Novena Day 7 - Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

PRAYER: I adore You, O my God, Who are sovereignly good and holy, or rather goodness and sanctity itself, in a word, Sanctity by essence. “The heavens are not pure in Your sight, and You have found corruption even among the Angels”. How, then, can I dare to present myself before Your divine Majesty – I who am all covered with sins! But I throw myself at Your feet, Lord, that You may enlighten me by Your grace and make me understand the greatness of the evil from which You will that I beg to be delivered. You do detest it, Lord, because it is Your supreme enemy; make me abhor it also as You do, because it is also my greatest enemy. Dissipate the clouds which my sins have caused in my heart and my mind, in order that I may see clearly and feel deeply how “great an evil it is to have abandoned the Lord, my God.”

MEDITATION: God is Love itself. He is the inexhaustible source of goodness and of love, and desires only to pour out His riches upon His creatures. Before the creation, and from all eternity, this communication took place in the Adorable Trinity, by the ineffable relations which the three Divine Persons have among themselves; and when God resolved to create man in time, He made him to His Image and Likeness, in order that he might enter into a participation of His Eternal Beatitude. God can do nothing but for His own glory, but this glory He places in the happiness of His creatures. The end and perfection of man consist in being united to God by grace in this life and by glory in the next. The Creator has regulated all the laws which govern this vast universe to this end, so glorious and so advantageous to His privileged creatures. He has given them the Commandments, not as the arbitrary condition of the infinite glory which He has prepared for them, but a just and reasonable means for arriving at it. Since the Commandments are the expression of His infinite Sanctity, He has prescribed them to man, in order that preserving or re-establishing in himself, by their observance, the image of God, he may merit to be eternally united to Him. Nothing then is more beautiful, more admirable or more just than the harmony existing among all the laws which govern the creatures of this vast universe, and the end which God proposed to Himself, when He drew them out of nothingness – man’s eternal happiness. My Lord, and my God, I cry out with Your Prophet: “How admirable is Your name in the whole earth… What is man that You have crowned him with glory and honor; and have set him over the works of Your hands?”

Who would now dare disturb an order so perfect, established for the glory of the Creator and the felicity of His creatures, a marvelous result of the eternal counsels, of the divine perfections, and in particular of infinite power, wisdom and love? This disturbance, this disorder is sin, the evil which wounds His adorable perfections in their exterior manifestations, in a manner so horrible, so unqualified, that if God, by His eternal and immutable Nature, was not beyond attack, sin would cause His death. Sin, then, has no being; it is rather a non-being, since it is a violation of the Holy Laws of God, and attacks this God, Who alone has Being – a violation so much the more culpable because it is committed by those in favor of whom these laws have been made – by man, who thus uses to outrage his Creator the very means given to glorify Him. These truths, which are so evident to reason enlightened by faith, are confirmed by the most formal teaching of Religion, teachings at which we should fear and tremble. In effect, we consider that God is Love; that He is Truth and Justice itself, that His mercies are above all His works, and by consequence, that the pains which he inflicts upon the culpable cannot be greater than their faults; that, on the contrary, knowing the frailty and imperfection of His creatures, whom He loves as His image, He shows, even in the chastisements to which He makes them submit, that His justice is tempered by His love. We are forced to admit that if God has inflicted upon sinners the greatest pains to which their nature is susceptible, it is because sin in His eyes is an infinite malice, a disorder, an evil without measure. This teaches us that the torments of hell are an assemblage of all evils, in an infinite degree, and that there may be a multitude of the reprobate guilty of but one mortal sin. Remember that God thrust into Hell his disobedient Angels and without any regard for their dignity, their beauty and their number. He condemned them to eternal and infinite torments, without giving them time to repent or the means to do penance.

Let us remember that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, willed by the Father, died the torments of death on a Cross. We must then conclude that sin is an evil of infinite malice, since it was effaced at so infinite a price.

Dear God, if You have not spared even the Angels, if You do plunge into hell each day a multitude of sinners who imitate these angels in their revolt against You, if You have not spared Your Only Son death upon a Cross for our sins, what will become of me?

Lord, grant me the grace that I may understand that sin is the one evil, and that there is no other, because it attacks You, O my God! Deliver me then from the sins which I have already committed, and preserve me from those into which I am in danger of falling. Holy Mother Mary, take me by the hand and lead me to Your Son and please lead me far far away from all that displeases Him.