In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of your faithful in the kingdom of the power of your love. Send forth your spirit and they shall be created. Let us pray. In the outpouring of your Holy Spirit, O Lord, cleanse our hearts and make them fruitful by the immense printing of His due through Christ our Lord. My dear patients, fathers and brothers, a bit of me would like to apologize if for any of you I seem to be talking this morning about too many mysteries at once. But another bit cannot apologize for trying to say something about developments in our lives which God will not normally let us off if we continue to seek Him and His ways as unreservedly as we originally meant to do when we came to the monastery. In the working out of this seeking there will certainly be some psychological, if you don't like that word, personal hang-ups on our side and a number of theological certainties on God's.

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And this evening I want to try to gain some more help from those simple theological certainties which in my experience are still too seldom being spoken of while some of us flounder more or less helplessly around in personal hang-ups of one kind or another. To restate the point from which we started this morning in a slightly different way, if monastic profession has often been spoken of as a second baptism, this has been justified because there is a strong theological similarity between the two, though the psychological or personal dimension of this experience may have been very different. The theological similarity is that monastic profession, like baptism, implies the acceptance of a summons to conversion, to living the fullness of the Christian life as, under the guidance of fine providence, it works itself out in our case. It's not altogether surprising, in the case of those of us who were baptised as infants, if it took us quite a long time to discover this, especially in times when the sacrament of baptism was a great deal too little talked about as the gateway to a whole distinctive way of life and to the other sacraments associated with our development, whatever turn that might take.

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It may perhaps seem a little more surprising that there are even cases of people making monastic profession for whom, as it were, the basic nature of the commitment hasn't hit home, though there are examples of this even among the saints. St. Gertrude the Great is an obvious one, from a choice that if it wasn't for Sturgeon was certainly under a very heavy Sturgeon influence. She learned how to live and behave in the monastery much as one learns in any other profession. Only going up to the dormitory after a conference one night did the nature of the reality dawn on her. Now this should have happened in some conscious way, at some point, is the necessary condition for anything we were saying this morning and will be saying this evening being meaningful. In saying this I'm not of course saying that at the time of our profession we can know precisely what it is that we are taking on, except in the most general terms, as is also the case after all for those who enter upon the commitment of marriage.

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After is generally the case only a short time of mutual testing. In either case, no number of years could ever explore all the possibilities of what might happen, life being life. And again we should note that in either case, as Christians, we commit ourselves not only to behaving as Christians should, however our partners may choose to behave, but also in relation to whatever may be that God himself clearly sends, sickness or health, and many other things that no one can foresee. This is naturally why we really need the sacraments through all the phases of our lives. For there are some things which without the help of God's grace we cannot possibly do. But to think of the sacraments as though they were simply some kind of limited, incurant policy is to understand only half their nature or less. For each of them is also a summons to growth and life in and with God through whatever may happen, including of course the sacrament of the sick.

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For it's an essential tenet of our faith that in relation to those who believe, God does nothing and permits nothing, that it's simply a meaningless accident. God, who is himself infinite life, is always acting to promote life. And Jesus, his only begotten son, explicitly says that we might have life and have it more abundantly. But naturally, since this is always his way, God will not force us to have it if we don't want it. I cannot forget being told by an extraordinary Russian I knew when I was in my twenties that we always get what we really want. I found this almost terrifyingly true both in my own life and in the lives of others I've known, as far as I can see this. If we think too meanly of God, we limit what he can do for us. It's really impossible to expect too much from him, provided we don't mind it taking some form we hadn't expected.

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But that, my dear brothers and sisters, is exactly what our prayer is all about. Ought to be, isn't it? Everything is there in the Our Father, and everything is there for us in the sacraments on the same conditions as they are in the Our Father. Namely, that like the only begotten son of God, we want our Father's will more than we want anything else. And we want this with confidence because, although we may find it sometimes rather difficult to say, we're sure that God always intends what he sends to be life-giving and not death-dealing. As it was even in the case of our Lord's death on the cross. I suppose it is not too bold to say that but for the resurrection God wouldn't have allowed the cross. Though going through it made the human nature of our Lord far from death, as the Gospels tell us. Our Lord went through it all, as the letter of the Hebrews says, for the joy set before him.

