01_1

THE

WAY • JA .NU~RY i96.~

Modern Spirituality M. C. D ' A R C Y

The Acceptable T ime P A U L C R A N E

W A L T E R A B B O T T

J . P H I L I P G L E E S O N

T O W A R D S T H E R E S U R R E C T I O N

I n t o the Deser t J O H N L. M c K E N Z I E

Spiritual Stamina J A M E S W A L S H "

Lenten Penance W I L L I A M Y E O M A N S

From Death to Life D O N A L O ' S U L L I V A N

VOL. I No. P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E M O N T H

31 F A R M S T R E E T L O N D O N W x

C O V E R S Y M B O L S

Christ is Alpha and Omega (Apoc 1,8), ' the beginning and the end'. The whole of creation finds in Him its coherence, for He is the keystone of the whole structure (Eph 2,21-22) ; as He is also the holder of ' the Key of David' (Apoc 3,7).

God revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush (Exod 3,2), a fore- shadowing of the supreme revelation in Christ the light of the world (Jn 8,12) and the lamp of the New Jerusalem (Apoc 21,23).

Christ is the star that rose out of Jacob (Num 24,17), ' the root and stock of David, the bright and morning star' (Apoc 22,16), a symbol expressing power and command. Christ reigns in virtue of His glorious resurrection in which we see the cross transfigured. (cf Exultet).

The raising of Christ on the cross was prefigured when Moses raised the brazen serpent in the desert (Num 21,8-9; Jn 3,I4).

The brazen serpent saved those who gazed on it. Christ is our salvation, in His name we are saved (Acts 4,I~). Jesus Christ God's Son Saviour, the iniflal letters of these words in Greek speel out ichthus - fish. The fish became a symbol of Christ, and the early Christians sometimes called themselves 'the little fishes of Christ' (Tertullian, de Baptismo ch I, PL I, 1 I98 A).

THE WAY A Q U A R T E R L Y R E V I E W OF C H R I S T I A N S P I R I T U A L I T Y

EDITED BY JAMES WALSH~ s.j., WILLIAM YEOMANS, S.J . , PHILIP CARAMAN, s.j. EDITORIAL ADVISERS :

DONAL O'SULLIVAN, s.~. (Ireland); JOHN MeKENZIE, s.L ttERBERT MUSURILLO, sz. (U.S.A.); NEIL McKENTY , st., ELMER O'BRIEN sz. (Canada) ; PETER LITTLE, st . (Australia).

C O N T E N T S

J A N U A R T I96z

-Modern Spirituality

The Acceptable Time

T O W A R D S T H E

Into the Desert Spiritual Stamina Lenten Penance . From Death to Life

Page M. O. D ~ A R C Y I

P A u L C R A N E 9 W A L T E R A B B O T T 14 J , P H I L I P O L E E S O N 21

R E S U R R E C T I O N

J O H N L . M c K E N Z I E 27 J A M E S W A L S H 4 0

WILLIAM YEOMANS 49 D O N A L O ' S U L L I V A N 60

L E C T I O D I V I N A

Holy Scripture: The Poor of God Texts:. Gregory of Palamas, Ignatius

Loyola, Bernard, Bede

Meditation: The temptations of Christ

Spiritual Vocabulary

Recommended Reading

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72 76

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ED I T O R I A L

C HRIST our Lord is the only Way. 'Spiritual Life', 'Spiritual- ity' are meaningless terms if they do not mean conscious participation in the life of Christ and an intimate sharing in the mystery of His incarnation, death and resurrection.

But the Church, because she is human, can only approximate, in any one age and any one moment, to the fullness of the life of Christ. So there can be, and indeed there must be, many expressions of the one Christ in His body the Church. Here is the only justifi- cation for various 'schools' of spirituality. And even so, each school must depend on and draw inspiration from the rest. Each must strive to express, in the light of what it has received, the unity of the Church's spiritual doctrine in any given moment of time.

The Church is fashioned by Christ to be the instrument of that Divine Providence which 'reaches from end to end ~ mightily, ordering all things sweetly'. She interprets the present in the fight of all that Christ 'who is the same yesterday, today and forever' has entrusted to her. She brings the sum-total of her 2000 years of experience of Chr!st to bear on the present. She is always adapting, re-formulating, taking fresh cognizance of her spouse and his message. The pattern of her spiritual teaching is being remoulded constantly to fit the problems of the time.

As Fr. D'Arcy indicates in his introductory article to this first issue, the true current of the Church's spirituality in our generation is reflected in the new impetus given to the study of the Bible and the Fathers, in the re-patterning of the liturgy and in the new pastoral emphasis on the sacramental life of the Mystical Body.

Though we hope that THE WAY will be of service to the increasing numbers of those who are called to the Contemplative Life, we expect that the majority of our readers will be engaged in the active apostolate. The Church trains her apostles by making Contempla- tives of them through her liturgy and lectio divina. They are to hand on to others the fruits of their own participation in the riches of Christ.

The three articles which follow Fr. D'Arcy's, under the general title of The Acceptable Time, are, we believe, accurate assessments of the spiritual needs of our world and of the way in which these needs are to be fulfilled. The Church is calling for apostles who are, to use a phrase which describes the Ignafialt ideal, Contemplatives in action.

E D I T O R I A L

In his Rules for thinking with the Church, St. Ignatius begins by saying that 'we must keep our minds and hearts ready to obey promptly, at every turn, the true bride of Christ our Lord, our Holy Mother the Hierarchical Church'. The task, then, which we set ourselves, in offering this new Review of Spirituality to English- speaking Catholics, is to understand and to interpret as faithfully as possible the Church's spiritual message to her children at the present moment. We hope that T ~ WAY will help its readers to think, will and live with Christ in His Church today; to recognise Him and to give Him to each other in the way in which the Church is now presenting Him to us.

M O D E R N S P I R I T U A L I T Y By M. C. D ' A R C Y

F Ew, whose memories can go back to the nineteenth century, would deny that a change in the form of ascetic and spiritual direction has taken place within their own lifetime. This change has been attributed by some to the Decree of St.

Pins X on Frequent Communion. The effects of frequent and daily communion have been remarkable even to human sight, but the Decree was more a signal than a cause, an encouragement to already existing desires. Long before i9o 5 writers like Scheeben or the Ven. Francis Libermann, for example, were teaching what would be considered characteristic of the present spirit of the Church. One contributing cause has been suggested, namely, the dying down of the long dispute on the nature of actual grace. There is some truth here because the seminaries and religious houses of theology teach the priests, whose sermons and direction are the word of God for the faithful. Now the controversy on actual grace took up so much of the time meant to be given to grace in class, that the nature of sanctifying grace and the supernatural life was hurried through. In 1900 a student had learnt hardly anything of this supernatural life. His first sermon as a priest would be invariably on loving God. By contrast the first sermon now will be usually on sanctifying grace or the mystical body.

For distant causes we have to go back to the post-Reformation policy of the Church. That was determined by the successes of heretics and the general laxity of the clergy and the people. In Rome itself statues and busts of gods and goddesses stood side by side with saints. Paganism was rife amongst the rich, and the people starved of Catholic teaching listened with open ears to new doctrines. The Council of Trent held the pass and preserved the faith, and many of its laws were concerned with the restoration of discipline, self- denial and unworldliness. The challenge of the Protestant heresies, also, had to be met. Great individuals rose to carry out the desires of the Church. The list of saints is astonishing, and a number of them founded religious orders or congregations given over to the practice of the counsels of the Gospel and the features of spirituality emphasised by the Council. The stress naturally was on individual perfection. St. Ignatius of Loyola, for instance, meant his famous

2 M O D E R N S P I R I T U A L I T Y

Exercises to be done by an individual for thirty days, and the exercitant was led to choose the ideal of the imitation of Christ and the following of Him in poverty and humility. This was their first purpose, but so permanently successful were they that in time they became a favourite method of prayer and asceticism, a universally recognised clear way of attaining Christian perfection for individuals and groups.

Other saints of the Counter-Reformation went afield teaching the precepts and counsels with their own special genius. But like Ignatius they inculcated individual asceticism and self-sacrifice. Even the 'douce' St. Francis of Sales was unsparing in tile severity of his rules for his foundation, the Order of Visitation. Bremond in his Histoire brings out vividly the characters in the great religious revival stretching through th~ seventeenth century. He himself was biased in favour of the mystics and those who leaned to passive prayer. This mystical movement was again individual and it had a mysterious rapid rise and fall. Within its lifetime it became suspect to many religious authorities owing to the excesses of some supposed mystics, like Mme Guyon. Novices in religious orders or seminaries were discouraged from reading its authors because the habit of passivity was thought to interfere with the active practice of the hard virtues. Even in 18oo the reading of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross was considered dangerous. A well-known book of the time, The Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues by Alphonsus Rodriguez, which continued to be popular reading as late as the first world war, upheld the active life of asceticism, as if the passive life were a treacherous bog. He could claim, of course, that in St. Ignatius true mysticism was joined to these virtues and that his ideal was contemplation in action. No doubt, as so often happens in the history of the Catholic Church, a view espoused by heretics drove Catholic teachers to show its error by exclusive attention to and defence of its opposite.

The nineteenth century carried on the traditions of the Counter- Reformation and brought out some of its less lovely traits. Con- troversy was once more sharp, and owing to the sufferings of the Church under the Absolute Monarchs and the French Revolution, theology h a d been left high and dry. It was not giving life and content to practice. As a consequence spirituality was tinged with Jansenism. Moreover the bourgeois society of England, as can be seen in the novels of Dickens, had become strict and puritanical, even sanctimonious. The novels of deans and high-minded women

M O D E R N S P I R I T U A L I T Y

reveal a religion in which joy is almost a sin, and children were taught to pray to a God who would punish them for the least failing. Many religious men and women, Catholic as well as Pro- testant, were strong Christians, athletes for God. Catholics had their rule of life; they practised mortification, followed precise methods of prayer, reading their pet prayers even at Mass. They went rarely to communion, and had their own individual devotions and sturdy piety. They came more and more to centre their spiritual life round Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and meditated upon the Passion.

I have said that within the lifetime of the old a noticeable change has occurred. This change is real but it must not be exaggerated. The nineteenth century was in many ways vigorous, and I have already mentioned writers who appeal to us now, Scheeben who died in 1888 and the Ven. Francis Libermann in 1852. There are others, men of genius like Newman, Rosmini, the Abb6 Huvelin and Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, who cannot be placed in any category. There also have always been individuals who sing outside choruses and may be more akin in spirit to a St. Augustine or Chrysostom than to a Faber or Gignac. We must never forget that the Spirit blows where It will and that within orthodoxy there are so many treasures that the householder can pick and choose.

The change is marked in philosophy by an attempt to loosen up the stiffpropositions of late Scholasticism, and to bring the will and intellect together and to show how love assists knowledge. Thereby light was cast upon that mutual love of persons which the mystery of the Holy Trinity suggests. In devotion the Blessed Sacrament is attached more closely to the Eucharist, and Communion is seen to be the culmination of the Eucharistic sacrifice, which in turn shines out as the corporate act of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. In literature the strong, but somewhat heavy, spirituality of the Benedictine Archbishop Ullathorne is exchanged for the Pauline views of Abbot Marmion.

Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson in his spiritual writings on the Church anticipated much that was to come. After him book upon book appeared dwelling on the supernatural life and sanctifying grace (Fr. Martindale's pamphlet on the Supernatural Life had and still has an immense sale), on incorporation and inhabitation, on the need of corporate prayer and corporate sacrifice, on the Mystical Body. The accompanying interest in the liturgical movement began with the dialogue Masses and the use of the vernacular. New translations of the Missal were made and the music purified.


This spirituality with a new look has many aspects. Perhaps the simplest way to understand its attraction and power is by fixing attention on the Eucharistic liturgy. The image of the Crucifix had made all the faithful understand one side of the Mass, that is, the suffering and death of Our Lord for man. The Resurrection, however, and the risen life of Our Lord were less well appreciated. The Catholic body learnt from books of instruction and apologetics that the point of the Resurrection consisted in its decisive evidence for the divinity of Christ. That once established, prayers and devotions remained fixed on the public life and passion of Christ. It was kept out of sight that the Victim in the Mass is the glorious Victim, Christ risen from the dead, the Lord and the Giver of supernatural life. The holocaust of the Mass should be celebrated with nuptial songs, for it is a thanksgiving act, the corporate act of the members of Christ, acting in the name and power of their Head. They re-present the one work of our Redemption in every land and at every moment of time until the consummation of all things, when Christ having formed the perfect society gives back to the Father the spoils of His victory and He 'shall be all in all'.

The Mass is now seen to be the act of the redeemed, of those whose life is 'hid in Christ'. At the Reformation reformers had charged Catholics with blasphemy in multiplying in the Mass the one sacrifice of Calvary. This would be fair, if it were not the very pith of the Revelation by God that love would so unite human beings to the Godhead in Christ, that as the Son is in the Father, so, as St. John wrote, we are in Him. This truth runs through the Mass. The congregation and the Church are the plebs tua sancta, those, who remembering Christ's 'blessed passion, resurrection from the dead and glorious ascension', ask that their gift may be carried by the angel to the altar on high, and thereby they may be allowed to enjoy 'every grace and heavenly blessing'. The Mass reaches its climax in the cry of assurance and exaltation, ' through Him, and with Him, and in Him be honour and glory' to the Father. The full teaching of St. Paul and St. Peter and St. John is here epitomised in the sacrificial drama of the Mass. All those in grace have been buried with Christ in baptism so as to walk in new life - the risen life of Christ. They are 'the vine-branches of the Vine'; their conduct should be marked by a serenity and sancta laetitia, a holy joy, because they are never alone and are free from despondency.

In such a version of the good news of Christ it is easy to see the lines which converge towards Christian perfection. There are, also

MODERN SPIRITUALITY

priorities - for the virtues which spring from the essence of the teaching come first. These virtues are faith, hope and charity, the theological virtues. They are the first steps in the new life. Faith, as St. Paul constantly repeats, is the condition of all the rest of our spiritual life. We see with the eyes of Christ the truth of His Reve- lation, and being now in Him our faith is 'the substance of things hoped for and the evidence o f things unseen'. We possess, that is, eternal life in Christ already, though we cannot experience it. Hope is like the other side of the coin, for now that God has given us a share in His divine life and Christ is present in us we have the confidence that God will fulfil His promises, and as 'He that is in us is stronger' than those in the world who are matched against us, we rely upon God's infinite power to defeat the devil and all who follow him - and this is hope. Lastly, charity is the very life of Christ, His body and blood which courses in us. Because of His love we are a new family, with a blood tie far closer than that of any human relationship. The name of charity has come down in the world, so that some writers have selected the word Agape to do better justice to the unique meaning and value of Christ's gift. So many think of charity as another word for almsgiving or kindness. No reference is made to the motive even in such noble acts as forgiving enemies or loving a neighbour as oneself. That neighbour is to us Christ. 'What you do to others you do to Me', for Christ 'plays in ten thousand faces'.

The supernatural life has to do with a body, the extension of Christ down time, so that no age or place will be without His presence. This doctrine of the Body corrects an excessive individualism, to which everyone is tempted. The holiness of the nineteenth century was supported by the Church and the sacraments. The individual, however, was not as conscious as he ought to be of this coincidence of his individual life with that of the whole fellowship of the faithful. Nowadays, however, it is not so difficult to appro- priate into one's thinking this idea of a society. We are surrounded by States which have been forced to take more and more control of the lives of their citizens. The problem throughout the world is of management with liberty, and it looks as if the benefits provided by the State must in a secular civilisation increasingly weaken

• freedom and personal initiative. Already in the Soviet system men and women have ceased to be treated as persons. In such a situation the Mystical Body shines out the mo~e clearly as the only example of Head and members existing in a loving union, where life and

6 M O D E R N S P I R I T U A L I T Y

liberty are given more abundantly to each single person, closely bound as he is with every other person.

Within this same society with its foundations resting on faith and hope and the charity of Christ, the function of prayer and the purpose of self-denial are made evident. Prayer keeps the mind attached to the truth of Christ's love, and self-denial serves to overcome our inward-looking wills. I f practised with wisdom, we come near to the lovely virtue of humility. We have decreased that He may increase in us. He works through the personal, unique dispositions which we have to add to the many-coloured perfections of the Kingdom of God. The Church after the Reformation, as it was forced to struggle for existence, did not insist so much on the Chris- tian taking his part in public life and sanctifying the secular. Long before, however, after the barbarian invasions, the Christian had to salvage what was left of the Roman culture and out of the chaos make a new culture formed from the beauty of Christ and His Mother. The summit reached by these efforts is to be found in Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and Botticelli's Nativity. They were the apprentices of the saints, who gave them the tools and the incentives. These saints themselves and the Church hardly took in what they were doing. They were like a mother who dreaming on other things strokes her child with love. The image is sufficiently exact because the first consuming love of a Christian is for ultimate union with Christ in glory. It may be as an afterthought that he finds temporal things can be so precious. In this care for and belief in time and nature Christianity differs from the Eastern religions. To the latter the temporal is an illusion or a misery, whereas the Church has ever a loving regard for the temporal. This is its Sparta, this will it adorn, for God the Son did not disdain the finite. He became flesh, and how could He not love the flesh and encourage the love for His Mother, seeing that He had been formed in her womb, and was born a child of her flesh alone and the Holy Spirit?

The balance between love of life and self-denial is always difficult as, our nature being what it is, we can always find excuses, justify indulgence and half-hoodwink ourselves until we' become shams. This is the problem of the individual, but the Incarnation and Redemption do give us a vision of man as man keeping his troth with Christ and reaching the end of life bearing many she~ves. I t h~s always been a help if the Cross and Resurrection are kept in their indissoluble unity, or at least if the Cross be made to stand for both the Passion and the Resurrection. At certain periods, especially of


stress, the figure of the Suffering Christ has been so rich in consolation that the suppliant has stopped there. Nevertheless, the Cross is not a sign of failure or gloom. It represents life as well as death. Dux vitae mortuus, regnat virus. It is for this reason that St. Peter and St. Paul both take for granted the already exisdng blessed state of thebaptised.

That we should bring back sheaves and transfigure ourselves and the little world given to our operations can be well seen in terms of Inhabitation and Incorporation. Inhabitation tells us that we have been reborn in Christ and wedded to the Godhead through the action and indwelling of the Holy spirit. Incorporation, on the other hand, is the action of Christ extending His own humanity so that all that is human and finite save sin will increase His stature to the plenitude of which St. Paul writes. All human experience, therefore, in some mysterious way, every good deed, thought and intention, every moment that is touched with beauty or goodness, the finite bitter-sweet experiences which live on in memory, are to be rescued from oblivion and find a place in the full life of Christ with His Father in His new body. St. Paul intimates that Christ's Headship extends to all creation, and all the variety of nature is to be influenced by Him as iron filings round a magnet. This is what is meant by the 'resuming' of all things in Christ in the second advent, when there will be 'a new heaven and a new earth'. It has been God's good pleasure ' through Him to win back all things, whether on ear th or in heaven into union with H i m s e l f . . . All things have been made subject to H i m . . . and when that subjection is complete, then the Son Himself will become subject to the power which made all things His subjects, so that God may be all in all'.

Such a wide panorama is provided by the theology of sanctifying grace that it may tend to beguile the mind. Some, too, may fear lest those who are slow of understanding or of a practical turn may be left outside, a kind ofprofanum vulgus in contrast with the initiates or an dlite. Not everyone shares the aesthetic enjoyment which goes with a pure and Venerable service of God devoid of any appeal to the excitements on which the majority of people live nowadays. The radio fan, the jazz lover will have to accustom himself to a very different k ind of emotion in church. As it is, those whose tastes seem little changed by their education, and all those who are without an ear for music or eye for colours and form, may find it hard to lift up their hearts to God in the austere liturgy and amid droning sounds. They have, like many a saintly soul, reached

8 MODERN SPIRITUALITY

spiritual joys by Benedictions, rosaries and the Stations of the Cross. Their spiritual pleasure is in holy medals and pictures and prayer- books. There are innumerable people of this sort, and to ask them to change would be as foolish as to ask public libraries to remove thrillers and westerns. Even priests feel the need of a sports magazine or detective story.

Only fanatics will demand complete uniformity, and the Church stands for liberty of spirit among the sons of God. I f the fanatic be as scornful of old practices as the true artist of the shop products which adorn so many churches and chapels, the old conservative can retort that this exclusive love for what is liturgical is a monomania, a pleasure of the mind or taste, but of insufficient help to the will. Life is a 'Spiritual Combat ' with eternal life hanging every moment on our decisions. There is too close a connection for safety between the modern taste and the reluctance to think or preach of the last things or enjoin mortifications. Those who are in peace should try to share the life of the Catholics behind the Iron Curtain and persecuted missionaries. For this reason those Exercises which have been disdained as 'spiritual athleticism' should not be dropped, and if private mortification be lessened, that self-sacrifice, which comes from identifying ourselves with the suffering members of the Mystical Body and with all the poor and stricken, should take its place. Always have we to love our neighbours as ourselves, and now with the new realisation of our membership with Christ in one body, the happy fusion between past individual heroism and present corporate life can be made. There is one place whence all spirituality draws its life and forms of inspiration, and that is the altar of God. The Mass is the furnace of divine love and it is the maker of sanctity. There is the memorial of what God suffered for love and there too is the new covenant with man, the covenant which gives, as St. John says, 'the power to those who believe to be sons of God'. The Mass, too, tells us that we are not alone. In it the priest speaks in the name of the Church, and the living and the dead are brought round the altar with the Mother of God and the multitude of saints who cry Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth. The ladder is fixed between heaven and earth, and all the means are there with Christ upon the altar to rise to that union of holiness with Him on earth, which anticipates the everlasting union with Him and His members in eternity.

