Fr. Edward - "God himself praised himself, and because he could well praise himself, man therefore learned how he could praise him.”

Sacristan - Altar flowers.

Dear Fr. Edward, 
Thank you for your Email "Subject: Some more lines."
At Vespers the first  Psalm was from “Exaltabo te. Deus meus Rex” (Psalm 144)    
And hence our astonishment from your "lines of contemplation".

In our background back home
It was the day of the Garvald Village FLOWER SHOW.
The weather was of dense fog, the worst known in early morning.
The Abbot attended.
Later, some of the benefits from the Show added to the tea time of the monks.
Of most interest to the Sacristan was the bouquet of PRIZE ROSES from good friend Dorothy. 
Some pictures fill up wheels turning in our hearts.
In Dno.
Donald

+ + +

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: edward b...
To: Donald ... 
Sent: Saturday, 25 August 2012, 15:39
Subject: Some more lines

Dear Father Donald,

I do not know whether this will interest you at all. 

I was   very struck with the idea of God praising God!

What insight! 

What purity of soul to perceive this! 

And please a copy for H ...

Blessings  in Domino

fr Edward O.P.

“Exaltabo te. Deus meus Rex” (Psalm 144)

Like a privileged man fresh from the experience

of being elevated, concentrated, purged,

into a contemplation of exceptional intensity

and transforming purity,

Augustine begins his sermon

with a power to convince without effort or questioning

his congregation:

“I have dared to praise the Lord with you;”

he finds in himself the urge to concentrate his spirit

in all his hearers in the sure trust

that his received fire will communicate itself to them.

So experiencing in the act of communicating it

he offers it with a safeguard:

“and since [the Lord] deigns to concede this

so that the praise which we are going to offer him

might have an ordering

lest there be something offensive to the one who praises,

it is better that we seek a way of praising

from the Scriptures of God

so that we do not stray from the path

to the right or left.

For I have the boldness to say to your collective charity,

so that God may be appropriately praised by man

God himself praised himself,

and because he could well praise himself,

man therefore learned how he could praise him.”

This passage I learned from the opening of an Apostolic Constitution

of Pope Saint Pius X.    

The quotation was among others equally authoritative, offering encouragement,

from the beginning of his Apostolic Constitution, Divino Afflatu, of 1911.

This was the true divine wisdom of the Pope acknowledged in his Collect.

It raises him from the secular encirclement of the Vatican

left by Garibaldi and Cavour.

from the disappointment of others at his election Conclave,

from the tiresomeness of irrelevant “modernism”

which time's progress soon ages

with its pressure of pastness,

from the march to Europe's brutal “civil war” of three years later.

A part of a group of gestures to give the Church a higher and purer worship

aligned with the profundity and reach of the Fathers

and later theologians.

A gesture of profound defiance aimed at the Godlessness

of the revolution begun in France

ending in the tyranny of Napoleon,

backed up by deceptive, never universally defined reason:

too prone to use the argument of bloodshed charged with envy.

These words can be applied at two depth-levels.

The first insight, deep-rooted in Christian culture, of the union in the Triune God

of the total and equal praise of

equal totally self-communicating Persons

offered to and from each,

timelessly, spacelessly,

beyond space-time,

where no relational opposition reigns.

An eternal lynch-pin where creation's all is

contained by a timeless, spaceless

self-balance of totality in a unity-totality

as one in se,

if distinguishable within this unity-totality

by Personal proceedings, yet all-containing and self-containing in identity;

participated by the angelic spirits as invisible and powerful,

as also by material's lower status, its equivalence with electro-magnetic energy

established a hundred years ago,

before atomic and sub-atomic force-bearers were located and identified.

In this space-time worship persists, when man can embrace the appearance

of configurations of matter-energy,

what his spirit demands – its guarantee of order, no matter what the depth.

His presence to self-praise and in self-praise of God

cannot be rejected by an act of human will;

it retains the cosmic all in a totality of changing equilibrium.

Essential stability and serial instances:

the former measured by self-authenticating theophany: 

Nature's highest because divine which shows itself in worship-cultus as realest, prompting the human mind to rise in humility and always to return.

Self-knowing is not high enough, nor tight enough to satisfy the capacity of man.

Self-praise in the divine alone is great enough and pure enough.

Not the all.

But what contains the all –

as one great timelessness and spacelessness.

Why do we resist what's most natural?

Stykkishólmur

21 August 2012