It is charity which raises our soul towards its destiny, but it is self-centred desire which drags it down to the things towards which, without God’s help, it would not certainly be drawn.
Thursday after Epiphany 4
A reading from The Power and Meaning of Love by Thomas Merton
Those of us today who seek to be Christians, and who have not yet risen to the level of full maturity in Christ, tend unfortunately to take one or other of the debased forms of love for the action of the Spirit of God and the love of Christ. It is this failure to attain to full maturity in love which keeps divisions alive in the world.
There is a ‘romantic’ tendency in some Christians – a tendency which seeks Christ not in love of those flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters with whom we live and work, but in some as yet unrealised ideal of ‘brotherhood’. It is always a romantic evasion to turn from the love of people to the love of love itself: to love people in general more than individual persons, to love ‘brotherhood’ and ‘unity’ more than one’s brothers, sisters, neighbours, and associates.
This corruption of love can be romantic also in its love of God. It is no longer Christ himself that is loved and sought, but perhaps an objectivised ‘experience’ of Christ, a degree of prayer, a mystical state. What is loved then ceases to be Christ, but the subjective reactions which are aroused in me by the supposed presence of Christ in thought or love or prayer.
The romantic tendency leads to a substitution of aestheticism, or false mysticism, or quietism, for genuine faith and love, and what it seeks in the Church is not so much reality as a protection against responsibility. Failing to establish a true dialogue with our brother or sister in Christ, this fallacy thwarts all efforts at real unity and cooperation among Christians.
Friday after Epiphany 4
A Reading from a homily of Gregory the Great
Let us attend to what our Lord requires of his preachers in the gospel, when he sends them out: ‘Go and preach,’ he says, ‘and say that the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Even if the gospel were silent, the world itself would proclaim it. Its chaotic state has become a statement. On all sides we are seeing the disintegration of our society: glory has come to an end. The state of the world is revealing to us the proximity of another kingdom, another kingdom which will overtake it; and the very people who once loved the world are now revolted by it.
The world’s chaos proclaims that we should not love it. If someone’s house became unstable and threatened to collapse, would they not flee? Surely, those who cherished it when it stood would be the first to run away if it began to collapse. If the world is collapsing, and yet we persist in loving it, then we are effectively preferring to be overwhelmed by it than to live in it. When love blinds us to our bondage, the ruin of the world will become inseparable from our own self-destruction.
It is easier for us to distance ourselves from the world around us when we see everything in such chaos. But in our Lord’s day, the situation was very different. The disciples were sent to preach the reality of an unseen kingdom at a time when everybody could see the kingdoms of this world flourishing. It was for this reason that the preachers of his word were given the gift of performing miracles. The power they displayed lent credence to their words. Those who preached something new were performing something new, as the gospel records, when the disciples were told to ‘cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons.’
With the world flourishing and progressing, people living longer and longer, wealth multiplying, who was going to believe in another reality? Who would ever prefer an unseen world to the tangible things in front of them? But as soon as the sick recovered their health, the dead were raised, lepers cleansed, the demoniacs cured of their demonic possession, then who would not believe in the reality of the unseen world? Such amazing miracles were performed in order to draw the human heart to believe in what it cannot see, and to explore that far greater world within us.
Saturday after Epiphany 4
A Reading from The Longer Rules for Monks by Basil the Great
What words can adequately describe the gifts of God? They are so many as to be innumerable, and so wonderful that any one of them demands our total gratitude of praise. I have no time to speak of the richness and diversity of God’s gifts. We will have to pass over in silence the rising of the sun, the circuits of the moon, the variation in air temperature, the patterns of the seasons, the descent of the rain, the gushing of springs, the sea itself, the whole earth and its flora, the life of the oceans, the creatures of the air, the animals in their various species – in fact everything that exists for the service of our life. But there is one gift which no thoughtful person can pass over in silence; and yet to speak of it worthily is impossible.
God made us in his image and likeness; he deemed us worthy of knowledge of himself, equipped us with reason beyond the capacity of other creatures, allowed us to revel in the unimaginable beauty of paradise, and gave us dominion over creation. When we were deceived by the serpent and fell into sin, and through sin into death and all that followed in its wake, God did not abandon us. In the first place, God gave us a law to help us; he ordained angels to guard and care for us. He sent prophets to rebuke vice and to teach us virtue. He frustrated the impact of vice by dire warnings. He stirred up in us a zeal for goodness by his promises, and confronted us with examples of the end result of both virtue and vice in the lives of various individuals. To crown these and his other mercies, God was not estranged from the human race by our continuing disobedience. Indeed, in the goodness of our Master, we have never been neglected: our callous indifference towards our Benefactor for his gifts has never diminished his love for us. On the contrary, our Lord Jesus Christ recalled us from death and restored us to life.
In Christ the generosity of God is resplendent; for as Scripture says: ‘being in the form of God, he did not cling to equality with God, but emptied himself, assuming the form of a servant.’ What is more, he assumed our frailty and bore our infirmities; he was wounded on our behalf that ‘by his wounds we might be healed’. He set us free from the curse, having become a curse on our behalf himself, and underwent the most ignominious death that he might lead us to the life of glory. Not content with restoring us to life when we were dead, he has graced us with the dignity of divinity and prepared for us eternal mansions, the delight of which exceeds all that we can conceive.
‘What then shall we render to the Lord for all his benefits to us?’ God is so good that he asks of us nothing, he is content merely with being loved in return for his gifts. When I consider this I am overcome with awe and fear lest through carelessness or preoccupation with trivia, I should fall away from the love of God and become a reproach to Christ.
The Presentation of Christ in the Temple
A Reading from a sermon of Sophronius of Jerusalem
Let us all hasten to meet Christ, we who honour and venerate the divine mystery we celebrate today. Everyone should be eager to join the procession to share in this meeting. Let no one refuse to carry a light. Our bright shining candles are a sign of the divine splendour of the one who comes to expel the dark shadows of evil and to make the whole universe radiant with the brilliance of his eternal light. Our candles also show how bright our souls should be when we go to meet Christ.
The God-bearer, the most pure Virgin, carried the true Light in her arms and brought him to help those who lay in darkness. In the same way, we too should carry a light for all to see and reflect the radiance of the true light as we hasten to meet him.
Indeed, this is the mystery we celebrate today, that the Light has come and has shone upon a world
