The Love Of God From A Martyr’s Perspective

By JAMES MONTI

Towards the end of St. Luke’s Gospel account of the Presentation of the Lord, we encounter the remarkable figure of Anna, a widow and prophetess with a truly exceptional prayer life. Having as a young woman lost her husband just seven years into her marriage, she was to spend somewhere around sixty years praying daily and continually in the Temple, up until the time of the Presentation of Our Lord, when she was eighty-four: “She did not depart from the temple, worshipping with fasting and prayer night and day” (Luke 2:37). What motive could explain such a relentless perseverance in prayer and such a magnetic desire to remain day and night near the Lord in His sanctuary? Only love can explain it.
It was over fifteen centuries later that another soul consumed by the love of God would succinctly explain such an attraction for the service of the Lord, penning these words in his prison cell little more than six months before his own martyrdom in June of 1535: “…love is the principal thing that maketh any work easy…” (Saint John Fisher, The Ways to Perfect Religion, in A Spiritual Consolation and Other Treatises, ed. D. O’Connor, London, Art & Book Co.; St. Louis, MO, B. Herder, 1903, pp. 23-24).
St. John Fisher was writing for his half-sister Elizabeth White, a Dominican nun of the convent of Dartford. Imprisoned in April 1534 for having refused to take King Henry VIII’s vile “Oath of Supremacy,” the beleaguered bishop of the south English See of Rochester was truly living what it ultimately means to love God with all one’s heart and soul, a willingness to lose all “for the winning of Christ,” as his fellow martyr St. Thomas More put it in his own prison writings.
Living with the prospect of an inevitable death sentence, Fisher decided to put his remaining time on Earth to good use by composing two short works on the spiritual life for Elizabeth, A Spiritual Consolation and The Ways to Perfect Religion. Undoubtedly the very act of drawing up these treatises served as a spiritual exercise for Fisher himself, helping him to keep before his eyes the reasons for persevering to the end in his own confession of the faith at the cost of his life. It is in the latter of these two works that Fisher explores in depth the soul’s calling to love God above all things.
Fisher begins his Ways to Perfect Religion with a unique comparison, presenting a detailed description of the tireless dedication of a hunter in the relentless pursuit of his game. Explaining his reason for choosing this particular analogy, he points out that “all true Christian souls be called hunters, and their office and duty is to seek and hunt for to find Christ Jesus” (text in O’Connor, A Spiritual Consolation and Other Treatises, p. 22). Fisher notes how the hunter is readily willing to rise early to begin the chase, and to forgo the comforts of food, drink, and rest in the hope that all these sacrifices will lead him to succeed by the end of the day in catching the “poor hare” or some other prey he desires. It is therefore out of love for what he is seeking to achieve that he gladly embraces all the hardships of the daylong chase.
Fisher explains that each of the sacrifices of a fervent hunter has its counterpart in the daily life of a religious in a convent, the life his half-sister is living. So, shouldn’t a religious be just as eager, and even more so, to make such sacrifices, not merely for the capture of a “poor hare,” but rather for the sake of the service of Christ? In both instances, love is the motivation, but in the case of the religious the object of one’s love is incomparably greater — none other than God Himself.

