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.
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.
Les videre The perspective on life and death offered us this night is extraordinary. We take in the whole sweep of human history at a glance, from the beginning of the world to the saving events of our Lord Jesus Christ to our own present reality.
Les videre The Passover is no magic charm; the Eucharist isn’t either. It is a pledge from the Lord and a pledge we give in return: a pledge to be faithful, to conform our lives to grace, to answer love with love.
Les videre How can we respond to the call of Palm Sunday with integrity? We can, quite simply, refuse to run away.
Les videre For Br Thomas, the history of the monastery and his own history were inseparable. This led him to invent what, to my knowledge, is a new and original literary genre, an extended autobiography in the form of obituaries!
Les videre Above the horizon we shall ever perceive the comforting twinkle of the Star of the Sea. It sheds the light we need to journey on with confidence: the knowledge that our gracious God saves, wants to save, never ceases to save.
Les videre Meister Eckhart once wrote: What good is it to me if Christ is born in Bethlehem but is not born in me? What use is it to me to call Mary full of grace, if I am not full of grace also?
Les videre Newman had a genius for wonderment. We find it expressed in natural terms, as when, at the end of his life, he picked up the violin again and was so moved by the sheer joy of it that he had, so he wrote to a friend, to lay down the instrument and literally cry out with delight.
Les videre It was during the reign of Edward the Confessor that a Norfolk noblewoman, after entertaining a vision of the Holy House of Nazareth, ordered a model built at Walsingham. Her masons had hardly got stuck in before they found the work completed by a team of engineers from quite a different league.
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