of the world heavenly business.
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| St. Pius of Pietrelcina pray for us! |
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