Whoever Obeys

Christ did what a dove does in winter when it goes down into the valleys and dwells molting in the hollows of tree trunks; but in the summer the dove returns to the mountains.  So, in the wintertime of unbelief and the frigid weather of demonic persecution, Christ came down into the womb of the lowly Virgin, and dwelt poor and abject in this world as if he were stripped of his feathers.  It is of this turtle-dove that Solomon says in the Canticle:  "The voice of the turtle-dove is heart in our land" (song 2: 12).  The voice of the dove is mourning and plaintive.  Christ came down to mourn and weep - never do we read that he laughed - in order to teach us to mourn and weep.  "The voice of the dove," therefore, "is heard in our land," saying:  "do works of penance" (Mt 3: 2).  But when summer arrived and the cruel persecution began to heat up and the trial of his Passion burst into flames, then he returned to the mountain, i.e., to the Father.  And then he said: "I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me: 'Where are you going'" (Jn 16: 5).  Were we to ask Christ by what way he is going to the Father, he would answer:  "By the way of the cross."  Which is why he said:  "Did not the Christ have to suffer these things, so as to enter his glory?"  (Lk 24: 26).

Christ had two quite different inheritances:  one was from his Mother, and this was struggle and sorrow; the other was from his Father, and this was joy and peace.  From the fact that we are co-heirs with him we must accept the same double inheritance...  In the earth of humanity, founded on the seven pillars of a sevenfold grace, he planted the heavens of the divinity.  Let us, then, take possession of the first inheritance which Christ left us, so that we may deserve to come to the second.

Saint Anthony of Padua

-Saint Anthony (1231) was a renowned Franciscan preacher.