T H E A C C E P T A B L E T I M E

Great Britain By PAUL CRANE

F o u r years ago, during the reign of Pope Plus XlI, the American Institute of Management gave the Catholic Church an extremely high efficiency rating. It scored 8,800 points out of a possible IO,OOO. Recently, a new audit has

been held and the results are even better. Under Pope John, the Church has attained an even higher pitch of efficiency. Her 'management excellence' has been raised by 21 o points to a total of 9,01 o, a sum equalled or bettered only by such organisafions as Standard Oil of California, General Motors and the Eastman Kodak Com- pany. On the surface, it would seem that the Church has little to worry about. But it is said that statistics often conceal more than they reveal. This would appear to be a case in point.

One turns back to an early Church whose efficiency modern analysis would have classified as extremely low. Yet, its missionary effort swept the known world. Today, by comparison, the positive effort is not so easily discernible. The impression is often of a Church confined to the defensive, its business often that of protecting its members from the secularism of modern surroundings. The contrast with early days is startling. To restore the balance, something more would seem to be required than an efficiency radng equal to that of the Standard Oil Company of California.

A clue is provided by a further comparison between the modern and the primitive Church. The early Christians saw their Faith as something that gave them life. For them it was a deliverance from the slavery of paganism into the freedom of the sons of God. They knew that, when they emerged from their baptismal dipping, grace gave them the key to life. Behind them was not merely the slavery, but the frustration of paganism. Ahead lay fullness of living, understood by them rightly as fulfilment in Christ. For the first Christians, their Faith was much more than a list of observances. It was abundance of life in Christ, something men lived by, enriching their days, the key to their happiness here on this earth. Christianity for the first Christians meant tr iumphant fulfilment, both for themselves

10 THE ACGEPTABLE T I M E

and, through them, for their world. By bringing them to share life with Christ, baptism made each a Christopher, a bearer of Christ to those about him. It could not be otherwise, for the gladness of life in Christ was not something a man could keep to himself. It flowed out effortlessly to others through the full living of a Christian life. The secret of the missionary effort of the early Church lay there. Men saw their Faith as something to be lived and transmitted, thereby, to others.

Today, by contrast, it is not so. For most Catholics in this country the Faith is seen as a discipline to which one must be loyal, a list of observances to which men must remain faithful. It is rarely related to life because seldom understood as fulfilment in Christ. Yet, fulfilment is what men want. They are not taught, however, to find it in their faith. The picture that emerges is the familiar one of a younger generation holding on out of loyality to a code of observance, which they have come to identify with their Faith and which they see as related in no real way to the business of life itself. Under the circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that many lapse, and that, of those who remain loyal, far too many are little more than formalists in the practice of their religion. The result is not merely an absence of missionary effort in the sense already described, a reduction, to the point where it is almost negligible, of Catholic impact on the society of contemporary Britain. The trouble goes deeper. The picture is of many in whose persons the Faith is being overcome by the world. They do not see the happiness they want in terms of their religion. It follows that they look for it elsewhere, in terms of the materialism of the world around them. One is treated to another disturbing picture: of Catholics, in search of happiness, clutching at the fag-ends of the secularist happiness of their neo- pagan friends. Never having been taught to find their happiness in the riches of their Faith, their problem becomes that of discover- ing how closely they can follow the way of materialism without provoking a clash with the code of observance which is all that their religion means to them. One thinks of the young man who asks how far he can go with a girl, or the couple who seek advice on the best means of avoiding children without the use of contraceptives. The Faith for these does not spell fulfilment. It is rather, a deprivation, tolerated as an insurance policy, which sets them the problem of extracting from life the best possible time that is compatible with what they think of as the repressive and negative nature of the injunctions of their religion. It is rarely seen as related to life.

THE ACCEPTABLE TIME II

Rather is life regarded as something to be lived despite their religion. For the many young Catholics today, happiness on this earth is forbidden fruit, something to be plucked surreptitiously from pagan surroundings. Their regret is that they cannot have more of it. Very often, when the desire to do so becomes over- powering, they give way; for there are limits to a man's staying power when this is based on blind loyalty alone. Of those who give way and fall down, a fair number fail to get up. Why should they come back to the deprivations of a code whose relevance to life they fail to understand? That is their position, and they will not be scared out of it by the threat of hell-fire. Young human nature takes the short view as a rule: death seems far away at twenty-five. There will be plenty of time for reconciliation. Meanwhile, there is life. So the young who have lapsed head cheerfully and tragically for what must bring them, i n fact, only further frustration.

Above, we have given a thumb-nail sketch of what we believe to be the story of many teenage Catholics in Britain today. From it, we conclude that the neo-pagans have stolen our thunder. The appeal of early Christianity to their ancestors was that they should forsake the frustration of pagan living and find fulfilment as sons of God. The appeal of modern paganism to the contemporary Chris- tian is that he should forsake the frustration of something pictured as an outworn code of observance and find fulfilment in uninhibited living. In either case, the appeal, understandably, is to happiness in terms of fulfilment. Tragically, today, it is identified with a neo- pagan existence. The task of the Church stands defined as a re- presentation of the Faith with a view to the complete reversal of this position. The rising generation of young Catholics must be shown its religion in terms of life. Nothing less than this will do. It is no longer inclined to be loyal to a system that it does not understand. It is not necessarily to its discredit that it should be so. At the back of its queryings is a demand that it should be treated as adult, shown life's key in terms of the richness that is Christ. The demand is much more to its credit.

We are brought to the bright side of the story, which is made manifest, by implication, in the questions put by many concerning their Faith. What they are asking for is that depth should be given to their understanding of religion. The Holy Spirit is at work here; in the boys and girls of the Young Christian Workers and Students and Sodality Groups who strike one, sometimes so startlingly, as feeling their way towards Christ as the very core of their lives. One

12 THE ACCEPTABLE TIME

thinks, too, of the priests connected with these movements. They are men acquainted with the meaning of grace and the work it is meant to do, sensibly inclined to allow grace to do its work in the soul of the layman, as distinct from an older fashion which con- centrated on pumping doctrine ruthlessly into his head. One notes, on the part of a growing number of clergy and religious, an increasing uncertainty as to the efficacy today of well-tried methods of former times, a willingness to think seriously of liturgical pos- sibilities in the parish and to revise their approach to the task of religious teaching in the schoolroom. There is a healthy and growing discontent with the working of the older Catholic lay organisations. From the ranks of these, many of the best of the young laity are beginning to dribble away. They are recognised increasingly as no longer suited to present needs. The best of the young men and women are looking for depth in their lives. They see little chance of securing it from the older lay associations within the Church with their accent on organised activity and their domination, as a rule, by the members of a previous generation who do not understand them and their ways; who fail to recognise behind the posturings of their juniors a cry for fully dimensioned living, which can be satisfied only by life in Christ. There can be a terrible conceit behind the attitude of the old when confronted with the new ways of the young. The damage which can flow from their blindness is at times tragic beyond measure.

Understandably enough, the points at which the Church is trying to make a start with its task of re-presenting the Faith to a rising generation, are those which are, as a rule, most resistant to change. The school very often is a closed corporation', consecrated to outworn methods of religious teaching, resentful of criticism because it hears, as a rule, only that which is outrageous, throwing up tradition as a smoke-screen to cover up a multitude of defects which it is vaguely conscious of, but which it rarely has the courage to admit to itself. Mr. Chips may be a quaint institution; he is not prevented, thereby, from being a fearful old stick-in-the-mud. Our point is that few Catholic schools, in all probability, are prepared to undertake the kind of agonising reappraisal with regard to the teaching of religion which is so urgently called for at the moment. What is needed is a re-emphasis - away from Apologetics and towards a revelation of religion as enrichment in Christ. The process of restoring Christ to the rising generation must be begun in the classroom. One goes further. The re-emphasis must run right through

T H E A C C E P T A B L E T I M E 13

the life of the school. How many headmasters are willing to face the implications of that statement? As a prelude they would have to ask themselves whether their primary aim is to turn out scholastic successes, English gentlemen or other Christs.

Back of the school, of course, lie the training college and religious house of formation. The school can only be touched through them. Yet, very often and understandably, the religious house is closed to the impact of outside ideas more effectively than the school itself. The training college, too often, is taken up with what you might call the secular technique of its trade. The task of swinging either to recognise the relevance of the reappraisal we plead for is not nearly so easy as it seems at first sight. It is our business in this context only to indicate its existence and to stress the importance of seeing it through. We believe that the Church has no more important task in this country today than that of teaching a rising generation the meaning of life in Christ.

Force of circumstances gives the school a part of primary importance in this effort. It should go to the family, but parents, till now, have been brought up in terms of the code. The school has to effect the break-through in order to build a generation of parents able to impart to their children the spiritual re-emphasis so necessary to their rives. The school, however, cannot act alone in this matter. It must have the support of a parish whose priest sees his task as that of revealing Christ to his people, and whose parishioners see their parish not primarily as a place of religious observance, attached in the shape of pickings from the pools; but as a source of supernatural rife. The liturgy is not a fad, nor the titivating of a weekly ceremonial. It is the articulate, the essential expression of the whole of our riving in and with Christ.

School and parish, as we see it, are the nodal points at which the effort must be made to present the rising generation of Catholics in Britain with the richness of rife in Christ. Being young, they are rightly in love with life, which means that they should be in love with Christ. We believe that they could be. The obstacle, at the moment, is not primarily from their side. It comes, rather, from those who teach them in pulpit and classroom. We conclude that the most immediate need is for a much greater awareness, in seminaries and religious scholasticates, of the prevailing mentality of the young and rising generation of lay Catholics in twentieth- century Britain. It would be tragic if steps to secure this were long delayed. A good deal more than a generation is at stake.

14

The United States By W A L T E R M. A B B O T T

T the close of their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1954, the Catholic bishops of the United States issued a statement in which they stressed that 'in recent times the drift from God and from the spiritual and supernatural

view of life has seriously weakened this country'. Nothing the bishops have said since then has changed what they set forth in that document, which continued with this frank sentence: ' I t is true that a rise in church membership has been reported during the past few years, but in the light of other evidence, one is forced to question how significant such mere statistics may be. One looks in vain for any corresponding increase of religion's beneficent influence upon the nation's life. Indeed, the trend in public and private morality has been downward; there is an alarming disregard in practice for God's teaching and God's law'.

The problem is not peculiar to the United States, of course. Even the bishops of Ireland - that land regarded by so many American Catholics as holy ground - have had to criticise practices of public life, labour relations and business which, as Bishop Cornelius Lucey of Cork has said, were no different from those of non-Catholic countries. On the bigger scale that the United States presents, however, the downward trend is more vivid, and not only bishops but civil authorities are alarmed. Long before the President's Com- mission on National Goals brought out its report in December, 196o , the materialism which reveals itself as secularism in politics and government, as avarice in business and in the professions, and as paganism in the personal lives and relations of all too many Americans had been analysed and excoriated even in such large- circulation publications as Life magazine. The Offcial Catholic Directory reported a total of 4o,871,3o2 Catholics in the country for 1959, which was 1,365,827 above the previous year's total. This means that about 23 per cent of nation's population is Catholic. The growth of the Catholic population is ahead of the general population growth, and some estimates indicate that the country may be about one-third Catholic by 197o. But one may well ask whether this growth in numbers is having any real effect in view of the alarming moral decline of the country as a whole.


Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis said in a 1959 pastoral letter that the manner of the people's support is a good indication of the spiritual condition of the parish. I f he is right, American Catholic parishes are in very good spiritual condition indeed. All over the .country parishioners are making sacrifices to build new churches, schools and rectories. When the Bishop of Brooklyn set out last year to raise $20 million for new schools in his diocese, he found within a few months that he had pledges totaling $38 million; he and his priests admit that it was definitely an achievement of working people and poor people.

Against this generosity is to be set the selfishness and short- sightedness of parents in the matter of priestly and re]igious vocations. Cardinal Cushing declared, in fact: 'There is an abundance of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, but their fulfilment is blocked principally by parents'. He said that some parents object- ed outright to vocations to the priesthood and religious life among their children, while other parents declined to pray for vocations. The Cardinal also stressed the lack of spiritual perception on the part of many who expose their children excessively to television, radio, movies, rock 'n roll and other diversions which allow them to succumb to the secularism and materialism of the times. Others point out that the school population has gone up eighty-nine per cent in the last ten years, but the number of sisters has increased only twenty per cent. Bishop James H. Griftiths of New York sounded a warning note in his keynote address at a religious vocations rally when he said that 'the role of the laity is important, but it would be tragic if it were regarded as a substitute for the religious state'.

Whether it is due to parents' defects or not, it is a fact that America's young people need to be convinced that sacrifices a r e demanded of them, not only in the case of those who have vocations to the priesthood or religious life, but all of them, if they are going to take the part they should in the work the Church has now entrusted to lay people, nationally and internationally. Organ- isations like the CYO apparently helped to train youth in the right direction. Boxer Rocky Marciano was widely quoted when he said in i954: ' I t took the CYO and Father Minehan to show me and a lot of other kids that life wasn't a free ride'. When Douglas Hyde was asked what in American life impressed him most, he replied: ' the Catholic college girl and the nuns who have shaped her higher education'.

But young people in America have had it so good that it is


difficult for them to appreciate the problems of unemployment, migratory labour, and interracial injustice. And not only the young people. Their parents have to be prodded into manifesting some concern about problems at home, to say nothing of topics like the underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa. American Catholics, and, in fact, most American people, do not feel themselves to be members of an affluent society, even though they a r e going up the ladder, and they will not take it when someone tries to tell them that they are - especially the farmers and steelworkers, who will reject outright the notion that they have been enjoying healthy economic conditions, in fairness to them one must add that the reasons that they give for not feeling affluent do not usually pertain to their own desires for enjoyment and pleasure but rather to the education of their children. The points parents and children have to get more clearly is that the all-pervading, demanding, but loving exactions asked of them by Christ Himself in and through His Church are for all the members of His Body.

Four years ago when Mgr. John Tracy Ellis, professor of Church history at the Catholic University of America, told the Harvard- Radcliffe Catholic Clubs that the Church in America had 'come of age', he added that there was still a curious timidity and backward- ness in the matter of self-criticism and the taking of effective meas- ures to remedy weaknesses. The inability of many Catholics to take a clear view of their own defects was 'strikingly demonstrated', he said, 'in the attitude which some of our people still show toward the all too obvious failure on the part of American Catholics to produce their proportionate share of leaders of odr national life and to win those influential posts wherein the mind of a nation is so often moulded in a long-ranged manner through scholarship - whether that scholarship be in the universities proper, in the fine arts, the arts of communication, the press, learned societies, or in the commanding governmental and business circles of the country' .

In recent years there have been many objective, critical articles and books about American Catholic life by American Catholics themselves, a sign of the vitality and fast approaching maturi ty of an Americanised Catholicism.

Recently Mgr. Irving A. DeBlanc, director of the Family Life Bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, bluntly charged that too many Catholics were influenced by U.S. culture, which, he claimed, appears to be 'one generation from paganism'. Catholic families, he said, too often reflect behaviour standards of their non-

THE ACCEPTABLE TIME 17

Catholic neighbours, and he cited some studies which indicated that Catholic married couples used contraceptive methods of birth- control about as often as non-Catholics. Mgr. DeBlanc was said to be so disturbed by the problem that he proposed the solution of an 'open ghetto', by which he was said to have meant that Catholics should avoid cultural contacts with their non-Catholic neighbours. The charges were not denied as they might have been a generation ago. And more encouraging still, Catholic editors throughout the country flatly rejected the remedy. Mgr. DeBlanc subsequently denied that he had made such a proposal, but in the meantime the country had seen how far Catholics had come in self-criticism.

Now one can say that there are many kinds of American Catho- lics - one sees the differences reflected very definitely in the Catholic p res s - and even non-Cath01ics are now pretty generally aware of the differences. 'Liberals' and 'Conservatives' quote snatches of papal encyclicals at each other to demolish each other's positions. There are vigorous debates about adapting to American life and holding aloof from it; there are cries of 'America first !' and 'One- worlders l' There are some pretty acid arguments about 'right-to work' laws. The McCarthy d6b$cle left wounds that are not likely to Ileal for generations. There are more and more competent Catholic critics who can Call things what they are, and gradually they are getting a better hearing. When people become absorbed in details of private revelations, preachers and editorial writers vigorously point out, for example, that the basic thing about Our Lady's message at Fatima was: 'Do penance'. Not all will do penance, but most will admit the point is well taken.

A perusal of the 131 Catholic newspapers of the United States might lead one to think that Catholics a reac tua l ly making out rather well in adjusting to their peculiarly mixed-up environment. It is a common thing to encounter a theological or scriptural article filling half a page - entitled, for example, 'Faith: What Price Must We Pay?' ; and opposite it will be a half-page 'ad' put in by a local supermarket featuring boneless chuck roast at 59 cents a pound (and if you save your pink stamps you can get free two-dollar tickets to a baseball game). But this apparent mastery of indifference or de tachment is accompanied by such odd things as the wide-spread habit many parents have of encouraging dancing class and dating for pre-teenagers in order that their children may be popular. The lack of spiritual perception implied by such attitudes makes even the parents finally begin to wonder about their co-operation with


grace when they find themselves embroiled in the problems atten- dant upon earlier and earlier marriages. Priests constantly have occasion to point out to their people that they are always in danger of becoming products of their secular environment, and they must therefore constantly examine their sense of values to correct and christianise whatever they do. In a country where there are so many divorced people on the loose - more than I,OOO divorces are granted every day in the United States - and where thirty per cent of the valid Catholic marriages are mixed marriages, it is not easy to keep the institution of the family on the right track. According to one study, we are losing forty per cent of the children from mixed marriages and thirty per cent of the adults.

In its famous look at American Catholics, Look magazine (Octo- ber, 1957) did not include any observation of the spiritual life of the American Catholic body. The otherwise well-informed author of the article apparently discerned no vitality from membership in the Mystical Body of Christ. Apparently Catholics were a sect like other sects. It reminds one of the observation that used to be made frequently, as, for example, by Evelyn Waugh in his Life article, that until recently America had a poor record in contemplative vocations. That, of course, has been changed. Since World War II there has been a remarkable increase iI1 the number of contemplative monks in the United States; the Cistercians have nine new monas.- teries and more than I,OOO monks in America.

It is curious, though, that a professional, large-circulation magazine would not have been aware of the spiritual life of American Catholics. We have come a long way from individualism and pietism and stress on one's own salvation. Our Catholic high schools and colleges are giving courses that stress the doctrine of the Mystical Body. The liturgical movement is restoring to the laity an active participation in the Mass and deeper awareness of the doctrines involved in the sacramental life of the Church. For years there was a charge that Catholics did not read the Bible: it was partly true, because the Douay version was so obscure that it discouraged reading and study. With the coming of the Westminster, Knox, Kleist- Lilly and Confraternity translations, there was finally fertile ground for the Biblical movement.

Fr. Mart in C. D'Arcy and other visitors to the United States have observed that Catholics are making more and more of an impression on America. Fr. D'Arcy thinks this is true primarily because of the 'continued intellectual growth of Catholic teachers who are able


to instil a greater confidence of the philosophical truth of Catholi- cism in their students'. Fr. D'Arcy has noted that American Catholic college students now get not only the Scholastic approach to philosophy but a more complete picture of all other philosophies. We might add that they also get a much better religion course nowadays than they used to; in many colleges the course merits the title 'theology' that is often given it. America's suburbs now contain a good number of young intellectual Catholics who are the strength Of the new revivals of liturgy and Catholic action in the parishes. But these edifying young people are still only a small minority of the Catholic faithful. For too many Catholic men, like most American men, reading books is 'not masculine'. The retreat movement is one of the strongest and healthiest movements in the country, but there are still far too many Catholic women making these retreats who think that Louis De Wohl's books are the ideal spiritual reading.

The Catholic Press Association recently announced that circulation of Catholic newspapers and magazines published in the United States has passed the 25,000,000 mark for the first time. Catholic publishing houses are numerous and they are turning out a fair proportion of worth-while books. But who is reading all these things ? All too often the faithful are subscribing to various publications but reading only the captions under the pictures. The spirit of pessimism found in the writings of Guardini and others is not widespread in America, because those authors are not widely read. Most Catholics still seem to be subsisting for their spiritual values on the catechism that they learned as children. As Cardinal Cushing has said: 'We have much dead timber in our organisation and much mere formalism in our habits of mind, especially in the habit that regards our chief task as being merely to conserve'.

Christopher Dawson has written, however, that Catholics have ac tua l ly 'changed the religious landscape of America and have become the largest, the strongest and the most united religious body on the continent'. ' In the face of this achievement', he added, 'it is impossible not to be optimistic about the future'. It certainly is vital that the spiritual life of American Catholics be solidly founded, because in accordance with directives from Pope Plus X I I and Pope John X X I I I the American Catholic bishops have given the laity the top role in the reconstruction of the social order, a vast project that will get nowhere without spiritual resources.

One often hears it said that 'you should go to the Midwest for

20 T H E A C C E P T A B L E T I M E

your lay leaders', but the bishops have been fortunate rather generally in securing enlightened laymen and laywomen to direct diocesan-wide movements and national movements. The real trouble is that on the parish level too many lay people feel it is the priest's job to devise and supervise everything, and too many priests seem to have that idea also. In the professions, in business and among the workers, therefore, the large influence the Church could have is not developed. Where some have gone ahead, as in the case of professional sodalities (like those in Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia), the results are striking and solid; these men are not more members of a pious union but participants in the apostolic labours of the Church. Lay folk and priests alike who have discussed the problem admit that sacerdotal paternalism is the principal obstacle to development of lay apostolic drive. Paternalism is out- of-date, by Pontifical decree, and the sooner it is realised the better will the American Church have the effect it should on the educa- tional, economic, and political institutions of the nation.

