I die (Jesus says) for all, that I may quicken all by myself. And I made my flesh a ransom for the flesh of all. For death shall die in my death, and with me shall rise again (he says) the fallen nature of humankind.
When the visitor told her
there would be a child
and that she would be
overshadowed by holiness
she felt the holy darkness
The disappointments of Holy Week and the bitterness of [the segregated seating in the left rear pew for] Easter Communion at St. Paul’s forced our eyes back to the inscription over the altar. “He is not here. For he is risen.” In a dreadful parody of their meaning, the words seem to tell a grim truth that was not exhausted by their liturgical import.
Enjoy the present, whatever it is, and do not be anxious about the future. For if you take your foot from the present and thrust it forward into tomorrow’s events, you are in a restless condition. It is like refusing to quench your present thirst by fearing that you will lack drink the next day.
Much confusion exists in the ordinary, popular mind about the much-used and much-abused words salvation and damnation. The ordinary/popular idea seems to be that of a God who sits like a chairman of Quarter Sessions or rather like the Lord Chief Justice and deals out sentences according to the verdict of acquittal or guilt. Is not this the lowest possible idea of God?
St. Francis himself passed through a period of despair lasting two years. One of his biographers, Father Isidore O’Brien, attributed this to the fear that his rule of poverty would be modified, to his disillusionment over the gross behaviour of many of the Crusaders, and to his increasing physical blindness.
Eloquence may be suitable for exhortation, reason may be effective in persuasion, but examples are more forceful than words, and it is better to teach by deeds than by words. Lawrence, the blessed martyr, whose suffering makes this day illustrious, was renowned with great honor in this preeminent kind of teaching.
In effect, Jesus is saying, “I am the bread of life,” not bodily bread, which merely eliminates the physical suffering brought on by hunger, but rather that bread that refashions the entire living being to eternal life. The human being, who had been created for eternal life, is now given power over death.
Sometimes, when he was in a convent, our holy father Dominic would stand upright before the altar, not leaning on anything or supported by anything, but with his whole body standing straight up on his feet.
The following translations have occupied a portion of my leisure time for the last twelve years: and some of them have already appeared in more than one ecclesiastical periodical. So has also great part of the Introduction.