Gratitude To God

In the pages of his Ways to Perfect Religion that follow, Fisher’s approach to his subject matter is very distinctive, drawing heavily upon the motivation of gratitude to God for one’s personal existence as a prime incentive for loving God. The series of ten “considerations” he offers for his half-sister to ponder begin with the reflection that of all the other possible human beings God could have created, He chose instead to create her.
Noting the many childless married couples across the ages who have wanted to have children but weren’t given any by God, in contrast to Elizabeth’s parents, whose marriage was fruitful in her birth, Fisher stresses to her that she ought to perceive her very existence as a singular decision of God, a singular gift of God’s favor for which she ought to be deeply grateful.
As an addendum to Fisher’s astute thought here, we should bear in mind that for each and every one of us, our very existence is contingent upon our parents having met and married, upon our parents’ parents having met and married, and so on through the preceding generations; in a word, our very existence was many centuries in the making, all by the loving design of God.
In his second “consideration,” Fisher takes this idea a step further by pointing out that of all the different kinds of creatures God could have made Elizabeth into — an ape, a toad, a tree, etc. — He chose not to make her into some irrational animal or object but rather created her to be a human woman, made in the image and likeness of God, and endowed with a reasoning soul.
In his third “consideration,” Fisher turns Elizabeth’s eyes to her incredible good fortune in having been born into a Catholic family, and thus “within the precincts of Christendom” (ibid., p. 32), receiving the salvific Sacrament of Baptism, in stark contrast to those born into pagan families in pagan lands. This too, Fisher stresses, is a singular gift of God’s loving providence for Elizabeth.
As a fourth consideration, Fisher speaks of God’s mercy in having given Elizabeth time up to this point in her life to repent of her sins and turn back to God through the Sacrament of Penance, rather than taking her from this world at a moment when she was not in a state of grace and would have suffered eternal damnation.
The fifth consideration pertains to Elizabeth’s particular state of life: that God has chosen her from the many other women in the world to become a nun, to become a spouse of Jesus Christ, called to make herself ready in this life through her prayers and sacrifices to enter into His presence and sight in Heaven, where she will be eternally His bride.
Having treated in his first five considerations the many reasons for gratitude to God in His creating each of us as we are and setting us in a particular time and place and state of life, all of His choosing, Fisher now turns to the very object of this love that our gratitude inspires, namely God Himself. Thus, in the sixth consideration, Fisher invites Elizabeth to ponder the infinite worth of Him whom she has been called to love, Jesus Christ, perfect in every way and infinitely deserving of all her love. Addressing the different attributes of God that draw us to love Him, Fisher says of God’s wisdom:
“If ye doubt of His wisdom, behold all this world, and consider how every creature is set with another, and every [one] of them by himself, how the heavens are appareled with stars, the air with fowls, the water with fishes, the earth with herbs, trees and beasts, how the stars be clad with light, the fowls with feathers, the fishes with scales, the beasts with hair, herbs and trees with leaves, and flowers with scent, wherein doth well appear a great and marvelous wisdom of Him that made them” (text in O’Connor, A Spiritual Consolation and Other Treatises, pp. 40-41).
In the seventh consideration, Fisher develops this idea further by observing that there is no one and nothing else as deserving of our love as Christ is, no one and nothing else to compare with what Christ in His love has done and suffered for us.
Christ loves each and every soul as if it were the only soul in the world, Fisher explains in his eighth consideration. His love for each soul is in no way diminished by the vast multiplicity of souls, because “the love of Christ Jesus [is] infinite” (ibid., p. 47). But by “scouring” one’s soul with prayer, penances, and self-denial, one can enlarge his own capacity to receive the love of the Lord. Fisher likens souls to different mirrors of various sizes, some clean, some dingy, all set before an image of Christ. They all receive the same reflection of the entire image of Christ, but the size and quality of that refection depends upon the size and cleanliness of the mirror.
In his ninth consideration, Fisher refutes the false notion that because Christ loves everyone whether they are good or bad, it makes no matter what we do, since Christ will love us just the same. Fisher explains that even though Our Lord will not forsake us, this changes when we gravely sin (commit a mortal sin), because by committing such sins we actually forsake ourselves, destroy ourselves and cast ourselves away from God, and it is only then, by our own doing, that we lose the favor of God.
The tenth and final consideration contrasts the meagerness of our love for Christ with the incomparable love that Christ has for us. It is for the sake of that incomparable love of Christ, Fisher observes, that innumerable martyrs have been willing to lose everything and their very lives, and endure every sort of horrible torture and torment, rather than forsake His love.
St. John Fisher understood his martyrdom on the morning of June 22, 1535 as an act of love. Asking his attendant Richard Wilson to lay out for him that day his best clothes for the journey to the scaffold, he explained:
“Dost thou not mark that this is our marriage day and that it behooveth us therefore to use more cleanliness for solemnity of the marriage?” (Fr. Francis van Otroy, SJ, “Vie du bienheureux martyr Jean Fisher: Cardinal, eveque de Rochester (+1535): Text anglais et traduction latine du XVI siècle” [Part II], Analecta Bollandina, vol. 12, 1893, pp. 190-191). Living in an age when we too may eventually have to suffer much for the profession of our faith, may the love of God give us a courage like that of John Fisher on our own journey to the Marriage Feast of Heaven. St. John Fisher, pray for us.