Lacordaire Truth Beauty

SUNDAY 24^th,Jan. 2010 MASS

Gospel according to Luke 1: 1-4; 4: 14-21 . . . "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing' The readings of the entire Pentateuch were covered in a three year cycle, much like our Christian lectionary today. Any well instructed male member of the assembly could be called upon to read and interpret the scriptures. On one occasion, Jesus was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read (Is 61:1-2). The passage spoke of the restoration of Israel through the work of God's anointed one (the Messiah in Hebrew or Christos in Greek). Jesus announced that Isaiah's words applied to his own mission. He had been anointed by God's Spirit to announce a Jubilee year of God's favour. Fulfilled in Your Hearing “Truth halts at the intelligence, beauty penetrates even to the heart”. Lacordaire Hearing the word of Jesus Christ in the Gospel, seeing his actions ... under the relief of Scripture, it is not possible for reason alone to recognize God there. Reason does not go beyond ideas, and although ideas lead it even to God, they only reveal his existence and his attributes, without revealing to it his person. There must be another light superadded to reason, in order that both together, inseparable, and convergent, may raise man to the vision of the divine personality, and prepare man one day to behold him in the impenetrable light of the uncreated essence; grace ... is that higher light which perfects reason by becoming united to it, and Jesus Christ... is the object of grace ... Truth is not however that which first strikes us, nor is it that which most powerfully attracts to it the observation of the mind. Truth has a vesture, a halo, something which touches our inmost feeling, and against which we cannot shield ourselves save by a supreme effort of virtue; it is beauty. While truth alone leaves us masters of ourselves, beauty moves us; it attracts and enraptures us, it subjugates us even to leaving to our liberty only that which God, by his omnipotence, maintains there against all seduction. Truth halts at the intelligence, beauty penetrates even to the heart ... While truth arrests us within ourselves to consider it, beauty bears us out of ourselves towards the being in which it shines. It is, in a word and what a word! - the principle of love ... Beauty is the creator of love ... God has sown beauty around us with a profusion that astounds and enraptures our thought ... As no beauty appears in the world without raising up a new love, Christ, the Man-God, had, as the first effect of his epiphany amongst us, the reward of a love before unknown to man, or, at least, of which he had lost all traces, in los­ing, with his innocence, the vision of his first days ... Grace acts within to enlighten us. Christ appears without as the object of the light which penetrates within us; grace moves within the hidden springs of our liberty, Christ calls us without as the object of that inner emotion. And no one, however far away he may be, is sheltered from seeing and hearing him. We meet Jesus Christ here below as we meet another man. Fr. Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (+ 1861) Dominican