infinitely more beautiful than all things in heaven and on earth; if you desire sweetness, God is sweeter than all sweet things.” How great then must not be the joy of possessing this sovereign Good in clear vision, and possessing Him by love as your very own property? When the disciples saw the glorified humanity of Our Lord on Mount Thabor, they were ravished out of themselves, and became almost senseless through delight. “Lord,” cried out Peter, “it is good for us to be here.”[1] Let us build tabernacles that we may dwell here forever. They thought they were already in heaven. What would have been their feelings if they had got even one glimpse of Our Lord’s divinity?
Even in this life the saints found great happiness in the thought of God. Even in this mournful vale of tears the mere remembrance and love of God sometimes, as St. John Chrysostom remarks, cause such comfort and delight to His faithful servants that all their trials and crosses become sweet; they take on themselves the greatest labors for God’s sake with joy and pleasure, and look on austerities, mortification of the senses, and the chastening of the flesh as most agreeable and delightful; nay, so great sometimes are the joy and consolation they feel in God that they are insensible to the natural pains of the body, and would not exchange the joys they experience for all the goods of the world. St. Francis Borgia, who renounced completely his duchy and all the riches he possessed or had hoped to possess, used to say that one quarter of an hour spent in his cell with God was worth all he had given up in the shape of worldly wealth. The great St. Anthony, hungry and thirsty in his desert, after having spent the whole night kneeling in prayer, used to complain when the sun came in the morning to disturb him by its light in the joy he felt in conversing with God. Our holy Father Ignatius could hardly ever think of God without shedding tears of consolation, and the doctors had to warn him at last to moderate the ardor of his meditations on God, lest he should lose his sight through constant weeping; as it was, he injured his eyes so much that he almost became blind. The holy apostle of the Indies, St. Francis Xavier, in the midst of his apostolic labors once received a special illumination from God while engaged in meditation, and the consolation and delight thus caused him were so great that he could no longer support them and had to cry out: “Enough, O Lord! enough!” No more light! Less consolation or else I must die! I am not able to bear it!
- ↑ Domine, bonum est nos hic esse.—Matt. xvii. 4.
