Her finner du et antall prekener. Guds ord er ‘levende og virksomt’ står det i Hebreerbrevet. Det vil ikke si at det lever et skjult organisk liv vi kan følge med mikroskop, som om det var et virus; men at det er inspirert, en bærer av Guds tidløse Ånd. Derfor ljomer det ennå med samme kraft det hadde da det først ble uttalt. Det har stadig noe nytt å si oss. Forkynnerens oppgave er å være lydhør for Ordet som på samme tid er urgammelt og nytt, for så å la sine egne, nødvendigvis begrensede ord bli dets redskaper. Jeg har ikke hatt mulighet til å oversette tekster som ble til på andre språk; men hvis du romsterer litt, finner du en god del materiale på norsk.
The religious and philosophical breakthrough of Judaism, whose grateful heirs we are, was to extend human thought sufficiently to conceive of a single God, a single absolute power, the source at once of life and truth. We must never forget what a revolutionary move this was, what intellectual and moral courage was required of the patriarchs.
Les videre By this great sacrament, Marie-Françoise will be made light and free, full of noble potential, equipped, through the power of Christ’s Paschal victory, to unmask every deception of evil, and to live beautifully. She will be made ‘a temple of God’s glory’.
Les videre Wer versucht hat, dem Herrn unbedingte Zuversicht zu zeigen, weiss welcher Kampf erfordert wird - wie Gott in Christus Mensch ward, muss der Geist in uns Fleisch werden. Das Gottvertrauen ist letztendlich eine Inkarnation: es geht um ‘Tat und Wahrheit’.
Les videre Try asking an Irishman who, on 17 March, appears with a shamrock why has has adorned himself with cattle food; try asking a veteran with a poppy in his buttonhole why he picked a weed from a railway line instead of getting himself a decent red carnation. Certain ordinary things take on extraordinary sense in given situations, at set times; we must be able to grasp that sense.
Les videre Your personal exodus journey has acquired a nobility and beauty all its own. Like the Israelites in the desert, you have learnt something precious about who God is, and about who you are yourself.
Les videre The Cistercian Fathers, so attentive and humane in their reading of God’s action in our lives, never tired of invoking a verse from the Song of Songs that, to them, summed up their experience of grace: ‘Ordinavit in me caritatem’; ‘He has set love in order in me’. If we let the holy angels roll away the heavy stone that blocks the way into our hearts, God enters to heal and recompose our disordered affections.
Les videre Reconciliation is never unilateral. It has to be two-sided, to be realised in dialogue.
Les videre Do we wish to be healed and made whole? Our answer must be Yes, yes or No, no: there’s no middle ground.
Les videre To be a Cistercian is to evaluate oneself constantly in the light of a great, exacting ideal. We are not to be scrupulous (for scruples are rarely life-giving), but we must aim to be truthful—and ready to recompose our lives on the basis of what we recognise as truth.
Les videre The message of Christmas is this: the Word become flesh in Mary would take possession of our flesh, too; it would fill our lives and make them glorious. Brothers and sisters, do we realise how wonderful this is?
Les videre The other day, on the Loughborough Road, I met a lorry so ablaze with psychedelic lights it blinded me. Attempts to rebrand Christmas as a ‘festival of lights’, a shopping binge, makes the shining symbol of the season ambiguous.
Les videre Each night, at bedtime, we invoke the Blessed Virgin as ‘our life, our sweetness, our hope’. Never do we see more clearly what this means than on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Les videre In Mary he would find a human being like those who, on the sixth day of creation, before the serpent’s insinuation, stood upright and free before God’s face, formed in his image. Mary Immaculate shows us what we all could, and should, have been, had it not been for the fall’s tragedy.
Les videre St Thomas Aquinas offers us a luminous description of holiness, full of refreshment in its brevity. He says: ‘Since good that is loved has the nature of an end, and since the motion of the will is called good or evil in terms of the end it pursues, the love by which the supreme good, God, is loved must possess the supereminent goodness that goes by the name of holiness.
Les videre A saying often on his lips was a distillation of experience, characteristically devoid of perfumed piety: ‘I have always tried to be obedient’, he would say; ‘often I haven’t liked it much, but I have tried.’ Then he would laugh.
Les videre The first companions of St Bruno tell us that this apparently austere, intellectual monk was in fact semper festo uultu: his face was always joyful, like that of a man on his way to a feast.
Les videre A great deal of nonsense is often said about angels. We may find we’re given to thinking nonsensically about them ourselves, haunted as we are by images of feathers, celestial chariots, and cascading cloaks: so earthbound are we poor human clods, so conditioned by our bodies, that it is hard for us to conceive of pure spiritual existences.
Les videre The Queen of Peace is our model. Like her, we are called to say a deliberate ‘Yes’ to the lordship of Christ, letting him take flesh in our flesh, becoming his instruments, sacraments of his presence.
Les videre I recently finished reading a new biography of St Bernard of Clairvaux by the Austrian historian Peter Dinzelbacher. In his effort to place Bernard in context, the author leaves no stone unturned: his book contains 3,000 footnotes.
Les videre For Guerric, divine contemplation was fundamentally a matter of assimilating, by interiorisation, the prayers we recite with our lips in the breviary and missal. He would have scoffed at any notion that mental and vocal prayer were somehow in opposition.
Les videre Kolbe’s death eclipses his life; his life, indeed, seems like a build-up to his sacrificial death. That is something to reflect on with regard to our own Christian lives.
Les videre Even if we can swim there was a time when we couldn’t. We may remember the awful downward pull; how scary it is, even up there in the shallow end of a pool, with people everywhere and lights on, with our father’s arms ready to carry us up.
Les videre So often, when what we considered a thoroughfare turns out to be a cul-de-sac, we raise our arms to heaven and cry out, ‘Why, Lord, why?’ We’re indignant and hurt, proceeding, as we are, from the assumption that our journey ought to be uncomplicated, that the Lord, like some tour guide, should make the path straight before us.
Les videre In my first year at Cambridge, I picked up a copy of the Rule of St Benedict from Waterstones. I read it right through, I remember, and thought: ‘Wow!
Les videre ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart’, says the Lord. It would take a brave preacher to expound that verse to two cardiologists.
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