Mary in Our Life

Mary In Our Life

Nirien ta' Mħabba

Kemm hi ħelwa l-għamara ta’ mħabbtek
O Ġesù, x’ġenna żgħira f’din l-art
Hawn il-bjuda u s-safa tal-ġilju
Hawn il-fwieħa tas-sagħtar u l-ward.
Le ma rridx noħlom iżjed bil-frugħa
Li tidħakli fil-għana, fil-ġid;
Inti biss tkun il-kewkba ta’ ħsiebi
Int il-ħakem ta’ qalbi u s-Sid.

Rit. Għax il-bewsa ta’ fommok ħanina
Fiha togħma ta’ ħobż is-smewwiet
Fit-tgħanniqa ta’ qalbi ma’ qalbek
Ruħi togħxa fil-mewġ tal-ħlewwiet.

Dik il-kelma li tgħidli fis-siegħa
Li ninxteħet sogħbien hawn f’riġlejk
Dik ix-xrara li tikbes ġo sidri
Meta naħseb fil-kisra t’għajnejk.
Ifissruli l-ħuġġieġa ta’ mħabba
Li wasslitek biex tmut fuq salib
U nħoss xewqa li nrossok fi ħdani
U mmut mgħannaq mal-għeżeż Ħabib. Rit.

Priġunier f’dik id-dwejra ċkejkna
Qatt ma tegħja tistenna lill-ħbieb
U fiż-żjara ta’ qlub għalenija
Tiftaħ beraħ ta’ darek il-bieb.
O Ġesù ibqa’ dejjem kellimni
Hekk, bil-ħlewwa sa kemm żmieni jtul
Ħalli nħobbok, inħobbok, inħobbok
fil-misteri tal-għeneb u ż-żbul. Rit.

Noli timere...

Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. Lk 12, 27.

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
My soul shall be joyful in my God;
For He has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
He has covered me with the robe of righteousness...  Isaiah 61, 10

But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him.' Lk 15, 22

Your lips are as sweet as nectar, my bride. Honey and milk are under your tongue. Your clothes are scented like the cedars of Lebanon. Song of Songs 4, 11

Clothe yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ. Rm 13,14

And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. Col 3, 14.

Hole in the Rule

Beautiful explanation of Carmelite Spirituality!

Climbing CarmelHole in the Rule | Blog | Order of Carmelites

Ignorance is bliss

Friends of God

A good means to having God is to speak with his friends.

Teresa of Jesus

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Address to the Thirteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith

Your Holiness, Reverend Fathers,

brothers and sisters in Christ – dear Friends

1. I am deeply honoured by the Holy Father’s invitation to speak in this gathering:  as the Psalmist says, ‘Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum’.  The gathering of bishops in Synod for the good of all Christ’s people is one of those disciplines that sustain the health of Christ’s Church.  And today especially we cannot forget that great gathering of ‘fratres in unum’ that was the Second Vatican Council, which did so much for the health of the Church and helped the Church to recover so much of the energy needed to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ effectively in our age.  For so many of my own generation, even beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church, that Council was a sign of great promise, a sign that the Church was strong enough to ask itself some demanding questions about whether its culture and structures were adequate to the task of sharing the Gospel with the complex, often rebellious, always restless mind of the modern world.

2. The Council was, in so many ways, a rediscovery of evangelistic concern and passion, focused not only on the renewal of the Church’s own life but on its credibility in the world.  Texts such as Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes laid out a fresh and joyful vision of how the unchanging reality of Christ living in his Body on earth through the gift of the Holy Spirit might speak in new words to the society of our age and even to those of other faiths.  It is not surprising that we are still, fifty years later, struggling with many of the same questions and with the implications of the Council; and I take it that this Synod’s concern with the new evangelization is part of that continuing exploration of the Council’s legacy.

