O Root

O ROOT OF JESSE, standard raised for all peoples, kings will stand dumb in your presence, the pagan world will pay you homage, come! Deliver us! Delay no longer!
 
 
St. Gertrude sings of flower and fruit more than root, but she surely knows from whom the flower and fruit spring.  As she states, “Ah my Jesus, fruit and flower of a virgin’s purity” and again, “O Thou exquisite flower sprung of the Virgin Mary!”  This O antiphon is focused on the humanity of Jesus in his human roots and flowering, and Gertrude, too, in her devotion to Christ’s humanity as revealed in his Sacred Heart, displays a similar focus.  It is in the heart of Jesus that “pietas” or tender mercy dwells, and it is through his heart that her own heart is rooted and grows.

As Jesus shared with her:
“Here I hold out my heart, sweetest instrument of the ever-worshipful Trinity, before the eyes of your mind.  You will entrust to it all that you cannot sufficiently complete by yourself, to be completed in trust on your behalf.  And thus all will appear before my eyes perfect in every way…It is beyond doubt that my divine Heart recognizes human frailty and instability, and earnestly hopes, ever waiting with inestimable desire, that you, if not by words at least by a gesture, may entrust to it the task of compensating for you and completing what you cannot complete on your own.”

Let us trust with Gertrude that his power is at its best in weakness, for Jesus, who rooted himself in the weakness and poverty of our humanity, knows that the way up is down and that completion and transformation are not the work of self but rather of total dependence on the powerful mercy of God.