Monday 11 October.
Our Night Office Reading is from
Sirach, Ecclesiasticus, Ben Sir. 11:11-18
[Sirach, by the Jewish scribe Ben Sira of Jerusalem, also known as Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus, is a work from the early second century BCE, originally written in Hebrew.
Responsory Sirach 11:19.20; Lk 12:17.18].
When the wealthy man says: Now I can rest and enjoy my goods, + he does not know how long this will last before he must die and leave his wealth to others.
V. The rich man says in his heart: I will pull down my barns and build them even greater, and there I will store all my possessions. + He does not ...
From the writings of Frederick Faber
(The Creator and the Creature, 342-343)
God's providence
The providence of God in human lives is to each one in particu¬lar a private revelation of God's love. The biography of everyone of usis to ourselves as luminously supernatural, as palpably full of divine interventions, as if it were a page out of Old Testament history. Moreover all that is providential is also merciful. The interventions are all on the side of love. Stern-looking accidents, when they turn their full face to us, beam with the look of love. Even our very faults are so strangely overruled that mercy can draw materials for its blessings even out of them.
It is true we may easily delude ourselves. But the natural tendency to find a meaning in what happens to us, and to exagger¬ate its significance, cannot altogether, or even nearly, account for the providential aspect which our past lives present to us, when we reflect upon them in the faith and fear of God. Our merciful Creator seems to have led us very gently, as knowing how weak and ill we are; yet he has led us plainly toward himself.
If it is not speaking of him too familiarly, he seems to have done everything just at the right time, and in the right place, to have put nothing before us till we were ready for it and could make the most of it, to have timed his grace and apportioned it, so that we might have as little as possible the guilt of resisting grace, to have weighed even our crosses before he laid them upon us, and to have waited for an auspicious moment each time he would persuade us to something fresh.
He has combined events with the most consummate skill, and brought out the most wonderful results, and they have always been in our favour. There are difficulties and seeming exceptions to the ordinary course of this genial providence. But it is only at first sight that they perplex us. These very exceptions on closer inves¬tigation, on longer experience, turn out to be the most striking examples of the general rule of beneficence and love. If we ask each person separately, this is what he will tell us. We have all of us had this private revelation,
Let us dwell on one feature of God's providence, the way in which he vouchsafes to time things. Think of the hour of death, of
its surpassing importance, of its thrilling risks, of all those inward processes of which we have already spoken. Now may we not conclude, or at least with reasonable hope infer, that to most people, if not to all, the hour of their death is seasonably tinted? They die when it is best for them to die. Who can think of what death is, and yet doubt that God's wisdom and his love are brought to bear with inexpressible sweetness both on its manner and its time? If God were pleased to tell us, we should probably be amazed at the numbers of convincing reasons there are why each of us should die when, and where, and how we do.
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