V. Choir23 July
Power of emotional distress and inner sufferingApollinaris
Pain of burial of Jesus by artist Du Jardin from year 1867 in Saint Willibrordus Church on September 4, 2013 in Antwerp, BelgiumPhoto c. by sedmak/depositphotos.com.

“We have received your mercy, O Lord, in the midst of your temple!” When we pray to the great angel, who is our intercessor today,

Saint Cholim,

from the V Choir of Powers, we must keep this psalm before our eyes.

Saint Cholim is a Sealed Power. He is the angel of the power of spiritual need, suffering and pain. He shines out from the earth as if filled with fiery embers. His eyes are wet with tears and his gigantic figure holds a broken sword in his hands.

Our Lord Jesus Christ wrested the sword of righteousness from the Father’s Hand that held it and broke it through the power of His suffering, distress, pain and death on the Cross. Distress of the soul is as much above distress of the body as the soul is above the body… and the Saviour bore the highest degree of spiritual hardship for us on the Mount of Olives and in His abandonment to God on the Cross. In doing so, He embedded all our emotional distress forever into the completed Redemption. And our suffering, our distress and our wounds lie in the Wounds of Our Lord, sheltered in His open Heart like a child in its mother’s womb.

In the power of this Redeemer’s Blood, which cries out daily to Heaven for mercy for us—every day and every hour and in all parts of the world—Saint Cholim is able to break the sword of justice that we call down anew every day through our guilt… our exceeding guilt. What remains is the infinite mercy of God, which bears our need, makes our misery bearable, possible to heal and worthy of eternity.

It is not for nothing that God has entrusted an angel of power with this task. All our pain is sheltered in the pain of the Lord and all our misery is sanctified in Christ’s abandonment to God. It will one day be our crown, our glory.

When this angel is one day unsealed, hardship will likely flood the earth. But for us it will be borne by the angel, who will hurl it with seven-fold force into the mercy of God, so that in the hours of adversity we can bear and overcome what the love of the Triune God calls us to bear with the same seven-fold power of God. We are never forgotten. We never fall from the Eyes of the Father, from the Hands of the Son or from the sacrificial Bowl of the Spirit. We will always be able to pray: “In you, O God, I have trusted; I will never be put to shame.”

Prayer: Holy Angel of all pain and need, Saint Cholim, help us by your power to recognise the love of the Father that strikes us. In the power of the Son, help us to affirm all suffering and offer it to God. In the power of the Spirit, let us see ever more clearly the light that Mary, with Her seven-fold pierced Heart, has carried before us as the purest and holiest “Fiat mihi…” and which also calls us to say “Yes” through Her, our dearest Mother. Amen.