21

Australia By J. PHILIP GLEESON

O ~E great and perennial spiritual problem for Catholics everywhere is that of achieving a right attitude towards the material creation. There is in this matter some difference in the attidude to be adopted by clergy and

religious on the one'hand, and by the laity on the other, although the fact has not always been understood with sufficient clarity and its consequences fully appreciated. Though the vocation of the priest and religious often demands that they withdraw from many activities, the laity are to immerse themselves in the affairs of the material world in order to consecrate it to God, as Pius XI I put it. At the same time, they are not to deliver themselves up to the material world, not to be completely absorbed and dominated by it. Rather, they are to dominate it in the name of God and for His purposes.

Christian history shows that this has never been an easy or a completely successful activity; and the circumstances of life in prosperous and developed countries today have certainly not lessened the difficulty, although they have changed the emphasis. Now- adays the ordinary Catholic has to deal with a condition of abundance and relative luxury rather than of shortage. This is certainly true, by / and large, for the Australian lay Catholic. He has left behind, possibly for good, the situation in which he had to show patience and humility under the burden of deprivation, or was forced to struggle long and hard to impose his will on matter, to wrest a meagre living from its tenaciously held riches. A genie has been let loose in our time, the productivity of modern industry, and now the struggle is rather to control its amazing power and to use rightly it and the abundance it produces.

These are the conditions in which the Australian layman must seek to become more like Christ, and it is the function of his clerical and religious brethren to help him in this. It is not an easy matter. The problem is not to be solved by trying to make the laity act like monks and nuns, nor by giving them a few formulas culled from the great spiritual writers. There is need for a major effort at spiritual education from childhood into adult years, an effort that will seek to create in the layman a strong desire for sanctity, an

22 T H E ACCEPTABLE TIME

understanding that it will have to be gained by a positive personal consecration to God through the Church, and by the exercise of self-discipline in the extraordinary task of further liberating, con- trolling and using the already abundantly available perfections of creation. This sort of education is not achieved by any system that concentrates on the defence of the Catholic against the world and the attacks of opponents. Whereas the defensive attitude was formerly common, now the will to conquer the world for Christ must be inculcated in its place, unwarranted fear and diffidence must be set aside, and the words of Christ, 'I have overcome the world', must inspire the layman's approach to prayer, the liturgy, Christian revelation, and his fellow men.

The need for a truly Christian use of the perfections of creation is nowhere more acute than in the field of higher education.

One of the outstanding and characteristic features of the latter part of the last century and the first half of the twentieth century has been the practical abolition of illiteracy in the world. It is true that in some backward areas the proportion of illiterates is still fairly high: but the campaign for popular education has been virtually universal and only 'pockets' remain here and there with any con- spicuously high proportion of illiteracy. Two interesting and important consequences have followed in the train of this contemporary development: and both of them are of immense significance to any mind that is alert to the demands of the 'acceptable time'; to the obligation, that is, to take into account the existential situation and circumstances when planning to play one's proper part in the life of the Church. The first is that not mere literacy but first-rate scholarship is now the passport to influence and leadership, to over- coming the world: and the second is that, with universal literacy, Catholics need to be more profoundly and intelligently instructed in their Faith if they are to overcome the obstacles which hamper the Church's growth, her progress to Christ, and positively con- tribute to the redemptive work of His Mystical Body.

Both of these consequences deeply concern all Catholics, at every level of intellectual development - but none more so than the Catho- lic whose vocation is to be the intellectual dlite of the Church, in particular the University Catholic Student. Every Catholic must study his or her milieu for the indications that point to the appro- priate apostolate in that particular milieu. The 'acceptable time' is not a mere matter of time, but also of what specifies the different en- vironments at that time. In the case of the university student's

THE ACCEPTABLE T I M E 23

environment two things are abundantly clear: that the leaders of the future are his companions; and that men and women who form the minds of these future leaders are the members of university

staffs. The unfortunate situation in the universities which is part of the

structure of our acceptable time, is the fact that nearly all positions of academic influence in the world of today are occupied by those who are not Catholics. Though often the Chancellors, the Lecturers, the Readers and the Tutors may be personally very good people, they so far outnumber the few Catholics whose scholarship has enabled them to share these positions that Catholic influence in shaping and forming the minds of the future statesmen and of the leaders of the various professions and enterprises is almost negligible. Hence one of the duties, and it is a most serious duty heavily incumbent on university Catholic students, is to conceive the ambition and to toil towards the achievement of first-rate academic scholarship. The Catholic graduate content with the Pass standard will never be called to fill the Chairs of the universities of the world, nor to carry out the equally influential task of lecturing to or tutoring the minds of the future leaders of the world in their acceptable time. Men will listen to and respect the man or woman whose views and whose vision of the world are supported by their repute for scholarship: but they will not be influenced by mediocrity.

If the Catholic student at the university humbly listens today to the answer to his question, 'Lord, what would you have me to do?' it is impossible to doubt that the Holy Spirit, ever conscious of the Church's contemporary needs, will give him to understand that the fulfilment of his specialised vocation as a Catholic student demands earnest and profound scholarship. He must understand that he is not at the university merely in order to obtain a degree, but essentially to equip himself to be a suitable instrument in the apostolate of restoring all things in Christ. The student must be imbued with the conviction that worldly and material success is not, despite all contemporary secular judgments, the meaning and the purpose of life. 'What does it profit you if you gain the whole world?' Christ asks him. It is true he must make it possible for himself to live respectably and independently, to marry and to care for his children, but throughout the fulfilment of these obvious obligations there runs the thread of the significance of the sign of the Trinity imprinted on him in Baptism and the mark of his Membership of the Body of Christ. His work, in his acceptable time,

24~ THE ACCEPTABLE T I M E

is to put his intellectual talents to the use of influencing his contemporaries; and later, if he undertakes an academic career, of influencing the minds of those who in their turn will be influencing others as leaders in the world of today.

The second feature of our time which has a special challenge for the Catholic student is the widespread and indiscriminate availa- bility of literature of every sort for the public mind. Knowledge of the famous, and of the infamous, writers of twenty-five centuries is no longer the preserve of those sufficiently educated to evaluate and crificise them intelligently. In ever cheaper editions, and in seductive appearance, they flood the bookstalls of the world, the good with the bad. The enemies of the Church have not been slow to take advantage of the opportunity to enter the minds of the Members of the Mystical Body of Christ. Any priest will bear witness today to the fact that he is increasingly 'put on the spot' by the depth and the seduction of arguments against the Church's authority, and against many of her most important teachings. In particular university students, representing - in fact, being - 'the Church-at- the-university', will feel the need for a far wider and far deeper understanding of their Faith if they are to play any positive part in the development of the Mystical Body under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the secular environment of their 'acceptable time'.

One thing at least may be said that is applicable to all alike: the Catholic student in the university world of today cannot any longer be left to subsist intellectually on the tabloid doctrine imparted to him in the days of his secondary schooling. The time has come - the acceptable time for him - to realise the sad inadequacy of his knowledge of the faith vis-&vis the milieu into which he is plunged when he arrives as an undergraduate in a modern university. Unless, under guidance, he takes the care necessary to secure that he advances in his knowledge of the Faith at least as intelligently as he fills his mind with secular kr~owledge, he will not be responding to the needs of the Church of his time. And even if there is not the tragedy of the shipwreck of his faith, there is the certainty that he is not vitally living as a member of the contemporary Mystical Body.

It is, of course, impossible for the average young university student to be the prime mover in meeting these specifically modern needs. He is, in fact, at a most grave disadvantage when he first arrives at the university, for he is savouring the heady wine of emancipation and immaturely experimenting with himself and society, pre-


occupations which leave him neither the time, the inclination nor the steady judgment to weigh such important issues. This has to be done for him, and his thinking must be guided. But the important point is that it must be his thinking ultimately which would lead him to make any personal decisions in the matters which I have said so Urgently need attention in today's university milieu. It is the Church's duty to see that the universities are provided with chap- lains who realise deeply the importance of the two points stressed in earlier paragraphs - the crying need for Catholic academics, and the very much greater and deeper knowledge of their faith impera- tive in today's university apostolate.

Finally, to conclude on a quite practical note, I hope I may mention two attempts to Cope with these problems in the university college where I work. In Newman College (Victoria, Australia) we have had the very great advantage in the last eight years of being able to offer a valuable annual Travelling Scholarship to attract prospective Catholic academics to fit themselves to compete on a level of equality with those who do not share their faith in seeking appointments to university staffs. On the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of the ordination to the priesthood of the Arch- bishop of Melbourne, the Catholics of the Archdiocese offered His Grace, Dr. Mannix, a very large sum ofm0ney. His Grace accepted o n the condition that the money was made over to Newman College (a residential college on the campus of and affiliated with the University of Melbourne) and administered as a Travelling Schol- arship. Each year since 1952 we have thus been able to send, especially to Oxford and Cambridge, one or two young men or women who have been inspired with the desire to devote themselves to an academic career. Gradually, as these young people have returned, they have been absorbed into one or other of the depart- ments of Australian universities - and in time we hope that this regular flow of young Catholic academics will considerably lessen the scandalous disproportion of Catholics on university staffs, at least in this country. It is a scheme which even so short an experience makes one want to shout from the housetops.

The second attempt tO deal with the problems mentioned earlier is one of longer standing. One of the Fathers on the staff of the college, a full-time chaplain to the students, during the last two months of each scholastic year visits all the Catholic schools who send their boys and girls for the matriculation examination. All those who are to come up to the university after the long vacation

26 THE ACCEPTABLE T I M E

are interviewed, and thoroughly briefed on conditions prevailing at the university. As many as possible are then and there recruited for what is called a pre-university summer school. When the time comes, about a fortnight before the beginning of the academic year, these young people are taken to a large sea-side camp, where they are given a solid week of instruction in the apostolate of the university. On their return they are encouraged to meet in small groups throughout the year to carry on their discussions and to further their apostolic formation. The summer camp has proved to be a most powerful weapon. From its numbers have come n e a r l y all of those who have subsequently heard the call to an academic life - and many of the friendships and the groups formed as a result of it have continued with weekly meetings long after those concerned have graduated. It is another venture towards the solution of the problems mentioned which one would like to recommend unreservedly.

I N T O T H E D E S E R T By J O H N L. M c K E N Z I E

J ERUSALEM has become a large city, and in spite of the medieval quaintness of the walled town, a modern city. Yet, for all the devastations Jerusalem has suffered in its thirty-five hundred years of recorded history, the roots of its past impress

themselves upon the observer with a sharpness which he experiences in few other places where man dwells. The impression does not come from the ruins of ancient Jerusalem, for they are few and poor and entirely without the magic of the Acropolis of Athens or the colonnades of Palmyra; it comes from the situation of Jerusa- lem in a landscape which has changed less with the passage of years than the city has changed, a landscape which at once seems familiar to any one who has read his Bible wi th assiduity. When one ascends to the top of Jerusalem's towers or to the summit of its neighbouring hills, one is within sight of the desert, and one knows why the desert is mentioned so many times in, the Bible. The Israelites could never forget that they had been a desert people, and indeed many of them remained desert people; did one see nomads less frequently near the Israelite cities of Solomon and Ahaz than one sees them in the neighbourhood of the Jerusalem of Flussein? One need not travet many miles from Jerusalem to lose oneself 'in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste'. 1 But this is only the fringe of the desert wastes of Syria and Arabia, which seem to stretch into infinity. To stand at the threshold of these wastes sobers one's thoughts.

Ernest Renan said that monotheism was born between the twin vastnesses of the desert floor and the desert sky. Between these two vastnesses man sees nothing but himself, and he becomes aware of the 'Thou' voicelessly making its presence felt to his own 'I ' . His- torians of religion have generally and wisely decided that this theory is nonsense. Man is no more perceptive of the divine reality in the desert than he is in other vast empty spaces, which Renan would have done well to explore, at least by voyaging in books. The desert impresses one no more with its cosmic emptiness than do the Arctic wastes; but the Eskimo has not been an evangelist of monotheism to the world. The experience of the desert is no more mystical than

1 D e u t 31 ,10 .

28 I N T O T H E D E S ' E R T

the experience of the dark grey terror of the North Atlantic, or of a windswept mountain peak buried in its perenniM snow, or even of the broad sky seen from 3o,ooo feet in the air from the cabin of a modern aeroplane. All these elemental scenes have something in common, and that something is not an awareness that God is near; it is an awareness that death is near, which is not quite the same thing. One realises that these vast empty spaces are empty because they reject man; they are actively, murderously hostile. The desert will kill you unless you have the skill and the determination to out- fight it and outwit it. I t is always something of a shock in a country which is well-equipped with the conveniences which sustain and protect the traveller, when one reads annually of some unwary tourists in, say, the western states of the U.S.A., who perish in the desert as people perished a hundred years ago when they crossed the desert in prairie schooners. These unfortunate people do not realise that when they explore the desert they flirt with death.

This is the fatal charm of the desert, its challenge. In the desert the complexity of civilisation vanishes as if it had never existed; one realises how little of the surface of the globe is available for human life, and one feels that one is an intruder. Life is reduced to a very few simple decisions, and a wrong decision may be fatal. One cannot allow oneself to be distracted from the single purpose, which is survival; and unless one accepts the fact that survival in the desert is totally demanding, one will not survive. The desert, like the Arctic waste, the mountain peaks, the ocean, and the wild blue yonder of the air, is home only to those few who have mastered the highly specialised skills which survival in these elements demands, and who have the will to live to an unusual degree.

Reflection, I think, shows that the desert does not produce the awareness of God as much as it produces the awareness of evil. Those who survive in the desert do so because they know that they are never out of the grip of a malignant force which seeks their lives. They do not pretend that they live in a world where all is right. Where water is very properly and literally life, water ranks among the destructive agents which maintain the desert in its hideous ragged erosion. Rainfall is an event which may happen no more than half a dozen times in a year, and one cannot watch a thunderstorm approaching without knowing why Psalm 28 is written as it is. 1 It is not the gentle friendly rainfall for which the

The voice of the Lord flashe~ like flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness, the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh'. Ps 28,7-8.

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Church prays and for which the farmer thanks God, and it would never be compared by the desert poet to mercy. The desert dweller runs for shelter, not because he is afraid of getting wet nor because he knows anything of positive and negative charges, but because h e has learned that in that empty landscape a man is easily the tallest projection in sight, and he is a sure target for what all desert people call the bolt, the hammer, or the arrow of God. The rain falls in torrents and tears through the ground like a giant harrow, leaving ugly barren furrows where the rock crops to the surface. No, even the forces which man thinks are friendly turn against him in the desert. But while the rare desert thunderstorm is more terrifying, is it any more menacing than the incredibly hot wind which blows from the very heart of the desert, dehydrating and debilitating the desert dweller or, at its worst, blinding him in a whirlwind of sand and obliterating tracks and traces? Then even the nomad whose element is the desert may be lost; and one who is lost in the desert is usually lost forever. The desert is not the place which breeds optimism; the nomad knows, and all who share his life must learn, that there are genuine evil forces which can be mastered only by decision and persistence; one who refuses to admit their reality or discounts their power has already lost the battle with them.

No one can do anything but fear the desert once he has sensed its raw violence. This is perhaps another feature of its fascination, its candour; it is honestly what it is and pretends to be nothing else. It is murderous and unforgiving, but it does not deceive. There is a ~ certain attraction in its naked and undisguised malignancy, which is present even when for a few minutes during early morning and late afternoon hours it is transformed into a paradise of flashing colour. It can mantle itself after the rains in lovely patterns of wild flowers, which it seems to delight in withering: 'the flower of the field which blossoms today and tomorrow is cast into the oven'. For the desert is death, and it will not tolerate life.

Surely if man were to form his idea of God from his desert experience the god so conceived would be created in the image and likeness of the desert. He would be an unforgiving enemy, harsh and cruel. He would in fact be not unlike the Mesopotamian Nergal, who seems to exhibit the character of the murderous burning sun, or of the Syrian I-Iadad, a stormy warrior who flings his thunderbolts with awesome abandon. The God of Israel was not a reflection of the desert; yet the desert was the scene where man in the Old

30 INTO THE DESERT

Testament encountered God. No one who is at all familiar with the Old Testament can think that the God whom Israel encountered in the desert derived His character from the desert; if He had, no Israelite poet could ever have said that His covenant of love is above all His works. Such a God could have claimed only that terrified submission which man must pay to superior irrational force. The desert imposes a code of life, but it is not the code which Israel attributed to Yahweh. Israel's encounter with Yahweh in the desert introduces us to the desert as a way of life; for it is a way of life and not merely a phenomenon of nature.

The civilisation of Mesopotamia and Canaan of the second millennium B.c. was advanced in more ways than we can easily realise. Its cities were rich and prosperous, its commerce flourished, its agriculture supported large populations. The nomad looks at civilisation with a mixture of envy and contempt: envy for its riches in comparison with his own existence on the margin of starvation, contempt for the toil and the loss of liberty which is the price civilised man pays for his security. More than this, ancient civilised man in Egypt and Mesopotamia and Canaan worshipped the gods which gave him the goods which he most anxiously desired; the civilisation was frankly and grossly materialistic, and its gods were modelled to suit its own ideals. To the Israelite these were false gods which promised spurious goods. Civilised man could never find God in his cities because he never sought God there. To find God man must leave the petty avarice of the cities behind him and go into the desert where the issues, as we have observed, were reduced to a few simple decisions on which life and death depended. In the desert one could see much more clearly what the basic values are; one could not afford to neglect the difference between what is vital and what is not.

I do not mean to suggest by these reflections that I am proposing in a more subtle form the discredited theory of Renan. It is true, nevertheless, that even a revealed religion is conceived by any people in the dominant ideas of its own cultures. There were differences between Greek and Latin Christianity in the early centuries of the Church, just as there are differences slowly emerging at the present time between European Christianity and the Chris- tianity of the Far East. Members of what is a single family of nations in Europe think they detect differences between the churches of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Latin countries. It is extremely difficult to imagine anything like the Neapolitan festival of San

INTO THE DESERT 31

Gennaro being celebrated in Brompton Oratory, London. When Israel encountered Yahweh it was not a settled people, and its thoughts and ways were those of the desert. After Israel became a settled people in Canaan, their conception of their God was enlarged; after all, civilised man mflst find God too, and he has neither then nor now decided that he must choose between God and civilisation. Israel always knew which choice it would have to make if the choice were put in these ultimate terms. This is tile hard choice of the desert whichreduces everything to the rigid alternatives of life and death; it is not a place of compromise. The desert encounter with Yahweh left a lasting impression on the religious belief of Israel long after Israel had become a settled people. But as we have noticed, in the land of Israel one is never far from the desert.

The first and classic encounter of God and man in the desert occurs in the vision of Moses. I Through the dialogue of this story runs a single theme: the imperious will of Yahweh to deliver His people. The theme is heightened by contrast with the reluctance of Moses to accept the saving will of Yahweh, which is not hard to understand; the deliverance of Israel meant a challenge to the Egypt of the Nineteenth Dynasty, a powerful kingdom. But in the desert there is no room for compromise; one makes the necessary decision to five, or one dies, and Israel could live only by the saving will of Yahweh.

Israel, led by Moses, must journey into the desert to find the God in whose name Moses spoke. Moses encountered Him in the burning bush, and Israel encountered Him at Sinai. ~ The desert, we have noticed, reveals nature in its harsh cruelty; the Sinai traditions of Israel show a deep awareness of the harshness of the scene. An old tradition, but not nearly as old as Israel, has placed this unique meeting in the Sinai peninsula, which is raw and harsh enough to suit anyone's taste; whether this location is correct or not is of little importance, for any number of desert sites are just as harsh. We are not here attempting to derive Israel's awareness of God from its awareness of the desert; but it is again worth our notice that in an atmosphere such as that of Sinai, Israel could not run and hide from Yahweh as it could do in the fields of Egypt and the cities of Ca- naan. In thedeser t there is no place to which one can run; Israel was, once again, brought face to face with a decision to live or to die, and there was no way to evade it. Yahweh, the lord of the

Exod3. " Exod 19.

32 INTO THE DESERT

desert, could leave them to perish if they did not accept His saving will. Their deliverance and their survival could be achieved only through the means which He placed before them: a total submission to His will. Yahweh is a desert God in the sense that Israel must accept Him on His own terms if it is to live. The covenant which was its life was formed in the desert.

The desert in Israelite tradition was a place of testing. Modern novelists and playwrights are fond of situations in which the civilised man, suddenly snatched from his artificial climate, his police and fire protection, his easy transportation and the security of his regular routine, must vanquish raw nature with nothing but his bare hands and his wits. In the minds of most of our writers of fiction this is perhaps the only true test of the quality of a man; and many of them seem convinced that the men who succeed best in the forum and the market would fail most miserably in a test with the elements. There is some truth in the conception of The Admi- rable Crichton. The qualities which keep the Eskimo alive in the Arctic and the Bedawi alive in the desert are not the qualities which would protect him in the streets of London or New York; and the bright young men of Madison Avenue would starve in the desert. The Bedawi, as we have observed, can never forget that survival demands a total dedication; the citizen of New York or London does not conceive his existence in these terms. Whether one test proves more than another is not at the moment relevant nor need it be decided; but it is of interest to note that the Old Testament view of the desert as a place where a man or a people is tested is by no means peculiarly biblical.

It is, however, peculiarly biblical to think of the desert as a place where God is tested; we read this each day in Psalm 94, which stands at the beginning of the divine office.: The Israelites explained the old name Massah which stood in their desert traditions as a place where Israel tested Yahweh. ~ But the desert was also a place where Yahweh tested Israel. 3 Anyone who has travelled in a group knows that nothing tests the members of the group like this shared experience; and it is an even more searching test when travel becomes a race with Death. So Yahweh and Israel journeyed through the desert, Yahweh testing Israel's fidelity to the promise

1 'Harden not your hearts, as at Meriba, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, When your fathers tested me, and pu t me to the proof, though they had seen my work'. Ps 94,8-9. a Exod 17,7. 3 Exod 15,25, Deut8,2.

