Summary of the Morrow’s Meditation
We will consider tomorrow our adorable master, Jesus Christ, teaching us by his example the use that must be made of our spirit. This faculty of our soul has two operations: it thinks, it judges. Now Jesus Christ teaches us by his example: 1st, to have only holy thoughts; 2nd, to make only wise judgments. After these two reflections, we will make the resolution: 1st, to keep ourselves on guard against useless thoughts, vain imaginations, the dissipation of the senses, and to keep ourselves recollected within ourselves; 2nd, to judge all things as God judges them, and as the Gospel teaches us to judge them. Our spiritual nosegay shall be the word of the Imitation: Happy the eyes which, closed to exterior things, are entirely intent on interior things!
Meditation for the Morning
Let us adore Jesus Christ in the marvelous and divine use which he made of his intelligence. Oh! how all his thoughts were holy, elevated, and celestial! how all his judgments were right, wise, and conforming to the judgments of the divinity which dwelt substantially in him! Let us praise him for having made such a noble use of his spirit.
FIRST POINT
Holiness of the Thoughts of Jesus Christ.
The holy soul of the Saviour opened itself only to holy thoughts, all for God, all to God or in God. Exterior things, far from dissipating it, raised it to the adoration of the power, the wisdom, the greatness, and the goodness of God which it saw imprinted there. In all the events of this lower world, it appreciated only the side which had relation to the greater glory of God; so that, during entire days, it was a recollection in God from which nothing could distract it; and even the nights were for it like a continual prayer. In this holy soul, no useless thoughts, no wanderings of the imagination, no preoccupations which absorb or trouble the attention. Alas! if I compare myself to this beautiful model, what a difference! I abandon myself to a thousand useless thoughts, to a thousand frivolous imaginations; I occupy myself with anything else more willingly than with God. Imprudent that I am, I forget that this is not loving God with all one's mind; that the account which I shall have to render of vain thoughts, of time lost in reveries, is not less redoubtable than the account of idle words and hours spent without utility. I carry blindness to the point of not seeing that the habit of useless thoughts destroys all disposition to prayer and oraison, dissipates the spirit, effuses the heart; that evil thoughts are separated from useless thoughts only by a step, a step easy to cross, and that passions are hardly less fortified by the representation of absent objects than by the enjoyment of present objects. O my God, I recognize and I confess before you the strange abuse which I have made of my spirit, and the necessity of putting an end to it by interior and exterior recollection, by fidelity to my spiritual exercises, the flight from the world which dissipates, and the promptitude to chase away useless thoughts, from the first moment that I perceive them. Such was the practice of the Saints; and they found there not only their sanctity, but also their happiness, because, after the first efforts which alone cost, the habit of union with God, fruit of the war made against useless thoughts, is a foretaste of paradise. Oh! what reproaches I have here to make to myself! What dissipations in my spirit! What divagations in my imagination! What time lost in reveries and useless thoughts, or foreign to what ought then to occupy my spirit!
SECOND POINT
Wisdom of the Judgments of Our Lord.
They were judgments always equitable in their principle and in their application. “I judge,” said Jesus Christ, “according to what I hear”; that is to say that he consulted the judgment of God on each thing, to make it then the rule of his own judgments. Is it thus that we do? Do we not judge according to the report of the senses and of the imagination, according to the interest of our passions, according to the judgments of the world, often almost as deceiving as our own, and sometimes more so? Let us learn from the example of Jesus Christ to judge no longer of anything except after having taken counsel of God, and read, in some sort, on his face and in his eyes what we must judge, approve or disapprove. Then we shall esteem nothing but salvation and eternity; and we shall console ourselves easily from losses or disgraces, as long as salvation will not suffer from it; then the world will be for us only a perspective which makes illusion to the eye, a dream which disappears on awakening, a charm which troubles; and we shall no longer say that he is happy and worthy of envy, who is rich, powerful, honored. We shall say, on the contrary, that it is desirable, the lot of him who suffers, who is forgotten, counted for nothing, but who loves the position which God has made for him. Then we shall judge all things during life as we shall judge them at death and in all eternity, as those themselves judge them now who, having preceded us in the tomb, let themselves be seduced by the world. May we, after that, reform all our judgments, change the ideas which we form of things, no longer call evil what is good, nor good what is evil, despise what the world esteems, and esteem what it despises!
Resolutions and spiritual nosegay as above.
Note on the Recovery of Missing Meditation
Important Note on This Meditation (First Week after Epiphany: Saturday)
This meditation (Saturday of the First Week after Epiphany) was lost in the original English publication by Benziger Brothers (1894 third edition), where pages 251–282 (and beyond) are missing from the available digitized copy.
The content has been recovered and translated directly from the corresponding section of the original French edition (Méditations pour tous les jours de l'année, by Rev. M. Hamon, 3rd edition equivalent, 1894), preserving the exact meaning, style, tone, and meditative structure of the 1894 English translation as closely as possible.
This recovery ensures continuity of the work while respecting the historical source material.