CHAPTER XXV.

THE LAST MARTYRDOM OF LOVE.

"O the torture of Mercy! which loves and yet crucifies.'' — ST. BERNARD.

Our heart is made to love; to love is its most natural act, the one in which it finds satisfaction, fullness, rest, peace. But God alone is capable of satisfying it. Nothing can be compared to the sweetness of divine love. "Taste and see how sweet is the Lord!" exclaims in an ecstacy holy King David. Under the law of grace, myriads of saints have happily experienced it, and unceasingly cry out in a manner to excite our envy, that one taste alone of this heavenly sweetness fills the soul with delight. The intensity of supernatural consolation causes them to beg God to put an end to their exile here below. They feel they must swoon away, even die, from this divine sweetness. "Enough, enough, my Lord!" they cry out. We will cite only the Spouse in the Canticles, Saint Philip Neri, our holy Mother Saint Teresa, Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, as typical souls who experienced these supernatural joys. However, this love which is so delightful is sometimes transformed under the master hand of God, into a real martyrdom. It is appropriate to recall here the inspired words of the Canticle: "Love is strong as death, jealousy is hard as hell." In the ordinary ways of Providence, when our Lord wishes to give a soul the last perfecting touches, that is to say, when He wishes to purify it as much as is possible in this life according to the measure fixed in His eternal decrees, He not only deprives it of all sensible devotion, but He takes from even its inner spiritual powers all the joy it can experience in prayer and contemplating the love of the Sovereign Good. And now see His dealings with the soul: an extraordinary light of pure faith sheds such rays into the mind, that their very splendor plunges its faculties into the deepest shadows. The soul's eyesight, piercing into the depths of God, is lost in the divine abyss, which it is the less capable of sounding as the way seems the more open to it. Such a one is made wise in proportion to her advancement in the secrets of this science, discovering afar off and suspecting mysteries which immensely surpass what she already knows. And it is for her the torment, as it were, of despair to feel herself the more ignorant as she increases in wisdom. What takes place in the mind regarding faith, now takes place in the will regarding love. This last becomes inflamed in proportion to the light of the intellect; but what a grief not to be able to love God with the infinite love the soul now perceives that He deserves! In the presence of sanctity itself, the failings of the soul's natural weakness appear to her frightful deformities. This causes her a feeling of helplessness, nay, of deadly aridity: a torment so cruel that mystics compare it to the pains of purgatory, nay, even to those of hell itself. And they apply to this purification of the soul these words of the sacred Spouse, quoted above: "Love is strong as death, jealousy is hard as hell." It is necessary to recall in passing these laws of the mystic life, in order that the reader may better understand what we are about to say regarding the last trials by which the sovereign Master completed the preparation of His servant for the eternal nuptials.

Sister Teresa Margaret most certainly passed through this night of spiritual darkness, which our holy Father St. John of the Cross calls "The obscure night of the soul." This was the last touch the divine Spouse gave to the work of her perfection. The charming serenity of her exterior recollection; her calmness on all occasions; finally the fervent aspirations which so often, in spite of herself, escaped from her lips, would seem to reveal an upright soul driven sweetly and gently onward by an ever favorable breeze towards the heavenly country. But let us not be deceived. It was with her as with St. Aloysius of Gonzaga, whom Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi proclaims a hidden martyr of divine love. In this respect we dare to assert that our angelic Sister resembled her noble model. Father Ildefonso testified under oath that when the Venerable Sister, still a novice, was obliged to reveal to him her most hidden secrets, she told him she was in a state of such great obscurity, dwelt in such an interior night, that it prevented her forming the least idea of God, notwithstanding her intense desire to know Him. She added that she suffered great aridity of spirit, in which she neither loved, nor knew how to love, the Sovereign Good. `What will become of my soul ?' she said to me, `My Father, can I hope for salvation, after so many favors on God's part, and so many infidelities on mine?' " Her confidence, it is true, kept her up; but only most obscurely and insensibly, and she did not enjoy the least feeling of security nor any sensible consolation. She remained abandoned to deep interior sadness. She declared she did not know God. However, as a matter of fact, for a young girl from 17 to 22 years of age, she really had very exalted ideas regarding the divinity. She spoke of the Supreme Being and His attributes as a learned theologian could hardly have done without much study and reflection. She declared that she did not know how to love her God. However, she did not draw a breath but through zeal for His glory; and, for love of Him, she chastised her virginal body with so generous a severity that it caused us to shudder. And she wore herself out in practicing fraternal charity in an extraordinary degree of zeal. For His sake also she had a thirst for humiliations which was never satisfied. She emulated the greatest lovers of the divine Crucified One, and, like them, was tortured by an interior agony of sympathy with the Redeemer in His passion.

Her faults, more apparent than real, seemed to her enormous crimes; and the frightful aridity which desolated her heart, a just punishment for her ingratitude. During these torments, which none suspected, Sister Teresa Margaret seemed to us a prodigy of heroic fortitude. Calm in the midst of her great distress, desolation, and interior darkness, her exterior never betrayed the secret of her suffering. Sometimes a suppliant glance toward heaven, a sigh — that was all that indicated the martyrdom she endured. Love, whose nourishment is suffering, continued unceasingly to increase in this state, in which the soul lived in a love pure, strong, and disinterested. This interior martyrdom lasted only a few years; but the intensity of its devouring flame was so great that death appeared to be the only remedy for such crucifying agony. She was in something resembling despair at not being able to know God, or love Him, and destined, as she feared, never again to bless Him. In this state the soul, in order to satisfy the craving which devours her, seeks to be delivered from her body and fly to the country where vision is unobscured and joy unlimited — if she could only believe she should be saved. The greater her suffering, the greater her desire for death; and the more she desired it, the more she suffered because she did not die. How true is this old adage: "To live while desiring death is a misery more terrible than death itself." How often this young seraphic virgin, after the example of our holy Mother Saint Teresa, sighing for heaven, could have uttered this great cry of love: "I die because I cannot die!" The reader recalls the devotion of Sister Margaret to Mother Teresa Adelaide, that worthy religious, weighed down by years, who could hear our Sister very well notwithstanding her complete deafness. In her last moments, her little infirmarian asked her as the sole recompense for all her services, to obtain for her a speedy death "that she might love God at last, and unceasingly, and possess Him forever." It pleased the divine Goodness to accede to the wishes of this heart all burning with love, and sooner perhaps than she had dared to hope.

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