INTO THE DESERT 33

which it had given and Israel testing Yahweh by stretching His patience, so to speak, to the limit. Israel failed the test, both in obedience and in faith in the power o f Yahweh to execute His will to save; and the second failure was more fundamental than the first. Obedience must rest ultimately upon faith in the leadership of him who leads.

Yet while the desert is unforgiving, Yahweh is not. w h e n faith fails and hope is shattered, He alone endures; and Israel recognised that it survived its desert experience because He had carried it in His arms as a man carries his child. 1 The speaker could have added that He carried a wilful and rebellious child. This was the test of Yahweh which revealed His character more clearly than anything else in the experience of Israel. He is proved not only lord of nature, lord of history, king of Israel, but he is proved superior to the mere human level of feeling and decision. When a prophet wished to remind Israel of the fidelity of Yahweh to His word, he appealed to the passage of Israel through the desert. * God, as well as man, is proved in human tribulation.

There is a story of Elijah, who, fortified by heavenly bread, walk- ed forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, I-Ioreb, as the mountain is called in some traditions. 3 It is obvious that when this story was told its tellers had no idea of where Horeb might be, except that it was a great distance. But it was the place where Israel had met Yahweh, and it was the place where Elijah went to search for Him; for Elijah was sure that He could no longer be found in Israel, where all faith in Him seemed to have disappeared. Israel had surrendered to Canaanite civilisafion; it aped the man- ners and ways of Canaan, and now it worshipped the gods of Canaan. So Elijah thought; and he hoped to find Yahweh where Yahweh had first revealed Himself to Israel and there lay down his life, because Yahweh and Israel had parted. He found Yahweh; but his discovery seems to be a deliberate inversion of the theophany of Sinai. For the elements are in convulsion, as they were in the story of Sinai; but Yahweh was not in the wind nor the earthquake nor the lightning. He is present in a barely perceptible movement of the air; and He assures Elijah that He is still the God of Israel, even when He does not manifest Himself in the convulsions of nature.

Elijah was only the first in a long line of men who have returned

I Deut 1,31. ~ Jer 2,6. 3 I Kg 19.

34 I N T O T H E D E S E R T

to the desert in hope of a new vision of God by which they might restore their faith and their courage. God was no more in Horeb than in Israel, but Elijah had to return to the desert in order to learn this. There, with the complexity of civilisation far behind him, the basic truths came more clearly into view. The desert where the religion of Israel was born is the source whence it draws its strength for renewal.

It was perhaps a hundred years or so after Elijah that another prophet looked at his people Israel and saw that they were still unfaithful to Yahweh. Hosea's conception of Israel, in the opinion of almost all exegetes, was formed in the fight of a searing personal experience: the infidelity of his own wife. He is the first to perceive and to express in the relations of man and God the theme of rejected love. Israel sells its heart for wool and flax, grain and wine and oil, gold and silver. These she finds more desirable than the love of Yahweh, and she gives her love to the gods who promise her these things. She has become candidly mercenary. How does one reach the heart of such a person, when there seems to be no heart to reach?

Hosea sees 0nly one possibility for the spiritual regeneration of Israel, and that is a return to the desert. 1 He idealises the traditions of the exodus and the wandering and represents them as a time of Israel's youthful affection and loyalty to Yahweh. Then history was more complicated than this, but the Old Testament takes a simple view of things; in the period of the desert Israel was still a people of the desert and had not yet been seduced by the worldliness of Canaan. Perhaps, if Israel is taken back to the harsh reality of the desert and deprived of the wealth and the luxuries of Canaan, she will recognize once again the spouse of her youth. For the desert is a place where life is reduced to a few vital decisions. It can be for Israel, as it was for Elijah, a place where faith and courage are restored. Israel met Yahweh there for the first time, and she will see Him more clearly if she returns to the desert. With no other noise to distract the attention, Yahweh can 'speak to her heart'. The desert is hideous and cruel, with death stalking those who enter it; but for one in Israel's desperate condition it can be a door of hope. 2

It is, then, not surprising that the Gospel begins with 'the word of the Lord which came to John the son o~ Zachary in the desert' .~ John came not only in the spirit and power of Elijah, ~ but also in

1 Hos2 ,14 . ~ Hos 2,15. 3 Lk 3,2; M t 3,1. ~ Lk 1,13.

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Elijah's garments and way of life. Elijah of Tishbe in Gilead, wherever this may have been, never appears in the stories of the books of Kings as man with a fixed abode; and John dwells 'in the desert' subsisting on the meagre diet which the desert offers. The kingdom of God is announced from the desert by a man whose life and manner affirm the austere rigour of the desert. His person, like his message, is an antithesis to the ideals of his contemporaries. John announced the greatest crisis in the history of Israel, and he recalled the desert origins of Israel's faith when he announced it. Unless the Jews left their homes and business and went out into the desert to hear the announcement, they probably would not hear it at all.

We have learned in recent years that John was not the only Jew of his time who returned to the desert to discern more clearly the present activity of God. In the same desert region, not far from the place where John preached and baptised, an entire community of Jews resided at Oumran. They withdrew from the world and its business and devoted themselves to an austere life in common and the study of the Law. They too expected the deliverance of Israel, and they felt that they could not prepare for it unless they returned to the desert. Only there, they believed, could they live as God intended them to live; it is evident from their writings that they regarded themselves as the one true Israel, the people of the covenant. The Judaism of the cities and villages, in their opinion, had betrayed its destiny.

Jesus Himself, the new Moses and the new Israel, first went to the desert before He began to announce the Gospel of the kingdom. The forty years of Israel's wandering in the desert are echoed in the forty days of the sojourn of Jesus in the desert. He experienced the full harshness of the desert, for He fasted the entire forty days. The story of the desert sojourn does not tell us that, like Moses and Israel and Elijah, he there found God, for the early Church knew that Jesus did not have to seek God as other men did. The story resumes the theme of the desert as a place of testing, for it is in the desert that Jesus, like Israel, was tempted. Here He proves Himself the new and genuine Israel, for He is superior to the seductions of the tempter. He does not betray God for gain or honour or power, as Israel had done. When He emerges from the desert He has demonstrated His claim to fulfil the destiny of Israel. He emerges charged with that strength which in Israelite tradition is acquired from the struggle of man against the desert. A later New Testament

3 6 I N T O T H E D I ~ S E R T

writer draws comfort from this episode; for we have here a high priest who is not without feeling for our weakness, since He was tested in all ways like us without yielding. 1 We can approach Him with the assurance that He is acquainted with the weakness which makes it necessary for us to ask forgiveness.

Finally, we read that St. Paul did not immediately after his conversion at Damascus take up the apostolate among the Gentiles which Jesus had committed to him, nor did he take counsel with any man, not even with the apostles in Jerusalem; instead he retired for three years to Arabia.~ Arabia here can scarcely mean anything except the desert; with the desert background which we have sketched above there can be no doubt that Paul felt the need of the desert experience before he could begin the mission. Paul had found God, or rather God had found him, in an entirely unique vocation; nevertheless, the full meaning of the vocation could not be penetrated unless Paul retired to the traditior/al source of spiritual strength, the place where man meets God. There he could determine whether he fully accepted the vocation and all that it implied, and there he could reflect upon what its execution demanded. We usually think of Paul as a man of the Hellenistic city which he knew so well, the cosmopolitan traveller who was at home in so many urban centres; we do not think of him as another Elijah or John the Baptist. But before Paul plunged into the crowded bustling Cities he had steeled himself by three years of rugged desert l i fe ;he does not explain why he spent three years in the desert nor what he did there. To those who knew Israelite traditions no explanation was necessary, and to those who did not no explanation was possible. The New Testament contains a number of allusions to the desert experience and the desert testing of Israel, both from Paul himself and from others ;~ the desert history of Israel is a type of the Christian spiritual experience, from which Christians may learn the meaning of what happens to them.

Across the Nile from the city of Aswan in Egypt and a mile or two downstream is an impressive ruin which, unlike most of the ruins of Egypt, is not a relic of the work of the Pharaohs. It was once the monastery of St. Simeon, and it is one of the larger remnants of the great movement into the desert of the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, Although the site is only ~ short distance from the city, the division between the irrigated land and the desert in Egypt is

1 Heb 4,15. ~ Gal 1,16-17. 3 1 Cor t0,-5; Heb 3,7-19; Acts 3,17.

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so sharp that a short walk takes one out of this world. The monastery lies in an entirely dead wilderness of sand and rock, and the silence is palpable. Here we are near the origins of the monastic fife, which left buildings like this in the Thebaid, and in the desert near Antioch and Aleppo in Syria, and at the desert ruin, of Mar Saba in Palestine not far from Qumran. Abandoned now, these ruins attest the weariness of the world which was so general in the late years of the Roman Empire and drove many men into the desert to see if perchance they could find there what the world did not offer. Quite often, it seems, they were merely in flight from a world which had grown intolerable; one cannot compare such flights to the desert with tl'/e sojourn of Jesus and Paul. The sad history of many of these monasteries attests the barrenness of a life which was as barren as the desert life. Seeking God in the desert demands more than a geographical change.

On the first Sunday of Lent the Church reads to us the Gospel of Matthew 4 , I - I I, which tells of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Traditionally the season of Lent has been called a return to the desert for the Christian. I have set forth the biblical background of this allusion in the hope that the spiritual experience of the desert may be better understood. For a spiritual experience of the desert does emerge from the passages which are cited; the elements of this experience have already been mentioned, and we have only to bring them together.

We are not, of course, speaking of the desert as a geographical phenomenon; we are venturing into the somewhat insecure field of typology, where it is easy to find glittering generalities and lose fight of what the Bible says. But if there is a genuine typology here at all, it seems to lie not in the geographical features of the desert, but in the spiritual atmosphere of the desert as the Bible reveals it. The spiritual atmosphere is not divorced from the geographical features. Man is not a pure form; his moods and his thinking and his decisions do not exist in a world of beautiful and objective abstrac- tions unaffected by sense perceptions and emotional disturbances. They are deeply affected by what he eats and drinks and how well he likes it, by the weather, by the scenery; our response to such environmental factors may not be deliberate, but it is no less real. The spiritual atmosphere of the desert is man's response to its gaunt and hostile face. It makes man aware, as we have noticed, that the universe is not simply his friend; it makes him aware that evil is real and active. ' I t reminds him that he is never far from death.

38 INTO THE DESERT " '

Against its threat the ideals and ambitions of the world beyond the desert look insignificant; and he learns that the one basic good which he must preserve at all costs is life. When he flees the desert to the security of civilisation where the naked menace of death is hidden, is he to think that he is returning to reality or fleeing from it? Which is reality, the desert or the world outside it? Wher~ the Church invites us to sojourn in the desert, she would have us face the reality of death and evil and stop pretending that it does not exist.

The desert, we have seen, reduces the complexity of life to a few simple and ultimate issues; in fact, it reduces these issues to one, which is whether one wishes to live or to die. I f one wishes to live, one must take the necessary means. The desert does not forgive frivolity. The Church would have us breathe the spiritual atmosphere of the desert and enjoy the clarity of vision which the desert demands. In this atmosphere and with this vision we can see that our life is resolved into a few ultimate issues, and that a decision must be made. She would have us create spiritual atmosphere by the traditional austerities of Lent; through them we learn, as the desert dweller knows, that very little is needed to sustain life. I f we can ever for a short period of time treat the world as if it did not exist, we shall learn that it is for practical purposes nonexistent, a sham reality. Against the threat of evil and death it is unable to protect us.

It is in the desert that Israel and her great men found God, and it is in this spiritual atmosphere that the Church would have us seek God. She would lead us into the desert, as Hosea describes Yahweh leading Israel into the desert, and there God can speak to our heart. Like Israel, we are entirely devoted to the acquisition of things like wool and flax, grain and wine and oil, silver and gold; if God isoto speak to us, either we must go into the desert to hear Him or He will snatch us from the security of our little world and drop us into a vast silence where nothing but His voice can be heard. In an appalling vision Jeremiah saw the garden land blasted into desert by the fierce heat of God's anger;, ~ if men will not return to the desert to find God, l ie will make their cities a desert where no sound drowns out His voice.

The Church wishes Lent to be a period of testing, as the desert experience was a testing, l iow, we may ask, are we tested? Surely the little abstinences by which we exhibit our penitential spirit

1 Jet 4,26°

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cannot be considered a serious test. Nor did the Church ever consider the mere flight into the desert, even the frightening austerities of the Lents of earlier centuries, as the true testing of Lent. The test of the Christian is whether he can withdraw from his habitual desires and interests sufficiently to meet God on God's terms. The abstinences of Lent in modern times are scarcely more than a ritual symbol of our readiness to follow God into the desert; but the symbol ought to symbolise something. The Gospel of the first Sunday of Lent places before us some fundamental issues on which the attitude of most of us is ambiguous: wealth, honour, and power. One need not desire much of these to desire them to excess; the world has suffered more from little Napoleons than it has suffered from big ones, and the greed of a million little men corrupts us far more than the occasional raids of a really great thief. The desert has no room for men of this stamp, and if we enter the spiritual atmosphere of the desert we are tested to see whether we are what we profess to be.

I t appears, then, that the Bible and the Church tell us that we must go into the desert, the very embodiment of evil and death, in order to find life. And indeed they do. But is the paradox of this invitation any other than the paradox uttered by Jesus Himself, who tells us that he who wishes to save his life must lose it?

S P I R I T U A L S T A M I N A By J A M E S W A L S H

A a w s children we were taught that one of the seven capital sins was Sloth. The word meant then, as it does currently,

chronic laziness and fecklessness. In traditional spiritual riting, however, its meaning is rather different. There its

name is acedia, a spiritual boredom and paralysis, a strong distaste for the things of God. The Fathers Often conceive of it as entering the soul through sadness and bitterness born of weariness and discouragement in the struggle to live according to the pattern of Christ. They speak of this sadness as the taedium vitae, the onslaught of the noon-day devil from which the man of God is protected by the Divine presence: 'he shall overshadow thee with his shoulders, and in the shelter of his wings thou shalt hope'. 1 They are emphatic that this sadness and discouragement form one of the great temptations of the interior life.

Many of us are familiar with the beginnings ofacedia. The priest, recalling the apostolic fervour and enthusiasm of the first years of ordination, the religious, looking back on the fervent prayer and easy familiarity with God which marked the novitiate or the years of first profession, will admit that discouragement and dissatisfaction with their lack of progress has led them to lower their spiritual standards, to set themselves a more limited target of achievement in the life of union with God. Consciously or unconsciously, they have introduced into their lives a distinction between salvation and perfection, and they have settled for the former, reluctantly perhaps, but with a certain sense of relief. They persuade themselves that perseverance, in their circumstances, must mean a more or less agonising and joyless endurance, which, at its worst, is a blind and minimising conformity to external law. Liberty of spirit, they feel, is not for the likes of them. And wherever their conscience forces them to reflect, discouragement is apt to be doubled and redoubled. They see their lives as an alternation between ineffectual remorse and that form of presumption which expresses itself in the thought ' I 'm not so bad as I might be'.

There are, certainly, saving qualities in this settled attitude of

Fs 90.

S P I R I T U A L S T A M I N A 41

despondency. There is the basic Christian good-will, the desire, no matter how faint-hearted it may be, to refer all to God and to cling to Him against the odds. With the religious, there is often the habit of essential conformity to rule; with the priest, the will to continue to strengthen the faithful. There is, above all, a realisation of having been chosen, of having been, at some time in the past, enlightened. And the mind cannot prevent itself longing for the prior, the better state of things. I t cannot entirely reject the belief that the glimpse it was once given of Christ, was given as a measure of true destiny, an experience of the Divine Love which was to serve as a standard of its growth. But equally certainly this state is one of ignorance and error. In its assessment (partially true) of its own inadequacy and inertia in the way of God, the mind has falsified the nature of christian perseverance.

Salvation, for each member of Christ's body as for the whole Church, is to reach His perfection, the maturity of the completed growth of Christ '? Salvation is the consummation of the redemptive work of Christ in each one who is called to share the inheritanceof the saints in His light. ~ Salvation is eternal life, the term of a process of assimilation to Christ and of permanent union with Him; for 'God became man that man might become God'. Salvation is participation to the fullness of our powers, natural and supernatural, in the perfect love of Christ; it is to know the one true God and His Son Jesus Christ, not through a mirror, and obscurely, but face to face: to know as I am known, to possess God even as I am possessed by Him. s I f we are to know what perseverance is, we must rehearse to ourselves what it is we believe in, and what is the object of our hope. For christian perseverance is travelling in the surety of hope, to salvation: to the Father in and with Christ who is at once the way and the destination. 'No man can come to me', he says, 'unless the Father draw him', and 'no man comes to the Father except by me'. ~ The constant moral effort which true perseverance demands seems beyond the strength and capacities of the man pre-occupied with his own failures and spiritual lassitude, largely because he is unaware t h a t Christ himself is the way, and also the power of movement which both attracts and propels towards the perfection of charity, salvation.

The revelation of God in Christ makes it plain that no matter

1 Eph 4,13. s Col 1,2. s J n 17,3; I, Cor 13,12~ Phil 3,12. 4 J n 6,44; 14,6,

42 SPIRITUAL STAMINA

how frequent or how long the halts along the way may have been, no matter how seemingly impenetrable the obstacles, every inertia can be overcome in the consciousness of God with us. Once a Christian (already by baptism alive in Christ) has been committed in earnest to the love of God, a renewal of this conversion to Christ is feasible at any moment, with the consequent re-kindfing of the light of Christ in his heart, the stirring-up of Christ's power in his will. ' I t is already the hour for you to arise from sleep. Salvation is closer to us now then when we first believed'. 1 The grace of Christ enables him, in any and every moment, to make light of the burden of his past, to turn away from it to Christ: ' I forget about what is behind and reach out for what is ahead'. 2

The Church in her Liturgy proclaims the same message precisely. Aware of the sinfulness and infidelities of so many of her members, she openly confesses her urgent need for Christ's power and presence. In Advent, at Septuagesima, and again at the beginning o f Lent, she seizes on the present moment and makes it a moment of decision, a new beginning in the way of salvation, a fresh turning to Christ. It is a decision that takes full account of sin and failure, weakness and discouragement. When Paul spoke to his Ephesians of the meaning of salvation in Christ's Church, of God's union with man and the consequent transformation of man's nature by the all- powerful Spirit of God, he added: 'He whose power is at work in us is powerful enough, and more than powerful enough, to carry out his purpose beyond all our hopes and dreams'. 3 The perfect antidote to the paralysis of discouragement is the understanding of the divine gift of Hope as this communication to and operation in us of the infinite power of the God who loves each one of us and delivered himself for each one of us. It is this power and this love which makes true perseverance possible and feasible, in this present moment of the Church's life in Christ. 'We are members of Christ's household if only we persevere in holding fast to our confidence and to the hope in which we glory'. 4

At the root of spiritual despondency is frequently a disappointment with self, a reluctance to exert ourselves further because of a settled belief that our efforts will again come to nothing. We have a chronic dislike of being humbled, even in secret. At the same time, we cannot rid ourselves of a sense of expectancy that our conditions and circumstances will, one day, so be re-arranged that

1 Rom 13,1. ~ Phil 3,13. 3 Eph 3,20. a Heb 3,6.


we shall be able to live again in the Lord's service with fervour and joy; and this, even whilst we tell ourselves that such expectations are illusory. Again, there is often a saving quality in this state of mind. In spite of the blindness and the weary cynicism, there is a half-recognition that, Stripped as we are, the Lord may do something with us yet. The Psalmist, in a similar state of weariness and despondency, has complained that he has striven to lead the good fife, to keep himself from sinful ways, and all for nothing; for he sees the wicked flourish and the children of God without succour. H e is tempted to conclude, as we are tempted, that the struggle is not worth-while. He, too, has been 'reduced to nothing'. But when he enters the sanctuary and turns again to his God, he confesses that his analysis of the situation is without reason, without sense: ' I was all ignorance, standing there like a brute beast in thy presence. Yet thou art always with me. Thou holdest my right hand. It was thy will to lead m e . . . What does heaven hold for me but thee, and what should I desire on earth, except thee? Though my heart and my flesh should waste away, God is the rock of my heart, and my eternal inheritance'. 1

Fo r us, as for the Church who makes the Psalmist's prayer her own, this being reduced to nothing, this humiliating realisation of our impotence is a purification. With the realisation comes the assurance that the strength of Christ enshrines itself in our weakness. ~ Our first mistake has been, perhaps, to accept the time of our first fervour, or any moment of special grace and ease in God's service, as an idea l level of attainment which would always be ours, if only we had corresponded with grace. The sense of expectancy which we condemn in ourselves as illusory, is, at bottom, a desire for the permanent possession of Christ. But we want the reward without the strife, the prize without the contest, or at least without this particular contest in which we find ourselves repeatedly bested. St. Paul reminds us that Christ has surrounded himself with our infirmities, has passed through the same trials and humiliations, has permitted himself to be bested. He has even made himself sin for us, that we might turn to him, take our standard from him, and so share the fruits of his victory. 8

The Church constantly returns, with the patience of Christ, to the task of re-formation, calling us to share Christ's sufferings, that we might be patterned according to his death and achieve

x Ps 72. ~ Cot 12,9-10. 3 Heb 2,17-18; 4,15; 2 Cor 5,21; Heb 12,2-3.

