In summarizing His mission to the Apostles, Our Lord tells them plain and simply that He “came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49). He came to set the world ablaze with divine charity and, so ardently does He desire the conflagration that He would offer Himself as tinder. To set the world aflame with a single kindle would take a highly combustible fuel, a fuel mixed with equal parts of the glory of God and the salvation of souls. In fact, we could say that everything Jesus said and did was for those two ends. It drove Him to clean the Temple and it drove Him up the hill of Calvary. When it was bottled up, it erupted out of the tomb and propelled Our Lord to ascend into Heaven. It is this fuel that drove Himself in the Eucharist (c.f. Lk 22:15) and it is this fuel that shines forth from all the monstrances on the earth.
This fire can never be extinguished. When asked by St. Catherine of Siena what His greatest pain was, Our Lord said it was the pain of desire:
“My child, there can be no comparison between something finite and something infinite. Consider that the pain of My body was limited, while My desire for the salvation of souls was infinite. This burning thirst, this cross of desire, I felt all My life. It was more painful for Me than all the pains that I bore in My body. Nevertheless, My soul was moved with joy seeing the final moment approach, especially at the supper of Holy Thursday when I said, ‘ I have desired ardently to eat this Pasch with you, ‘ that is, sacrifice My body to My Father. I had a great joy, a great consolation, because I saw the time arrive when this cross of desire would cease for Me; and the closer I felt Myself to the flagellation and the other torments of My body, the more I felt the pain in Me diminish. The pain of the body made that of desire disappear, because I saw completed what I had desired. With death on the Cross the pain of the holy desire ended, but not the desire and the hunger I have for your salvation. If this love that I have for you were extinguished, you would no longer exist, since it is only this love that maintains you in life.”
This habitual desire, this “predominant virtue” of Our Lord as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange describes it, is zeal. Our Lord was not only meek and humble, but also zealous. And it is this zeal that sets the world ablaze. But we must be absolutely clear on how the fire of Christ’s zeal is spread.
Christ’s Zeal
We might initially think that it is spread via imitation of Christ. We would, of course be correct, but only in a secondary way. Christ’s virtues are not primarily taught to us, but caught by us. His Messianic mission was not simply to shed His blood on the Cross, but to have that blood touch every aspect of human life. Messiah was not just a mission, but an identity and His act of redemption is continuous. He came not just to show us how to live, but to empower us to live that way. He does not give us an example, but a share in all of His virtues so that if Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is right, then He wants us to predominantly share in His zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
We have spoken previously on what zeal is and isn’t so rather than revisiting that, we should examine how by true zeal we already are. The Church has long taught that one of the distinctive marks of Catholics is the practice of the Works of Mercy. But there is always a danger in examining ourselves against these because they can easily be animated by a humanitarian spirit. When this is the case, they become merely signs of activism rather than evangelism. Therefore we must examine the spirit in which we perform these acts. To be truly acts of mercy, they must be zealously done for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. When we feed the hungry we must do so for the glory of God and the salvation of the hungry man’s soul. Any other reason is superfluous and draws us towards humanitarianism. This remains a serious temptation because activism often masquerades as zeal.
Fr. Jean-Baptiste Chautard in his book The Soul of the Apostolate calls this the “heresy of good works” and describes “activistic heretics” as those who, “for their part, imagine that they are giving greater glory to God in aiming above all at external results. This state of mind is the explanation why, in our day, in spite of the appreciation still shown for schools, dispensaries, missions, and hospitals, devotion to God in its interior form, by penance and prayer, is less and less understood. No longer able to believe in the value of immolation that nobody sees, your activist will not be content merely to treat as slackers and visionaries those who give themselves, in the cloister, to prayer and penance with an ardor for souls equal to that of the most tireless missionary; but he will also roar with laughter at those active workers who consider it indispensable to snatch a few minutes from even the most useful occupations, in order to go and purify and rekindle their energy.”
Catching Zeal
If it is not in external works that we catch Christ’s zeal, then how do we catch it? Fr. Chautard tells us that we become infected in prayer. All of our exterior works are simply overflow from our interior lives. The more time we spend in prayer, close to the Heart of Jesus, the greater will be our love for Him. The greater our love, the more we will desire what He desires—the glory of God and the salvation of souls. An apostle without an interior life is no apostle at all but simply a social worker. We must first be committed to a deep prayer life before we should set out into the world to save souls. Only in slaking our thirst for Jesus can we quench His thirst for souls.
As Fr. Chautard puts it, “I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me: If I cease to increase my thirst to live in Jesus, that thirst which gives me both the desire to please God in all things, and the fear of displeasing Him in any way whatever. But I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading; or if, while not altogether abandoning them, I draw no profit from them, through my own fault.”
It is this principle in action that has left the Church with a co-Patroness of missionaries that never left the convent. St. Therese of Lisieux is, along with the great missionary St. Francis Xavier, the co-Patroness of Missionaries. Her great zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls was formed and then poured out in prayer. In fact, it was revealed to St. Therese that through her prayer she had converted as many souls as St. Francis Xavier, the great missionary to the East. The point is that zeal must always be formed first in prayer and then exercised in the manner in which God chooses.