The return to God : readings for Lent meditation

Foreword

THE keynote of Lent, the end we are to set before us, the spirit in which we are to enter upon it, are proclaimed in the Liturgical Offices of Ash Wednesday. Through the lips of her children Holy Church cries: Turn thee unto us, O Lord, according unto the multitude of thy mercies, look upon the frailty of our nature, upon us who are but dust and ashes, who have sinned against thee, who yet hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent. To whom the instant Voice of the Divine Mercy, who indeed has inspired our cry, responds: Turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting and with weeping and with mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments; that thy return be known unto thy Father which seeth in secret, with all your heart, your innermost and entire being, for where your treasure 1s, there will your heart be also.

The purpose of the following meditations is to aid souls in this return to God himself. Too often our spiritual life is dissipated on trifles, means being mistaken for the end, devotions for devotion, sensible consolation for the soul’s union with God. The building lacks foundation, unity, design, purpose, solidity, stability; the characteristic Christian virtues, humility, abnegation, faith, hope, charity, patience, confidence in God, are strangely wanting. And this is largely due to the fact that souls seek rest and satisfaction in the things of God rather than in God Vv vi FOREWORD himself, their Sole Rest, Satisfaction, and Blessedness. For, as St. Augustine says: He who prefers that which he receives to him from whom he receives it esteems the gift more than the Gwer. Hath God, then, no reward? None, save himself. Thou, O God, art my exceeding gréat reward.

The desire for God is love for God, the seeking after God is his will for us in this life and pleaseth God full greatly, as Dame Julian says, for by this seeking do we come to that knowledge which is eternal life. Knowledge, which is fruit more of prayer than of study, of those moments when

‘‘ Rapt in oblivion, the soul Doth, in a single moment, learn More than the busy brain and sense, With all their toil, could ever learn. Mirrored within its God, it views Today, tomorrow and the past, And faith sees here in time the things

That through eternity shall last.”

To this end may the Divine Wisdom, who alone guideth the just in right paths, sheweth him the Kingdom of God and giveth him knowledge of holy things, lead each reader of this book.

BEDE FROST, O.S.B.

Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Contents

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Part I The Conditions Of Our Return

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PART I THE CONDITIONS OF OUR RETURN

ASH WEDNESDAY

CuristIAN doctrine, which is the Revealed Truth made by God to man through Jesus Christ, whether found in the teaching of Holy Church, in Holy Scripture, or in tradition, is chiefly concerned with God, whose handiwork is especially man (Summa Theol., I. iv.), whom he has created to be immortal and made an image of his own eternity (Wisd. ii. 23), to be to the praise of his glory (Eph. i. 12). Thus it is more concerned with Divine Things than with human acts; though it does treat of the latter, inasmuch as man is ordained by them to the perfect knowledge of God in whom consists eternal bliss (Summa Theol., I. iv.).

It has, together with all Christian practice, but one end, to bring man into union with God, his First Beginning and his Last End, to reveal God, to create and foster desire for God, to enable man to seek, find, possess, and enjoy God, who is his sole Happiness, Satisfaction, and Beatitude.

Man naturally desires and seeks after happiness, such a fulness and perfection of life as shall satisfy every element of his complex being. He is persuaded as by an inextinguishable conviction that such a completion of his being is to be found. No less is he compelled to acknowledge that all his search for it amongst created things is a failure. I

Ever he retraces his steps in disappointment at the © futility of trying to satisfy such deep needs as his at the fount of creatures less indeed than himself. The things he makes his gods mock him by their im-— potence or destroy him in his folly. He sees himself — a capacity which nothing of time and space can fil, a question without an answer, a lock without a key, — a problem lacking a solution.

Now, either all this—his thirst for fulness of life — and the failure of any created thing to satisfy it— means that the universe is a bad joke (which would certainly not appear from naturalism, which is particularly devoid of humour) or a meaningless tragedy devoid of purpose or end (and tragedy is never merely that), or it means that such a fulness of life — is to be found outside the material universe, in someone who is greater and other than man; in a ~ word, God. Man is a capacity, an emptiness created — to be filled with all the fulness of God (Eph. iii. 19). The most profound characteristic of his being is that he is capable of desiring, knowing, and receiving God. The glory of God is the living man; the life — of man is the vision of God (St. Irenzus). The — perfection of each creature is only to be found in © attaining its end, the purpose for which it was created. Man’s end is God himself, Supreme and Perfect Good, Infinite and Eternal Truth, Full and Un- © ending Life, for whose pleasure all things are and were created (Rev. iv. 11), and in the knowledge, possession, — and enjoyment of whom consists the true and eternal life of man, for the happy life consists of joy in the Truth, for this 1s a joying in thee, who art the Truth, O God, health of my countenance, my God (St. Aug.).

FIRST THURSDAY IN LENT

_ The end of man is union with God by charity, the perfection of which is the result of the Sight of God in heaven. Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he ts (z St. John iii. 2). So St. Augustine says: The contemplation of God is promised to us as being the goal of all our actions and the everlasting perfection of our joys (St. Aug., De Trin. 1-17)... i i for the hope of the eternal contemplation of God that everyone is converted, and undergoes the process of repentance and purification from sin (St. Aug., C. Faust xxii. 52). No one, he goes on to say, loves the labour of the Christian life for its own sake, but for its Eternal Reward, God himself. .

Compared with other ages, there seems to be but little thought and said about heaven in our time. There is, indeed, an insistence upon virtue for its own sake and a feeling that the future life is so obscure and unknown that it is useless to spend time in dwelling on it. This comes largely from forgetfulness of the fact that what constitutes the reality, peace, and joy of heaven is not what are known as its “‘ accidental joys’’—the absence of sin, temptation, suffering, and the like—but the known, seen, loved, and enjoyed Presence of God. The blessedness of heaven does not lie in this or that, but wholly in the soul’s contemplation of and rest in

God, its Eternal Home. When I awake up after thy likeness I shall be satisfied with it, for in thy presence is fulness of joy (Ps. xvii. 15). Eternal life, our Lord tells us, is the knowledge of the one true God—knowledge, that is, personal, intimate, perfect, and so a possession and an enjoyment of the One loved. The beginning of this knowledge is the work of this life. Man was created to know God, to know thee is perfect righteousness (Wisd. xv. 3), says the wise man; and St. John: We know that the Son of God is come and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true . . . this 1s the true God and eternal life(1 St. John v. 20). Moreover, our Lord has summed up all the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount in a call to perfection—Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven 1s perfect (St. Matt. v. 48)—which implies that we can and must know in what that perfection consists. It is true that we cannot know the all of God, since the finite creature is unable to comprehend and entirely grasp the Infinite Creator, but we can gain a sufficient knowledge of God, a knowledge which will enable us to love and serve him here and to find our happiness in him hereafter. Each Christian, then, according to his capacity and circumstances— for God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature (Summa Theol., I. ix.}—is bound to seek after the saving knowledge of God. For the first commandment is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart (St. Matt. xxii. 37), and we can only love that of which we have some knowledge. He is bound to set his feet on the way which leads to the perfection of contemplation which shall be his in heaven, and which on earth consists, as St. Gregory says, in clinging with one’s whole mind to the love of God and our neighbour and to desire nothing beside our Creator (Hom. IV. in Ezek.). It is, in a word, nothing else but that love of God which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which he hath given us (Rom. vy. 5), inasmuch as through this love of God we are aflame to gaze on his beauty.

Look, and make according to the pattern shewed thee in the mount (Exod. xxv. 40). It is God himself who is to be our Model; we are to imitate the interior life of God (St. Ignatius Loyola), the Divine Type by which we are to re-form ourselves, the Image to which we are to be conformed. It is the end which determines all human desire and action, some object seen as desirable and so sought after. But the end must first be seen and known, and so it is that God has revealed himself to man, making known to him that which he could not attain to by use of reason alone. Reason, contemplating the works of God, can arrive at the knowledge of the existence of God, and Holy Scripture utters the reproach: Surely vain are all men by nature who are ignorant of God and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that 1s, blaming them, for if they were able to know so much that they could aim at the world: how did they not sooner find out the Lord thereof? (Wisd. xiii. 1-9). But both the limitations of human reason in itself and the blindness which came as a result of sin made it impossible for reason alone to know God with that

knowledge which is eternal life. So God unveiled so much of his Nature, Being, and Will as it was necessary for man to know in order to attain to his end, and that revelation made in Jesus Christ and conveyed to us through his Mystical Body, the Catholic Church, is ours to receive, enter into, and make our own, a knowledge of God so perfect in itself that, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, any share in it, however imperfect, confers a supreme perfection upon the soul (Contra Gent. I.). |

FIRST FRIDAY IN LENT

To seek God that our souls may live in the knowledge of him who is the Life and the Light of men. What are the conditions of that search?

First, faith; for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him (Heb. xi. 6). Faith, which is not an emotion, a self-engendered feeling, but a gift of God conferred upon us in Holy Baptism, a gift which enables us to believe in God and _ his word, not because of any reasons or evidence, but simply on the authority of God himself speaking to us through his Church. Faith is an act of the intellect, the homage of the mind, aided by grace, to the Divine Word, the bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. x. 5), who is the perfect revelation of God, the full expression of the Eternal Mind. It is, in the admirable definition of St. Paul, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Heb. xi. 1), by which, like Moses, we endure as seeing him who 1s invisible (Heb. xi. 27), and with all the saints of old see the promises far off and are persuaded of them, embrace and confess them, living and walking in the full assurance that the word of the Lord is true and endureth for ever. Faith, says Bossuet, zs the union of two apparently contradictory things: the conviction that certain things are which at the same time are not perceptible to sight. The authority of faith causes as firm a conviction as to the existence of the invisible things of God as we have of the things which we see and touch, of which we have a full and entire comprehension.© Thus faith 1s, without evidence and in the midst of obscurity, an entire persuasion, a full security, an absolute conviction, a perfect acquiescence in the truth, and the repose of the whole spirit in the consent thus given by the mind (Instr. et d’oraison, ch. 15).

Faith, then, is the first rung in the ladder by which the soul ascends to the knowledge of God; it is the beginning of our salvation because it brings us to God our Saviour. Repeatedly in the Gospel we hear our Lord’s word, Thy faith hath saved thee, and this is so because it is faith which moves us to come out of our self-created darkness into that Light in which we see light, which brings us into that living, personal contact with our Lord by which we touch him and are made whole. Faith does not create the mysteries of the Kingdom of God; they exist, realities independent of our faith or knowledge, having God alone as their Cause and Principle. Faith adds to our faculty of vision, extends

8 THE RETURN TO GOD | its range beyond the limitations of sense and natural reason : “Faith alone, our sight transcending, Shows true hearts the mystery.”

.

It enables us to know the things that are freely givén © to us of God (1 Cor. ii. 12), to see and touch and ~ taste the hidden mysteries of the Kingdom of God, © to enter into the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in — God, who created all things by Jesus Christ... in — whom we have boldness and access with confidence — by the faith of him (Eph. ui. 9-12), coming no © longer, as did the Israelites of old, to the shadow of good things to come (Heb. x. 1), but enabled, with a true heart in full assurance of fatth (Heb. x. 22), — to draw near to the divine realities themselves. And, first, to God who IS—I am that I am (Exod. iii, 14)—the Self-Existent, Uncaused Being in whom Essence and Existence are one, who is Necessary Being—i.e., who must and does exist of himself—is all that it is possible that God should be, full and — complete perfection within the circle of his own Blessed Life, who would still be God, as he has ever been, were all creation to come to naught, who is the substantial Cause and Creator of Being, Existence, Substance, and Nature; the Beginning and the —

Measuring Principle of ages; the Reality underlying time and the Eternity underlying existences; the time in which created things pass; the Existence of those that have any kind of existence; the Lifeprocess of those which in any way pass through that process (Dion., Divine Names y. 4). God who is and by whose word all things consist, of whom we may speak much and yet come short; wherefore in sum, he 1s ALL (Ecclus. xlii. 27-28).