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And that is now the pattern that God means for us, who believe in him. He means us to share this pattern. And of course this is what, as you know, and we keep on hearing it in these days of Lent, and as we're approaching Easter, our Lord repeatedly has to try to train his own apostles, this is what's going to happen to them. And that's why they of course naturally report this in the way they do in the Gospels when those come to be written. Now this sharing may occur in several rather different ways. It may do so to some extent through our consciously chosen asceticism, provided we engage in it in the awareness that without the help and blessing of God it's utterly without value, and may sometimes only put us further from God, as indeed Anthony the Great noted about those who lack the virtue of discretion. But much more securely does this sharing in the pattern of our Lord's life and death

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occur in the way we accept by the mercy of God what humbles and tries us in ways that are often far from what it would have been wise to choose. Through either of these ways, when God wills it and we choose it, God liberates us from our limitations, sheds light on our darkness, and thereby enables us to grow in intimacy with him by and with and through our Lord Jesus Christ. For as Jesus once says in the Gospel of John, without me you can do nothing. He says this, as some of you remember, in relation to his image of himself as the vine, through whose branches the sap of God's life courses. He uses rather similar language in speaking about himself as bread, and this naturally brings us to the supreme way in which we share in the pattern and strength of our Lord's life and death.

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If only we recognize all the dimensions that the sacrament of the altar opens before us, some of which are too seldom spoken of, and therefore too seldom realized, though they are a great deal more certain than some of the thoughts which a certain kind of relatively modern Eucharistic piety, limiting and limited, has very often tried to foster. For as our Lord says in the Discourse on the Bread of Life, in chapter 6 of John's Gospel, here I'm quoting verses 3 and 4, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. What is wrong with all those frequent, if not daily communicants, of whom almost the last thing that would occur to one to say is that they seem so alive? Is it the fault of the sacrament itself, or is it the fault of the way those who receive it think about it?

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Gregory the Great has a wonderful little sermon on the two disciples going to a mass after the resurrection, of whom he says they saw in their companion exactly what they expected to see. And Jesus, of course, went along with this for a time. Should we not ask him to open our eyes to some of the things we do not see about the Eucharist? Not because there's any doubt about their truth, but because of the blinkers we've either chosen to wear, or someone who ought to have known better has put upon us. Little books of piety can be an awful menace here, not, of course, the wonderfully austere yet rich prayers of the Roman Missal, of which, unfortunately, those who cannot read the Latin of the Missal have often been so wickedly deprived in our own day. But this is a faction which I'm not going to delay on. My own brethren have to hear about it every week several times. It's really very terrible. This is not the moment to enter into any of the possible intricacies of Eucharistic theology,

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but there are two very clear moments of sign in the celebration of every Eucharist. Whatever rites may be being used. There is the memorial itself, which, sustained by the long history of the Hebrew notion of memory, this makes present the living Christ as shown in the moment of his supreme offering of himself to his Father in the separation of his body and blood. And there is the communion, in which those who partake of the sacrament consume the sacred fetus, thereby making the sign which is always implied in the natural process of eating, namely, that the food and the eater become one by assimilation, by likeness, so as to be ultimately indistinguishable. In leading us round to chapter 10 in the letter of the Hebrews this morning, it was my intention to prepare us for considering as many as possible

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of the links between these two signs in every Eucharist. For even in its most desiccated period, the Church has never lost the sense that both signs should be genuinely present. By this I do not, of course, mean that those who receive the sacrament should be already fully-fledged saints, but that those who make the sign of union in their reception should be at least united with the one they receive in desire, even to receive the sacrament. There are circumstances in which what one feels in receiving the sacrament, if one feels any very much at all, is any very sure guide to what's really going on, any more, of course, than it would be in most other spiritual matters, as all the saints and masters agree. In making it understood that no one should approach the Eucharist in a state of unrepentant grave sin,

