Thursday 0f the Twenty Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Night Office: from Ida Gorres.
Introduction
to Mass
St
Therese of the Child Jesus (1 October 2015) – Fr Hugh
Our Lord has told us that unless we
become like little children we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Childlike not childish. St Therese exemplified this.
One of the characteristics of a child is
a sense of wonder.
At Confirmation the prayer over the
candidates asks that they may receive the Spirit of Wonder and Awe at God’s
presence. This is one of the Seven Gifts
of the Holy Spirit – Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety
and Wonder and Awe at God’s Presence (also called Fear of the Lord.).
________________________________________________________________________________
Poem from St. Therese
. A LAMB.
Would you
charm the Lamb of God?
In the path
that He hath trod
Tread to-day
with willing feet!
Leaving all
things here below,
Seek alone His
will to know;
Do His will
surpassing sweet!
cf. Lk. 10:3 'out like lambs'
A Reading about St. Teresa of Lisieux, from a Book by Ida Gorres*
IN Teresa herself, during
every hour of her
life, the sustaining foundation of
the Church was made manifest. The details of this fabric were too small individually to be singled out by the
eye; but together they formed the ground out
of which everything else grew.
Teresa thought
and talked like a nun of her period. She had amazingly little understanding of "the
world", of the natural, ordinary life outside the convent
walls. But she lived the sanctity and transparency of
ordinary human life. Her essential experiences
of God, her conclusions from them, were not founded upon or inspired
by the special insights of the mystics, nor upon
the tradition of the Carmelite Order. They derived from the homely traditions of a good family, from
the simple everyday, catechism-nourished devotion
of father and mother.
Thus she became–like Francis de Sales, her great spiritual ancestor–a teacher of that
lay spirituality which is so much discussed nowadays; just as,
conversely, all monastic piety has always been nourished by the primordial example of marital and parental
love. Only God
knows the number of souls who share in the honour and the reward of this one saint. In her glorification there
is revealed, as through a rent in the curtain,
both as consolation
and promise, and comprehensible to the earthly heart, a gleam of that which awaits the lowliest in our Father's
House.
St. Pius X is said to have prophetically called Teresa, whose full rise to fame he did not live to witness,
the greatest saint
of the century. May we be permitted
to understand
him in that
way. He, the saintly Pope who restored to the
ordinary
Christian the forgotten
heritage which
for centuries
had been the privilege only of the clergy or of the most devout–free
access to the Eucharist; he who again recognized
that the participation of the laity was the lifeblood
of the liturgy and
thus broke down the artificial dividing wall between clergy and people~ act of enormous significance may well have understood that this
little Carmelite stands for innumerable
souls, for the legions of
those to
whom she revealed it for the first time. Therefore she stands precisely on the crossroads between
the "old" and the "new"
piety. She is a remarkable example of the invincible powers of renewal in the Mystical Body of Christ, of the activity of the Holy
Spirit, whose creative power is ever at work. And
she is all that precisely because she lived so apart from and so innocent of all the discussions and disputes
over reform and rebirth.
It is a, source of deepest...happiness to see in the Church this process of self-purification
for once not manifesting itself in the form of protest against abuses, or
conflict and strife with the world, but welling up from the clear spring of a
child's soul.
In Teresa there gathered and became purified the deep, intimate essential unchanging elements of the
Faith and of Love. As the perfected butterfly, breaks out of the chrysalis, so she emerges
transformed from the shrivelling shell of her period and appears before us as
the pure embodiment of Christian reality.
To be sure, she represents also a perfection of the period's religious
ideal; but
in fulfilling the law of her own being, she overcomes it. She who knew only obedience, only
listening, unquestionably accepted the highly questionable elements in her
contemporaries' piety. But the pruning purity of her touch melted away all the
old slag. What she grasped and what she embodied is one again the beginning,
the core, the original meaning. We see in her girlish face the hidden face of
the Church, the Face of the Hidden Church, which in the chaos of time flowers, eternally
young and beautiful, to greet the returning Lord.
* The Hidden Face, New York 1969, 412-414.
SAINT THERESE OF LISIEUX
MEDITATION OF
THE DAY
From Magnificat
com
Sent Like Lambs
O my Jesus! I love you! I love the Church, my Mother!
I recall that "the smallest act of PURE LOVE is of more value to her than all other
works together" (Saint John of the Cross). But is PURE LOVE in my heart? Are
my measureless desires only but a dream, a folly? Ah if this be so, Jesus, then
enlighten me, for you know I am seeking only the truth. If my desires are rash,
then make them disappear, for these desires are the greatest martyrdom to me.
However, I feel, 0 Jesus, that after having aspired to the most lofty heights
of Love, if one day I am not to attain them, I feel that I shall have tasted more sweetness in my martyrdom and my folly than
I shall taste in the bosom of the joy of
the Fatherland, unless you take away the memory of these earthly
hopes through a miracle. Allow me, then, during my exile, the delights of love.
Allow me to taste the sweet bitterness of my martyrdom.
Jesus, 0 Jesus, if the desire
of loving you is so delightful, what will it be to possess and enjoy
this Love?
How can a soul as imperfect as mine aspire to the possession of the
plenitude of Love? 0 Jesus, my first and only Friend, you whom I love UNIQUELY, explain this mystery to
me! Why do you not reserve these great aspirations for great souls, for the eagles
that soar in the heights?
I look upon myself
as a weak little bird, with only a light down as covering. I am not an eagle,
but I have only an eagle's EYES AND HEART.
In spite of my extreme littleness I still dare to gaze upon the divine
Sun, the Sun of Love, and my heart feels within it all the aspirations of an eagle.
SAINT
THERESE OF LISIEUX Saint Therese of Lisieux (+
1897) was declared
a Doctor of the Church in 1997.
Prayer for the
Evening
No comments:
Post a Comment