Q&A: Saint Louis de Montfort writes, “If you humble yourself convinced that you are unworthy to appear before Him or even to approach Him, He condescends to come down to you.” I don’t mean to offend, but that sentence I find silly, at best. Jesus calls us to Himself. He forgives us our sins. We are, through His grace, worthy to approach Him.
Father J. Patrick Gaffney, SMM
Worthy . . .
Keep in mind that holiness both attracts and wards off. Not one or the other. Both. A holy person – I think we can use Pope John Paul II as an example – attracts us and at the same time the spontaneous awe we experience in his presence, holds us back. When in the presence of the Holy Father, we yearn to approach him, but at the same time the awe we experience holds us back. We don’t slap him on the back and invite him out for a couple of beers.
Jesus is THE HOLY ONE of Israel and remains so even if we live in His grace. He attracts us, yet His divine awesomeness makes us say with Peter: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”. No one is more approachable than Jesus, no one is so awesome as Jesus. It is this all-holy grandeur of Jesus that makes us realize our unworthiness. Jesus both attracts and at the same time, causes reverential fear. They are both sides of the same coin.
Attraction and Awesomeness
And Saint Louis de Montfort stresses both. However, in the section of his writings from which you take your quote, he tries to find reasons why, de facto, Jesus has given us Mary as the most direct path to Him. It’s as if Father de Montfort now tells us: “Doesn’t it make sense that Jesus comes to us through Mary and that we go to Him by the same path? After all, how awesome is Jesus, our Mighty God, and how nothing we sinful creatures are!”
It is this AWESOME approachableness that Saint Louis de Montfort is underlining in #143 of the True Devotion. His statement is founded upon the bedrock of our faith: Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity who takes to Himself, in Mary’s womb, a full humanity. He is both God and man. The awesome God becomes our brother, while remaining our awesome God.
To put it another way, the more intimately we approach the All-Holy, the more we experience distance. The splendor of Eternal Light both calls us and at the same time makes us understand – almost painfully at times – how unworthy we truly are.
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Christ: The Last Judgement: Italian Artist and Painter: Michelangelo: 1536-1541
This is a very small portion of a much larger Sistine fresco painted by Michelangelo twenty-five years after painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