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the Church clearly recognises the principle to which I am referring here. The Church wishes to exclude that the sign made by the communicant of being united to this vision for one who offers himself should not in fact be a lie, even if it might sometimes feel so to the communicant. A sign sometimes, of course, can be the case, but people may be troubled by a feeling of sinfulness and spiritual confusion and not be clear enough about it. So sometimes, of course, the confessor will have to say to his penitent, whatever you feel like, you go to the sacrament, that's what you need. Because he knows, perhaps better than they do themselves, that if their dispositions are good, that they won't be making a lie in receiving the sacrament. As everyone knows, the thing that unites us, even as human beings, is fundamentally the state of our wills. Granted that, everything else becomes possible. And if we are to believe what our Lord says in his long discourse

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on the Bread of Life, in chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, it's to people who understand this that our Lord gives himself in sacramental form. It's not necessary to be a scriptural scholar in order to see how the chapter moves from our Lord speaking about himself as bread in himself to talking about the form in which he gives himself to be consumed in the sacrament. And this is a necessary point to grasp if we understand what it is, that it is in fact a question of what we receive the sacrament for. It is to lead us to our Lord himself that our Lord institutes the sacrament at all. The sacrament is not an end. If the sacrament produces in us that final fruit of leading us to our Lord himself, which it's always designed to foster, then we shall get to heaven where, as St. Augustine says,

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there'll be no more sacraments because we shall not need some means by which to be united to God himself. But in our present situation, we need to note the distinctive mark which our Lord gives himself as bread. For it will give us what is the link that should exist between our Lord and the one who receives him. You'll remember that in answer to his mystifying hints about some form of bread that will really satisfy us, those who hear him saying this for the first time say, Lord, give us this bread always. And our Lord replies by saying, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. If there is a primary obstacle in his hearers, it's their lack of belief, notice. For faith, living faith, is the most fundamental way in which we do come to our Lord.

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And our Lord adds, he who comes to me I will not cast out. Why? For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And the will of one who sends him, he says, is that no one who comes to me should be lost. There could be no surer ground for feeling confidence than going to the altar, if this is what we understand. There then is the evident link between the one who gives himself and the one who receives him. Different as they may be, do they want the same thing? Do we want what our Lord wants for us? Then we should go with great confidence. You'll appreciate how this discourse from the Gospel of John confirms the argument of the Letter to the Hebrews about what is most fundamental to the reason for the Incarnation.

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And we realize, from the way our Lord has taught us to pray in the Our Father, that he means us, in our human situation, to do what he did in his. Long to do the will of the Father. Which is to give us eternal life, as a result of the spirit of faith in which we live. And there's much more gift than effort in all this. So that to live a Eucharistic life into spiritual maturity is to grow in love and wisdom and consequently, of course, also in peace. Though the quality of that love and wisdom may not often be apparent to those who reach it. Christ the way becomes, truly, more and more that life which he will be for all eternity. There will still be lots of mystery about it for all the greater simplification which occurs. In so far as the way to this involves

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the acceptance of a good deal of what is dark to us. Both in the initial process of detachment and in the gradual penetration of the life of faith into our souls, which causes God on the cross to speak of those deep caverns in the spirit. It involves also accepting a share in those thoughts and desires of our Lord which go much further than the acceptance of sacrifice. For it is affirmed several times in the New Testament and our Lord particularly confirms it in several of the discourses in the Gospel of John that the Easter mystery is for everyone. Just as we also affirm in the Creed that from the very beginning the incarnation of the Son was for us human beings not of course just men, but humans for our salvation, for everybody and that's what we believe by faith.

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It cannot be an accident that some of those who have communicated their thoughts to us after having evidently led a lifetime of prayer find themselves filled with longing for the good absolutely everyone beyond all known frontiers. For this is what we should expect to be the result of genuinely coming to share and not just approving in our heads the declared designs of God and his love as we know it from Revelation. Heaven forbid that we should set limits to our love which God has not set. This is a mystery into which we should not try to pry. For although the Church has taken upon herself the responsibility of declaring that certain of her holy ones are already eternally united with God she has never dared to tell us with certainty even a single name of the occupants of hell which is one of many reasons for treating with considerable reserve the many graphic descriptions

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of certain visionaries which may well contain all too much doubtful human feeling on that subject. I've not forgotten a woman saying to me with a tint in her eyes some years ago I want to see them punished. Our communion is ought to encourage a very different state of mind. But it is not only these life-giving desires of our Lord which are communicated to us in the Eucharist as an important element in his motive for declaring designed to do the loving will of the Father. We should not forget that just as our Lord in his humanity and his divinity is truly sacramentally present to us in the Eucharist so in a certain sense is his whole body. All those who are alive in him whether in the world, in this world or the next we should not forget how when he appeared to St. Paul at his conversion our Lord asked him why do you persecute me? So close is our Lord's identification

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with those who come to him by whatever roads in faith. They're all part of the liturgy of the living and so by the mercy of God are we. What courage this ought to give us through all our doubts and stumblings. It's a very great privilege to share by these means in the priestly work of our Lord. Over depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God says the convert Paul in his great letter to the Romans how unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways. I appeal to you therefore brethren he goes on by the mercies of God present your bodies as a living sacrifice wholly acceptable to God which is your spiritual worship. This is of course the level at which we are all priests. As St. Peter Christologus says

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in a little sermon which well summarizes Baptistic doctrine on this subject. Listen to it a bit carefully. As St. Peter says a human being is now both the offering and the priest. They need not look for something outside themselves to offer to God. They carry with them and in themselves the very thing that is offered to God for themselves. The offering is always the same and so is the priest. That offering is sacrificed yet lives. This sacrifice my brothers derives its form from that of Christ who offered his body as a living victim for the life of the world. And indeed he made his body a living offering for he lives though slain. In this kind of sacrifice death is inflicted but the victim survives. This is what the prophet declared

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sacrifice is an offering you did not desire but you prepared a body for me. So be the sacrifice and the priest of God. You will not lose what God gave. Let your heart be the altar and thus let your body be the victim destined for God. And then he quotes Doubts from Memory because one can't forget it when one first reads a phrase of St. Cyprian. God looks for our faith and not our death. Our service not our blood. And of course Cyprian uses that phrase in explaining why not all of us may have the honor of being literally martyrs. It's enough in and through everything if we share the desire of the martyr of martyrs our Lord himself and every martyr since to promote and make possible for as many as do not reject it

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access to the bottomless fountain of eternal life welling up from the God who made us all who wishes everyone to be saved. I hope that isn't now just as I felt I was being serious this morning I hope that isn't too compressed but you can see that if you think about it there's an intimate connection between our reception of the Eucharist our living out of the pattern of the life of our Lord and as this continues into prayer because it's there that we share his desires if we share the desires of our Lord then we make the signs we should and then we live the life of the sign we receive if we come to our Lord himself in very great desire all the time. Somehow then we live our Eucharist as we should. And sometimes we may have

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the luxury of knowing this but lots of the time we won't. It's enough if we long that it should be just like that. Lord Jesus Christ who lived and died for us and offered yourself on the cross teach us to understand the mystery of your cross and your Eucharist in our lives so we may live more fully in you this night and all days to come better and better in your mercy and in your love Amen. Come Holy Spirit to fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love send forth your spirit and they shall be created Let us pray May the outpouring of your Holy Spirit O Lord cleanse our hearts and make them fruitful by the inward sprinkling of his dew through Christ our Lord. If it seemed right yesterday

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my dear fathers and brothers to try to find the principles and indeed the real sources of Christian and therefore monastic maturity as it were concentrated in the living memorial of himself which our Lord and Savior gives us in the Eucharist it's perhaps right today to extend our understanding of the assimilation of the Christian soul to Christ by turning to the supreme example known to us of spiritual communion between the soul and Christ in the one whom in a familiar litany we greet as the seat of wisdom It would be quite a special task to try to compile a history of this title for the Old Holy Mother of God which is said first of all to be found in St. Augustine Now I'm not to assert that it's directly used by Blessed Gary Covigny but it's certainly present to his thought in all three of his sermons for the Annunciation and if we look at some of these passages

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we shall I believe find something that will help us this morning In the first of these sermons which celebrates the joy of the news of our redemption to the Annunciation by the Annunciation of Mary Garrick says A good word it is and a consoling one that your almighty word Lord, today has come from his royal throne into the Virgin's womb where he's also made a royal seat for himself In that phrase Garrick is of course quoting in the image of the leap of the word into the womb a phrase from the book of Wisdom As he develops his thought at this point the new royal seat is, Garrick says our Lord's own body made from the ivory of the Virgin and he adds this idea may be applied in a secondary sense to the body of Christ which is the Church Notice how in all these earlier writers

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the thought of the Church when intimacy with Christ is spoken of is never far away And in the opening paragraph of the second sermon not very well translated I fear it's a search and publication series Garrick says Today wisdom began to build itself a house of our body in the womb of the Virgin and to build the unity of the Church out of the cornerstone from the mountain without the help of human hands Here the development of the thought is more important for us I think, for Garrick says We shall be opened to the Lord What shall be opened to the Lord is not the integrity of the virginal body for Ezekiel adds this shall be closed even to the prince but the ear and the door of the heart For it was through the ear of the virgin the word entered to become incarnate Through the closed door of her body came forth incarnate And again

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If then, O faithful virgin your ear is open to hear and your mind to believe listen with your ear to the angel's word and with your heart receive the word of the Most High It is in the third of these enunciation sermons that Garrick develops this idea of the fructification of the word in the heart most beautifully To you, brothers to you the silence of the word speaks To you it cries aloud To you, indeed it recommends the discipline of silence For in silence and hope shall be your strength as Isaiah promises Just as that child conceived in the womb developed towards birth in a long deep silence so does the discipline of silence nourish, form and strengthen the spirit of man Garrick says that his brethren have told him how true this is and he adds If you ask

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with what business the mind is to be occupied I do not give you anything burdensome Eat your bread as the Lord himself shows you by the example of his conception Of course you know Bernard too will remember that Bernard has this idea of eating the bread of the word of consuming it in the heart and of course Garrick is telling something very concentrated here quite evidently isn't he We're going to do it like the what is shown us by the example of conception of the word in the womb It's there that the Holy Spirit fructifies the word that sends Whether you happen to like these lovely passages or not there's no doubt that Garrick has here hit upon something that's exactly what the exegesis of the Annunciation seen in Luke's Gospel requires us to think He gives us

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our first meeting with one whom the Gospels as a whole portray as the ideal disciple of Christ a true seat of the loving wisdom of God And it's almost impossible to miss the resonances with another scene which obviously Luke must have had in mind in writing this up right at the beginning of the Old Testament where the tempter the fallen angel comes to Eve with the interesting suggestion that there is after all no real danger in eating the forbidden fruit To Mary a faithful angel appears with a message of truth which is hard to credit And Mary shows herself a faithful virgin because she believes that God will in fact do what seems impossible This as Elizabeth rightly sees on the day of her visitation is the first blessedness in Mary which explains all she becomes and remains She has the

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incomparable foundation of blessing of the one who believes She receives the word of God that comes from God and fosters it in her heart until it becomes fruitful And she receives this word of God in its two major different forms In the form of what God says and in the form of what God does which of course in the Hebrew mind is the same thing Luke though writing in Greek knows just enough Hebrew to make the shepherds say to each other let us go over to Bethlehem and see this word And their very coming was Luke tells us one of the words that Mary pondered in her heart as she pondered about the occasion when she and Joseph found the boy Jesus in the temple It is I suppose correct to see that particular moment as marking an evolution in Mary's life

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of faith for its beginnings profound as they must have been are not so profound as its end In the words of the boy Jesus did you not know that I must be about my father's business we hear the first clear indication of the summons to Mary to accept something beyond the birth and nurturing of the boy namely his coming ministry It would certainly be wrong to sentimentalise in a way the break with the family which the ministry involved just as it would be the break with the sorrowing mother under the cross The sort of separation which the following of personal vocation always involves naturally has an aspect in the life of personal feeling but to an unusual degree the acceptance of our Lord's ministry by his mother involved the acceptance of the theological mystery That Mary rose to the stature required by this is indicated

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by her behaviour at the wedding party at Cana in Galilee Having indicated the shortage of wine Mary makes no claim upon her mother upon her son precisely as his mother She doesn't say I am your mother nothing like that She simply says to the waiters do whatever he tells you If we needed a background document to the news of our Lord to the answer of our Lord to a woman from the crowd who says what a privilege it must have been to have been given birth to this son it's surely these words of Mary at Cana that we should remember For they are the last thing we hear her saying in the New Testament and not the last thing we hear of her doing She really gives out what she told the waiters to do And this our Lord knew very well when he said Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it However

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he may have formulated his words and something like them occurs also in the Gospel of Mark The essential meaning must always have been the same Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother In her full acceptance of this exacting role Mary takes on a stature of universal significance for the Church A role which is of course confirmed under the cross in the words of our Lord Woman behold your son The Gospel of John is too careful in its choice of words and images for it to be an accent as our Lord is made to use the word woman in addressing his mother both at Cana and on the cross The new Eve enters into her full stature as mother of all the living in her full acceptance of the implications of her Christian vocation to the end with all its often painful childbearings so much more difficult than Bethlehem can ever have been So the last time

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she appears in the New Testament she is with the other women at the heart of the life of the Church praying Thus it is that in the traditional icons of Pentecost it is upon her sitting in the middle of the apostles that the Holy Spirit pours down giving her a new mode to the presence of Christ from that which she'd known on the day of her Annunciation A presence like that which we all enjoy by the gift of the Holy Spirit She would hardly be the unique and universal model of all Christian holiness which the last Council of the Church saw her to be were it not for that theme of faith running through her life right through from the day to the day of her Assumption growing in stature and in the silence of loving wisdom which her silent presence to the Church so clearly indicates So it is that in the first

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of his Assumption sermons British Gaelic with a touch of sure instinct says in the final paragraph the soul of any just person is said to be the seat of wisdom For what is now in this present life a seat of wisdom will then in the other life be a seat of glory Thus on the very day of her Assumption Our Lady displays what is promised to us all She is indeed a seat of wisdom but evidently not in some exclusive sense What God does for her he wishes in proportion to our calling to do for us all It might perhaps surprise you that I should like to delay a little over this third of these Assumption sermons of Gaelic which is a long look backward as it were over the life which reaches its heavenly culmination on the day of the Assumption This lovely sermon

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begins from the text of the Book of Sirach In all things I sought rest As inevitably a kind of mid-harvest sermon as I read it it reminds me of a visit to the Abbey of Vaux-Tourive up in the mountains of Switzerland almost thirty years ago and hearing the delightful harvest sermon of the abbot Tom Cow which gave a kind of zest to the summer work when we went out to do it The fruit of this work says Gaelic in his sermon will be that rest rest from work rest for work the very thought of which renews the strength of the faithful soul in its work it's shade for those in the burning heat food for the hungry for when reflection on eternal rest gives shade to the heads of those who toil it not only cools the heat of temptation it nears the spirits for work happy is he who in all his works and ways