4 4 S P I R I T U A L S T A M I N A

resurrection with h im? So she endures through Lent, the preparation for the transitus Domini, a suffering and dying according to the pattern of Christ's humiliation.2 We are to possess our souls in a patience born of Christ's meekness, one which bears with our own impotence, with despondency and repeated disappointment. In her liturgy the Church confesses repeatedly the sinfulness and infidelity of her members. Christ offers himself daily for our unnumbered sins, offences and negligences. This turning to the Lord is an admission that 'we have turned, everyone, repeatedly, to his own way'. 3 Each Lent the Church calls upon us to rend our hearts and not our garments, to accept the ashes of humiliation implied in the sincere confession of our infidelity and fecklessness. But in the depths of our humiliation and despondency she reminds us that we are the chosen children of God, called to walk according to the love which he shows for us in his passion and death. 4 In the daily renewal and return to Christ in the liturgy we can achieve, in faith and hope, a conversatio, a growing acquaintance with eternity, a gradual transformation into Christ, a transfiguration into his likeness. ~ In this seeking in and with the Church for salvation, for the face of God, there is the firm acceptance of every situation, no matter how unpromising, as one in which we can grow according to Christ 's stature. In spite of the limitations of our many weaknesses, even when these are the direct result of past folly and stupidity, we can gtill exercise the liberty of the sons of God. Though we are often beset by a cloud of motives which appear so compulsive - our own comfort and convenience, our dislike of hardship, hard work and monotony, our fear of others' disapproval, Christ can still be our compelling motive. Because he has made the choice of us, and we have never revoked our acceptance of the choice, every conscious turning to Christ makes of the moment the acceptable time and the day of salvation, and each act becomes an exercise of the self- determining spirit of Christ in us.

The Church would have us realise, then, that these times of self- disgust and discouragement can have a real value for our growth in Christ, and for his redemptive work now being accomplished through us in the Church. The wounds and scars of our weakness and humiliations become those marks of Christ's dying, which 'we carry about in our bodies, so that the living power of Jesus may be

1 Phil 3,10. 2 Phll 2,7-8. 3 Isai 53,6. 4 Eph 5,1-3. s Phil 3,20; 2 Cor 3,18.

SPIRITUAL STAMINA 45

manifested in our bodies'. 1 We can only realise the nature of the treasure we carry about in proportion as we are aware of the flaws in the vessel. We learn to expect from ourselves nothing but weakness, incapacity and the bitterness of failure. But we come to hope for and confidently to expect a constant renewal of interior strength, the power of the Spirit of Christ who dwells in us. A time comes when we do not even pray that the weight of this burden of self should grow less; for it is the nature of the Christian vocation to demonstrate that the divine power finds its full scope in human weakness.

In her prayer, the Church turns constantly to 'the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all consolations, who consoles us in all our trials'. ~ The Church perseveres because He strengthens her always, because in the extremes of her weakness and peril she keeps her eyes fixed on Him, the source of her life and holiness. It is this looking on Christ which purifies her, illumines her, and fashions her according to His likeness. During Lent the accents of the Church at prayer often re-echo the weariness, heaviness and grief manifested in His own prayer in agony. She is the mourner, the persecuted, the sick, the exile, the sinner in process of being reconciled. But she is also the beloved, the bride o f Christ, who is to be hallowed and purified by His redemptive love, to be summoned in all her beauty to His presence, a

The Church is weary with our weariness, sinful with our sins. But Christ's love for the Church is also His love for each of us. So, with th e Church, we are to 'pass through' what He himself endured: the transitus Domini which purifies and sustains His Church, in us. We can see how the Church's love for God is purified and freed by suffering and sacrifice. The Church can offer her prayers of joy, of praise and thanksgiving, of love in the midst of weakness within and persecution from without. She is conscious that these hymns are sung in an alien land. But her sorrows are lightened as she passes with Christ through suffering and death to resurrection. There are moments when she forgets her exile, in the joy of receiving a pledge of the consummation of the Divine power and love. Here is true perseverance: to be inspired by His glorious power with full strength to be patient and to endure with joy. * The Church's liturgy is the great act common to God and man in the Person of Christ, when human nature becomes the vehicle, the centre of

1 2Cor4~I0. ~ 2Corl,3. s Eph5,26-7. 4 Coll~ll.

46 S P I R I T U A L S T A M I N A

operations, as it were, of the Divine power. It is the explanation and manifestation of life in Christ, where in our faith we come to find the face of God. Here we experience and understand true piety - pietas, the perfection of the relationship between Father and child. Here alone the creature can pay the perfect homage to the Creator in the sacrificial obedience of the God made man: Here the incred- ible love of Christ for the Church, His Bride, the inaestimabilis dilectio caritatis, is renewed and made effective from day to day. Our daily life in Christ consists in the experience, in faith, of this three-fold relationship; there is no aspect of living, of growth, which cannot be expressed in these terms. Hence our participation in the Liturgy is the unmistakable way to salvation and the mirror of christian perseverance.

Spiritual stamina, then, is the effective power of the Divine life within us which enables us to endure and to endure joyfully. To have it means an awareness in our daily lives of our living union with Christ. To acquire it and to build it up means a constant turning to Christ. I t finds its characteristic expression in that confidence and daring of which St. Paul speaks so lucidly: ' I can do all things in him who gives me strength'? The real problem of the spiritual life is not how we can return to a first fervour, to some ideal state in our past, which may well be the product of our own imagination. It i s simply how we can so cling to our Lord in his Church that his power becomes increasingly operative and effective in us. Growth can never be a return to a former state, any more than a grown man could find happiness if it were given to him to return to his boyhood and youth which he looks back upon with such nostalgia. Equally, growth has little to do with imagined success or failure in seeking out our faults, dominant or otherwise. Nor does it depend on the sensible consolation which we find or fail to find in meditation or in various devotions or pious practices. There is but one measure of progress, the strength of our attachment to Christ, from whom all power, which in us is virtue, flows. Nor is it possible, normally, to gauge the strength of this attachment, since the stronger the bond, the clearer we see our neediness and poverty. But the awareness, in faith, of living union with Christ brings with it a contentment in the midst of (but never complacency with) our weaknesses, faults and discouragements. I t eventually confers on the beholder a measure of true devotion, which is a certain facility

1 Phil 4,13.


in finding God, as well as perseverance in seeking Him. From time to time he will forget, with the Church, where he is, and approximate, in his living, to the state of eternity. When the soul really begins to desire the Lord with all her strength, when the choice of the Lord against all else becomes effective, then, in her turning to the Lord, 'the veil is removed', and she becomes transfigured into His likeness. 1

I f a deeper awareness of our relationship with Christ in His Church is the effective remedy for the sickness of spiritual despondency, it can be equally effective as a preventive. It would appear that there comes a moment in the lives of very many who have' dedicated themselves to God, when they cease to find any satisfaction in spiritual things. Often enough this loss of taste has a natural explanation. I t may merely be that what was once new and intriguing has now become routine, and the mind is seeking fresh distractions. It may be that the minimum of recollection required for fervent prayer and its consolations becomes seriously interfered with by pressure of work, mental strain, ill-health of one kind or another. The cause may also be negligence or unwise indulgence in material satisfaction which the mind instinctively prefers to the consolations of prayer. And it is natural that, if these consolations recede, the mind will become increasingly absorbed in the lesser but sensibly keener pleasures, the fascinatio nugadtatum. ~ It also happens, and certainly more often than we are wont to suppose, that God is calling a soul to a life of more intimate union; in which case she herself grows restive in her search for a more penetrating knowledge.

But whatever the explanation (and prompt diagnosis is clearly essential), there is no really effective remedy except a more intimate sense of responsibility to and awareness of Christ in His Church. It is not always possible to relieve external pressures and psycho- logical strains; whilst attempts to restore a surface recollection will be at best, a temporary measure. Spiritual growth demands a constant detachment from lesser goods (in the context the saris- factions of sensible consolations), so that knowledge and love of God may be purified and strengthened. Here is the mortification, the suffering and the dying which is the normal pattern of life in Christ. There is never any moment in which the Christian can be absolved of the necessity to seek salvation. Stamina is an essential

1 2 Cor6,17. 2 Wis 4,12.

48 S P I R I T U A L S T A M I N A

requisite for every soul in darkness; the causes of the desolation are always secondary. 'Night', says an English spiritual theologian of the fourteenth century, 'signifies adversity, and the lack of consolation, both sensible and spiritual, when it seems that grace is withdrawn and the soul left in darkness. But blessed is the man who has the courage to stay firmly where he is, in his darkness, showing God's justice, trusting well in him, not poisoned by fears and doubts or any resentment against God. This is what the just man does; because when he is conscious that grace is in some way withdrawn, and he is deprived of devotion and compunction, when his sweet affections and his special consolations seem to be lost, and he is left as naked and poor as a man whom thieves have stripped to the skin, when it seems as if God has forsaken him and forgotten him, still he does not turn back to the love of the world, for he cannot do this, and does not want to do it: he could find no pleasure there, no rest of heart. He is not angry with God, does not impute cruelty to Him; and he does not despair because of his own wickedness, for that is all forgiven. But he continues in this dark night, and he shows to the Lord the Lord's own faithfulness in perfect trust. There is much light in this night, but it does not shine. It will shine when the night is over, and the broad day appears.' 1

This passage illustrates exactly the dispositions of the soul which possesses spiritual stamina. And it can be applied not only to the state of 'contemplative darkness', but to that of spiritual blindness, paralysis, or simple despondency. When St. Paul reminded his Thessalonians that the Lord would keep faith with them and strengthen them, he prayed that the Lord would direct their hearts in the love of God and in 'steadfast endurance'.~ It is no coincidence that the word used by St. Paul here, hypomone, signified, in the early Church, Christ's own endurance, and the endurance of Christ's chosen. In the vocabulary of St. John it is clearly associated with the word mone, which is God's dwelling, God's home in the hearts of the man who loves God and keeps his word2 The Apostle reminds us that our life on earth is a constant opportunity to practise the patience of the saints. 4 For when a man strives to hold fast to Christ, even the weight of sinful self, heaviest of all human burdens, becomes easy and light. 5

Walter Hilton: a Commentary on Ps 91. 2 Thess 3,5. 8 J n 14,23. 4 Apoe 3,10; 13,6; 14,12. 5 Mt 11,28-9.

L E N T E N P E N A N C E B y W I L L I A M Y E O M A N S

R ollECENT years have seen a relaxing of the general penitential discipline of the Church during Lent. Gone are the rigor-

s fasts of former years, gone too is the additional abstinence. Does this mean that the Church no longer

believes in lenten penance? Or are we to conclude that modern man is incapable of doing penance? Such answers are obviously un- acceptable in the light of the Church's constant insistence on the necessity of penance. The mitigation of the laws concerning lenten penance is not a sign that the Church has abandoned penance. It is rather an indication that she does not want us to think of penance merely in terms of particular types of penance. It is true that the majority of people have a legitimate excuse for not fasting, but there can never be a legitimate excuse for not doing penance.

Christ Our Lord proposed penance not as an option but as a necessity. There is no compromise in the words: 'Unless a man deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me he cannot be my disciple'. I t is impossible to reject the cross and keep Christ. Indeed it is the very presence of Christ which reveals the need for penance: because 'the Kingdom of God is near at hand' we must 'repent and believe the Gospel'. 1 A right understanding of what penance is and of why it is an integral part of the Christian life can come only by situating penance in the context of the work of salvation accomplished in Christ.

When the Church calls upon all Christians to enter courageously into 'this time of Christian warfare' which is Lent, she does not inculcate the doing of penance as an end in itself. Nor does she make of penance the unique object of Lent. Lent as a time of preparation and penance is but one of its constituent elements. Lent must not be separated from Easter. Historically it was the feast of Easter which led to the institution of the period we call Lent. Theologically too it is the Resurrection which gives meaning to the death of Christ. I t is because Christ is risen that we can contemplate His sufferings and death without losing heart. The Christian God is not merely the dying God of Calvary but the risen glorious Christ who gives

1 M k 1,15.

50 L E N T E N P E N A N C E

His followers His divine life. I f the Christian faith culminated in the death of its founder it would be vain and worthless. The dead Christ would be a noble example of self-sacrifice but no more. The Resurrection reveals His death as the way towards a fuller life, as a victory over what seemed to be invincible. The Gospel narrative of the Risen life reveals Christ still as full of loving kindness in the days of His triumph, as He was during the days of His humiliation. The propter nos homines of the Credo governs the whole of what follows - the Incarnation, Death and ReSurrection, and Ascension is on our account and for our benefit. The victory of Christ is ours because He is for us. His risen life is for our benefit, the gift he came to give us in order that we may become children of God. The prospect of sharing in that divine life in Christ reveals the true nature of penance. Penance is not a road which ends in death but a way into life. Like every authentic constituent of the Christian life it must have primarily a positive, constructive value. For as St. Paul repeats so insistently Christ died to death not to life, and gave death a positive value making of it a beginning, not an end - 'O death where is thy victory?'. 1 Christ made a prisoner of the captivity of death and thus liberated those who lived in the gloomy shadow of its domination. Sharing in Christ's death then, can only mean increasing our capacity for living with him; i t is the way towards freedom and the realisation of our full stature as children of God.

This mystery of death and life marks our entrance into the Church of God. We are baptised into the death of Chirst and rise with Him from the waters of baptism. The liturgy of the blessing of the baptismal water depicts the Christian emerging newly-born from the fertile womb of the Church. A new child is born to the Father in Christ by the power of the Spirit. Thus man is caught up into the divine life of the Trinity, an adopted son of God. But this newness of life is also a dedication to a new way of living. The Christian plegdes himself to renounce Satan and 'serve God faithfully in the Holy, Catholic Cuhrch'. He begins to live according to the Spirit, that same Spirit of love by Whom the Father created and re-created him, in Whom he prays, and by Whom he is moulded more closely to the likeness of the unique Beloved Son. This 'spiritual' life is then essentially a life of love lived according to Christ. I t is a giving of oneself to the Father, through the Son, in

1 1 Cor 15,55.

LENTEN P E N A N C E 51

the Spirit, a constant affirmation in action of sonship, fellowship and love. But all this is only possible through Christ, God and man, the one Mediator and high Priest between heaven and earth. It is Christ who communicates to us the Spirit and Who is the way back to our heavenly Father. Becoming a Christian is a passage from death to life, from the isolation of sin to the family of God, from the coldness of selfishness to the warmth of love. This is the reality signified and brought about by Christian baptism.

Baptism is then a real death and resurrection. The Christian emerges from its waters as one of the saved, one who belongs to God's household. He must now live according to his status of an adopted son of the God who is love. His whole life must be ordered in charity 'upon the model of that charity which Christ showed to us when He gave Himself up on our b~half, a sacrifice breathing out fragrance as He offered it to God'. 1 With Christ the Christian must rejoice that he lives in God and is called to reveal the mystery of God's saving love for mankind. Holiness is not an option for the Christian. He must be holy because God is holy. He does not paint for himself a picture of what he would like to be and then live up to it. The image and likeness to which he is fashioned and into which he grows continually is that of the Son of God. The force which moulds him into that likeness is none other than the infinite creative and vivifying power of God. Christian virtue.is not a manifestation of personal strength of will. Nor can the motive behind Christian living be an egoistical dissatisfaction with one's own failings, a disappointment with self. The Christian's reaction to his life will always be - 'He tha t i s mighty has done great things for me'. His true inspiration can only be the desire to see the glory of God made known to men - 'so let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven'. * In this spirit we seek the pardon of God for our sins and ask Him to free us in His mercy s0 that He may be glorified. 8

Penance then, since it is the way to the glory of the Resurrection, cannot be inspired by any ethical considerations of self-control. It is not meant to produce that sentiment of satisfaction with our own will power which inevitably leads to a 'holier-than-thou' attitude. Christian penance finds its inspiration in the longing to see the glory of God made known to men and the consequent detestation of the disorder Of sin which obscures the vision of the love of God. At the

1 Eph 5,2. x Mt 5,16. ~ Ember Wk in Lent. Sat 4th CoIL


same time it is evident that only the power of God can show forth His glory, and consequently only by the divine strength can man do penance. Penance is a manifestationnot of personal will power but of the divine creative power, renewing man from within. The desire to do penance must come from an attitude of adoration before the might of God who can do all things and without whom we can do nothing. The stronger our desire for God the more easily will we see the need for penance. I t was the sight of the Holy God which made Isaias realise that he was 'a man of unclean lips'. 1 Union with God demands a purification from sin and that can only mean penance. Furthermore the God Who inspires our desire for Him will Himself consume in the fire of His love the impurities which cloud our vision of Him and adulterate our desire. Penance wilt always be a constant of our life on earth since only in the final consummation will all things return to their source in the glorious union of the whole of creation in Christ.

The whole period of Lent is then a preparation for the Resur- rection, 'the Paschal Feast upon which all the mysteries of our religion converge'. ~ That prospect of joy cannot be devoid of joy and the 'rejoice always' of the Saturday Epistle of the first week in Lent and of Laetare Sunday summarises the spirit in which the preparation is made. When we fast we are not be 'as the hypocrites sad'2 The Christian fasts not before other men, not even before himself but before God. The attention of the penitent is fastened in loving and joyful confidence upon God - 'Our eyes too are fixed on the Lord our God waiting for him to show mercy on us'. 4 Gloom, despondency and depression have nothing to do with penance. The God to Whom the penitent turns does not seek the death of the sinner but his conversion. He is a God who turns a blind eye to s in and looks only at the desires to get rid of sin. Penance can only be undertaken in this spirit of trust which is founded on unshakable faith in the efficacy of Christ's death. I t completes the work of baptism, leading us back to, the welcoming embrace of our heavenly Father eagerly watching the road for our return, drawing us to Himself in the exaltation of his Son2 The road back may be long and difficult but the goal is the freedom of our Father's house and the liberty of the children of God. Penance eliminates gradually the selfishness which makes us blind to ourselves and to others. I t

Isai 6,5. 2 St. Leo: Sermon 46. 3 M t 6,16. 4 Ps 122,cf. Introit Mon. 1st Wk. ~ Cf. J n 12,32; 13,1; 17,1-10.

LENTEN PENANCE 53

thus enables us to share more in the loving vision of God which embraces all the troubles and needs of mankind.

The Church's instruction on penance given during the first days of Lent is introduced by the account of the temptations of Christ in the desert and ends with His Transfiguration on Mount Thabor. In Christ tempted we see that the Christian life is of necessity a time of t r iMand testing. More important still we see in the victory of Christ over Satan our own victory over our own temptations: 'He fought them so that we too may be able to fight afterwards: He conquered them so that we too may be able to conquer in the same way'. 1 The point is not merely that Christ was tempted but that He won. His rejection of Satan is the guarantee of the efficacy of our renunciation of Satan in the renewal of baptismal vows.

The Transfiguration reveals the glory of the same Christ Who was tempted, but it also heralds an even greater temptation - that of Gethsemani. I t is not coincidence that the prophecy of the passion follows directly on the account of the Transfiguration. Nor was it chance that the three who were privileged to see His glory were the same Peter, James and John who saw His agony. It is essential to glimpse the glory of God before engaging upon the way of the cross and to realise that the same glory is present, though hidden, at Calvary. The Church encourages us in the true sense of the word, she puts heart into us for the fight. The prospect of Christ's glory does not withdraw us from Christian warfare but leads us straight to the combat.

But Christ did penance before triumphing over Satan. Conse- quently, with Him we do penance during Lent because we know that our Christian life is going to be a struggle. Penance prepares us for 'the battles of our temptations'. 2 which are inevitable since, by our baptism, we are pledged to mortal combat wi th forces of evil. Temptation, coming to grips with the enemy, must be expected - were it only because the enemy is continually 'seeking whom he may devour'. ~ In the encounter the outcome is either victory or defeat. I f we conquer it is because we have done penance. I f we are defeated we shall need the sacrament of penance, that merciful loving pardon which sets our feet on the road of penance. We conquer in the same degree as we have died with Christ. It is the li t t le death of penance which frees us to walk in the ways of God. Living according to the charity of Christ is not a penitential practice.

I St. Leo, Sermon 39. " St. Leo, Sermon 39. ~ i Pet 5, 8.


Virtue is the living force liberated by the death which is penance. The perfection of virtue is seen in the ease and spontaneity with which it is practised, for then it mirrors the infinite effortless power of God which nothing can withstand. The fact that we have difficulty in being kind, patient and forgiving, that we find it hard to be unselfish and chaste, shows that we need to do penance. For penance aims directly at reducing that inner complicity which sin finds in us. Because our nature has lost its pristine integrity we are 'drawn away by the lure of our own passions'~. This connivance of our nature with sin constitutes the real danger of temptation, for it is an unhealthy liking for evil. Until this is eliminated sin will always be present in our lives and as long as it remains we bear within us the possibility of eternal damnation. It is against this deep- rooted bias of a nature warped by original sin that penance must be directed. For before it ever becomes an action sin is a thing of the heart, and it is 'what comes from the heart that makes a man unclean. ~

It is then to be expected that the Church calls us to do penance with the words - 'Rend your hearts and not your garments'; 3 and turns our attention first of all to the fact that penance is an interior renewal, a change of heart without which the external gesture has no meaning. Turning towards God would be easy were it simply a movement of the body, but is is also a movement of the heart and the will, 'the unjust man must forsake his thoughts', ~ if he is to forsake his unjust practices. Fasting, disciplines, depriving oneself of comforts and necessities may have all the exterior appearance of penance. That appearance however is an illusion unless it signifies an interior change. Man is neither just a soul nor just a body. Body and soul together form that unity which he is. He either goes to God as a unity or not at all. ' I t is of little use if the body is weakened whilst the soul's strength is not increased'. 5 The whole object of penance is to make room in our hearts for the love of God, to oust our guiky affection for sin and replace it with divine charity. The external penance is meant to signify to us this interior desire - the hunger of the body is a sign that we wish to hunger for the love of God. To neglect this interior change of heart makes a mockery of penance or at best makes it a mere futile process of 'toughening ourselves up', a sort of endurance contest. Success in performing

1 J a s 1,14. ~ M t 15,18. 8 Joel 2,13. 4 1 Isai55,7. St. Leo, Sermon 39.

L E N T E N P E N A N C E 55

external penance will inflate our egoism instead of eliminating it, just as failure will lead to discouragement. To make of penance a purely external affair can only ultimately lead to frustration, irritation or self-complacency, But it would be an illusion to imagine that the external gesture does not matter. It should be no more arbitrary than the interior penance. It should express the interior attitude which we seek and harmonise with it.

