As we begin Lent, we try to comprehend more deeply Jesus’ love and suffering for us, so we can grow in our own love and conformity to Him on our Lenten journey to the Paschal mysteries. The following meditation is from Archbishop Luis M. Martinez’ book, Only Jesus:
If we could only understand what we have cost Jesus! If we could dispose ourselves at least to think about what He suffered for each one of us! Our souls are enveloped in His tenderness and in His pain. We are the fruit of His love and His martyrdom. We unceasingly receive His gifts of all kinds. We receive them tranquilly, at times joyfully. But those gifts are marked with the blood of Jesus, the blood from His veins and from His heart. In order that we might taste the least of His heavenly consolations, Jesus had to taste the gall and vinegar of interior desolation. In order that our souls might remain spotless, Jesus had to shed His blood to purify them. Each degree of grace, which for us is a degree of glory, was for Jesus a degree of incomprehensible suffering, and each Communion we receive cost Jesus the sacrifice of Calvary and the interior sacrifice of His heart. . . .
We do not understand what one Communion is, nor the gift given to us in it, nor the tremendous sufferings which that sublime gift cost Jesus.
We could discourse in a similar way upon all God’s graces; all are dyed in His blood and saturated with bitterness. The light shining in our spirit, the love burning in our heart, the strength sustaining our soul, the virtues adorning it, the gifts of the Holy Spirit that deify it, the fruits of the Sanctifier, the grace that makes us sharers in the nature of God, the charisms, our present graces of preservation, graces of sanctification, all that form the world known as the spiritual life—all is the fruit of love and sorrow, all came forth from the Sacred Heart, and all conserve the heat of its flames and the bitterness of its martyrdom, although this bitterness is usually changed for us into sweetness.
If all the graces we receive were the fruit of love alone, there would be sufficient motive for us to die of gratititude and to make every sacrifice in order to correspond with that ineffable love. But if these graces are also the fruit of Christ’s suffering, which lacerated the Divine Heart, causing it to bleed, how can there ever be gratitude sufficient to acknowledge them and love adequate to correspond with them? The contemplation of the interior of Jesus’ heart would of itself suffice to sanctify us without measure. Why do we turn away our eyes and our heart from that Heart, the only object worthy of our life?
— from Only Jesus by Archbishop Luis M. Martinez (archbishop of Mexico City from 1923-1956)