Luis M. Martinez - When God Is Silent: Finding Spiritual Peace Amid the Storms of Life

When God Is Silent

Finding Spiritual Peace Amid the Storms of Life

Luis M. Martinez

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

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Luis M. Martinez:

True Devotion to the Holy Spirit

When God Is Silent was formerly published by Sophia Institute Press in 2000 under the title When Jesus Sleeps , an excerpt of three chapters from Only Jesus (St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Company, 1962) with minor editorial revisions to the original text.

Copyright 2000, 2014 Sophia Institute Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

Cover design : Coronation Media in collaboration with Perceptions Design Studios. On the cover : Fisherman (121909360) sunipix55 / Shutterstock.com.

Biblical quotations are based on the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright 1965, 1966, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Nihil Obstat: J. S. Considine, O.P., S.T.M., Censor Deputatus Imprimatur: Albert Cardinal Meyer, Archbishop of Chicago May 10, 1962

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martnez, Luis M. (Luis Maria), 1881-1956.[Only Jesus. Selections]When God is silent : finding spiritual peace amid the storms of life / Luis M. Martinez. pages cm Previously published under title: When Jesus sleeps : finding spiritual peace amid the storms of life, c2000.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-62282-220-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Jesus Christ Devotional literature. I. Title.BT306.43.M28 2014
232.9 dc232014019299

Editors note: Except where noted otherwise, the biblical references in the following pages are based on the Revised Standard Version of the Old and New Testaments. Where applicable, quotations based on other translations have been cross-referenced with the differing enumeration in the Revised Standard Version, using the following symbol: (RSV =).

Chapter One

Rely on Christ when He seems distant

Through the intuitions of love, more than through the liveliness of the imagination, we have often constructed interiorly an arresting scene: the ominous sky, the wild winds, a little boat tossed by the seething waves of Lake Tiberias, with Jesus asleep in the stern. What a contrast between the fury of the tempest and the sweet, majestic peace of the divine slumber! The omnipotent, the Most High, He who is infinite activity because He is infinite perfection and unfailing felicity, surrendered to that sure sign of limitation and misery: sleep.

What would the sleeping Jesus be like? St. Thrse of the Child Jesus as the Song of Solomon declares.

The gentle Virgin Mary often contemplated the ineffable beauty of Jesus asleep. With the eyes of a mother, a lover, and an artist, she enjoyed the celestial delight of that marvelous divine beauty. What mildness in that incomparably comely countenance! What harmony in that motionless body! What majesty in that sweet repose! What radiations emanated from that sacred humanity quietly resting there.

Jesus was exceedingly beautiful when He spoke words of eternal life, accomplished wonders, looked with love, pardoned with mercy, and caressed with tenderness. But I would like to have seen Him while He was sleeping because I could have contemplated Him to my hearts content, without the fascination of His gaze distracting me, without the perfection of His beauty and the glory of His splendor dazzling my eyes and enrapturing my soul. The beauty of Jesus awake is too great for my smallness. Who could support it? I feel it more suited to me veiled by sleep, as the glory of the sun is more adapted to my eyes when I look at it through a translucent lens.

Mary most holy must have watched the sleep of Jesus many times. Marys ecstatic eyes would never tire of looking at her divine Son. With holy liberty, she covered Him with the kisses of her virginal lips as her immaculate hands caressed Him tenderly. If we had seen Jesus asleep, small and helpless as we are, we too would have dared to caress Him without reserve and to lull His mystical sleep with our timorous but ardent kisses.

Great artists striving to express the contrasts involved in the strength of repose have succeeded in producing the impression of an immobility filled with power, a calm of restrained activity, an activity that is its own mistress. Through the magic of art, incompatibles majestic repose and animated activity are united.

Through a divine art, this mighty contrast is realized in an indescribable manner in Jesus asleep. With the person of Jesus, the phrase of the Song of Solomon, I slept, but my heart was awake, is not a figure of speech used in the language of love, but a profound reality of the divine order. His sleep was like ours, because He took on Himself our miseries. His exterior and interior senses during sleep had that mysterious ligature which wise men have not yet explained satisfactorily. Sleep was not for Him, as it is for us, a suspension of our active life mingled with an occasional flash or mysterious phantasm of light and action. Although the lower part of His most holy soul was plunged in shadows, the higher part opened fully to the light of glory and the Beatific Vision far beyond the need of bodily aid, nourished in the unfailing torrent of the divinity.

The profound understanding of Jesus was flooded with celestial splendor. Beatific love burned in His Heart, enveloping with flames of blessedness and glory that Sacred Heart ever alert for love, ever living to make to His Father the holocaust of His tenderness, ever active to pour into souls the treasures of His mercy.

In the presence of that regal immobility and the divine silence of that most comely body, could one guess the interior glory? Through the delicate, celestial veil of human sleep, could penetrating and loving eyes like those of the Virgin discover the deep secret of the interior joy of Jesus?

The Apostles, with their narrow, human judgment, because they had not yet received from the Paraclete the deep sense of the divine, did not suspect on Tiberias the mystery of that Heart which was always watching.

Frightened by the din of the storm, they awakened Jesus to command the winds and the tempest. Why are you afraid? Have you no faith? They did not understand that even though we need to be awake to exercise our limited activity, Jesus, even as man, concealed under the mystery of His sleep the limitless power of the Beatific Vision.

Who can comprehend the sleep of Jesus? Who can conceive the strikingly beautiful contrast between the summit of that soul bathed in the light of glory and the lower part covered with the shadows of sleep, like the earth immersed in the suns glory in one hemisphere and submerged in the calm of night in the other?

Christ works in your soul even as He sleeps

Jesus lives mystically in souls, reproducing in them all the mysteries of His mortal life. With the keen intuition of her love, St. Thrse of the Child Jesus understood the mystery of this mystical sleep, expressing it with her inimitable language, full of ingenuous and truest poetry: Jesus slept in my boat, as was His wont. But how rarely will souls allow Him to sleep in peace. Wearied with making continual advances, our good Master readily avails Himself of the repose I offer Him, and in all probability will sleep on till my great and everlasting retreat; this, however, rather rejoices than grieves me.

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