3. But one of the most important aspects of the theology of the second Vaticanum was a renewal of Christian anthropology.  In place of an often strained and artificial neo-scholastic account of how grace and nature were related in the constitution of human beings, the Council built on the greatest insights of a theology that had returned to earlier and richer sources – the theology of spiritual geniuses like Henri de Lubac, who reminded us of what it meant for early and mediaeval Christianity to speak of humanity as made in God’s image and of grace as perfecting and transfiguring that image so long overlaid by our habitual ‘inhumanity’.  In such a light, to proclaim the Gospel is to proclaim that it is at last possible to be properly human:  the Catholic and Christian faith is a ‘true humanism’, to borrow a phrase from another genius of the last century, Jacques Maritain.

4. Yet de Lubac is clear what this does not mean.  We do not replace the evangelistic task by a campaign of ‘humanization’.  ‘Humanize before Christianizing?’ he asks – ‘If the enterprise succeeds, Christianity will come too late: its place will be taken.  And who thinks that Christianity has no humanizing value?’  So de Lubac writes in his wonderful collection of aphorisms, Paradoxes of Faith.  It is the faith itself that shapes the work of humanizing and the humanizing enterprise will be empty without the definition of humanity given in the Second Adam.  Evangelization, old or new, must be rooted in a profound confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share with the world.  There are many ways of spelling this out, but in these brief remarks I want to concentrate on one aspect in particular.

5. To be fully human is to be recreated in the image of Christ’s humanity;  and that humanity is the perfect human ‘translation’ of the relationship of the eternal Son to the eternal Father, a relationship of loving and adoring self-giving, a pouring out of life towards the Other.  Thus the humanity we are growing into in the Spirit, the humanity that we seek to share with the world as the fruit of Christ’s redeeming work, is a contemplativehumanity.  St Edith Stein observed that we begin to understand theology when we see God as the ‘First Theologian’, the first to speak out the reality of divine life, because ‘all speaking about God presupposes God’s own speaking’; in an analogous way we could say that we begin to understand contemplation when we see God as the first contemplative, the eternal paradigm of that selfless attention to the Other that brings not death but life to the self.  All contemplating of God presupposes God’s own absorbed and joyful knowing of himself and gazing upon himself in the trinitarian life.

6. To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts.  With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow.  And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart of the trinitarian life.  St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3.18) of how ‘with our unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord’, we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance.  That is the face we seek to show to our fellow-human beings.

7. And we seek this not because we are in search of some private ‘religious experience’ that will make us feel secure or holy.  We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God’s creation.  In the early Church, there was a clear understanding that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings to the ‘natural contemplation’ that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the order of the world and allowed us to see created reality for what it truly was in the sight of God – rather than what it was in terms of how we might use it or dominate it.  And from there grace would lead us forward into true ‘theology’, the silent gazing upon God that is the goal of all our discipleship.

8. In this perspective, contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them.  To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit.  To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly.  It is a deeply revolutionary matter. 

9. In his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303).  He had contracted flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a ‘secret joy’ at the opportunity this gave him for prayer – and ‘to do everything that I want to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.’  He is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that ‘All my bad habits…had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.’  In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction.  It is a powerful warning: we have to be every careful in our evangelisation not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives.  It was expressed even more forcefully some decades ago by the American scholar of religion, Jacob Needleman, in a controversial and challenging book called Lost Christianity: the words of the Gospel, he says, are addressed to human beings who ‘do not yet exist’.  That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the Gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings.  To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.

10. Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process.  To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me – this is to allow God to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me.  Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life.  Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people.  And as this process unfolds, I become more free—to borrow a phrase of St Augustine (Confessions IV.7)—to ‘love human beings in a human way’, to love them not for what they may promise me, to love them not as if they were there to provide me with lasting safety and comfort, but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God.  I discover (as we noted earlier) how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me.  And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its roots.

11. The human face that Christians want to show to the world is a face marked by such justice and love, and thus a face formed by contemplation, by the disciplines of silence and the detaching of the self from the objects that enslave it and the unexamined instincts that can deceive it. If evangelisation is a matter of showing the world the ‘unveiled’ human face that reflects the face of the Son turned towards the Father, it must carry with it a serious commitment to promoting and nurturing such prayer and practice.  It should not need saying that this is not at all to argue that ‘internal’ transformation is more important than action for justice; rather, it is to insist that the clarity and energy we need for doing justice requires us to make space for the truth, for God’s reality to come through.  Otherwise our search for justice or for peace becomes another exercise of human will, undermined by human self-deception.  The two callings are inseparable, the calling to ‘prayer and righteous action’, as the Protestant martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, writing from his prison cell in 1944.  True prayer purifies the motive, true justice is the necessary work of sharing and liberating in others the humanity we have discovered in our contemplative encounter.

