A writer arrived at the monastery to write a book about the Master. "People say you are a genius. Are you?" he asked. "You might say so." said the Master, none too modestly. "And what makes one a genius?" "The ability to recognize." "Recognize what?" "The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being."
Like the Good Thief. The penitent criminal, who became a Saint. He could talk to Jesus heart to heart on the Cross or as the popular Catholic motto goes “heart speaks to heart” (Cor ad cor loquitur).
He called him simply by the name “Jesus.” Everywhere else in the Bible, people address Jesus with a reverential title (e.g. “Lord,” “Master,” “Teacher”), or they modify it like “Jesus of Nazareth,” “Jesus, Master,” “Jesus, Son of David.”
But the Good Thief simply calls him “Jesus.” This is the only time this happens in the entire Bible to teach us that the more helpless and marginalized you feel, the more you need to cry out in simple faith to Jesus.
Mary taught us to even personalize it at Fatima: “O my Jesus” which begins the Rosary decade prayer after the Glory Be.
Don’t let the devil shut you up.
Don’t let others shut you up, like the rulers, the soldiers and the non-repentant criminal.
With anger and sarcasm, they all say, “you don’t deserve to speak to Jesus heart to heart.” But mockery will never end on a good note.
The Good Thief did as Richard Rolle, a mystic of fourteenth century England taught:
If you think the name "Jesus" continually, and hold it firmly, it purges your sin, and kindles your heart;
it clarifies your soul, it removes anger and does away slowness.
It wounds in love and fulfills charity. It chases the devil and puts out dread.
It opens heaven and makes a contemplative man. Have Jesus in mind, for that puts all vices and phantoms out from the lover.
2. “It opens heaven”--
Jesus will speak to your heart, saying “Amen, I say to you...”
This is the only place in the Gospels where the pronoun “you” is used with “Amen.”
Amen means “it is so” or “so it be.”
So, Jesus spoke to the Good criminal’s heart saying “It is so, that you, “today will be with in Paradise.”
Paradise has returned, and it consists in eternal life in and through Jesus.
We may need to close our eyes from time to time to re-establish our attention and awareness on this heart to heart speaking with Jesus.
E.g. Pope Benedict the 16th taught that, God does not look at the words but at the heart of the person praying” (Diadema monachorum [Diadem of the monks], and he also quoted The Little Prince:
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
