Excerpt from Fr. Faber's book "All for Jesus"
(Ch.5 - The Riches of Our Poverty)
"If we are in earnest about our souls, with a quiet fidelity to those duties, practices, and devotions, which obedience sanctions to us, our love of God increases without our knowing or feeling it. It is only now and then, in certain temptations, or on great feasts, or some times without apparent cause, that God allows us to perceive that we have really made some progress, and that we care more for Him and less for anything else but Him, than we used to do. One sign to us of this increase of love is the growing sense of our own unworthiness, and of the extreme littleness of everything we do. It becomes a pain to us that we have so little to offer to God, and that our service of Him is after all so wretched and ungenerous. The more we know Him, and the more we approach to thoughts at least a little more worthy of His blessed Majesty, the more this feeling increases upon us, and, as I say, becomes a pain.
[...] Every gift He gives is double, treble, or a hundred-fold. One drop of blood would have done, and He shed every drop. Grace would have sufficed for His sacrament of love, but He must needs give Himself, Body, Soul, and Divinity. The Blessed Sacrament is a superfluous mercy, an unnecessary love. Only that to show most love and to get most love -- this was what was intended. This is His way. And as we get to know Him and to love Him more, we want it to be our way also. And the little we can do seems so little, so very little!
Now, from what we know of Him we may be sure He would never leave us in this predicament. He desires nothing so much as our love; He would never leave us without adequate means of loving Him. If an earthly father knew that his child was longing to make him a present, but had not the means, with what prompt hand and overflowing heart would he furnish him with the means! Will Jesus do less? That at least is not His way.
[...] Thus, also, does He come to the rescue of our love as well. He can do so in two ways. First of all, by giving to the littleness of our actions an immensity of value by uniting them to His own, and letting the worth of His own flow into them. Of this hereafter. Secondly, He can do so by treating us as He treated Mary, giving us Himself and all that belongs to Him to do with what we will, and to offer to God, as and when we please. And it is of these riches of our poverty I am going to speak at present.
It is really very difficult to believe our own greatness and nobility in Christ. The catalogue of our privileges always seems to be only a sort of devout exaggeration. Take yourself at any given moment, whether of pain and weariness, or of satisfaction and sensible devotion, and you will see how difficult it is not so much to hope, as to believe that some day you will really be saved, dead, judged, crowned, in Heaven, and eternity before you. It is not so much that you fear the opposite, as that the greatness of the reward, the infinity of the bliss, and the contrast with your present misery and lowness, are more than you can take in. You meditate on Heaven, and then you think, Will there be a moment, or an hour, while men on earth are going on as usual, and I shall be thus, in the fixed possession and enjoyment of all this? And you smile, not exactly with incredulity, but as Sara smiled when she heard the angel say that she should have a son. So in its measure is it with the inheritance we have in Christ even when on earth. It seems too much. Yet St. Paul says to the Corinthians, "All things are yours, whether it be the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; for all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." And again to the Hebrews, he says, not you shall hereafter, but you are already, "come to mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the first-born who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new Testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel." When Mary rules with her sweet sceptre of ever-granted prayer over the empire of the Sacred Heart, it is our kingdom over which she is the queen. All it is, and all it has is ours, for "all things are ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's. For these are our treasures, which He has given us, having won them for us with His Blood: His own Sacred Humanity, Body and Soul, His Childhood, Hidden Life, Ministry, Passion, Blessed Sacrament, and Session at the Father's Right Hand; His Mother, all she is or has; His countless angels beautiful and strong; all the good works and penances of earth; all the masses that are said; and the countless sufferings of those in purgatory; the graces which the lost had and did not correspond to; the sanctity of the saints, Joseph, the Baptist, the Apostles, and the rest; all the praise of birds and beasts and the orderly elements; all that possible creatures could do; God's past mercies, through the Old Testament History downwards; and the love which the Three Divine Persons bear to each other, and the incommunicable love wherewith God loves Himself eternally.