12. Those who know little and care less about the institutions and hierarchies of the Church these days are often attracted and challenged by lives that exhibit something of this.  It is the new and renewed religious communities that most effectively reach out to those who have never known belief or who have abandoned it as empty and stale.  When the Christian history of our age is written especially, though not only, as regards Europe and North America—we shall see how central and vital was the witness of places like Taizé or Bose, but also of more traditional communities that have become focal points for the exploration of a humanity broader and deeper than social habit encourages.  And the great spiritual networks, Sant’ Egidio, the Focolare, Communione e Liberazione, these too show the same phenomenon; they make space for a profounder human vision because in their various ways all of them offer a discipline of personal and common life that is about letting the reality of Jesus come alive in us.

13. And, as these examples show, the attraction and challenge we are talking about can generate commitments and enthusiasms across historic confessional lines.  We have become used to talking about the imperative importance of ‘spiritual ecumenism’ these days; but this must not be a matter of somehow opposing the spiritual and the institutional, nor replacing specific commitments with a general sense of Christian fellow-feeling.  If we have a robust and rich account of what the word ‘spiritual’ itself means, grounded in scriptural insights like those in the passages from II Corinthians that we noted earlier, we shall understand spiritual ecumenism as the shared search to nourish and sustain disciplines of contemplation in the hope of unveiling the face of the new humanity.  And the more we keep apart from each other as Christians of different confessions, the less convincing that face will seem.  I mentioned the Focolare movement a moment ago: you will recall that the basic imperative in the spirituality of Chiara Lubich was ‘to make yourself one’ – one with the crucified and abandoned Christ, one through him with the Father, one with all those called to this unity and so one with the deepest needs of the world.  ‘Those who live unity … live by allowing themselves to penetrate always more into God.  They grow always closer to God … and the closer they get to him, the closer they get to the hearts of their brothers and sisters’ (Chiara Lubich: Essential Writings, p.37).  The contemplative habit strips away an unthinking superiority towards other baptised believers and the assumption that I have nothing to learn from them.  Insofar as the habit of contemplation helps us approach all experience as gift, we shall always be asking what it is that the brother or sister has to share with us – even the brother or sister who is in one way or another separated from us or from what we suppose to be the fullness of communion.  ‘Quam bonum et quam jucundum …’.

14. In practice, this might suggest that wherever initiatives are being taken to reach out in new ways to a lapsed Christian or post-Christian public, there should be serious work done on how such outreach can be grounded in some ecumenically shared contemplative practice.  In addition to the striking way in which Taizé has developed an international liturgical ‘culture’ accessible to a great variety of people, a network like the World Community for Christian Meditation, with its strong Benedictine roots and affiliations, has opened up fresh possibilities here.  What is more, this community has worked hard at making contemplative practice accessible to children and young people, and this needs the strongest possible encouragement.  Having seen at first hand—in Anglican schools in Britain—how warmly young children can respond to the invitation offered by meditation in this tradition, I believe its potential for introducing young people to the depths of our faith to be very great indeed.  And for those who have drifted away from the regular practice of sacramental faith, the rhythms and practices of Taizé or the WCCM are often a way back to this sacramental heart and hearth.

15. What people of all ages recognise in these practices is the possibility, quite simply, of living more humanly – living with less frantic acquisitiveness, living with space for stillness, living in the expectation of learning, and most of all, living with an awareness that there is a solid and durable joy to be discovered in the disciplines of self-forgetfulness that is quite different from the gratification of this or that impulse of the moment.  Unless our evangelisation can open the door to all this, it will run the risk of trying to sustain faith on the basis of an un-transformed set of human habits – with the all too familiar result that the Church comes to look unhappily like so many purely human institutions, anxious, busy, competitive and controlling.  In a very important sense, a true enterprise of evangelisation will always be a re-evangelisation of ourselves as Christians also, a rediscovery of why our faith is different, transfiguring – a recovery of our own new humanity.

