Confirmata est Cor Virginis

In festo Immaculati Cordis Beatae Mariae Virginis
Saturday 13 June, 2015
Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Confirmata est Cor Virginis

THE HEART OF THE VIRGIN, immaculate, as she too was conceived, full of the grace of God; a grace which is pure love. What do we celebrate today, if not the love to which we shall all aspire? Not the love of the human state, which waxes and wanes with the phases of our emotional attachments to this mortal world, but the divine love, which is given for those who would receive it with an assent to love that yields it totally to its source; which is so totally penetrating that nothing can assail it; which is inexhaustible in its profusion, such that it may be given without ever counting the cost.

For how shall we doubt that the gift of love, which she was conceived to receive as the purest vessel of grace, was not surrendered completely to her Lord and God in her Fiat; in that perfect acquiescence with the divine love that desired to be united with man in her womb? And what may we do but witness in awe of that love, as it endured even the cruelest torment without malice, but oblating itself on the altar of the Victim who reconciles all in His sacrificial love? And how may we honour her whom, from the Cross, the Saviour gave as our own Mother, that we might behold the love that knows no bounds and is given daily, without being consumed, in prayerful intercession, before the throne of her love, for us whom she loves with the devoted tenderness with which she nurtured the Christ child?

For the love of God we shall honour her, and today gaze upon her Immaculate Heart as our model for our own love of God, for our fiat to His love that dwells in our own hearts, for the love of those he sends to us in this world that we might walk with them in love to the next.

Deus Caritas Est

Deus Caritas Est

In Festo Sanctissimi Trinitatis

31 May, 2015

God is Love.

Perfect love cannot be contained. It cannot be manifested in isolation. It must be given. And where it is given, there is the Son; the perfection of perfect love; distinct only in its giving but perfect in its essence. And being the reception of perfect love, he too, necessitated by his perfection, gives love for love just as in his essence he is love from love. This perfect impulse to give and receive, which is itself the essence of perfect love, and proceeds in infinity between the giving of the Father and the perfect reception and returning of love in its totality by the Son, is the Holy Spirit. Yes, God is indeed love, though not as we know it.

This eternal reality of God, without beginning or end, perfect in its impulse to give and be given, in time is revealed through the action of love in creation. Love begets love and rejoices in its proceeding. However what is created of love, although it is made of the perfection of that love, is nonetheless, by virtue of it being made, not of one essence with its maker. It needs to choose freely to give back of the love it has received in its generation. And at the fall, the creation of love chose to direct love inwardly on itself rather than to return it wholly to the love from which it was made. Unable to participate in the infinity of the divine love, creation itself became finite and subject to the decay of finite love that always gives less until there is nothing more.

Every error of the human condition is a defect of love. We desire love for ourselves and thus direct this spirit of love inwardly. We may love ourselves as completely as human, selfish love allows, but love is shared imperfectly, giving only ever of what we hope to receive. The unquantifiable love of God is quantified in man and apportioned in our relationships with others. Thus we may ask, whom do we love more, our spouses or our parents or our offspring? The answer creates worldly divisions in the eternally indivisible love that is God because its eternality and inexhaustibility is not perceived in fallen man.

Hence the Incarnation of the Word; the love that is God joined perfectly with creation to correct the defect of love in mankind and to choose freely for the created the Creator as the source and object of love through the perfect giving of self. Hence the sending of the Holy Spirit into the hearts of the faithful, that the impulse of love be no longer directed within ourselves but without, in eternity to God from whom all love is given, and in our daily lives to our neighbour with the infinite-abundance of love received from God in Christ.

Thus Christ’s commands to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and to love your neighbour as you love yourself. For it is in this total abandonment of all our reason in love of God with our whole spiritual being, that we once again participate in the divine being of love and receive from that relationship the totality of God who created us in his love. Our souls caught up in the infinity of eternally perfect love, in our own time and mortal world we must then bring this spirit of love that dwells in our hearts to all mankind. And in that complete and perfect giving of self, which is to love our neighbour as perfectly as the love that is within ourselves, we complete the eternal image of God in which we were created in our own times, and when our time ends we then return to that perfect love from which we were made.

“Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God. And every one that loves, is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, knows not God: for God is love. By this has the love of God appeared towards us, because God has sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we may live by him. In this is love: not as though we had loved God, but because he has first loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins. My dearest, if God has so loved us; we also ought to love one another. No man has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

1 John 4:7-12

Veni Creator Spiritus

VENI CREATOR SPIRITUS
In Vigilia Pentecostes
23 May, 2015


I penned a new translation of this ancient hymn as a gift for a dear friend who is on retreat over Pentecost. Replete with errors, taking many liberties with the original Latin, and with many other better translations about, she nonetheless encouraged me to share it with you all, which I do now, with the same heartfelt wishes for a blessed Pentecost.

Hinc quo egrediemur?

In Ascenscione Domini
14 May, 2015

HINC QUO EGREDIEMUR?

Where shall we go from here? The Lord has ascended from our midst and no living man shall ever see His face until He comes again on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead.

Where shall we go from here but to the ends of the earth in His name? For the Lord has charged us, as he did the eleven, to go forth from this place and proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven to which He has gone to prepare a place for His faithful.

Where shall we go from here but back to His Word? For His are the words of eternal life – a secret now told, once whispers now bold, which proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour. As the eleven recall His words spoken along the way, His Truth and His Life become The Way they must lead us in following Christ to the place where is He gone.

Where shall we go from here but to the consoling embrace of Mother Church; there to await the outpouring of the Holy Spirit as He came upon the apostles in the upper room? For there, in their communion as members of the Body of Christ, He anointed them with His Spirit to send them forth as apostles to all nations. And He sends us forth too, from the same Body of Christ of which we are a part, endowed with the gifts of His Spirit, to live lives of faith, hope and love.

We shall indeed go from here, from this mountain where our gazes first met with our heavenly inheritance, never to lose sight of it but to seek in this life only the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, so that in the fullness of time we may gather here again, His Body, to ascend with Him to the courts of the house of our God, where He lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Amen.

Sit angeli tui invenietur me

Holy Saturday

May your angel find me by your tomb, O Lord.

I come here to mourn 

what my hands have done

to the one whose love 

I repaid with the scourge and the lance.

I come here to see

the magnitude of my sins

that tore your flesh

and pierced your heart.

I come here to weep;

for I have lost my Lord,

and among the crowds of the condemned

I fear you will no longer see me.

I come here to die

to my sins and to let

my soul descend among the dead;

for there you are, my Lord and my God.

And should you see my soul
next to my father Adam’s,

despise me not

for what I have done to you.

And as your light leaves Sheol

do not forever deprive me

of your presence, but

may your angel find me by your tomb, O Lord

when you rise,

and lift my broken body

to your light.

QUID VULTIS MIHI DARE

Wednesday of Holy Week

01 April, 2015

QUID VULTIS MIHI DARE

"WHAT ARE YOU PREPARED TO GIVE ME?" This is the question that Judas asked of the chief priests. We live somewhat calculated lives. There is little that we do, which we do not perceive to be to our advantage. In our zero-sum world we train ourselves to be on the side of gain, and even in our relationship with God, we are prone to ‘keep faith’ because we have more to gain than we have to lose. That is, until changes in lifestyle make it too much of a sacrifice for people to commit to God. This is the reason why many estrange themselves from the Church.

Fear of eternal damnation becomes a gamble worth taking for such people, when they see the immediate ‘gain’ of their sinfulness. This is why we need the ‘New Evangelisation’ to renew the faith of the ‘lost’ and in the process reinforce our own. This is the call of Pope Francis, to infuse our faith with love; not our corrupted, mortal concept of love, but the Divine Love of God that is limitless in its outpouring.

In the love of God there is no counting of cost. It is pure selflessness in its giving, leaving the giver no less complete having given. It is love for the sake of love – not the unrequited love that we fear, not even the requited love that we so often seek, but the eternally prerequited love perfect in its proceeding from the complete perfection of the infinite God, and made known in our time by the perfect love of Jesus Christ. Participation in this love is Evangelii gaudium – the joy of the Gospel that drives out fear and makes us whole, so we will never have to ask, “What are you prepared to give me?”