Gracious, loving, and compassionate God of our fathers and mothers, we give you thanks for your faithful servants in every age who have struggled against injustice and oppression and who have fought to root out the evil and sin of racism and discrimination.
Let us thank God that, because we are all made in his image, it is possible for all to be united. Let us thank God for the special unity which those who are new creatures in Christ Jesus can enjoy. Let us ask God to forgive the sin that has destroyed the unity he intended for humanity.
Whenever a large crowd such as this came to his cell, Antony was never put out. He listened patiently to all they had to tell him and treated each person gently and with immense courtesy. And they recognized that the Living Word informed all his actions and his every utterance. Among those who came to him were many who had all manner of afflictions both of mind and body; and Our Lord healed them by the hand of this blessed man.
When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?”
To be “in the mystery,” and thus live a “mystical” life, is to be “in Christ,” dwelling by faith in the light of this great work of God, reconciling his creation. By the same token, “mystical theology” is reflection upon our formation in this “Mysterium Magnum.”
Do you see, beloved, how many and how great blessings we would have lost if the Lord had yielded to the exhortation of John and declined baptism? For the heavens had been shut before this. The region above was inaccessible.
St. Hilary of Poitiers is one of the greatest, yet least studied, of the Fathers of the Western Church. He has suffered thus, partly from a certain obscurity in his style of writing, partly from the difficulty of the thoughts which he attempted to convey. But there are other reasons for the comparative neglect into which he has fallen.
Bouts of acute pain from arthritis and the stone had compelled Aelred reluctantly to submit to mitigations in his daily regime from about 1157 onwards, and to find a way of being as little trouble as possible to everyone else on these occasions.
Today the Source of all the graces of baptism comes himself to be baptized in the river Jordan, there to make himself known to the world. Seeing him approach, John stretches out his hand to hold him back, protesting:
Gracious Father, I humbly beseech thee
for thy holy catholic church.
Fill it with all truth, in all truth, with all peace.
Where it is corrupt, purge it.
Where it is in error, direct it.