On this second Tuesday in the series of 15 Tuesdays in honor of our Holy Father St. Dominic, our reflection ties together aspects of the mystery of the Visitation with St. Dominic’s virtue in community life.
If you are joining us after the beginning of the 15 Tuesdays, don’t worry! Fifteen weeks is a long time, and you can begin at any point to grow in love of God and devotion to St. Dominic through joining in.
The Visitation, St. Dominic, and Community Life
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” This admonition of St. Paul, which Our Lady perfectly exemplifies in the Mystery of the Visitation, also encapsulates St. Dominic’s approach to community life. As we live our community life, whether in the religious community or with a spouse and family, we must learn to associate ourselves with the joys and sufferings of others, including—and this is sometimes the most challenging—their moral weakness and struggles. Such mutual understanding can seem impossible when a combination of physical ailments, personality differences, besetting character flaws, demanding schedules, and even mere idiosyncrasies set everyone on edge and incline us to blame others for making our own lives more difficult. Yet, as St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, “We must treat them, even the most imperfect, with precautions like those that are taken for bodily ills. Oh, very often people do not think about that; they wound them by inattentiveness, by tactlessness, although what they need is for us to care for them and comfort them with all our power. Yes, I feel that I must have as much compassion for the spiritual infirmities of my sisters as they have for my physical infirmities.”
In her visit to Elizabeth and Zechariah, Our Lady not only congratulated and assisted Elizabeth during her joyful expectation of the birth of St. John the Baptist, she also sympathized with Zechariah as he endured the imposed penance of muteness for his disbelief of the Archangel’s message. Elizabeth and Zechariah were both “righteous before God…blameless”; yet they were not perfect. To both of them, she brought Christ; and to both of them, she showed the sincere love, drawn from Christ, that knows how to adapt itself to the various needs and situations of one’s neighbors. Only in the Heart of Christ, the Heart of the Savior of the world, is there enough compassion to encompass and heal each individual misery of the human race. As we sing before the Gospel during Holy Week, “Hail to You, our King! You alone are compassionate with our errors. You alone are compassionate with our faults.”
Saint Dominic, too, is an example of one who knew how to “rejoice with them that rejoice and weep with those who weep.” Our Constitutions, speaking of times of recreation, recall the example of Our Holy Father of whom it was said, “No one was ever more community minded, no one more joyous.” Blessed Jordan of Saxony also recorded of him, “Nothing but compassion and mercy troubled the equanimity of his soul.” When a novice was severely tempted to leave the Order, he helped him with kindly persuasion and efficacious prayers; if he caught a brother in some fault, he first passed him by and later mildly and kindly admonished him to confess and repent; toward penitents in his confessional he was encouraging; for sinners and heretics he spent his life in preaching, prayer and penance; he miraculously obtained bread for the friars’ meals, and wine for the nuns’ recreational refreshment. From his heart, closely united to Christ’s, there gushed forth the living water of Christ’s love, by which he increased and sanctified the joys of those around him, and treated and cured the ills of soul and body of everyone he met.
If we feel discouraged at Saint Dominic’s extraordinary example of community life, we should remember that such virtue was not easy for him either. Saint Dominic was a man of noble birth, great intelligence, high ideals and irreproachable life; he had received an excellent education; he even had apparently indefatigable physical endurance. Such a man must have sometimes been tempted to impatience with people of lesser character or ability, who were spiritually, intellectually, or physically unable to keep up with him. What was Saint Dominic’s secret?
His secret was Mary—Mary and her Rosary. When Our Lady appeared to Our Holy Father to give him the Rosary, she said, “Wonder not that until now you have obtained so little fruit by your labors: you have spent them on a barren soil, not yet watered by the dew of divine grace. When God willed to renew the face of the earth, he began by sending down on it the fertilizing rain of the Angelic Salutation. Preach my Psalter…and you will obtain an abundant harvest.” Without impugning the heroic virtue Saint Dominic had already attained, may we not suppose that the first one to benefit from the softening dew and rain of the Rosary was Dominic himself? Perhaps the lone apostle, on fire with zeal for the truth, dedicated to radical poverty and asceticism, still needed to learn from the Mother of Mercy, how to attract souls to Christ by a magnetic compassion. Our Lady’s irrigation was the final element needed to make his heart’s fertile soil blossom forth in a magnificent harvest of souls. By contemplating the humble Virgin Mother of the Visitation, Saint Dominic also became a vessel of Christ’s saving love. Like Our Lady carrying Christ in her womb, Saint Dominic, from the Eucharistic presence of Christ and the mystical presence of Christ in his soul, poured out Christ’s salvation on those around him. We also, by receiving the mercy and compassion of Christ in the Sacraments and meditating on it, during the period of these Fifteen Tuesdays, can share Saint Dominic’s secret of community life. We can be transformed, as our Custom Book says, into other Marys, giving Christ to each other.
Additional Prayers
If you would like to observe this day with additional devotions, we have posted the following prayers in the past: