By Henry Aloysius Barry
Moses entering into the midst of the clouds, went up into the mountain and stayed there forty days and forty nights." As a matter of fact, we want no stairs to climb, we want an elevator, and some one to run it for us. We come to the foot of the mountain of the Lord—"and there was darkness." (Deut., iv, 11.) And we dwell in the moral blackness and stand aghast at the uphill toil, and the glorious vistas, the enchanting color pageantries. The revelations of the Holy Ghost vouchsafed unto such, and such only, as bravely forge their way forward, daily, gradually but persistently, those outpourings of interior light, that, like lightning-flashes, illumine our way, are not in store for us because we shun the toil, we spurn the conditions upon which the gift of heaven is dependant, we do not co-operate with the Holy Ghost. We dwell outside the orbit of the spirit. We want God to do all for us as though we were not moral beings nor dwelling in this world. Our life, as a consequence, remains dark, depressing; and, spite of all our diplomatic dodging, we suffer more in the long run from the justice of God and the gnawing regrets and terrors of conscience than we should have had to do had we chosen, from the outset, to be courageous and firm out of love and never to have surrendered to the pressure of evil. Old age, the season of ripeness for the saints, finds the worldly and unspiritual-beclouded, sitting in sadness and despondency over wasted opportunities, and the world's promise of joy unfulfilled. Forty days and forty nights,—what a splendid meditation, what a glorious retreat! Wonder not, then, at the immense spiritual force of Moses, at his wisdom, at his courage. The presence of God would tire our unwilling spirit and unmastered senses. Retreats and meditations and often the common and most ordinary services and functions of prayer affright many of us. Wo are earthy, O so earthy; we love the low ground, we court the phantoms of earth, the Jack-o'-lantern pleasures of life. What we find it hard to tear ourselves from we surely must love, and, we can scarcely be said to love that to which we have to drag ourselves.
By daily meditation one climbs higher and higher each day with Moses and his kind, and, more and more do the mantling clouds of the Holy Ghost fold themselves about us, permeate and refresh us, fertilizing our souls and extinguishing thereby the fires of concupiscence or in any case moderating and subordinating, consecrating and directing, their energy to the supremacy of reason and faith. There is a disease called malaria, a very common complaint with mankind. We spiritually need the higher air, the dry atmosphere of the mountains, we need a daily inter-communion with God to rid us of lack-lustre and that apathy of our souls which has gripped us so ardently after a systematic neglect of, or aged indifference to, our religious duties after, in a word, a starvation of the soul and a dissipation that has so run it down as to make it receptive to each and every form of spiritual fever and illusion, so drained it of its buoyancy and elasticity as to render it a speedy prey to the eagle's talons and the lion's paws,— "Going about seeking whom he may devour." The Holy Ghost is fire. Like love, it seeks union, and is assimilative. "Charity seeketh not her own," says St. Paul. "Charity begins at home," is the world's quick retort and incredulous sneer. Indeed, the adage is, I have no hesitation to say, a wholesome one, from a theological standpoint, but when charity ends at home, as it so habitually does, the adage is a gross travesty on, or mockery of, the true ideal of charity.
The corpulent, well-fed, well-housed, powerful world rarely finds a moment to expend upon the interests of another. "Each one shall bear one another's burdens," is a very brilliant theory, and that alone as far as the most of us are concerned. The mind-sickness of another, the low-heart ache discerned only by spiritual ears and sympathetic hearts, the poverty, the sickness— well, they annoy us beyond endurance, and, what makes the matter infinitely worse, many of us are just cruel enough to show the fact by our all too brusque, savage, unchristian manner; we have no penny for the needy —or we fling it at him in a perfect rage,—no word of kindness for the distressed —how un Christ-like! How adverse to the sympathy and love that emanates from the Holy Ghost! Ah! how much the world lacks and needs the communication of the Holy Ghost!—to irradiate its dark paganistic soul, to purify its cold, unsympathetic and selfish heart. Come, Holy Spirit, and rest as a dove upon my mind; as once upon the Rabbi's majestic brow, Thou spreadest Thy wondrously white wings, in the Jordan enfold my life, yea, with those same snow-white wings. Circle my heart with Thy dewy clouds, softening it toward every ill of mankind. With the tongue of Thy flame cauterize the sores of my diseased soul.
