Preview: "Christ Our Friend Vindicated" and Us

Last we ended our discussion of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's The Friendship of Christ on the Son Rise Morning Show, Anna Mitchell and I commented:

After this imaginative narration of Saint Mary Magdalene's encounters with Our Friend Jesus, Benson applies these lessons to us--but that will have to wait for another discussion on Monday, April 20!

I don't think you'll be surprised at how Benson applies the lessons Saint Mary Magdalene learned to us, because they echo the examples he offered before: Our Friend Christ in the Eucharist, in the Church, in the priest, in Our Lady and the Saints, etc. In each lesson he outlines how Christ is Present to us after His Resurrection and Ascension:

First, then, He lives in the Sacrament of His Love -- as our Friend, our Sacrifice and our Food -- and all three for friendship's sake.

Then, in another mode He lives in His Church on earth; in such a sense that the soul that hears Her hears Him, and the soul that despises Her despises Him; since she is His Body of which He is the Soul; since she has "the Mind of Christ," speaks (as He did) as "one having authority," and does "greater works" than did He "because He is gone to His Father" and therefore can live in her. It is to the lips of her Head, then, that His Friends listen, for this human Head is He to whom the Good Shepherd committed the pastorate of His Flock, to whom the "Door" entrusted "the keys"; whom the "One Foundation" named "the Rock."

Then, in yet another mode He lives in His Saints and supremely in His Blessed Mother. It is to these chosen Friends of God that we go to learn what is Friendship; to His Mother that we go to learn about her Son; to the Queen of Heaven, to learn the dispositions of the King.

And he lives, too, in His own dear sinners; in those who from their darkness teach us what light must be in those who, Crying in the wilderness in sin, make us keen-sighted in our despair on their behalf to seek the Shepherd who comes to seek them.

His conclusion is that we will find Christ everywhere we look if we look for Him, even in our unfaithfulness, our troubles, and our joys:

So, little by little as we go through life, following with a hundred infidelities and a thousand blunders, with open defiances and secret sins, yet following, as Peter followed through the glare of the High Priest's fire to the gloom of penitence where Christ's Eyes could shine -- as we go, blinded by our own sorrow, to the ecstasy of His Joy, thinking to find Him dead, hoping to live on a memory, instead of confident that He is living and looking to the "to-day" in which He is even more than yesterday -- little by little we find that there is no garden where He does not walk, no doors that can shut Him out, no country road where our hearts cannot burn in His company.

And, as we find Him ever more and more without us, in the eyes of those we love, in the Voice that rebukes us, the spear that pierces us, the friends that betray us, and the grave that waits for us: as we find Him in His Sacraments, in His Saints -- in all those august things which He Himself designed as trysting-places with Himself; at once we find Him more and more within us, enwound in every fibre of our lives, fragrant in every dear association and memory, deep buried in the depths of that heart of ours that seems most wholly neglectful of Him.

So, then, He asserts His dominion from strength to strength; claiming one by one those powers that we had thought to be most our own. To our knowledge He is the Most Perfect; to our imagination He is. our dream; to our hopes their Reward.

Until at last, following His grace towards glory, we pass to be utterly His. No thought is ours unsanctioned by the Divine Wisdom; no love is ours save that of the Sacred Heart; no will save His. "To me . . . then, "to live is Christ; and to die is gain."{3} For "I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me."{4}

My Friend is mine at last. And I am His. . . .

Christ is Risen: He is Risen Indeed!