Since God, the Creator of man can alone renew his heart; since it is His power which can change a heart of stone to a heart of flesh; before ever we do penance we are brought up against the futility of the external gesture that is not inspired by God. External penances do not cause grace. They are not a means of bargaining with God. Nor is there necessarily any correspondence between the amount of external penance we do and our increase in the love of God. Unless external penance is what God wants it to be, unless it is performed in co-operation with Him, it will indeed be a death, but it will never be followed by a resurrection. The value of penance is not measured b y the pain, difficulty or discomfort it inflicts, but solely by its efficacy in disposing us to love God and our neighbour with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength.

The prayers of the Masses in the first Week of Lent teach us to regard our external penances with great reserve and caution. We do not parade them before God demanding a quid pro quo, but we offer them with a prayer that they 'may please God and so be a helpful remedy to us' .1 In order that our penances may be profitable we ask God 'to educate our hearts with his heavenly teachings'3 He alone knows what is in the depths of our souls and it is only in so far as He allows us to share in His clear vision that we shall see 'what is t o be done and be capable of doing what is r ight '3 Only God's merciful attention to His wayward children can create in their hearts the desire signified by bodily penance. The whole tone of these prayers reveals that the Church regards exterior penance as an appeal, a cry for help, a dumb gesture of the body for which we seek God's approval. Only if He carries on in us this work of penance will our external gestures become signifi cant and profitable.

But we must not imagine that external penance is our part of the work and interior penance is God's. That sort of Pelagianism cannot disappear too quickly. Penance is one work, and it must be inspired,

x Ash Wed. Postcommunion. * Mon. 1st Wk. in Lent: Collect. 3 Wed. 1st Wk. in Lent: Orafio Super Populum.


carried through and perfected by God. In this one work we are called to co-operate. Our efforts will avail only in so far as they coincide with the unceasing workings of God's grace within us. I f the Church advocated and imposed fasting for so long it was because it seemed to have the divine sanction in the Bible. The fast of Christ in the desert revealed the sense and value of the fastings of Moses and Elias. But now that the Church no longer insists on fasting what are we to do?

The broad lines of an answer to that question are found in the simple formula - prayer, fasting, almsdeeds. Instead of 'fasting' we can substitute 'external penance in general', but let us remember that this triad is not made up of tt~ree separate actions. Prayer, penance, almsdeeds, are but three aspects of one reality, three moments in the single movement of turning back to God. Penance must be based upon a prayer for light and strength, upon a prayerful looking into our lives. Self-examination is a necessary preliminary; for unless we in some way feel that our sins are a burden, that our work for God is hampered by them, penance will be halfhearted. We must be convinced that we need penance.

The simple ceremony of the imposition of Ashes brings this point home. As is well-known, it belonged to the old rite of excommunication. The words - 'Remember man that thou art dus t . . . ' , ~ take us back to that first dreadful excommunication of man by His Creator. Sin excludes us from fellowship with God and therefore from fellowship with His household and family - the Church. Sin weakens and, when it is serious, severs the bonds of love which bind us to the body of Christ, and prohibits us from partaking of the sacrament of love. It is an offence against Christ in His members, and we are responsible for our actions before that community of charity which we have betrayed. Sin is never a purely private affair between the creature and the Creator. The fact that the sinner is a member of a Church which is the family of God means that he sins against his brothers and his heavenly Father. His deficiencies affect not merely himself but others. I f sin separates and ostracises us from that community of charity which is Christ's Church, penance must lead us to a more intense participation in that life. Charity is above all a way of behaving towards others, it is revealed in action not in words. Penance should then enable us to act in a more Christian way towards our fellow men and especially 'towards

1 Gen 3,19.

LENTEN PENANCE 57

those of the household of faith'. I The most ancient tradition sccs fasting in this light. It was a means of having money or food to give to the poor. Personal penance was thus translated into immediate and effective service of God's poor. 'Without almsgiving, indeed, fasting is not so much a purification of the soul as a mcrc affliction of the body; thcrc is more of avarice than of sclf-rcstraint in one who so fasts from food that hc also fasts from works of loving- kindness, s Evcn though wc do not today fast from food it is possible to fast from other things. The nccds of our fellow-men will guide us in our choice of penance. Visiting the sick or the lonely may mean giving up some of the time devoted to the cinema. The only way in which wc can make a contribution in money to some sort of Christian charity may bc by giving up tobacco or drink. In all this wc arc not merely depriving ourselves aimlessly of something wc like, but wc arc replacing a selfish interest by one inspired by the universal charity of Christ. Our penance should help us to have a greater awareness of the needs of the world, an ability to rccognisc Christ in the poor, the sick, the lonely, the ignorant.

It is necessary to cmphasisc this social aspect of penance since the Church calls us as a body to do penance during Lent, but it would bc an error to exclude the personal value of penance. Action, for Christ will bc cffccdvc only in the measure in which it finds its source in an intense personal love for Him. Furthermore, genuine action for Christ inevitably increases our awareness of the nccd for that personal contact with Christ which comes through prayer. Wc all agree that modern life is a hectic rush. Our days may of necessity bc crowded and busy, but is it necessary that Christ should bc on the fringe of the milling throng of events and activities instead of at their centre? The religion of Christ is not a luxury which only the leisured classes can afford. It is not an additional activity but a driving force which permeates and quickcns every aspect of human life. Thcrc is not one of the multitude of activities which make up a day which does not either take us ncarcr to Christ or scparatc us from him. Christ has given an eternal value to each temporal moment and his Incarnation obliges us to take our human, tcmporal situation seriously. A Christian life is necessarily full, but its fullness is purposeful, working always towards a greater integration of man with God, with himself and with his fellow-men.

Ordering our activities in a Christian way necessarily entails

Gal 6,10. s St. Leo, Sermon 15.

58 LENTEN PENANCE

penance. Making time for prayer may entail the discipline of getting up earlier and consequently of going to bed earlier. I t can be a salutary penance to ensure that we get the right amount of sleep even if it means abandoning television or an interesting book. Irritability and moodiness often follow a late night. Indeed the whole field of recreations and amusements may need serious Christian consideration. Wasting time does not mean doing nothing but rather the engaging of oneself upon an activity which has no relationship to daily life. Recreations can so often be merely an escape from the business of living. We plunge into them as into a dream world where we can forget the passage of time. They become distractions, vain attempts to abstract ourselves from the history which is a part of human nature. A vacation does not re-create us in the sense of enabling us to take up our work in the world with renewed energy and purpose. Rather it makes the return to work inordinately difficult, and we cling to its memory as a refuge from reality during the rest of the year. It can be a true penance to choose recreations wisely, using them only in so far as they help us to be relaxed and purposeful, conscious of our vocation as children of God working with Christ for the salvation of the world.

We may not be free to organise our daily schedule, but we are free to choose the attitudes we adopt to the daily round of events. Fretting never yet made a slow train go faster or produced sunshine on a rainy day. But there is a certain self-satisfaction in that sort of irritation - an impotent revenge like cursing the stone on which we have stubbed a toe. Boredom is often not a product of monotony but an attempt to escape from the realisation that time is passing. The life at Nazareth was probably humdrum but its uneventfulness did not bore the Saviour of the World, since He freely chose to submit Himself to the exigencies of human nature. In Him that freedom becomes ours. The Christian freely chooses with Christ to take up the cross of daily routine joyfully and purposefully, refusing to take refuge in daydreams, anxieties or regrets. That is the penance which can give a zest for life and sharpen our palate to appreciate the subtle but real values which Christ gives to the most ordinary of lives.

Penance is a normal part of the Christian life because it is normal that we should make up what is lacking of the spirit of Christ in our lives. Sin is an alien presence in the life of a Christian. The charity of Christ should in all justice manifest itself in the lives of those who belong to Him by their baptism. Hence we must make saris-

L E N T E N PENANCE 59

faction for our sins, we must replace the evil in our lives by good. That is nothing more than justice. Sorrow for sin is an illusion unless it is accompanied by an effective activity which seeks to restore the balance lost by sin. Sacramental pardon indeed effaces the guilt of our sins but it is granted only to those who are ready to do penance. Today the penance imposed by the priest in the sacrament very often consists only of a few prayers. But it would be an error to think of that penance as an equivalent to or a gauge of the seriousness or lightness of our sins. The work of satisfaction, of restoring the love that should be in our lives, does not end when we have said our penance. Penance has to be done as well as said. The prayers imposed by the priest are effective only through their relation to the merciful pardon of God which re-admits the sinner to the communion of the Church. The sacramental penance is the effective sign and pledge of our re-engagement on that way of salvation which can only be a following of Christ crucified. Accomplishing our penance after confession means shouldering the cross once again with the strength which only God can give. In union with the whole Church militant we enter the struggle against ~ the powers of evil and strive to make manifest in our lives the victory of Christ by the splendour of our charity.

F R O M D E A T H T O L I F E

The Gospels of the First Week in Lent By D O N A L O ' S U L L I V A N

T o become dead to our sins and to live for holiness'. This is St. Peter's description of the aim of a Christian life. 1 It is no abstract deadening or abstract holiness that he envisages it is a mortifying and a rising through, with and in Christ.

'Rejoice, when you share ill some measure the sufferings of Christ; so joy will be yours and triumph when his glory is revealed. Your lot will be a blessed o n e . . , it means that the virtue of God's honour and glory and power, it means that his own Spirit, is resting upon you'. ~ Lent, in the mind of the Church, is the great period of preparation for the annual commemoration of her founder's passing- over from death to life; a commemoration that is not empty and abstract but is the sacramental re-presentation of the Paschal mystery, of the passion, death and resurrection of the Saviour. It is a period of intense and ardent aiming at the Christian ideal of 'learning to know him, and the virtue of his resurrection, and what it means to share his sufferings, moulded into the pattern of his death, in the hope of achieving resurrection from the dead'. 8 Lent, the fast that is a feast - so the liturgy describes it - demands a joyous sincerity in our exercise of penance, in purging out the old leaven, so that when Christ our pasch is sacrificed we may feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. ~ The more sincere our struggle, in Christ, against our lower selves during Lent, the more sincere and meaningful will be the renewal of the promises of our Baptism during the Easter vigil, and the greater the increase of Baptismal grace. What this grace is, Mother Church makes quite clear in her exhortation to the children whom she has brought to life in Christ. 'By Baptism we have been buried with Christ into death. As Christ, then, has risen from the dead, so we too must walk now in newness of life. For we knowtha t our old self has been crucified with Christ, that we may no longer be slaves to sin. Let us remember always that we have died to sin, but are to live for God, in Christ Jesus our Lord'. s

1 1 P e t 2 , 2 4 . 2 1 P e t 4 , 1 3 - 1 4 . 3 Phi l3 ,10-11 . 4 Easter Sunday epistle. 1 Cor 5,7-8. 6 Easter vigil liturgy.

F R O M D E A T H T O L I F E 61

Led by the Spirit and the Bride into the desert of Lent, 'let us fix our eyes on Jesus' as He is shown to us in the gospels of the first week passing from temptation to transfiguration. Only with 'the mind which was in Christ Jesus' can we securely deal with the Tempter and his temptations; only in His light can we peer into the darkness of evil; only in His strength - and how repeatedly the liturgy reminds us of this! - can we ever hope to 'rid ourselves of all that weighs us down and the sin that does so closely beset us'. x That light and strength is what is begged for, ' through Jesus Christ our Lord', in every Lenten Mass. 'Enlighten our minds, we pray thee, Lord, by the brightness of thy shining, so that we may be able to see what we should do, and have the strength to do it'. ~

SUNDAY Matthew 4, I - I i

'Turn these stones into b r e a d . . , cast thyself down to e a r t h . . , fall down and adore m e . . . Begone, Satan !' No stranger dialogue than this could be imagined: Christ, the Son of God, the second Adam, on the one side; Satan, the Adversary, the overthrower of the first Adam, on the other. It is reported to us by our Lord Himse l f - no one else knew of it - to be a warning against the almost daily dialogues that Satan will try to initiate with each one of us, and also to be an example full of grace for dealing with them. That starving man, who was also God, could only be tempted externally. We, children in the flesh of the first Adam, have an enemy within, inherited from Adam because of his fall. Indeed it is that frequent soliciting to evil, sometimes nagging, sometimes crudely violent, that is our sad inward testimony to the truth of revelation as to a primal fall and the existence of 'the devil, our enemy, who goes about roaring like a lion to find his prey'2 Whatever advantage we gain in modern spiritual direction from a more exact psycholo- gical knowledge is at times entirely negatived by our serious lack of actual belief in the devil. The amusement which twentieth- century man draws from the 'legend' of St. Anthony or the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch is an indication that he is perilously unaware of the tragic tension between the 'kingdom of God's beloved Son '4 and the kingdom of ' the prince of this world'.5 The gospels, especially that of St. John, remain unintelligible to him, because he belongs to 'those whose unbelieving minds have been blinded by the god

z Heb 12,1-2. ~ Prayer over the people. Wed. Week I. ~ 1 Pet 5,8. 4 Col 1,13. ~ J n 12,31.

62 F R O M D E A T H T O L I F E

this world worships, so that the glorious gospel of Christ, God's image, cannot reach them with the rays of its i l lumination'?

An awareness, then, of our fallen condition and of the diabolical powers that are pitted against us in temptation can be the first fruit that we draw from the consideration of this dramatic duel in the desert. And confidence in our ultimate victory must come from the victory of Christ in whom, through his sacred humanity, we are incorporated. 'Draw your strength from the Lord, from that mastery which his power supplies. You must wear all the weapons in God's armoury, if you would find strength to resist the cunning of the devil. I t is not against flesh and blood that we enter the lists: we have to do with princedoms and powers, with those who have mastery of the world in these dark days, with malign influences in an order higher than ours'. 2 The trust essential to victory will be increased by another awareness - that of the loving-kindness of the Saviour in sharing with us the humiliation of temptation and in a certain sense that o f sin. 'Christ never knew sin', wrote St. Paul, before going on to startle the Corinthians and ourselves by adding: 'And God made him into sin for us, so that in him we might be turned into the holiness of God'. 3 It is this Jesus who is 'dispossessed',~ who is made 'an accursed thing', 5 who gives us, in the loneliness of temptation and the despair that follows sin, a new trust that is born from our knowledge of His fellow-feeling with us. 'It is not as if our high priest was incapable of feeling for us in our humiliations; he has been through every trial, fashioned as we are, only sinless'. ~ For many souls, pride and self-confidence is a greater danger in temptation than their weakness. Their surest antidote is the grace- force that flows from the tempted yet triumphant Christ, and the weapon to their hand is that which He himself used in the desert, 'the words of the spirit, God's word'Y 'What great matter is it if an angel be strong? But it is a great matter if flesh is strong', s

MONDAY Matthew ~5,3i-46

But the mighty sword that is God's word can be for our judgement as well as for our strengthening. 'The man who makes me of no account, and does not accept my words, has a judge appointed to try him; it is the message I have uttered that will be his judge at

1 2 Cor 4,4. ~ Eph 6,10-12. a 2 Cor5,8. 4 Phil 2,7. n Ga13,13. 6 Heb 4,15. 7 Eph 6,17. a Aug. I n Ps. 138.

FROM DEATH TO LIFE 63

the last day'. 1 I f I 'have been given a share in Christ', ~ so has my neighbour. It is in the context of that sharing that we shall both be judged: not as individuals in some vague vacuum, but as members of the 'one body in Christ', where 'each acts as the counterpart of the other'. 8 That is not to deny in the least the importance of individual salvation; nor does the liturgy of the first week in Lent leave us in the slightest doubt about it. Friday's gospel could not do more to impress it upon us; Wednesday's gospel paints the frightening picture of the devil's return to the soul tha t he has 'left for a while'; and the epistles of Thursday and Friday from the prophecy of Ezechiel destroy the too apt facility with which Jews of the sixth century B.C. and Christians of the twentieth century A.D. equate sin with the consequences of heredity. 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are being set on edge! As I am the living God, the Lord says, this proverb shall be current in Israel no more'. 4 But there is a marked emphasis laid on the collective aspect of sin; on the mysterium iniguitatis, the massa damnationis, on 'the lump of sin'. Plebs, populus, fideles, ecclesia, familia occur in every Mass during the week, as indeed they and cognate words are to be met frequently in the liturgy of all the seasons of the year.

'When the Son of Man comes in his g l o r y . . , he will divide men one from the other, as the shepherd divides the sheep from the goats'. But that division men themselves have already made in the days of their mortal life: the judgment of the Son of Man will but confirm and make public the judgments that they have already passed upon themselves. Our judgment will not be on what we did in an ideal world, as so often our earthly judgments in our favour are inclined to be, but on what we did in a world where there are people who must eat and drink, who break the law of the land and are sent to prison by an earthly judge, who are sick and badly clothed and have no shelter for the night. In as far as we have seen Christ in them and been Christ to them, we shall find ourselves on the right hand of the judge. I f we have lived as islands and refused to allow the greatpontifex, the bridgebuilder, to bridge the gulf between them and us, we shall be damned. A lenten spirituality, whatever mortifications it may include, that does not lead us to a greater charity is not merely suspect: it is un-Chrisfian. Lent, as we have seen, is our preparation for our insertion into Christ's mysterious passover from death to life (baptism being its 'sign') : and we must

1 J n I2,18. B H e b 3,14. 8 l ~ o m 12,5. 4 E z c k 18,2-3.


' remember that we havechanged over from death to life in loving the brethren as we do'. 1 For love cannot be divided: we cannot say we love Christ when we hate Him or neglect Him in those He has identified with H i m s e l f - our fellow men. All we 'who are reckoned as Christians', qui christiana professione censentur, have a double duty to love in a time when hate and dissensions make us fear even for the continuance of our physical world. 'For it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when or why, or how, or where'. The poet is right; millions have left God for no god. But it is lack of love rather than lack of light, as far as one may separate what God has joined, that has led them into the waste and void. Every day of these present years we are living, materialistic atheism is forcing us Christians to sit in judgment upon ourselves. It is - provided we have faith - one of the great sacraments of the present m o m e n t : 'now is the judgment'. ~ We are each and all our brothers' keepers through the love-example that we are bound to give by the very fact of our calling ourselves 'Christians'. 'By this shall all men know that you are my disciples'2 The gospel of the first Monday in Lent provides us with an examination as topical as it is salutary, on the essence of Christianity.

T U E S D A Y Matt]z~w 2 I , I O - I 9

The gospel of the cleansing of the temple puts before us a Lord who will cleanse His Church and her children by fear if worldliness and material interests should have shut their ears to the call of love. 'Then Jesus went into the temple of God, and drove out from it all those who sold and bought there, and overthrew the tables of the bankers, and the chairs of the pigeon-sellers'. The Church is divine; she is also human. And good and evil, wheat and cockle, will be found in her children until the day of final judgment. ' I t is impossible that scandals should not come' .4 But Christ's sad recognition of the fact has not prevented Him from renewing, by the universal scourges of history and by the mischances of our individual lives, the mystery of the cleansing. 'Let them fear God in love' said Saint Benedict. When the blow falls and our laden tables are overturned, our faith must aid us to know that the hand is still the hand of Christ and that His justice is a loving one. The more loving and

1 1 J n 3,14. ~ J n 12,31. ~ J n 13,35. 4 Lk 17,1.


the more understanding our response, the more effective will be our purification. 'Christ shewed love to the Church when he gave himself up on its behalf. He would hallow it, purify i t . . . he would summon it into his own presence, the Church in all its beauty, no stain, no wrinkle, no such disfigurement; it was to be holy, it was to be spotless'? But the Church is no abstract idea; it is the stains and wrinkles of our individual sins that mar the beauty of the Church. That beauty we can help to restore by the lenten mortifications that we assume, but, above all, by seeing and welcoming the cleansing hand of Christ in all the chances and changes of our lives.

