Father Dignams Retreats

Author : Augustus Dignam
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781482755282
Total Pages : 550 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (552 download)

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Download or read book Father Dignam's Retreats written by Augustus Dignam and published by . This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Very Reverend Father General of the Society of Jesus, in his letter to the writer of Father Dignam's Memoir, says: "In this Memoir the good he did in his life will be perpetuated and extended. A special fragrance hangs round his memory." One, perhaps the chief, element of this special fragrance, all who knew the Father will agree, was his special devotion to the Sacred Heart, ever pleading for us, and, above all, his continual labour to make that Heart and Its pleading known and loved. His continual labour-just as honey is the sweet and fragrant product of the manifold toil of the hive.The beautifully organized labour of the bee, most busy among the great and little creatures of God has in all times attracted the mind of man, himself a toiler; and it calls forth praise from the mouth of the Church, when, after toiling through the penitential season of Lent, she, full of song, sets up the light of triumphant joy in her sanctuaries at Eastertide; and again, when she celebrates the martyrdom of St. Cecily, and sings of her: "Busy like a bee, thou didst serve the Lord." With this image in the mind, we shall, perhaps, more fully relish the samples of Father Dignam's Retreats and Conferences offered to us in this volume, which, it will be found, will serve as a kind of window in the hive of his days and years, that through it, we may see how busy he was, on what kind of work, and how the honey, which he was continually gathering for the nourishment of others, was also the daily food of his own soul. This last we shall be the better able to see, in that we have already been given the Memoir of his life, and have admired in it the abundant store of his virtues and good works, as the rich product in himself of that hidden labour of the hive, prayer and meditation, examples of which we are now about to examine in this book.The Memoir alone, or the Retreats and Conferences alone, would not have sufficed. But, together, they enable us to discern how the path of the Father's daily life led up to the chair or pulpit from which he taught, and from them ascended again ever to higher things. I shall be forgiven, I feel sure, if I add my own testimony in this matter to that of the Memoir. Not that I have any but a few little facts to relate; but they are facts whose meaning and value are raised out of the common by this: that they took place in the first weeks of his last illness, in the critical time when God seems to put the soul and its virtue to the final test, in which it is proved, in the sight of men as well as of angels, whether or not the harmony between a man's preaching and his practice has been the real and genuine result of an evergrowing love of God. When in the evening of the day that sudden1y summoned me home to take the reins out of his failing hands, I saw him, and saw what a wreckhe was of his former self, and instinct led me not to ask him for any instructions or direction, but simply to say: "You need have no anxiety, Father; I shall do all the work until you get well," his face litup and he said slowly, and most fervently, "Thank God." The tone of it was unmistakable: it did not matter what was to become of him, or what he suffered, so long as the work of the Sacred Heart was not neglected. This spirit of self-effacement appeared more clearly still next day, when I begged him to let me recommend him in the Messenger to the prayers of the Associates. "No, Father, no," he said, " in this work, we have to efface ourselves." He meant it, and was earnest and sincere about it. Sincerity had always been a great word with him, and in many places in his writings it may be found suddenlyappearing like a warning finger: "But let us be sincere."So therefore, in those sad days when the truth was being forced upon him that his work was over, he was throughout quietly business-like in putting himself aside, and in submitting to the melancholy process of being" shelved."