Category: Speaking to the Soul

Every individual instinctively strives for happiness. This desire has been implanted in our nature by the Creator Himself, and therefore it is not sinful. But it is important to understand that in this temporary life it is impossible to find full happiness, because that comes from God and cannot be attained without Him. Only He, who is the ultimate Good and the source of all good, can quench our thirst for happiness.

Sweet Bird! up earliest in the morn,

Up earliest in the year,

Far in the quiet mist are borne

Thy matins soft and clear.

I wish I could hear these words for the first time. Familiar as they are, they thrill me with their exult¬ant strength whenever I read them anew. They open up new vistas of hope and happiness, of greatness and immortality, of a world exalted, completed, unified, made Christian wholly and irrevocably. They set their own seal upon their authenticity. Under their spell we move out into life with the joyous sting of certainty goading us on to renewed effort to do the great bidding of winning the nations of the earth to Him.

Simplicity means not being complicated, not being double in any way, not deluding oneself or anyone else. The first exercise in simplicity is to accept oneself as one is. There are two tremendous results of this: one is humility; the other is that it enables other people to accept us as we are, and in this there is real charity.

Our blessed Lord has not committed his goods to us as a dead stock, to be hoarded up, or to lie unprofitably in our own hands. He expects that we shall put them out to proper and beneficial uses, and raise them to an advanced value by doing good with them, as often as we have opportunity of laying them out upon the real interest and welfare of his poor children and subjects.

Our Lady was not fifteen years old at the time of the Annunciation. What was the secrete which enabled her to translate all this suffering into joy? It was the secret of the twofold love, which our Lord tells us is one and the same: the love of God and the love of man. It is in the Magnificat, that wonderful expression of joy, with which she answered the greeting of her cousin Elizabeth, that our Lady shows this twofold love, and shows how the love of God and the love of man was interlocked in her mind.

It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts.

In Armenian the word that we translate as “worship” is yergeerbakoutyoun. Repeated often in the Divine Liturgy, the word means literally “kissing the ground.” It says a lot about the Armenian understanding of what we do in church. The Armenian Church, like all the ancient Christian churches, worships not only in words,

The Holy Eucharist is the doing in the sensible world, by God’s appointment under material forms, what Christ our Head and Chief is ever doing in the spiritual world. There is an earthly altar, and a human priesthood, and bread and wine; but Christ is really present as priest, and offering, and the food of the faithful who feed upon the sacrifice. One would expect that since Christ is in the Eucharist as priest and offering.

Cranmer was not only a cautious man but a peaceable man. Faced with the necessity of making great changes, he followed Luther in not making greater ones than he could help; moreover, he made them by stages, not all at once. Thus, the 1552 Communion service was the fourth stage in a process which began with the first introduction of English into the Latin Mass in 1547.