WEDNESDAY Matthew I~,38-5o

But such a seeing and welcoming is an acknowledgement that we are sinners. The Pharisees of Wednesday's gospel, as always, refuse to make any such admission. They isolate themselves from the common sinful mass of mankind and in doing so reject the redemption that is offered them. Wicked and unfaithful, they will be shamed at the judgment day by 'the men of Nineve' and 'the queen of the south'. To them were addressed some of the hardest words ever spoken by Jesus. 'Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you are like to whitened sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men's bones, and of all filthiness'. ~ Self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction was their mark: their very name means separated. And in this they were the direct antithesis of the meekness and lowliness of Jesus. They were the experts on sin - but on the sin of others: they wrote glosses on the glosses of the law till they had long lost its spirit and had become arid and self-canonised legalists. They would have stoned to death the woman taken in adultery had not Jesus saved her by challenging them on their boasted sinlessness. And feeding all their many sins was the fearful guilt of deliberate blindness, their will not to see. 'Are we blind too?' they asked the Source of all light. ' I f you were', Jesus told them, 'you would not be guilty. It is because you protest "W e can see clearly" that you cannot be rid of your guilt'. 8

Pharisaism as a sect is long dead - though its influences reach even into the Jewry of today; as a fact it lives, and corrupts true religion; and it masquerades, now as then, under the guise of zeal for the observance of the law's letter. It lies in ambush for the zealot;

1 E p h 5,25-27. 2 M t 23,27. 3 J n 9,41.

66 FROM DEATH TO LIFE

it is the parasite of piety. It talks of observance and sin, but it has no true sense of sin as a wilful opposition of the human will to the will of the Creator; above all it fails to see in it the negation of the sweet charity of the Father. It refuses the family relationship that is offered by Christ to His poorest disciple because i t has blinded its eyes to its beauty. The gospel we are discussing shows our Lord stretching out His hands towards His disciples and saying: ' I f anyone does the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother', a But the pharisee of all times lacks the 'simple eye' that would put him body and soul into the homely light of our Lord's family circle. A sense of sin brings the prodigal back to his father's house; whereas the boastful prayer: 'I am not as the rest of men" keeps the pharisee from a 'share in the fellow- s h i p . . . Fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Chr i s t . . . God dwells in light: if we t oo move and live in light, there is fellowship between us. '8 Many sins will be forgiven us - on the condit ion that we have loved much. Lenten fasts or any other

• exterior observances that are not informed by true charity can be a grave danger to our spiritual lives. And the danger is all the greater where there is a tradition either of conservative catholicism or of puritanism. That tradition does, it is true, preserve a sense of sin: but too often it is a sense of the neighbour's sin. In such a climate, those 'who have confidence in themse lves . . , and despise the rest of the world '4 may only too easily thrive and set a standard of mere external observance that is far from Christ's: 'Be ye perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect'. 5

THURSDAY Matthew i5,21-28

Here we see Jesus dealing very differently with a very different type. The Chanaanite woman who begs for her daughter's cure is no expert in the law. For the pharisee she would be outside the law, a pariah, an outcast. We, who are also gentiles, may see in her a type of reconciliation and participation in the great mercy of Christ and an example of how we are to approach Him in our needs. 'A woman, a Chanaanite by b i r t h . . , cried aloud: 'Have pity on me, Lord, thou Son of David. My daughter is cruelly troubled by an evil spirit'. 6 In the Church, we have to make for

1 M t 12,50. s Lk 18,11. 8 1 J n 1,5-7. 4 Lk 18,9. 5 M t 5,48. 6 M t 15,22.


practical reasons the distinction between the 'born Catholic' and the 'convert'. In these weeks, when we are preparing for a new outpouring of baptismal grace at Easter, it is most salutary to remember (which we rarely do) that we too are 'Chanaanites by birth'. No one is born a Catholic; each is born 'cruelly troubled by an evil spirit' from whom we have to be delivered as surely as the young pagan girl - and by the same power of Christ now spread far and wide beyond the narrow bounds of Israel through His continuing presence in His Church. 'I bid thee begone, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy G h o s t . . . Accursed fiend, acknowledge thy doom and give honour to the living and true God, give honour to Jesus Christ, His Son, and to the Holy Ghost, and keep far away from this servant of God, because Jesus Christ our Lord and God has been pleased to call him to his holy grace'. 1 A more vivid appreciation of this holy grace and an understanding of Baptism as our Christian initiation is one of the principal reasons for the remodelling of the Easter liturgy. With it will return what is so lacking in our age, a sense of sin, a spirit of compunction. 'The greatest sin at the moment ' , said Pope Plus X I I in 1946 , 'is that men have begun by losing the sense of sin'. But it is not any kind of Jansenism or morbid spirit of introspection that we need: it is rather the 'tasting of the goodness of God' as it frees us from original guilt and our own personal sins. There is nothing morbid about the Chanaanite woman. Rather she gives evidence of great good humour and great humility when she acquiesces so readily in our Lord's reference to her people as 'dogs'. Nor is there the slightest trace of morbidity in St. Peter's two letters, though they certainly show a great awareness of sin and its iniquity. The accent is on gratitude and hope and trust. 'You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people God meant to have for himself; it is yours to proclaim the exploits of the God who has called you out of darkness into his marvellous light'. ~

F R I D A Y John 5,1--15

The cripple whose cure is narrated in Friday's gospel also proclaim- ed the exploits of the God-Man who called him from the darkness of bodily disease to the lightsomeness of health: and quite probably also from the darkness of sin to the light of grace. 'The man went

1 Ri te of Baptism. 2 I Pet 2,9.

6 8 F R O M D E A T H T O L I F E

back and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had restored his strer/gth'. But what determines the liturgical choice of the gospel is the stern warning that Jesus gives about sin to the man who had been lying disabled by the pool for thirty-eight years: 'Behold, thou hast recovered thy strength; do not sin any more, for fear that worse should befall thee'. To take little account of the sternness of Jesus when He speaks of sin would be to scandalously edulcorate His teaching. His immense love for sinners is matched by His hatred for sin; He shows the tenderest of understanding for the sin but He never in the slightest condones it. 'Has no one condemned thee? No one, Lord, she said. And Jesus said to her, I will not condemn thee either. Go, and do not sin again henceforward'?

On the eve of His public life Jesus was pointed out as 'the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world'. ~ The man who said that had himself gone 'all over the country announcing a baptism whereby men repented, to have their sins forgiven'. 3 And our Lord's own first preaching was: 'Repent, and believe the gospel'. 4 Nor did it change: 'Except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish', s What is here referred to is not penance as we now understand it in the sense of mortification, but a whole-hearted changing over, a genuine conversion, a saying good-bye to oneself (the literal meaning of our 'self-denial'), a reversal of values - in practice as well as in theory, a passing-over from the darkness of spiritual death to life 'in Christ'. And the failure to do so means separation from Christ here, with the fearful possibility of eternal separation from Him afterwards. However unpalatable it may be to our self-love, the paradoxical death-life law that runs through all Christ's teaching is neglected only with grave peril: 'he that will save his life shall lose it, and he that shall lose his life for my sake shall find it'. 6 When we ask ourselves why, even allowing for human weakness, this repeated demand for a thorough conversion often meets with so little serious response in Catholic lives, we find it hard to give any single adequate answer. And the aid which we can get from the sacrament of penance makes it still more puzzling. Sometimes we may blame a mechanical use of the sacrament with little or no genuine purpose of amendment: there is no genuine awakening to the gravity of our situation and our sorrow is superficial. This can obviously have its source in lack of prayer, especially real personal prayer.

x J n 8 , 1 0 - 1 1 . 2 J n 1,29. 8 Lk 3,3. 4 Mk 1,15. 5 Lk 13,5. M t 16,25.


But we might also ask ourselves if the clear-cut views of Jesus on sin and conversion have not been to some extent blurred by a legalism and an externalism which are the by-product of our manuals of moral theology and our catechisms. Is there not a danger - increased by the frequency of our confessions - that we look only to the fact that sin is forbidden and scarcely advert at all to its malice? The punishment for sin is not seen as inwardly and necessarily connected with it: God is regarded more as one who threatens the sinner with hell rather than as one who will say to the unrepentant sinner: 'Thy will be done'. And the consequence is generally a minimum service of God, a disregard of venial sin and the obliteration of any desire for progress. The continuous effort to correct our venial sins and to advance in God's love - which is what spiritual writers mean by a 'second conversion' - is the Christian ideal. Let us at least preach it and awaken the desire for it in souls. 'Hast thou a mind to recover thy strength? . . . Take up thy bed and walk'. 1

SATURDAY Matthew I7,1- 9

The encouragement to persevere in the struggle with temptation and sin, and to walk to the mountain of God, is given by the mystery of the transfiguration. Jesus drew from it strength for His own coming struggle - it is placed between two announcements of the passion - and we must also be fortified by i t in our passage from darkness to light, to the lumen Christi of the Easter vigil and to the ultimate lumen gloriae of heaven. Even at this early stage of Lent, we can ask ourselves whether the Resurrection of Christ and that of our own bodies holds anything like the place it should in our spiritual lives. For centuries the passion has been stressed - not infrequently overstressed - to the detriment of our practical belief in the Resurrection; and it will take many years of the restored Easter liturgy to redress the balance. The Paschal mystery is a mystery of death and life, of Passion and Resurrection. 'Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory?'. 2 But - if only we could realise it - we have, by Baptism, already entered into His glory even though its shining cannot yet transfuse and permeate our mortal bodies as it did the body of Jesus in the transfiguration on Thabor. ' In our baptism, we have been buried with him, died like him, that so, just as Christ was raised up by his

1 J n 5,6 and 8. 1 Lk 24,26.


Father's power from the dead, we too might live and move in a new kind of existence. We have to be closely fitted into the pattern of his resurrection, as we have been into the pattern of his death'. 1 It requires indeed a great exercise of the theological virtues to live and move in this new kind of existence while we are at the same time involved so intimately in the life of the senses. The seed is in us, 'Christ in you, your hope of glory', ~ but while we are in these bodies of death and 'the whole world about us lies in the power of evil', 8 it is only the faith that we 'demanded' of the Church of God in Baptism that can empower us to envisage the final glory of the flower in the hidden seed. 'What do you ask of the Church of God? Faith. Of what does Faith assure you? Life everlasting'. 4

In no period of her history has the Church ever ceased to foster in her 'faithful' that implanted faith, and to remind us that 'even

now we are sons of God'. ~ But the Spirit has his 'times and moments'. Today, caught up i n an almost tangible outpouring of the Spirit, millions have a new consciousness in mind and in heart of the divine indwelling and of the power that it gives them to conquer the death of sin and to live in Christ. Through the scriptural and liturgical 'movements' of the present century, the generation that has to face collective death, physical and moral, has 'all the wealth of Christ's inspiration 'n for their guide and the fat of the eucharistic wheat for their strength. They know, with a new knowledge, that 'he that is in us is greater than he that is in the world'Y The texts of these lenten gospels are no dead words; 'the word of God to us is alive, full of energy' .8 And it is Christ's transfigured body, once physically, now sacramentally, broken for us that the gospel prepares us to receive. I t is the same riving God who looks down on us at the breaking of the bread, and testifies to us also that we are His beloved sons, brothers of His Only-begotten. So we 'catch the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, with faces unveiled; and become transfigured into the same likeness, borrowing glory from that glory, as the spirit of the Lord enables us'. 9

1 R o m 6 , 4 - 6 . 2 Coi1 ,27 . 3 1 J n 5 , 1 9 . 4 Li turgy of Baptism. 1 J n 3 , 2 . 6 Co13,16. ~ 1 J n 4 , 4 . 8 Heb4 ,12 . 9 2 C o r 3 , 1 8 .

S C R I P T U R E R E A D I N G

N O T E . Holy Church has never looked upon the reading of the Bible as one of the many 'pious' exercises of the spiritual life. Holy Scripture is the history of the revelation of Christ. It is therefore the Church's history, and our history. Christ still speaks to His Church through the Scriptures. They are her voice because they are first of all.His. Holy Scripture read, understood and lived is our life as members of Christ's Body. We read the Bible in order to enter more deeply into the mystery of our union with Christ in HIS Church, and to bring our lives into ever closer conformity with the Word of God revealed in the written word of the Scriptures.

The Editors intend this feature to be a help towards this prayerful reading of the Bible.

T HE P O O R OF GOD

The prayer of the Church in Lent is essentially the prayer of those who realise their desperate need of Christ. They are the poor of God praying with Christ, who became poor that we might become rich (2 Cor 8,9). They are the poverty-stricken who are confident that 'God has chosen the men who are poor in the world's eyes to be rich in faith, to be heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love Him (Jas 2,5; el. I Cor 1,26-31 ).

Christ's teaching on poverty can be understood only against the background of the Old Testament. I t was fundamental in the belief of the Israelites that God was glorified in bestowing his free gifts of material prosperity on his chosen people as a reward for fidelity to His law. (Pss I I I ; 34; 36; Prov IO,3; I3,21-25; 23,17). Because Job and Toby were faithful in time o f trial both were Messed with material prosperity. (Job 42 , I2 - I6 ; Tob i I , i8 -2 i ) . Nevertheless the Israelite found the material prosperity of the wicked and unjust a stumbling block, Je r i2,i ; Mal 3 , I4 - I5 ; Qoh 7,I5; Psalm 72 hints at the solution: the union with God is the prosperity and consolation of the just. The mystery of God's providence which allows the just to suffer and the sinner to prosper is illumined only by the mystery of Christ the poor and suffering servant: He who is also the Just one and the well-beloved Son.

I Blessed are the poor in spirit - Mt 5,3

The word for 'poor ' in Mt 5,3 used by Christ was very probably the same word used in Num Io,3; Pss 9 , I7 - I8 ; 21,27; 24,9; 33,3; 37,I I ; 68,33; I49,4. I t designates the poor of God i.e., those who have the interests of justice, kindness and considerateness so much at heart that they prefer to endure wrong rather than commit injustice. Their opposites are the proud who demand and stand on their rights and ride roughshod over others.

I. Christ does not praise want, hunger or loss of liberty, Mt 23,4; J n 8,36. 2 . l i e praises hunger for God, entire dependence on Him, readiness to

72 S C R I P T U R E R E A D I N G

share with others, to be kind, gentle and forgiving to al l : M t 5,38-43; 18,21-35; I9,2I ; Lk 6,30-38; I 2 , 2 I - 3 I ; I4 ,7 - I4 ; I8 ,9 - I4 ; 2 I , I - 4. 3. Such is Christ 's own att i tude to his Fa ther : J n 4,34; I7,IO,24; M t 4,4; I I ,27; Lk 22,42; 23,46. 4. A n d to mankind: M t I I ,28; Lk 4 , I 8 - I 9 ; J n 7,37; 8,1o-11; io, i i . 5. Though he is King, Christ comes without show or ostentation. M t 21,4-5; Zach 9,9; Lk 1,32 ; 2,I2. 6. He is poor Himself and invites H_is followers to be poor for the sake of the Kingdom. St. Luke especially stresses this point : cf 3,11; 6,30; 7,5; I1,41; I2,33-34; I4 , I4 ; 16,9; I8,22; 19,8; Acts 9,36; IO,2,4,3 L

I I The Prayer of the Poor

I. A cry for help to the Father of the poor - (a) F rom the community: Pss i I ; 43; 59; 73; 78; 82; 93; 122; 128; 136. (b) F rom the individual : Pss 3; 5; I2; 2I ; 24; 38; 41-42; 53-56; 58;

62; 63; 68; 69; 76; 85; IOI; I I 9 ; I39-I42 . 2. A prayer of trust and confidence: Pss 4; Io; 22 c f L k 2~,35-36 and M t

26,3I ; 6 I ; I2O; I24; I3O." 3. A prayer of thanks: i Kgs 2 , I - I I ; Lk 1,46ff; Pss 77; 112; 113; 144; i45. 4. The sincerity of this prayer is seen in pract ical action towards those in

'need: Tob I2,8; Sir 7,9; Isai 58; Zach 7 ,5-I4; M t 25,3Iff; Acts 9,36;

i o , 2 ,4 ,3 i ,

T E X T S

I. The Lenten Fast

C o ME, brethren, and let me show you the kind of fasting which is true and pleasing to God. You must know that we praise bodily fasting not for its

own sake but for the substantial benefits it brings to the soul. The blessed Apostle Paul says that mere bodily exercises help us but little. And the Holy Fathers, speaking from experience, do not approve of long fasts. They judge i t more praiseworthy to take food once a day - though this should not be a banquet. Fasting, they say, should be moderate and reasonable. Holy Scripture gives us the same advice: we are not to be tricked by the belly's greed nor the pleasures of gluttony, but simply to satisfy our na tura l appeti te for food - to take as much food and the kind of food as is conducive to the strength and nourishment of the body: what, in fact, is enough for the proper maintenance of health. In the case of a man who enjoys poor health, i t is no detr iment to holiness to eat in moderat ion of the dainties set before him, so long as he does not a d d excess and over-abundance to what is necessary, and looks for nourishment rather than pleasure, for drink, not drunkenness, for temperate use, not superfluity and intemperance.

This, then, is the principle, the beginning of the fasting which is true and

T E X T S 73

pleasing to God. But its end, the reason why fasting is imposed and honoured amongst Christians, is the soul's purification. O f what use is i t to abstain from bodily food and to give way to fleshly, thoughts and passions ? O f what use to abstain from wine and to feel the torment of thirst, if a man still gets drunk ' though not with Mne ' , as the prophet says: if the soul grows heated with anger and jealousy? Of what use to avoid the gourmet 's tame with a soul full of pride, to make one's food less pa la tab le when the soul, in its fasting lacks humili ty? O f what use to avoid the delight of well-prepared dishes when our minds are poverty-stricken with vain thoughts and pursuits, and our prayer likewise? Fast ing is good only when it succeeds in over- coming the passions, in making the soul humble, in remedying hatred, in quenching the fires of anger, in forgetting grudges: fasting is good only when it leads to a more frequent and more perfect p rayer and meditat ion. And i f you keep a good table, see that a share is set aside for feeding the poor.

I f you have kept this kind of fast, then you have suffered and died with Christ. And more: you shall rise with Christ and reign with H i m for ever. Through such a fast as this you are fashioned after the likeness of His death, and so you will share His resurrection and inheri t life in Him.

From a homily of Gregory of Palamas for the fifth Sunday of Lent (i~G 15 i , I6o-2).

2. Personal Defects

C ERTAINLY it is essential that who ever knows himself should recognise these in himself. For in this present state of wretchedness we will never

be without them, until all our malice is burn t away in the forge of the eternal love of God our Creator and Lord; when our souls are penetra ted and completely possessed by Him; and our wills completely conformed to His, or rather transformed into that Ml l which is the very essence of Rect i tude and perfect Goodness.

But in the meant ime may His infinite mercy grant us all, a t least, a greater sense of and abhorrence for all our sins and defects whatever they be; may we share more fully in the eternal l ight of His wisdom and keep before us His infinite goodness and perfection; in this way our own defects will become very plain to us, and, no mat ter how slight they are, they will also become intolerable to us. By so struggling against them we shall great ly weaken and lessen them, with the help of the same God our Lord.

Letter of St. Ignatius Loyola to Sister Teresa Rejadell, Rome, October x547 (Ep I, ,627-628).

3. Brought to Nothing ~V] 'HOEVER loves evil hates his own soul (Ps IO,6). I hated mine, and

~ / would still be hat ing it, had not he, who first loved it, given to me the little beginnings of his love for it.

74 T E X T S

Through his good gift, then, I can sometimes think about my soul. And it seems to me that I find there two contraries. I f I examine it truly, as it is in itself and with all that comes from itself, I can see nothing more than this, that it is reduced to nothing. Is it necessary to make a catalogue of its miseries, except to say that it is weighed down with sins, shrouded in darkness, trapped in its evil pleasures, itching with bad desires, a slave to its passions, glutted with false thoughts, weighted on the side of evil, reaching out after every vice: full, in short, of every kind of confusion and baseness? What then shall be the verdict on our unrighteousness, if what we judge to be right in ourselves appears under the piercing light of truth as a thing o f shame? I f the light that is in us is really darkness, what of the darkness itself? Easy it is for each one of us, if he examines well all that he has, without any pretending, and passes judgment without sparing himself, to bear witness in all things to the Apostle's truth, and readily to proclaim: He who tries to make something of himself, since he is nothing at all, deceives himself (Gal 6,3 ). What is man that you should make so much of him or that you should set your heart on him? (Job 7,I7). W hy indeed? Man is become like nothing, brought to nothing; indeed, he is nothing. But how can he be nothing at all when God makes so much of him? How is he nothing on whom God's heart is set?

We can breathe again, my brothers, for if we are nothing in our own hearts, perhaps there is another opinion of us hidden in the heart of God. O Father of mercy, O Father of those who need mercy! Why do you set your heart on us? I know, I have the answer: Your heart is where your treasure is. How can we be nothing if we are your treasure. In your sight all men are as if they were not: they are to be reckoned as nothing, as hollow mockeries. Yes indeed, before you, but not within you. In the judgment of your truth certainly, but not in the love of your fatherly heart. Of a truth you call those who are nothing as though they are something. And they are nothing because you call only those who are nothing: and they are something worth, just because you call them. For though they are nothing in themselves, yet in your sight they are something, according to the word of the Apostle, 'not because of their rightful words, but simply because you call them' (Rom 9,i2). Surely it is thus that You console, in Your fatherly love, him whom you have brought to nothing by Your truth, that he might grow to greatness in Your heart who was so straitly confined in his own. So all your ways are mercy and truth to those who seek your covenant and your faithfulness' (Ps 24,IO): a covenant indeed of fatherly love and the faithfulness of truth.

From St. Bernard's 5th sermon on the Dedication of a Church (PL I83,53I).

T E X T S 75

4. The Persevering Prayer of the Sinner

~ F, then, we are conscious that we are unclean through avarice, pr ide, vainglory, resentment, anger, envy or any other vice: if, like the Chanaa-

nite woman, we have ' a daughter possessed of an evil spirit ' , we must run to the Lord and beseech H i m humbly to heal u s . . .

The man who is t ruly humble and submissive will not consider himself as a l ready belonging to the chosen of Israel and worthy of the company of the clean of heart ; he will see that he has still to reach that state, that he is not yet worthy of heaveniy gifts. But even so, he will not despair, but will remain as insistent as ever in his prayerful demands; for he has an unshakable trust in the goodness of God the most high, the giver of all good. For if He could make a saint of the thief of Calvary, an apostle of him who persecuted the Church, an evangelist of the extort ionate tax-collector: if H e could make sons of A b r a h a m out of the very stones, then surely he can make a chosen child of Israel of this dog that keeps on b a r k i n g . . .

And when the Lord sees the burning ardour of our faith, and the strong perseverance of our prayer, he will surely send us His merciful grace and see to i t that we become what we want to be. He will drive out the tumul t of evil thoughts, strike off the shackles of our sins, and we shall be fully restored in holy peace of soul and the perfection of good works. (But note that this prayerful insistence will be effective only if it is in our hearts as well as on our lips: our appeal is cut in two if our lips clamour for one thing and our hearts for another).

Let us then follow the example of the Chanaani te woman: let us settle ourselves in this prayer of peti t ion and remain in it, unti l we are visited by the grace of our Creator, which straightens out all that is crooked in us, brings holiness out of our uncleanness and peace out of our agitation. His faithfulness and holiness are powerful enough to forgive our sins and cleanse all our guilt, i f only our hearts will keep on crying out to Him, Who lives with the Fa ther in the uni ty of the Holy Spiri t , and is Lord and God with Them for ever. Amen. From the Homily of the Venerable Bede on the Gospel of the Second Thursday of Lent (Mt I5,ox-8. PL 94,Io4-5).

