Читать книгу The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. From the Meditations of the Saint and Prophet Anne Catherine Emmerich онлайн

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Every one of the ceremonies and festivals of the Church was to her far more than the consecration of a remembrance. She beheld in the historical foundation of each solemnity an act of the Almighty, done in time for the reparation of fallen humanity. Although these divine acts appeared to her stamped with the character of eternity, yet she was well aware that in order for man to profit by them in the bounded and narrow sphere of time, he must, as it were, take possession of them in a series of successive moments, and that for this purpose they had to be repeated and renewed in the Church, in the order established by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. All festivals and solemnities were in her eyes eternal graces which returned at fixed epochs in every ecclesiastical year, in the same manner as the fruits and harvests of the earth come in their seasons in the natural year.

Her zeal and gratitude in receiving and treasuring up these graces were untiring, nor was she less eager and zealous in offering them to those who neglected their value. In the same manner as her compassion for her crucified Saviour had pleased God and obtained for her the privilege of being marked with the stigmas of the Passion as with a seal of the most perfect love, so all the sufferings of the Church and of those who were in affliction were repeated in the different states of her body and soul. And all these wonders took place within her, unknown to those who were around her; nor was she herself even more fully conscious of them than is the bee of the effects of its work, while yet she was tending and cultivating, with all the care of an industrious and faithful gardener, the fertile garden of the ecclesiastical year. She lived on its fruits, and distributed them to others; she strengthened herself and her friends with the flowers and herbs which she cultivated; or, rather, she herself was in this garden like a sensitive plant, a sunflower, or some wonderful plant in which, independent of her own will, were reproduced all the seasons of the year, all the hours of the day, and all the changes of the atmosphere.