By CARDINAL JOHN J. O'CONNOR

"The Christian God does not consist merely of a God who is the author of mechanical truths...but the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. The God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation; he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy; who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love; who makes them incapable of having any other end but him."

That was part of Blaise Pascal's response to the philosophers and scholars and scientists of his day who believed that their purely naturalistic studies could lead them to discover a God of natural religion in place of the God of Christianity. Pascal himself, of course, was one of the most brilliant scientists of all in "his day," the 17th century, but on the night of Nov. 23, 1654, in reading of the crucifixion of Christ, he had a vision of the crucifixion which changed his life and put his genius at the service of Christianity, while continuing his scientific pursuits. He called that night, the "night of Fire."

"If we submit everything to reason," Pascal wrote in his "Pensees," "our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural, (but) if we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous...submission and the use of reason: that is what makes true Christianity."

Such are among the many citations reprinted in an extraordinary new book, "Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart," by historian Marvin R. O'Connell. It is in a series called "Library of Religious Biography," published by Erdmans, and I have been reading, or better, meditating on it in preparation for Holy Week and Easter. I am grateful for it.

Moving, comforting, thought provoking, gentle, sentimental, even dramatic, as so many of our feasts are, or utterly crucial to our faith, as the Incarnation and Christmas, Holy Week is the great summation, Easter the great culmination of everything that Catholic and many other Christians live for, sacrifice for, and, through the centuries and still today, die for.

"...If Christ has not been raised from death, then we have nothing to preach and you have nothing to believe," St. Paul told the people of Corinth. I will be preaching my heart out in St. Patrick's Cathedral all through Holy Week almost 20 centuries later, and St. Paul's words continue to prevail. If Christ has not risen, I have nothing to preach. My preaching and my life, as would be true of the thousands of people who will come to the cathedral, would become Macbeth's "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

But St. Paul goes even further. He doesn't speak only of Christ, but of us who are Christ's Body still on earth, and lays out his argument to include us and to give us enormous hope.

"(But) if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is a delusion and you are still lost in your sins. It would also mean that the believers in Christ who have died are lost. If our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world.

"But the truth is that Christ has been raised from death, as the guarantee that those who sleep in death will also be raised. For just as death came by means of a man, in the same way the rising from death comes by means of a man. For just as all people die because of their union with Adam, in the same way all will be raised to life because of their union with Christ." [1 Cor. 15 :12-22]

These are the convictions, the beliefs, the hopes that will permeate, soak through our celebration of Palm Sunday as we go with Christ in his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, exalted by those who had seen him raise Lazarus from the dead, or had heard the news first hand. At our Chrism Mass on Tuesday, we will bless the holy oils, some used at our entrance into the Body of Christ at baptism, some as we enter into his eternal glory while departing this world.

On Holy Thursday, the words, "This is my body...This is my blood," we know are far more than a symbolic remembrance of his words on the night before he died. We know they are words of the sacrifice and the Resurrection that take place in every Mass until the end of time. We are there at the Last Supper because the Resurrection has extended it through all the centuries.

Without the Resurrection, Christ's words to his new, apostolic priests, "As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me," would have been (dare we risk what some might think blasphemous), only empty chatter, a show of bravado by a man about to be executed.

Then Good Friday, the Three Hours Agony, the Communion Service, where even while in memory he is still in the tomb, we receive him in his Eucharistic form, risen from the dead even before Easter Sunday. It is as though we were among those in "Limbo," his own foster father Joseph, for example, to whom he appeared while his body was, indeed, still in the tomb.

Good Friday is, for me, the day of the wanderer, the confused, the weary, the hungry, the "lost," the wretched, the sinner who thinks no other sinner equal in degradation. They come for mercy, and "Betwixt the stirrup and the ground is mercy sought and mercy found."

Good Friday is, as well, for the unwavering faithful, who have ever stood and want to stand today with Mary and the few others beneath the cross who refuse to leave him, though the whole world deride them.

What a joy the Easter Vigil will be, with those who were either never gifted with baptism or having been once introduced into Christ's Body have for whatever reason drifted away or cut themselves off. At the Easter Vigil all will come home.

What a week this will be, this week of intimacy with the suffering, joyful Jesus. Pascal reminds us, as well, "Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we can not know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves." What a wondrous week it can be for rediscovering ourselves through this intimacy with Christ. Truly a Holy Week.

And what of Easter Sunday and our both seeing and receiving the risen Christ of the Eucharist? What tremendous, mind-boggling faith is ours. It is this gift of faith of which Pascal speaks so poignantly in his best remembered words, issued as a warning to those who idolize reason alone: "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing...It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason."