123 part i: sunday meditations for the entire year Today, my soul, you visit Christ not through an envoy, but you go to Him yourself. However, do not hasten to Him so that He would console you, held in the harsh prison of your body, because you are not at all worthy of the consolations of Him whom you have so many times saddened by your evil deeds, especially in the fatal garden (of Eden).18 Rather, you come that you may know to what you should cling: to pleasure? To the world? To the passions in which you are greatly entangled? Or to this crucified God, the One who is going to feast you today — undeserving and rebellious as you are — with His flesh and blood? Decide whom you are to follow. Be careful, lest by succumbing to your evil will you do wrong to God, who wishes that you belong only to the One, and that you follow Him alone.19 2. “Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ” (Mt 11:2). Take note of this slight oddity: that the Herald,20 the son of Zacharias, who had surely gotten to know the Lord when giving Him holy Baptism, sends to Him his envoys after hearing about the Lord’s works and miracles, as if not knowing who He was. As for you, mark that you do exactly the same: You know that the true God — who gives life and puts to death, saves and condemns — is under the species of bread; and yet you do not mature to a true conversion after so many Communions, and they seem to be not at all salutary for you, because the more often you approach the sacred table, [f.5v] the worse you slacken in spirit, as if never refreshed by this most nourishing spiritual food. What more do you expect? Are you waiting for Him to act? Do you await exceptional graces? You should instead reconsider what 18 According to the theology of recapitulation, the Garden of Eden became “fatal” for our first parents and their descendants as a result of original sin (cf. Rom 5:12-19). On the other hand, each of the stages of Christ’s Passion, taken on voluntarily, has a salvific (not fatal) character (including his spiritual suffering and sadness in the Garden of Olives). Cf. IC crit. ed., p. 246 (f.114v § 1). 19 St. Stanislaus uses a beautiful play on words here that cannot be translated into English: ut sis una uni, et solum sola sequaris. 20 John the Baptist. As the one who announces Christ, he is here called the Prodromus, that is, "herald", or "messenger."
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