“EVERY morning of life we begin anew. We go forth from our doors to encounter a new day on its passage to eternity. It has much to say to us, and we to it; and it carries its tale to God at sunset, and its word is believed, and its message remembered till the doom. Would it not be an unproductive day in which we did not meet our Lord? For is not that the very meaning of our lives? If the day is meant for the sun to shine, it is but half a day, or rather it is night, if only the material sun shall shine, and the Sun of justice also rise not on us with health upon His wings. We go out to meet Jesus in every action of the day; but we require this fourth dolor (of Mary’s meeting Jesus on the path to Calvary) to admonish us that we must rarely expect to meet Him except with a Cross, and that a new one. When we are in sorrow, He Himself “draws near and goes with us,” as He did with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. That is the privilege of sorrow. It is an attraction to our dearest Lord which He can seldom resist. Provided we seek not other comfort, He is sure to draw near and comfort us Himself. Oh, if unwary souls did but know the graces which they miss by telling their griefs and letting their fellow-creatures console them, how saints would multiply in the Church of God! We read the lives of holy persons, and wonder how ever they can have attained to such a pitch of union with God, little suspecting all the while that we have had sorrow enough to carry us further still than that, only we would not wait for Jesus; and, if we will not let Him have the first word, He may perchance send His angels to fulfil our consolation, but He will not come Himself. But when we take the initiative, when we ourselves go out to meet Him, and we do so by our promises in praycr, by our open profession of piety, by our ecclesiastical vocation, by our religious profession, by the works of mercy to which we have now by usage committed ourselves, then it is always with the Cross that we encounter Him. Why, then, are we so amazed when crosses come? When it has happened thus so often, do we not see that it is a law, a law of the kingdom of grace, and that not to perceive it is to lose half its blessing, by missing tho promptitude of obedience? We lay ourselves in the arms of our heavenly Father, knowing not what is to come, only that much is to come, more than without Him We could by possibility bear; let us lie still now that we are there, and not be surprised into retracting the offerings we once have made. What cross we shall meet to-day we know not: sometimes we cannot guess. But we know that if we meet Jesus we shall meet a cross, and evening will find us with the burden on our backs. Only let us remember this invariable peculiarity of these divine encounters, and then, if we are reverently wary in making promises, we shall also be reverently firm in keeping our resolutions.
Some men meet Him, and turn away. Some see Him far off, and turn down another road. Some come close up, and leap down the precipice at the side, as if He were a destroying angel blocking up the way. Some pass by, pretending they do not know Him. He has been walking cross-laden in thousands of earth’s roads to-day; but He has had a few honest greetings. [Emphasis added.]
— Fr. Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, or the Sorrows of Mary, 1864
