examination of the heart 146 wine. Thus, at least at the end of the wedding (that is, our life) we may offer you and our heavenly guests the sweet drink of virtues and refresh the parched palate. Amen.” After Holy Communion 1. “My hour has not yet come” (Jn 2:4). Understand that there is a time for doing miracles; this time, as the Lord says, has not come yet. It is not as if He has a specific time-frame for doing miracles, outside of which He could not bring about any supernatural sign. For He was able to perform unheard of wonders even lying in a cradle, and indeed He performed themwhen He closed the mouth of demons, lest they give answers, and drove them out from images.43 But understand that the Lord said these words because, capable as He was, He did not want at that time to demonstrate His omnipotence and divinity. Hence learn this: If you are denied in Holy Communion and at other times the pleasure and sweetness of spiritual food, it happens not because the Holy Body of the Most Holy Lord lacks heavenly sweetness, delights, and taste, but to put your strength and virtue to the test. The hour has not yet come for you to abound in heavenly delights, and it is more advantageous — and is more meritorious for you — to experience dryness of heart and mind, rather than to abound in sensual devotion and to drink the sweet heavenly nectar. 2. “Fill the jars with water” (Jn 2:7). It must not be doubted that the Lord will transform the water of your heart, that [f.16v] is, your tears, into the purest wine if only you would fill the jars with it; that is if you would pour them out so abundantly that they would suffice for washing away your 43 Saint Stanislaus evidently learned about this episode in Jesus’s infancy from the 6th-century apocryphal writing: Pseudo-Matthew, Book of the Nativity of Mary and the Infancy of the Savior, Ch. XXIII, which claims that during their flight to Egypt the Holy Family, “arriving in the land of Hermopolis, in a city called Sotinen, ... they entered a temple containing 365 idols, which all immediately fell to the ground in a thousand pieces.” Ferdinand Prat, SJ., Jesus Christ: His life, His teaching, and His work, Trans. John J. Heenan, vol. I, Bruce Publishing Co., Milwaukee, WI, 1950, p. 104.
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