Vultus Christi

My translation of a few pages from the autobiography of Dom Vital Léhodey was so well received that I set about translating a bit more of it. Here it is:

"The Little Jesus also taught me to know myself. I have but too many reasons to make myself little: my past faults, my present miseries, temptations. All these things recall me ceaselessly to humility. My Little Jesus does not permit that I should forget them; He takes care to recall them to me, but bathed, as it were, in His mercy.

Nothing, however, preaches effacement, and nothing makes humility sweet and amiable to me as does my Little Jesus at the age at which I love to contemplate Him. He is infinitely great, infinitely holy as is His Father, by reason of His divine nature, and His Sacred Humanity is adorned with the most marvelous gifts of nature and of grace. But, in order to teach us to make ourselves little, He received the counsel to hide His Divinity and let let appear in His Sacred Humanity only what befits a perfect child of His age. So well does He observe this counsel that, with the exception of His Most Holy Mother and of Saint Joseph, forewarned by revelation, no one knew who He was, so simply did He make Himself the very little One! And I, who amount to so little, should I not be ashamed to make myself great, when He who is so great makes Himself so little? And since I love Him and I want to be loved by Him, is it not in becoming like Him that I will please Him, in shrinking myself, in making nothing of myself, as it were, so as to be His size and so as to be able to walk with Him, hand in hand?

He gives me the same teachings in the Holy Eucharist where He makes Himself so small, to the point of hiding even His Sacred Humanity. But, beneath the veils of the Sacrament, it is always my Child Jesus that I delight in contemplating in His holy littleness.

He shows me His lessons and His examples realized to perfection in His Most Holy Mother. The Mother resembles her Divine Son so perfectly. Their hearts are so united by the bonds of love that they will not to be separated. One cannot better win the Heart of the Son than by loving with Him His Mother who is so loving and so loved. It is by her that He entered into the world; even now one must ask her where He is when He hides Himself. And the role of the Mother, her great joy, is to lead us to her Son, in such wise that in going to Mary, I do not leave her Little Jesus. Nor do I leave Him when He draws me to honour Him in His Passion, so sorrowful for Him and so blessed for us: “tam beatae Passionis”, as we say in the Canon of the Holy Mass.

Since the death of my youngest brother, He draws me to make the Way of the Cross every day, except when it is impossible; and I find there so much comfort. But I must admit that even in contemplating His humiliations as our Victim of Love, and even as I find Him so great in His generous sacrifice, I need not to forget His sweet Childhood and I hasten to return to my Beloved Little Jesus.

He has taught me many other things; because His Heart, as we say in the litanies, contains all the treasures of knowledge and of wisdom. It is the “abyss of all the virtues”. But He was most especially my light and my guide in the Ways of Mental Prayer and in Holy Abandonment."