‘Second, to God who is a rewarder of them that seek him, who has promised, Ye shall seek me and find me when ye shall search for me with all your heart (Jer. xxix. 13), a promise which faith hears and receives as the word of Very Truth who cannot deceive or be deceived. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever (Isa. xl. 7). It is in such a faith resting upon the word of God that, with Abraham, father of the faithful, we are fully persuaded that what he has promised he 1s also able to perform (Rom. iv. 21). In an unbounded confidence rooted in the loving mercy of God, who calls to the soul, Turn ye even unto me (Joel ii. 12), for whosoever cometh to me I will in no wise cast out (St. John vi. 37), every child of God may enter upon the journey of faith, may seek for that knowledge which is eternal life since it is the knowledge of him who is the soul’s true life, for man doth not lie by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (St. Matt. iv. 4), and he himself is that true and living Bread which cometh down from heaven that man may eat thereof and not die (St. John vi. 50).

FIRST SATURDAY IN LENT

Once we have come to a living faith in God desire awakens within the soul. In truth, as we have seen, man has a natural desire for God; his insatiable 2

IO THE RETURN TO GOD search after happiness springs from nothing less than the fact that he was created for God, the ultimate — and full perfection of his being. That he constantly — mistakes the end in which his happiness lies is no proof that he was not destined for it, but only that he is blind to where it alone exists. And when by the mercy of God he comes to himself, that desire rests at last upon the true object of his search, as faith sets before him the infinite Beauty of the Adorable Creator whom all unknowingly he has ever desired. Desire is the deep interior of the heart. We shall receive it if we expand our desire as widely as we can. It is for this that all the practices of religion are intended, not only that desire may be planted and grow, but that it should be increased to such a capacity as to be able to receive the things that eye hath not seen nor ear heard (St. Aug., Hom. on St. John xl. 10). This desire must be the incentive which both initiates and carries on the whole of our life towards its end. The beginning of wisdom is the sincerity of the desire . . . therefore the desire of wisdom bringeth to a kingdom (Wisd. vi. 17-20). It is the first stirring of the love of God within the heart, a movement by which it reaches out and opens itself to the operation of God. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in unto him (Apoc. 11. 20). For desire creates within us a capacity to receive that which we desire, and every exercise and expression of our desire deepens and extends that capacity. To desire knowledge of and love for God is to have something of that knowledge and love already in our hearts. You would not have

THE CONDITIONS OF OUR RETURN II sought me had you not already found me (Pascal). Too often we forget that God alone is the Author of all our good, attributing to ourselves what is his gift. What hast thou that thou hast not received? (1 Cor. iv. 7). It is God who is both the prompter and the answer of our desire; it is his love which draws us to himself—We love him because he first loved us (x St. John iv. 19)}—and our desire for him 7s love for him. Slight, imperfect, wavering it may be, as a candle flame quivering in the wind, or as the tiny sparks of fire in the midst of a heap of dull, damp matter. But if we tend it, guard it, exercise it, it will spring into a flame, into such a fire as the Sacred Heart came to kindle on earth, a fire of Divine love, consuming, purifying, illuminating, and transforming, as does the fire the iron bar placed within it, the dull substance of our nature into a living flame of love for God.

Yet how shall we desire that which we do not know, or know so imperfectly that our knowledge is but a surface-impression, a mere acquiescence in a fact which has no real influence upon our lives and actions? ‘There must be some sight to enkindle desire, to excite the thirst which cries: As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O my God (Ps. xlu. 1). This psalm is sung, says St. Augustine, as a Psalm for Understanding. For what understanding? Come, my brethren, catch my eagerness; share with me in this my longing: let us both hasten to the well of Understanding: let us long for that Fountain of which another Scripture saith, For with thee 1s the well of life. For he is both the Fountain and the Light; for it is in thy Light that we shall see light. If he ts both the Fountain and the Light, with good reason is he the Understanding also, because he both filleth the soul with knowledge, and everyone who hath “ understanding’’ is enlightened by a certain light; not an outward but an inward light (Enarr. Psi:

Well, then, does the Church bid us address God as him from whom all good desires do come (Coll. — for Peace) and to pray that we may love the thing which thou commandest and desire that which thou dost promise (Easter IV.), and grant that we may be inflamed with heavenly desires and thirst after the fountain of life (Blessing of Font at Pentecost). For let us but so pray, and he unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known (Coll. for Purity), will assuredly hear us, as it is written: He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him (Ps. cxlv. 109).

FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT

He who in faith and desire seeks after God already possesses him for whom he seeks. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you (St. Jas. iv. 8). Not as though our drawing nigh was an

— unaided act of our own, for from the beginning it is —

God who worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure (Phil. i. 13). The prodigal comes to himself because, though he has left the Father, the Father has not left him; it is the Divine dwelling within that in very truth has caused all the pleasures of sin to become as less than nothing and awakened that thirst for the Living Fountain, the Eternal -Home of the soul. It is the first perception of God which awakens, not only desire, but penitence, that Christian penitence which is quite other than the sorrow of the world (2 Cor. vil. 10), being founded in the sight, not of sin or its punishment, but of a God wounded by sin. Reaching out to the Vision of God, the soul is both blinded and illuminated by the pure Light of him zn whom 1s no darkness at all (z St. John 1. 5), and in that Light catches a glimpse of its own darkness, a realisation so vivid that the Gloria in Excelsis Deo it fain would have mingled with the Sanctus of angels resolves itself into a Kyrie Eleison—God be merciful to me a sinner (St. Luke xviii. 13). Thus it was with holy Job when he came to the knowledge of God—I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes (Job xlti. 3-6). So Isaiah, at the sight of God high and lifted up, cried, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips (Isa. vi. 5), and St. Peter, confounded by Divine Omnipotence in human flesh, fell down upon his knees, saying: Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man (St.

Luke v. 8). Both the prophet and the Apostle had yet to learn that the God whose eyes are purer than to behold iniquity (Hab. 1. 13) is no less the God who is the Salvation of his people, full of compassion and mercy, who deals not with us after our sins, nor rewardeth us according to our wickedness (Ps. citi. 8-10). In the first shock of a true self-knowledge, or in the oft-repeated falls, there is ever the subtle temptation to a false humility, a vain penitence which would think more of our own unworthiness than of the everlasting mercy of God, a penitence of human fashioning and temper which would hide itself in a corner as a sulky child, wrapped in its own darkness. True penitence, forgetting no whit of the malice and ingratitude of sin, sees even more clearly the Infinite Love which waits but one word to forgive and cleanse, sees that its most creaturely act, most childlike act, is to fling itself in confidence into the arms of the Most-loving Father. Such a penitence, repeated if need be a thousand times a day, is an act by which we most honour God, whom by our sin we have dishonoured, and most quickly advance in the way of salvation. There is no lesson more important for our spiritual — life than this. It is one thing to arise quickly, another not to fall (St. Aug.). And it is in this rising quickly from our falls with the best act of contrition that we can make at the time that we come to an ever-new knowledge of God. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (St. Matt. v. 8). Vain indeed would be our hope of that Vision were it but for the Divine mercy, which in the moment of true penitence floods our hearts with its cleansing and illuminating Light. Idle to waste our time in self-reproach, in disgust at our impurity, in regretting the past. Drive away your melancholy, writes St. Paul of the Cross to Agnes Grazi, even if you fall into some fault, never be troubled, for that would be a greater evil than the fault itself; but humble yourself before God, speak to him with filial love. The Divine Purity can alone purify our hearts, and in so doing he gives us precious revelations of himself, a saving knowledge by which we advance -to a fuller comprehension of what God is in himself and to us. Walk we, then, by the sure path of a humble penitence, not with our eyes cast down upon self, but uplifted to the Deifying Light, not dwelling upon but confessing our sins with a true and loving - contrition, not lying where the malice of the devil or the frailty of our nature has tripped us up, but rising quickly and going on with a new knowledge and a deeper appreciation of the immeasurable loving-kindness of our God.