"Were you to look upon one wounded..."

From the Week 1 Colloquy:

"Were you to look upon one wounded, so that from out deep gashes the dark life-blood flowed; were yours the hand which, with cruel stab or brutal blow, had changed the God-like majesty of that human form into a helpless mangled mass of pallid clay and red-stained ashes, of quivering pain and crumbling dust; were the life thus ending one that had been devoted to your welfare and sacrificed for your love, would not your very soul recoil in horror and in shame from the sight of what our crime had done? But if, through some strange chance, the very wounds you gave had been the means of binding your victim and yourself in one love, strong as death and warm as blood, would not the memory of those wounds have ever after for your eyes and heart a mystery and a message of tender sympathy as well as of pathetic sorrow?"

"Those who have led the purest and the noblest lives have most of all been wont to dwell in constant contemplation upon the sacred Passion of Our Lord. The physical pain which He endured might, indeed, of itself only fill the mind with bitterness or with terror, and make us shrink from the recollection of such appalling woe; but those sufferings are bound up with the tenderest proofs of God’s great pity for the sinner, and they teach us, as nothing else could, what deep sympathy we may find, when we least merit it but need it most, in the great Heart of Jesus Christ. Thus the thought of Our Redeemer’s wounds not only does not repel us in horror but gently draws us towards Him; for we cannot forget that they were borne patiently and lovingly for our sake, and we know that it is not yet too late to change those bleeding marks of pain into traces of a loving compact sealed in blood and fruitful in heroic tenderness.’"

From Good Friday to Easter Sunday by Robert Kane SJ (1921: Longmans, Green & Co., New York) [pp. 1-2]

Ecce Homo, Caravaggio, 1606-1609