16. And of course it happens most effectively when we are not planning or struggling for it.  To turn to de Lubac once again, ‘He who will best answer the needs of his time will be someone who will not have first sought to answer them’ (op. cit. pp.111-2); and ‘The man who seeks sincerity, instead of seeking truth in self-forgetfulness, is like the man who seeks to be detached instead of laying himself open in love’ (p.114).  The enemy of all proclamation of the Gospel is self-consciousness, and, by definition, we cannot overcome this by being more self-conscious.  We have to return to St Paul and ask, ‘Where are we looking?’  Do we look anxiously to the problems of our day, the varieties of unfaithfulness or of threat to faith and morals, the weakness of the institution?  Or are we seeking to look to Jesus, to the unveiled face of God’s image in the light of which we see the image further reflected in ourselves and our neighbours?

17. That simply reminds us that evangelisation is always an overflow of something else – the disciple’s journey to maturity in Christ, a journey not organised by the ambitious ego but the result of the prompting and drawing of the Spirit in us.  In our considerations of how we are once again to make the Gospel of Christ compellingly attractive to men and women of our age, I hope we never lose sight of what makes it compelling to ourselves, to each one of us in our diverse ministries.  So I wish you joy in these discussions – not simply clarity or effectiveness in planning, but joy in the promise of the vision of Christ’s face, and in the fore-shadowings of that fulfilment in the joy of communion with each other here and now.

Rowan Williams 2012

Apertura dell'Anno della Fede

http://player.rv.va/vaticanplayer.asp?language=it&tic=VA_Q556EF6L

Jesus as Mother

Gero Crucifix 

Germany

1000 AD

As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother... Jesus is our true Mother in nature by our first creation and he is our true Mother in grace by his taking our created nature... The Mother's service is nearest, readiest, surest; nearest, because it is most natural, readies because it is the most loving, and surest because it is truest... We know that all our mothers bear us for pain and for death... But our true Mother Jesus, he alone bears us for joy and for endless life... The mother can give her child to suck of her milk but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself and does, most courteously and tenderly with the Blessed Sacrament, which is the precious food of true life... The Mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his sweet open side and show us there a part of the godhead and of the joys of heaven, with inner certainty of endless bliss... To the property of motherhood belong nature, love, wisdom and knowledge and this is God. For though it may be so that our bodily bringing to birth is only little, humble and simple in comparison with our spiritual bringing to birth, still it is he who does it in the creatures by whom it is done.

Julian of Norwich

Aperi Mihi!

Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat. Vox dilecti mei pulsantis 

APERI MIHI soror mea amica mea columba mea inmaculata mea 

quia caput meum plenum est rore et cincinni mei guttis noctium...

Pessulum ostii aperui dilecto meo at ille declinaverat atque transierat anima mea liquefacta est ut locutus est quaesivi et non inveni illum vocavi et non respondit mihi...

Adiuro vos filiae Hierusalem 

si inveneritis dilectum meum ut nuntietis 

ei quia amore langueo...

Dilectus meus descendit in hortum suum ad areolam aromatis ut pascatur in hortis et lilia colligat. 

Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi qui pascitur inter lilia... 

