Against Depression

Moses the archetype, made a tabernacle at the command and the specifications of the Lord’s majesty, where God gave him commandments for the people and conversed with him as a friend. This tent was like a very large temple with purple walls, stretched widely over golden columns and posts. The world had seen nothing more beautiful, nothing more laboriously made, nothing more artful until that time. I do not think that even today any king could match this dignified structure. As the sky is decorated with stars, the ground with flowers, the world with various kinds of ornaments, thus this mobile palace shone with every imaginable splendor. The entire structure consisted of the whitest linen, and was adorned with twicetinted purple cloth and golden fabric. Superb painting of every color and every shape added to the decoration. All the lands and all the seas and all the beauty of the world – you would have thought that it had all been gathered there. And the golden cheer of the sun would shine its rays through this most translucent structure, like a temple of solid glass in every color, and with its light would beautify the abundant gold and the manifold painted figures, and reflect from the light-flooded roof as if from a second sky, and it would paint the inside of the entire tabernacle and all the sacred utensils golden. So much dignity and so much beauty surely prefigured the majesty of the Church’s Holy Sacraments. But it also afforded much solace at that time to the Hebrew people in the desert, and lightened the labors and the tedium of their long solitude. They were blessed with a column of light from the sky, and with artful beauty from the floor of the desert.

Thus you, too, my sweet child, if the power of your mind has not yet allowed you to enter the land of the living; if you sometimes forget the homeland that you are seeking and are depressed by your solitude, your imprisonment and your enclosure; build yourself a column of faith and a tent of hope, and as in a tabernacle painted in every color rejoice in the law of the Lord, practicing and meditating in it day and night, with the manifold decorations of the examples of the saints.