These things are ours in Christ. Oh surely a fair and magnificent domain! These things He puts into our hands, just as He put Himself into Mary's hands at the Presentation, that we may be able to satisfy our love, What blessed occupation for our time! what heaven begun on earth! Every one of these things we can use, as freely as if it were our own, for three distinct purposes; and we can merit by them all, as by our own actions, for the oblation of them is our own. He gives us them to be offered. First, we may use them to make acts of love, and secondly, to make acts of thanks- giving. Of these two uses I shall speak hereafter. And thirdly, we may use them for intercession, and this is what we have to do with at present. If we have laid well to heart the lessons of the last Chapter, we shall feel so drawn to the blessed practice of intercession, that we shall be discontented with our own means of interceding. We shall feel that our dry, bald petitions, our cold words, our slovenly devotions, what with the distractions of our employments, and what with the hardness of our hearts, can never satisfy the loving desires we feel to promote by intercession the glory of God, the interests of Jesus, and the good of souls. See then! Jesus puts all these things into our hands as weapons of intercession. He fills our quiver full of these arrows, dipped in potent balms, to wound His Sacred Heart, which He uncovers to us for our aim. If aimed with devout intention, they must reach the mark, and if they reach it they must wound infal- libly. As there are no bounds to His love of us, so does He seem bent that there shall be almost no bounds to our possibilities of loving Him.
Love would not be love, if having these treasures it did not use them. When, therefore, we desire to intercede with God for something which is to His greater glory, we can offer to Him any of these things, presenting to Him the actions themselves, that they may appease His anger and stir His compassion towards us. The mere offering, with a devout intention, is a great thing, and avails much, just as the silent presence in heaven of the Five Wounds which our Lord deigned to keep after His resurrection, is said by theologians to be our Lord's intercession, continually pleading with the Father, though our Lord no longer prays for us as He did on earth. But we ought not to stop here with the actions only. We should endeavour to unite ourselves with the dispositions in which Jesus, Mary, the angels or the saints did the particular action in question. This will make our intercession still more efficacious and still more meritorious. We may also, if we please, wish the action could be multiplied a thousand times, so that God should have more and more accidental glory thereby. Oh, it is astonishing how the conversions of sinners will come in upon us, how quickly scandal will be abated, how the dews of grace will become heavy rains, and fructify in the Church, if we devote ourselves to this practice! And we shall not be, as in past years we have so often been, like Gideon's fleece, dry, almost miraculously dry, when all was wet around!
Take the Sacred Humanity of our dearest Lord. We may offer to God the perfections and powers of His Human Soul, the abysses of grace, science, and glory, which are in it; the love with which it loves God at this moment, and all the love with which it will ever love Him, to all eternity. We may ask for the conversion of a sin-stained soul, by the beauty and brightness of His soul which at this hour is so lighting up the heavenly Jerusalem, that it needs "neither sun nor moon to lighten it, for the Lamb is the light thereof." We may ask health and strength for the preachers and missioners of our Lord by all the perfections of His glorified Body at this hour. Or leaving heaven we may come down to earth, and offer to the Father all the unspeakable worship which our Lord's mystical life in the Blessed Sacrament is offering Him from a thousand thousand tabernacles; the poverty, the humiliation, the obedience to His Priests, and zeal for souls, the refraining of His senses, the endurance of sacrileges, the patient love, the miraculous manifestations of that Hidden Life. Or, again, we may draw upon the past. There is the act of love in the moment of the Incarnation, the imprisonment for nine long months in Mary's Blessed Womb, the virtues practised there, and the world governed from thence. There is the Nativity, and the mysteries of the first twelve years, Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, all they mean and contain of the unfathomable humiliations of the Incarnate Word, and of His inexpressible love for Mary and for men. There is the Hidden Life at Nazareth, the hiddenness of the Omnipresent, the obedience of the Omnipotent, the poverty of the All- rich, the fatigue of the Great Creator, the prayer of God, the love for Joseph, the sanctification of Mary, the merits and the satisfactions, and the complacency of angels, Mary, and of God in the wonders and virtues of those eighteen years. There is the Three Years' Ministry, the baptism by John, and the fasting in the wilderness, His way with His disciples, and His way with sinners, the contradictions He encountered, the sermons He preached, the miracles He wrought, the weariness He endured. Then we come to the shore of the illimitable sea of His most dear Passion, the seven journeys, the five trials, the seven words; and beyond that we have the Risen Life, the various apparitions, specially that first one to His Mother, the forty days of secret legislation for the matter and form of the sacraments and for the Church, all the beauty, charity, and hiddenness of those days, the words spoken, the wonders done, the graces given, the blessings imparted, and then the admirable pomp of His ascension. When will this fountain have run dry? When, if we never repeated the same thing twice over, shall we have exhausted these marvellous infinite acts, infinite not in themselves, but by their union with His Divine Person, and which have such unlimited power with God? All these are at our disposal for intercession; and we may well believe they will have especial efficacy when suited to the sacred seasons of the year, all except the Passion which has all seasons for its own."
"But let us now speak of the intercessory use we may make of the Passion...."
Online source: Google books