L'amico è

E' l'amico e'
una persona schietta come te
che non fa prediche
e non ti giudica
fra lui e te divisa
due la stessa anima
pero' lui sa
l'amico sa
il gusto amaro della verita' . .
ma sa nasconderla
e per difenderti
un vero amico anche bugiardo e'
L'amico e'
qualcosa che piu' ce n'e' meglio e'
e' un silenzio
che puo' diventare musica
da cantare in coro io con te
E' un coro e'
un grido che piu' si e' meglio e'
o o o o o o o o o o o
o o o o o o o o o o o
e il mio amore nel tuo amore e'
E' l'amico e'
il piu' deciso della compagnia
e ti convincera' a non arrenderti
anche le volte
che rincorri l'impossibile
perche' lui ha
l'amico ha
il saper vivere che manca a te . .
ti spinge a correre
ti lascia vincere
perche' un amico punto e basta e'
L'amico e'
qualcosa che piu' ce n'e' meglio e'
e' un silenzio
che puo' diventare musica
da cantare in coro io con te
E' un coro e'
un grido che piu' si e' meglio e'
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
e il mio amore nel tuo amore e'
E' l'amico e'
uno che ha molta gelosia di te
per ogni tua pazzia
ne fa una malattia
tanto che a volte ti vien voglia
di mandarlo via
pero' lui no
l'amico no
per niente al mondo io lo perdero' . .
litigheremo si
e lo sa lui perche'
eppure il mio migliore amico e'
L'amico e'
qualcosa che piu' ce n'e' meglio e'
e' un silenzio
che puo' diventare musica
da cantare in coro io con te
E' un coro e'
un grido che piu' si e' meglio e'
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
e il mio amore nel tuo amore e'
e il mio amore nel tuo amore e'

The Cross by itself suffices

Hitler could die, and return to life again fifty times, but I should still not look upon him as the Son of God. And if the Gospel omitted all mention of Christ's resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross by itself suffices me.

For me, the proof, the really miraculous thing, is the perfect beauty of the accounts of the Passion, together with certain glowing words of Isaiah's: 'He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth...', and of St Paul's: 'Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation... and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross... He was made accursed.' That is what compels me to believe.

Simone Weil.

The Divine Liturgy Of Saint John Chrysostom

Greek, English and Greek transliteration of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Very good for those who haven't learnt Greek yet... like me! : )

http://gama.happyhippie.co.nz/orth_leitourgy.pdf

Ave Generosa

Ave, generosa,
gloriosa et intacta puella.
Tu pupilla castitatis,
tu materia sanctitatis,
que Deo placuit.

Nam hec superna infusio in te fuit,
quod supernum Verbum in te carnem induit.

Tu candidum lilium,
quod Deus ante omnem creaturam inspexit.

O pulsherrima et dulcissima,
quam valde Deus in te delectabatur,
cum amplexionem caloris sui in te posuit,
ita quod Filius eius de te lactatus est.

Venter enim tuus gaudium havuit,
cum omnis celestis symphonia de te sonuit,
quia, Virgo, Filium Dei portasti,
ubi castitas tua in Deo claruit.

Viscera tua gaudium habuerunt,
sicut gramen, super quod ros cadit,
cum ei viriditatem infudit,
ut et in te factum est,
o Mater omnis gaudii.

Nunc omnis Ecclesia in gaudio rutilet
ac in symphonia sonet
propter dulcissima Virginem
et laudabilem Mariam, dei Genitricem.

Amen


In the pupil of chastity's eye
I beheld you
untouched.
Generous maid! Know that it's God
who broods over you.

For heaven flooded you like
unbodied speech
and you gave it a tongue.

Glistening
lily: before all worlds
you lured the supernal one.

How he reveled
in your charms! how your beauty
warmed to his caresses
till you gave your breast to his child.

And your womb held joy when heaven's
harmonies rang from you,
a maiden with child by God,
for in God your chastity blazed.

Yes your flesh held joy like the grass
when the dew falls, when heaven
freshens its green: O mother
of gladness, verdure of spring.

Ecclesia, flush with rapture! Sing
for Mary's sake, sing
for the maiden, sing
for God's mother. Sing!

Hildegard von Bingen

Detachment

Affliction is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation - no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.

To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death.

'He emptied himself of his divinity.' To empty ourselves to the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time - that is to say, to nothing.

To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world...

We must give up everything which is not grace and not even desire grace.

The extinction of desire (buddhism) - or detachment - or amor fati - or desire for the absolute good - these all amount to the same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes.

To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good.

Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void - to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses. 

If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void. It has nothing to do with an intellectual process in the present-day sense. The intelligence has nothing to discover, it has only to clear the ground. It is only good for servile tasks.

The good seems to us as a nothingness, since there is not thing that is good. But this nothingness is not unreal.  Compared with it, everything in existence is unreal.

