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December 8 - December 28, 2024
Each saint has his special work: one person’s work. But Our Lady had to include in her vocation, in her life’s work, the essential thing that was to be hidden in every other vocation, in every life. She is not only human; she is humanity. The one thing that she did and does is the one thing that we all have to do, namely, to bear Christ into the world.
Yet it is really through ordinary human life and the things of every hour of every day that union with God comes about.
Love is more effective then than words.
There is only one cure for fear—trust in God.
Education is no longer primarily intended to teach him to serve God, or to enrich his life, but only to give him a passport into the commercial scramble.
Fed in this soil of vanity and fear and folly, the love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.
The remedy for fear is trust in God. If we fear for ourselves or if we fear for others, it is all the same: trust in God is the only remedy.
You only love at all because God loves infinitely more.
But certainly at first there was nothing to suggest that being the Mother of God would involve her in anything more heroic than the joys and sorrows of her domestic life. The sorrows of the whole world, not only the dramatic ones but the daily ones, began to unfold gradually in her life, and the intelligent heart can read into them not only the broad outline of all the world’s tragedies but also the smallest details of human existence.
For nine months Christ grew in His Mother’s body. By His own will she formed Him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life. She had nothing to give Him but herself. He asked for nothing else.
We shall do it just for one thing, that our hands make Christ’s hands in our life, that our service may let Christ serve through us, that our patience may bring Christ’s patience back to the world.
Sometimes it may seem to us that there is no purpose in our lives, that going day after day for years to this office or that school or factory is nothing else but waste and weariness. But it may be that God has sent us there because but for us Christ would not be there. If our being there means that Christ is there, that alone makes it worthwhile.
If Christ is growing in us, if we are at peace, recollected, because we know that however insignificant our life seems to be, from it He is forming Himself; if we go with eager wills, “in haste,” to wherever our circumstances compel us, because we believe that He desires to be in that place, we shall find that we are driven more and more to act on the impulse of His love. And the answer we shall get from others to those impulses will be an awakening into life, or the leap into joy of the already wakened life within them.
It seems that this is Christ’s favourite way of being recognised, that He prefers to be known, not by His own human features, but by the quickening of His own life in the heart, which is the response to His coming.
The great tragedy that has resulted from modern methods of industry is that the creativeness of Advent has been left out of work. Production no longer means a man making something that he has conceived in his own heart. It usually means a great many men making part of something which is no part of themselves and in which, by an ironical paradox, they have no part.
The integral goodness and fittingness of the work of a man’s hands or mind is sacred. He must have it in his heart to make it. His imagination must see it, and its purpose, before it exists in material. His whole life must be disciplined to gain and keep the skill to make it. He must, having conceived it, allow it to grow within him, until at last it flows from him and is woven of his life and is the visible proof that he has uttered his fiat: “Be it done unto me according to thy word!” Yes, according to the will of God, as an expression of the love of God.
We live in an age of impatience, an age which in everything, from learning the ABC to industry, tries to cut out and do away with the natural season of growth. That is why so much in our life is abortive.
Human nature was to have the qualities of wine: it was to be coloured all through with the splendour of the red blood of Christ; and it was to inebriate, to enliven, to exalt; so that people would infuse life and the sweetness of life into one another.
Christ on earth was a Man in love.
His love gave life to all loves. He was Love itself. He infused life with all the grace of its outward and inward joyfulness, with all its poetry and song, with all gaiety and laughter and grace. With His body He united Himself to the world.
The gift of Christ’s Body makes everyone a priest; because everyone can offer the Body of Christ on the altar of his own life.
The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ’s presence.
We were once that poor man. But gradually we have frittered our freedom away: always increasing our wants, little by little making more and more necessities for ourselves; forming habit after habit of petty indulgence; until one day (if we are given the grace of realising it), we discover that we too have lost the Divine Child. The lyrical young Christ that was the youth of our soul has gone away, leaving us a dyspeptic old man, lonely in a cluttered room of his own making, a forgotten invalid sitting in a timeless twilight of mediocrity.
This is because we usually judge people by our own reactions, fears, and desires. We do not see them as separate people who possess their own souls and live their own lives, but as part of ourselves and our lives. We attribute to them motives which we would have in the same circumstances.
Most of us know how cruel those people who think of themselves as more sensitive than others can be. We know the torture of liking—let alone loving—someone who is always taking offence, who watches us, using his own so-called sensitiveness as a magnifying glass to detect slights and coldness in the smallest involuntary expression on our faces; who has mental ears like whispering galleries, ready to detect hardness of heart in the tones of our voice; who interprets our every action in the twilight of his own obsessional self-pity. We are unable to maintain friendship with these poor people. The
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That is what faith is: believing something because God has told us that it is so. It is not believing something because we feel that it is true or because we want it to be true or because our reason can encircle it. Truth would be a very small and petty thing if it would fit into our minds.
Just as we cannot depend upon feelings to know that Christ is in ourselves, we cannot depend upon appearances to know that He is in others.
That which is true of the Host is true of people. We cannot discern God’s presence through our senses, but faith tells us that we should treat one another with the reverence that we give to the Host.
Love is most likely of all to spring from another’s need of us, and the fact of spending ourselves for another always generates new life in us.
If we understood the courtesy of God, we should not be scandalised by the grief of the world: not, indeed, that God has caused all these evils, or that He wills them, but that He has hallowed them.
Christ is the Light of the World; the sun which shines upon everything; gives colour to everything; heals and gives life, light, and heat; the warmth that goes down deep to the root of the tree and discovers the tiniest seedling in the darkness and feeds it and draws it up into the day. But it is not only as the light of the sun that Christ wishes to be seen, but also as the little candle burning in the house, a candle in a dark room.
Nothing can any longer be ugly to us in the sense of being repellent, for in this search we realise that God is everywhere, and everything reminds us of Him.
Even when the makers worked unconscious of their Divine prerogative, they were unconsciously imitating God; and therefore those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries; from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.
