Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Aemiliana Lohr "The divine simplicity which is fed on the Church's milk is faith, that childlike power which makes us invincible..."

A Word in Season - Augustin Press 2001
Night Office ...
     

OCTAVE OF: EASTER
TUESDAY Year I
First Reading
1 Peter 1:22-23; 2:1-10
            Responsory      1 Pt 2:5.9
Build yourselves like living stones into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood. + Offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, alleluia.
V. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people God has claimed as his Own. + Offer spiritual sacrifices ...
         
Second Reading          From the writings of Aemiliana Lohr
(Dns Herrenjahr Band IT, 154-157

Our youth is renewed
Easter has made Christ's resurrection a present reality for ourselves; we have risen with him. Our life in Christ that began with our baptism has been renewed. Christ our God has led us from death to life. No matter how long ago the day of our bap­tism, time and space count for nothing in the sacred mystery. It has happened now; it is now that we have put on the new being. That is the great joy of Easter: our youth is renewed like the eagle's.
The baptized are children; they remain children not in the sense of an infantile immaturity but in the sense of a divine originality and simplicity. They have put on Christ, and as he is essentially a son, their share in him has changed their nature and made them the Father's children too. Nothing of the corrupting complexity and sterile multifariousness of the world can remain in those who have been regenerated through Christ and have risen again to divine youth. Their thinking has become childlike in its Simplicity, because they stand with God above the disunity of the world in a second, eternal childhood.

Christ said: Whoever will not accept the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it.
This divine childhood may, however, grow old and die unless it finds appropriate nourishment. We hear a maternal warning in the Church's call to us: Like newborn children, desire the pure milk of the spirit. There is nothing feeble about the nourishment the Church our mother offers her children. It is the he­roic blood of her crucified Bridegroom, the conqueror of death and hell, which makes us invincible too, childlike and strong at one and the same time. It makes us strong, in fact, because it makes us childlike. That is the nourishment which produces children and conquerors, the food we must long for.
We already know the nature of that divine food which is to nourish our new childhood. It is Christ, the incarnate Word of the Father, the sacrifice of the new covenant, dwelling in us through God's Holy Spirit. Christ is the milk on which the Church our mother rears her children, not to the false maturity of the world but to the abiding and everlasting childhood of the children of God. It is this holy and heavenly milk which Clement of Alexandria praises in the hymn at the end of his book Teacher:

Jesus Christ, you are the heavenly milk
flowing eagerly from the gentle breast
of your gracious bride, your wisdom;
gather your children in simplicity around you
so that in pure song, with innocent tongue,
they may call you holy,
Christ, the leader of youth.

The divine simplicity which is fed on the Church's milk is faith, that childlike power which makes us invincible and gives every Christian dominion over the world. In the dying martyr, the barren virgin, and the despised monk, faith achieves triumphs of life such as those who are sated with the world's pleasures long for in vain. The victory that conquers the world is faith.
And what is the essence of this faith? Let us listen to Saint John: Who are the conquerors of the world, if not those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Faith in the redemption of the world by the incarnate Son of God, faith in his cross and resurrection, faith in the Lord who lives on in his Church, faith in the divine life that dwells in our own hearts - in a word, the faith of Easter was and is the invincible strength of the Church and her children. The divine simplicity of that faith solves every problem, overcomes every need, and surrounds those who in the eyes of the world perish in disgrace with the glory of an eternal resurrection in God.

            Responsory      Rom 6:4.3
By our baptism we were buried with Christ, we shared in his death,
+ so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life, alleluia.
V. By being baptized into Christ Jesus, we have all shared in his death, + so that as ...

Lohr, Aemiliana (1896-1972), born in Dusseldorf, Germany, studied literature and philosophy at the University of Cologne and taught before entering the Benedictine monastery of Herstelle in Germany in 1927. For several years she was chronicler and annalist, but most of her life was given to writing. She was thoroughly familiar with the works of Ildefonse Schuster, Pius Parsch, and Odo Casei on the popular explanation of the liturgy. In her book, The Church's Year of Grace, her mind soars above his­torical and philological detail to grasp the actual reality of each Mass. She is the author also of The Great Week.

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  Saturday, April 7, 2012   

An idea, "the happiness of guilt" - Holy Saturday

The church has settled at the grave to weep. She looks where they have laid their Lord, where the woman has laid the Adam where it buried the people where it has the man overthrown by his advice (see FIG. Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 80). She sees it and cries.
She weeps at the tomb of the Lord, as the Lord at the tomb of Lazarus wept: the death of people over the grave of life, about the sin that killed the author of life. 
Jesus is laid in the grave - 
Stations of the Cross in the Church of St. Blaise, Glottertal

But her tears flow gently and quietly. It is no longer the painful lament of Sunday Septuagesima, they rocked. The death of Adam has lost its terror at the tomb of Christ. The death of obedience has deleted sin. No longer crashes the "massa damnata" from sin to sin, from death to death down, but the body of the obedient rests in hope. An idea of ​​the "happiness of guilt" that "such and so great a Redeemer was invented worth" ... makes the show end (the church and the soul) calm and hopeful.
 Aemiliana Löhr OSB: The manor year. The mystery of Christ in Ordinary of the Church . 2. Tape the fourth edition. Regensburg 1942. 63f.  (Trs. from German) 
  https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Aemiliana+L%C3%B6hr&fr=dss_yset_chr 


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