We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in the providential ordering of events - in short the 'consolations' which are ordinarily sought in religion.

To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage - and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light.

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

Simone Weil

Enduring the void

Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give. But if, doing violence to this necessity, we leave a vacuum, as it were a suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if we receive other wages: it is this vacuum which makes it come.

It is the same with the remission of debts (and this applies not only to the harm which others have done us but to the good which we have don them). There again, we accept a void in ourselves.

To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counterbalance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first there must be a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created. Void: the dark night. 

Admiration, pity (most of all a mixture of the two) bring real energy. But this we must do without.

A time has to be gone through without any reward, natural or supernatural.

The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God....

To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death....

Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls. It is a terrible risk, but one that must be run - even during the instant when hope fails. But we must not throw ourselves into it.

Simone Weil

Draw me!

As I have two brothers and my little sisters, the novices, the days would be too short were I to ask in detail for the needs of each soul, and I fear I might forget something important. Simple souls cannot understand complicated methods, and, as I am one of their number, Our Lord has inspired me with a very simple way of fulfilling my obligations. One day, after Holy Communion, He made me understand these words of the Canticles : “Draw me: we will run after You to the fragrance of Your ointments.” (Canticles 1:3) O my Jesus, there is no need to say: “In drawing me, draw also the souls that I love”: these words, “Draw me,” suffice. When a soul has let herself be taken captive by the inebriating fragrance of Your perfumes, she cannot run alone; as a natural consequence of her attraction towards You, the souls of all those she loves are drawn in her train. Just as a torrent carries into the depths of the sea all that it meets on its way, so, my Jesus, does the soul who plunges into the shoreless ocean of Your Love bring with it all its treasures. My treasures are the souls it has pleased You to unite with mine; You have confided them to me, and therefore I do not fear to use Your own words, uttered by You on the last night that saw You still a traveller on this earth.

Jesus, my Beloved! I know not when my exile will have an end. Many a night I may yet sing Your Mercies here below, but for me also will come the last night, and then I shall be able to say: “I have glorified You upon earth: I have finished the work which You gave me to do. I have manifested Your name to the men whom You have given me out of the world. Yours they were, and to me You gave them; and they have kept Your word. Now they have known that all things which You have given me are from You; because the words which You gave me I have given to them; and they have received them, and have known for certain that I came forth from You, and they have believed that You sent me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them whom You have given me, because they are Yours. And all mine are Yours, and Yours are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name, whom You has given me, that they may be one, as we also are one. And now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy filled in themselves. I do not ask that You take them away out of the world, but that You preserve them from evil. They are not of the world, as I also am not of the world. And not for them only do I pray, but for those also who through their word shall believe in me. Father, I will that where I am they also whom You have given me may be with me, that they may see my glory which You have given me, because You have loved me before the foundation of the world. And I have made known Your name to them, and will make it known, that the love wherewith You have loved me may be in them and I in them.” (cf. John 17) 

Yes, Lord, thus would I repeat Your words, before losing myself in Your loving embrace. Perhaps it is daring, but, for a long time, have You not allowed me to be daring with You? You said to me, as the Prodigal’s father to his elder son: “All I have is yours.” (Lk 15:31). And therefore I may use Your very own words to draw down favours from Our Heavenly Father on all who are dear to me. My God, You know that I have ever desired to love You alone. It has been my only ambition. Your love has gone before me, even from the days of my childhood. It has grown with my growth, and now it is an abyss whose depths I cannot fathom.

Love attracts love; mine darts towards You, and would fain make the abyss brim over, but alas! It is not even as a dewdrop in the ocean. To love You as You loves me, I must make Your Love my own. Thus alone can I find rest. O my Jesus, it seems to me that You could not have overwhelmed a soul with more love than You have poured out on mine, and that is why I dare ask You to love those You have given me, even as You love me. If, in Heaven, I find that You love them more than You love me, I shall rejoice, for I acknowledge that their deserts are greater than mine, but now, I can conceive no love more vast than that with which You have favoured me, without any merit on my part.

Thérèse of Lisieux