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M E D I T A T I O N

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted bY the devil and when he had fasted forty days and forty nights he was hungry. . .

~ N the wilderness God learnt to be a hungry man. He learnt the craving for food, the faintness and weakness, the nagging emptiness; He watched

the flesh melt away from bone. And He never forgot that hunger. But Christ remembered His own hunger in such a way that He never forgot that others are hungry. The first thing He will say at the Judgment will be - I was hungry, and you gave Me to eat as long as you fed the least of these My little ones. Christ never forgot His own hunger so He fed four thousand and gather- ed up the fragments afterwards. Even after His resurrection, there by the lakeside He had breakfast ready for His Apostles after their long night 's fishing. He taught them the n as he taught them at Emmaus. On that occasion two of them had the kindness to invite a stranger to eat with them. Their meal became a Eucharist. Christ fasted to show man that God never forgets that man is hungry even though man forgets that God is hungry.

For Christ's hunger was not merely that of a famished body, it was also a hunger of the soul. An eternal divine hunger. The hunger of the Son eternally satisfied and eternally sharpened by the food which is the will of H_is heavenly Father. Strong meat which at times is washed down only by the chalice of suffering drained even to the dregs of death. The hunger in Christ's body was nothing to the hunger in His soul - a hunger for the salvation of man.

I f He longed to feed hunga-y mouths, His desire to satisfy those who hungered and thirsted after the living God was even greater - I am the bread of life: he who comes to Me will never be hungry. He gave Himself to satisfy the hunger in man 's soul and He gave Himself under the form of the food of the body.

Man does not live by bread alone - these are the words of a man who was famished as He spoke them. He knew bodily and spiritual hunger and He knew which was the more important. Bread is not the only food of man. And yet before He told Peter - Feed my lambs, He gave him bread and fish; before He revealed Himself as the living bread He fed the multitude. An empty stomach is deaf to pious words. Tha t may be true but there is more to it than that. Christ was able to feed the body in such a way as to stimulate the true hunger of the soul. Christian charity is not just a soup-kitchen which has been blessed. I t is looking after the material needs of ma n in such away that he becomes more of a person, more capable of realising that his needs are not purely material.

But Christ is not alone in the desert. The devil is there too. A devil who is concerned about the hungry Christ - Command these stones to be changed into bread - I f you are the Son of God. Who ever heard of a hungry God ! What is the use of being a God unless you get something out of it? What is

M E D I T A T I O N 77

the use of religion unless you get something out of i t . . . ? The perquisites of the K ingdom of G o d . . . ten per cent less suffering, ten per cent more consolation because I serve God. Because I serve God do I expect H i m to serve me? Are the people there because there are priests to support or vlce-versa? How much does the K ingdom of God cost? A pearl of such price that i t will always cost a man all that he has, poverty is the price that buys it. W h a t do ! get out of it? The joy of having given everything. You love in order tO give everything, not in order to get. I f you are able to love ut terly and completely you will have given everything - Blessed are the poor in spirit. The devil can fast but only in order to fill his belly the more. Christ

fasts in order to become hungry. Not only can the devil fast but he knows his Bible - 'He has given his

angels charge over t h e e . . . ' Throw yourself down from the top of the Temple ' . This man who would live by the word of God shall have a phrase from the Psalms as a parachute. But abandoning oneself to divine Providence does not mean abandoning one's human condition. The Providence of God is concerned with man and His needs, moving with that Providence means concerning oneself more deeply with the needs of humanity. The Kingdom of God is not going to fall out of the sky but to rise from the depths of the earth. The rod of Jesse is not a thunderbol t of God hurled from on high, but a p lant which springs from Israel 's soil. A p lan t puts down its roots first of all. The yeast is buried in the dough. The Kingdom of God is a movement from inside, working outwards. God does not advertise, He appeals. Nor is a miracle mere heavenly slelght-of-hand. God has nothing up His sleeve and we should not behave as i f H e h a d - You shall not tempt the Lord your God. Jumping from the Temple or coming down from the Cross: they amount to the same thing. I t is the same diabolical voice which whispers ' Jump ' ,

or screams - 'Come down' . But the devil persists, risking everything on one throw: 'All this will be

yours i f you bow down and adore me' . Is the world to he saved by compromise with evil or by the Cross? - 'Get away from me Satan' . Christ 's choice here reveals what is involved in each decision of mine. I adore either God or the devil by each of my free acts. In the struggle between Good and Evil no-man 's- land does not exist. 'He that is not with me is against me' . Light or darkness, the two are mutual ly exclusive. Christ and the devil separate, but it is the devil who retires. Get away from me, Satan. He will come back, only however when God allows him, and even then, though he will crucify Christ, the devil will accomplish nothing but his own destruction. The devil in the hear t of Judas led h im to suicide. When Christ has overcome the worst onslaughts why do I yield like a coward before lesser attacks? - Get away from me Satan. How often one little sin seems capable of producing so much good. Jesus's answer is clear, our own so often confused. We adore the devil of impatience because he gets things done in a hurry; the devil of stubbornness because he is tenacious of purpose; the devil of self-indulgence

78 M E D I T A T I O N

because he is so human and the human touch wins souls - but for whom? The devil of unimportance with his consoling ' I t doesn't matter ' . Exactly how much it does matter is seen in Christ's refusal.

Prayer against the temptations of the devil

'You, Lord, who are the true teacher and helper, Creator and Redeemer, Giver of gifts and strengthener, Advocate and terrible yet merciful Judge, Giving sight to blind hearts, Empowering the weak to fulfil your commands, So full of fatherly care that you desire our repeated requests, So bountiful that none are allowed to despair, Pardon all my sins and all my mistakes, And by your goodness full of grace, good Jesus, Lead me to that blessed vision of my desire Whence I can no longer wander. You know into what great sins I have fallen You who know all that is hidden. You know how wretchedly frail I am and inclined to evil, You know well the unrelenting enemy who afflicts and harasses me. To You then, O Christ my God, Strongest of warriors All-conquering victor To you I appeal in this uneven combat; My mortal weakness seeks you. I f the roaring lion is overcome by the feeble lamb I f the most violent of evil spirits is vanquished by the weakest of men That is to the glory of your Majesty. And if, by permission of your just judgment, We endure for a time the domination of the evil one, May his insatiable jaws never entirely engulf us. May man's joy, O lover of men, strike sadness into him Who rejoices over our stumbling'.

(Attributed to Isidore of Seville, PL 83, I273D-I276A)

79

SPIRITUAL VOCABULARY N 0 T E. The traditional spiritual vocabulary of the Church has its origins in the Hebrew, Greek, and especially the Latin languages. Many of its terms, first translated into English by medieval writers, have been greatly impoverished through centuries of use. The words gracious and graceful, for example, when used in a spiritual context originally meant "grace-giving', 'endowed with grace', in the full theological sense.

The primary purpose of Spiritual Vocabulary is not to provide etymological or abstract definitions, but to help towards a deeper appreciation of the richness of meaning hidden in a terminology which often seems hackneyed and old-fashioned. Though the Editors have in mind the gradual compilation of a spiritual glossary, they do not intend to follow any particular order of presentation. Words will be chosen to fit the theme of each issue.

P I E T Y is the relationship between God the Father and His only-begotten Son in the love which is the Holy Spirit. This relationship is extended in Christ to all the , adopted children of God. It implies fatherly care and loving providence on God's part: true worship and loving dependence on the childrens' part. Both sides of this relationship are revealed to us in Christ: both the piety of the beloved Son whose meat and drink is to do the ~ of the Father: and the piety of the Father whose love for his children is made known to us in the Incarnate Christ - 'God so loved the world as to send His

Son'. Hence, to be pious means to have the mind of Christ Jesus, the head of

the human family, whose love for his Father is expressed in the love and service of his brethren. We are pious when we co-operate with God's fatherly care and with Christ's work of redemption. Our piety is the loving service of Christ in our fellow-men, children of our heavenly Father. It is also the loving gratitude with which we allow ourselves to be cared for by God, rejoicing in our total dependence on Him.

M E R C Y is the divine attribute, a name of God. The Biblical notion expresses love rather than piW; but a love inspired by the sight of human wretchedness and misery. The spiritual and material needs of man provoke God to fulfil those needs. God's mercy is His effective love for sinful man, in particular, the healing, consoling and enriching aspects of that love. The great work of mercy is the Redemption: Christ's emptying Himself in order that man might be enriched. The merciful pardon of Christ is' precisely His taking away of man's sin, becoming sin, in order to replace sin by grace. The Christian works of mercy are ways of sharing with Christ in the needs of others and lovingly supplying those needs out of one's own God-given resources and gifts. The merciful shall obtain mercy, i.e., those who forgive will be forgiven by Christ, those who give will receive Him in return.

80 S P I R I T U A L V O C A B U L A R Y

A B N E G A T I O N or self-denial. As a creature I must deny tha i I am God, confessing that He alone is G o d and that I am entirely dependent on Him. Denying self means denying the false self which tries to act independent ly of God. The more I admi t God's supremacy in my life, the more I deny this false self. Hence a true act of self-denial is both a denial of what is false and an assertion in its place of what is true. I deny 'strange gods' in order to adore the true God.

R E N U N C I A T I O N . The Christian renounces all t h a t is 'not God ' , because his heart is set on God. Whole-hear ted adherence to God means put t ing H i m before all else and loving all things in Him. The Christian renounces anything that distracts him from God, but in the same movement gives his whole heart to whatever leads him to God.

M O R T I F I C A T I O N is the put t ing to death in ourselves of sin and sinfulness: dying to sin in order that Christ 's life and love may grow in us. I t is Christ 's life and power in us which kills our sin and sinfulness. We are mortified when we submit ourselves to this life and power (passive mortification). When, with the strength of Christ in us, we do to death our sinful appetites, we actively assist the growth of I-l_is llfe in us (active mortification). Mortif ication is dying with Christ in order to live more fully with Him.

81

R E C O M M E N D E D R E A D I N G N O T E . 'Recommended Reading ' / s intended as a library service for spiritual literature. It aims at giving no more than a brief exposd of the content and a short appreciation of the value of books brought to the notice of the Editors.

Scripture. The Theology of Saint Luke by Hans Conzelmann is a translation (and a very good one) of an important work. Professor Conzelmann studies the Gospel of St. Luke and the Acts from the standpoint of the Tendenzkritik school of exegesis, i.e., he attempts to discover St. Luke's special preoccupa- tions and aims in his writing of the Gospel and the Acts. Conzelmann's hypothesis is that St. Luke set out to adopt 'synoptic material ' to meet the spiritual needs of a Church which saw its hope of an immediate parousia disappearing. The book wiU be of great interest to Scripture scholars and despite its dogmatic weaknesses takes a step towards the better understanding of St. Luke. In Witness to God Ft. Johnston gives a series of short and very readable studies of some Old and New Testament personalities. Abraham, Moses, Elias and others are situated in their historical context and seen as witnesses to God. For God revealed Himseff through these men and they still reveal Him. This revelation culminates in the man Jesus Christ. The book is based on reliable scholarship and is unencumbered by technical apparatus; it could serve as an admirable introduction to the Bible. A useful book for teachers and study groups is Reading the Word of God by Lawrence Danne- miller. The author gives 15o 'readings' which follow the order of the books of the Bible. Each reading is linked with the psalms or other biblical prayers. Brief commentaries which give the point of each reading are also provided. The idea is excellently worked out; but this book suffers from monotonous repetition. This disadvantage, however, may pass unnoticed in a book which is a manual and guide. I t could also serve as a meditation book, and should help many to a better understanding of how to pray the psalms. The English edition of F. X. Durwell's Resurrection makes available to a wider public this excellent study i n biblical theology. The mystery of the Resurrection is given the place it deserves as a mystery of salvation in which we share just as we share in the cross. Worth reading for its theological merits, the book will also help towards a better understanding of the Easter Liturgy.

Patristics. Berthold Altaner's Patrology is an indispensable reference book for those engaged in patristic studies.

Theological students in English-speaking countries will welcome this translation of a most useful and competently written work.

Liturgy. Bringing the Mass to the People by H. A. Reinhold concerns itself with the future development of the liturgy. The book gives a concise, well- documented summary of existing trends and discusses further possible

82 R E C O M M E N D E D R E A D I N G

reforms in the light of these trends. A sample Mass is included to show the practical result of Fr. Reinhold's analyses. There are three useful Appendices including a resumd of the proposals of recent Liturgical Congresses. Fr. Frederick R. McManus has written an excellent Preface to a Lbook which is admirable for its clear, balanced thought.

Those who desire to have a better understanding of the Liturgy and have no time to read a lengthy book will find Fr. Charles Davis's essay Liturgy and Doctrine most helpful. Short and to the point, the book deals with the doctrinal basis of the Liturgy and reveals its dogmatic roots. The style is easy and uncomplicated, with the simplicity that comes from clear thought. The book's brevity should not lead anyone to despise it. We welcome a revised edition in English of Dietrich yon Hildebrand's Liturgy and Personality. The author shows how the community spirit of the liturgy develops the true personality of the individual in the community. Though it is thirty years since the book was first published, it is one that ought to have a place in every liturgical library.

Hagiography. The Holiness of Vincent de Paul by Jacques Delarue is a short but well-constructed study. A brief outline of Vincent's life and character introduces a series of extracts from his letters and talks, grouped under chapter headings: Brotherly Love, Prayer, Death, etc. The choice of material is excellent, and well illustrates the preceding character sketch. St. Ignatius of Loyola -Letters to Women by Hugo Rahner is a most revealing study of Ignatius seen through his correspondence with women of all classes. Each group of letters is situated in its historical background, and apparent clich~s become rich with unsuspected meaning. Fr. Rahner has the gift of being able to combine immense scholarship with a style of writing which, even in translation, is vivacious and stimulating.

Church History. The Age of Martyrs by G. Ricciotti is a sound historical work which covers the history of the Church from Diocletian to Constantine. The book will be appreciated by experts in this field and will be a valuable help for those who have to study or teach Church History.

Spirituality. The Meaning of Grace by Charles Journet is a series of talks published in book form. The thought is not original, but it is clear and has the great quality of avoiding nseless controversy. The educated layman as well as the priest will appreciate this simple expos6 of the doctrine of grace seen as a reality which is lived in union with God. Christ and the Christian by Robert W. Gleason is an attempt to present the spiritual life in the light of recent developments in spiritual theology. What Fr. Gleason has to say is worth saying, but his analyses though accurate are sometimes too brief. The chapter on 'The Work of the Christian' is meagre in content and adds nothing to what has already been said. Fr. Gleason's thought is sometimes

RECOMMENDED R E A D I N G 83

obscured for his reader by the use of too personal a terminology. OurLife, Our Sweetness, Our Hope by M. Raymond completes a trilogy on the mysteries of the Rosary. I t deals with the Glorious Mysteries. The treatment is, as one might expect, unusual. Fr. Raymond's brother, dying of cancer and the father of seven young children, receives as his penance after confession 'to live gloriously'. Fr. Raymond helps his brother to live the glorious mysteries. The book is highly emotional and many will find it too intense for their taste. However, if you have liked Ft. Raymond's other books you will like this one too.

Two translations, The Holiness of the Priesthood by Josef Staudinger and Dom Gaspar Lefebvre's Redemption Through the Blood offfesus belong to a style of spiritual writing which has put the inverted commas round words like 'devotional' and 'pious'. We would not recommend them to anyone. Off- beat Spirituality by Pamela CarsweU is an original work which lives up to its rifle. I t is a book which spiritual writers should study, for they are in a certain measure to blame for Miss Carswell's work. She has the merit of honesty and conviction, but she spends so muchtime sho~ng how complicated things are that there is little space left for a positive, constructive approach. At the end of the book, Miss Carswell realises this and feels compelled to defend herself against attack. This is not the sort of book for those who are looking for positive inspiration. Back to ffesus by Canon Jacques Leclercq has dated slightly since it was first written. The dry bones of the moral theology manual are just a litde too evident in this study of the christian life. Consequently the book lacks flexibility and the author falls too easily into a moralising style which has little appeal today. Transformation in Christ by Dietrich yon Hildebrand is already a spiritual classic. I t is a masterly treatment of the spiritual life in terms of the fundamental attitudes which the Christian must develop. Professor yon Hildebrand may not have a light touch in his writing, but his thought is authentic and nourished by the true sources. His is a book which can be recommended without reservation.

Altaner, Berthold: Patrology (Nelson: Herder 6os, pp. 660). Carswell, Pamela: Offbeat Spirituality (Sheed and Ward I6S, pp. 243). Conzelmarm, Hans: The Theology of Saint Luke (Faber and Faber 3os, pp. 255 ). Darmemiller, S. S. Lawrence: Reading the Word of God (Helicon Press $4.50,

pp. ~oI). Davis, Charles: Liturgy and Doctrine (Sheed and Ward 4 s 6d, pp. IOO). Delarue Jacques: The Holiness of Vincent de Paul (Geoffrey Chapman 12s 6d,

pp. 132). Durwell, o.ss.R., Francis X.: The Resurrection (Sheed and Ward SOS,

pp. 37x). Gleason, s.j., Robert W. : Christ and the Christian (Sheed and Ward 3os,

pp. 37r).

84 RECOMMENDED READING

von Hildebrand, Dietrich: Liturgy and Personality (Helicon Press $3.5 ° PP. 131 ). von Hildebrand, Dietrich: Transformation in Christ (Helicon Press $4.5o,

pp. 406). Johnston, Leonard: Witnesses to God (Sheed and Ward I3S 6d, pp. 174 ). Journet, Charles: The Meaning of Grace (Geoffrey Chapman 12s 6d, pp. 127)- Leclercq, Jacques : Back to ~esus (Clonmore and Reynolds 2IS, pp. 213). Lefebvre, o.s.B., Gaspar: Redemption through the Blood of oTesus (Sands and Co.

2IS, pp. 233). Rahner, s.j., Hugo: Saint Ignatius Loyola - Letters to Women (Nelson: Herder

63s, pp. 563). Raymond, o.c.s.o., M. : Our Life, Our Sweetness, Our Hope (Clonmore and Reynolds, I8S 6d, pp. 204). Reinhold, H. A. : Bringing the Mass to the People (HeliconPress $2,95, pp. 1 I4). Ricciotti, Giuseppe: The Age of Martyrs (Geoffrey Chapman 24s , pp. 305). Staudinger, s.j., Josef: Holiness of the Priesthood (Clonmore and Reynolds

3os, PP. 546).

N O T E S O N C O N T R I B U T O R S

FR. MARTIN I) 'ARCY, former ly Mas te r of C a m p i o n Hal l , Oxford and Provincia l of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, is wel l -known th rough his numerous books as a theologian and philosopher. H e is at present director of the post -graduate school of phi losophy at George town Univers i ty , Washington , D.C. FR. PAUl. CRANE has spent most of his life as a priest in the social apostolate and al l ied fields. I n L o n d o n he has recent ly opened a centre devo ted to the t ra ining of lay apostles f rom the under -deve loped countries. H e is also Edi to r of Christian Order, a mon th ly review giving a Cathol ic angle on cur ren t affairs. FR. WALTER ABBOTT was one of the or iginal editors of New Testament Abstracts. A gradua te of Boston College, Massachusetts , he m a d e fur ther studies at Oxford Univers i ty . H e is now an Associate Ed i to r of America, the Jesu i t Weekly. FR. J. PHILIP OLEESON is Rec to r of N e w m a n College, M e l b o u r n e Univers i ty , and a Bachelor of L i te ra ture of Oxford Univers i ty . All his priest ly life has been spent in the field

of h igher educat ion. FR. JOHN L. MCKENZtE, au thor of The Two-edged Sword, is professor of Sacred Scr ipture at Wes t Baden College, Ind iana , the Theo loga te of the Chicago and Det ro i t Provinces

of the Society of Jesus. FR. DONAI. O'SULLIVAN was for m a n y years Mas te r of Novices in the Ir ish Province of the Society of Jesus. H e is now engaged in re t rea t work, and has recent ly been appoin ted C h a i r m a n of the Irish Arts Counci l .

Genesis Gen Exodus Exod Leviticus Lev Numbers Num Deuteronomy Deut Josue Jos Judges Jg Ruth Ruth

I Kings 1 Sam II Kings 2 Sam

III Kings 1 Kg IV Kings 2 Kg I Paralipomenon 1 Chr

II Paralipomenon 2 Chr I Esdras Ezr

II Esdras Neh

S I G L A O L D T E S T A M E N T

Tobias Tob Judith Jud Esther Est Job Job Psalms Ps Proverbs Prov Ecclesiastes Qoh Canticle of Canticles Cant Wisdom Wis Ecclesiasticus Sir Isaias Isai Jeremias Jer Lamentations Lain Baruch Bar Ezechiel Ezek

Daniel Dan Osee Hos Joel Joel Amos Amos Abdias Obad Jonas Jon Micheas Mic Nahum Nab Habacue Hab Sophonias Zeph Aggeus Hag Zacharias Zech Malachias Mal I Machabees 1 Mace

II Machabees 2 Macc

Matthew )/It Mark Mk Luke Lk John Jn Acts of the Apostles Acts Paul to the Romans Rom I Corinthians 1 Cot

II Corinthians 2 Cot Galatians Gal

N E W T E S T A M E N T

Ephesians Eph Philippians Phil Colossians Col I Thessalonians 1 Thess

II Thessalonians 2 Thess I Timothy 1 Tim

II Timothy 2 Tim Titus Tit Philemon Phm

To the Hebrews Heb The Epistle of James Jas I Peter 1 Pet

II Peter 2 Pet I John 1 Jn

II John 2 Jn III John 3 Jn Jude Jude The Apocalypse of

St. John Apoc

F A T H E R S

Patrologia Latina (Migne) PL Patrologia Graeca (Migne) PG

Printed in the Netherlands by N.V. Drukker~ Trio, The Hague

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