THE REASONABLE GENIUS

Today is the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, not every modern person's favourite saint. But note him well; find something to read by or even about him: the Wikipedia article is a decent start. He is HUGE. In every sense: his fellow-students at Cologne called him "the dumb ox" because he was very large (if good-looking) and taciturn. But for the next 30 years or so he got up before Mattins every morning and read, thought, and wrote. And wrote, and wrote. It's not his fault that he became the Church's Official Spokesperson at the Council of Trent and got co-opted by every anti-modernist since. He is beyond brilliant. And his junction of faith and reason should be mandatory reading for everyone worried about how to live faith in a supposedly rational (and "therefore faithless") world today. He is a feast for the mind -- a faculty all too often exiled from our sentimental devotion. (I remember leaving an otherwise admirable Catholic prayer group because they lived as if God had created every bit of them except their mind.) And if you look at current cutting-edge images of the Universe, there is nothing there to contradict Thomas's ideas on the Creator and his Creation. Dumb Ox, indeed. From a castle in Sicily to a tomb in Toulouse, this was one stupendous Doctor Ecclesiæ.

Image: Fra Angelico, Virgin & Child with St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas (detail)

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"Prayer has far more to do with what God wants to do in us than with our trying to 'reach' or 'realize,' still less 'entertain,' God in prayer. This truth eliminates anxiety and concern as to the success or non-success of our prayer, for we can be quite certain that, if we want to pray and give the time to prayer, God is always successful and that is what matters....The logical consequence for us must surely be that our part is to let ourselves to be loved, let ourselves be given to, let ourselves be worked upon by this great God and made capable of total union with him."

Source: Ruth Burrows, Essence of Prayer

THE WAY WE ARE

It may seem idle on my part, but today's little note by Sr Bénédicte de la Croix, a Cistercian from the Vaucluse (where Petrarch lived), read like a useful extension of Sr Emmanuelle's post yesterday. So here it is, a commentary on Psalm 2:

"'You are my son: today I have begotten you.' This verse from Psalm 2 is my nourishment, as it was that of Jesus during his public life. Loved by the Father we are: wanted, desired from all eternity. Whether believers or savagely allergic to religion, God loves each of his children with a choosing love. The hardest thing is to believe in this tenderness, to discern it on the face of Christ from Christmas morning to the dawn of the Resurrection. In this beginning of the year when everything is still possible, let us allow ourselves to be embraced by this certainty: God loves me the way I am!" 

KINGS FOR A DAY?

I have from time to time in this blog translated meditations by the French Benedictine hermit Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau; and I found her remarks on this Sunday's Epiphany celebration particularly perceptive. So I offer them here in my own translation, in the hope that others will find them as helpful as I do.

Matthew 2:1-12

THE OFFERING THAT PLEASES GOD

The Epiphany liturgy gives us a coherent collection of prayers and readings to meditate, centred on Christ, the light of nations. It invites us to note the universality of salvation, which is the basis of our unconditional acceptance of ourselves and others.

Preparation

‘You wanted neither offering nor sacrifice, you have opened my ears: you asked for neither holocaust nor victim, so I said, ‘Here I am: I come.’ (Ps 40:7-8)

Observation

Let us look at the Magi’s response to the proposed salvation discerned in the sign of the star, to the hope it awoke in them, to the point of committing them to an adventure upon unknown roads. Men of open mind, seekers after truth, humble enough to ask men far less cultured than themselves for what they did not know, they are not unlike a fair number of our contemporaries in their quest.

            Their gesture of adoration and offering particularly draws our attention. The diversity of their gifts represents the unique something that each person can bring to God. And let us not forget the Church Fathers’ interpretation which identifies the gold, the frankincense and the myrrh as the recognition of, respectively, the royalty, the divinity and the humanity of a Christ destined to death.

Meditation

Let us ask ourselves what we offer the Lord and in what spirit we do it. Are we Christians who are rooted in the thankfulness of being in the world, conscious of receiving everything from God and having only loving to do? Or are we like those who want to lay hands on him, to justify themselves in his eyes – and in their own --, proving to the whole world their value and their superiority like the Pharisee in Luke’s Gospel (Lk 16)? Are we able to give ourselves to the Lord just as we are, in the truth of our being at the same time sinners and made in his image: clay vessels bearing a treasure, the valuable mixed with the vile? If our response is negative, let us not be discouraged. Let us rather ask to be granted the inward freedom of those who know themselves unconditionally beloved in their singularity and who, consequently, are able to receive others with that goodness of which the wellspring is in God.

Prayer

‘Blessed be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! He has blessed and filled us with the blessings of the Spirit in Heaven, in Christ.’ (Eph. 1:3)