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seeks that blessed rest always hastening as the apostle urges us to enter into that rest in longing for this afflicting his body in preparing his spirit and settling it for this rest being at peace with everyone as far as in him lies consciously choosing the rest and leisure of Mary for preference but ready also to undertake the occupation of Martha when it's necessary in doing this with as much peace and tranquility as he can and always drawing himself back to the one thing necessary from the many kinds of distraction this kind of a man is at rest even when he's working just as on the contrary the evil man works even when he rests to speak of all this is to speak as it were of the cross of the life of fidelity its heart and center ought to be life and growth

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the gradual coming to birth of the new man destined for the life of heaven I remind you that inciting that phrase from the letter to the Hebrews about hastening into God's rest Gerich is obviously remembering chapter 4 the letter which is discussing Psalm 94 in its summons not to harden our hearts today of course in the letter to the Hebrews remember chapter 4 Psalm 94 which is so often used as an invisitory not to harden our hearts today to hear the voice of God so that in this way Gerich's preoccupation with the fertility of the word in our heart is never far below the surface of his mind it's always there in the kind of things he has to say thus it is that the descent of the word of God into the womb of the Virgin Mary seems to him to be something like an image of the life of the Christians and particularly that of the monk he was born

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in a shelter for travellers says Gerich in the fifth of his Christmas sermons so that we should recognise by his example we are strangers and travellers upon earth thereto choosing the lowest place he was put in a manger we might learn in the concrete the thought of David I have chosen to be nothing in the house of my God rather than live among the wicked he was wrapped in slings we might be content to have enough to cover it in everything he was content with his mother's poverty in everything submissive to his mother so that the very model the form of monastic life might seem to be born in his birth I think we should evidently be careful not to over romanticise this comparison in relation to most established monasteries even the observant ones even the least

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well informed of us must know that there are in the cities of America and other places up and down the world people whose real destitution of human resources is much greater than that which is to be found in the poorest communities to have one's brethren about one is already a resource the importance of which we should never underestimate whatever its limitations may sometimes seem to be there are elderly people today all over the world abandoned by everyone to say nothing of the deprivations of a spiritual kind which is possible to suffer even in the midst of wealth and which no one but their spirit in the world is really able to be quite sure of reaching in any case this is not the level of Dick Garrick's deepest thought about the mystery of the incarnation as a model of the Christian life it is perhaps in the third of the Christmas sermons that we touch that most nearly preoccupied as it is with the divine self-emptying which the birth of the Son of God in the flesh

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displays for as though he were too little emptied out if he only became a man he so radically emptied himself of the glory of human flesh made folly of its wisdom weakened its power and cut down its greatness that in his birth and in his passion he showed himself to be the last of men so they did not take him for anything I must say this particular point constantly strikes me every year whenever I read the Passion accounts in the Gospels there's absolutely no heroics in the way the story of the Passion is told in the New Testament in this way it makes a strong contrast to even some of the earlier accounts of Christian martyrs to say nothing of the later ones which are all blown up our Lord even permits his own cross to be carried by somebody else some other way and all his

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quiet dignity is quite hidden in this way he ensures that his Passion is like many human Passion stories very typical and hardly remarkable in the loneliness of the victim and the incomprehension of the executioners pawns in the hands of superior forces whose hostility is ruthless and stabilised behind a wall of self-righteous common sense as I pointed out something I wrote some years ago given the appropriate circumstances the argument of Caiaphas that it is expedient that one man should die for the people never fails to find its ready supporters it wouldn't in America today any more than it did in Jerusalem when our Lord died there this is the true compassion of the suffering of our Lord which comes so near to that every simple suffering soul in the world it's so close to the least of his brethren that is the final paragraph of this same third Christmas sermon

[45:50]

that Gerek touches upon the ultimate mystery of the process of likening to Christ in each believing soul O my brothers this name of Mother is not the special prerogative of religious imperiors although on them particularly falls the duty of maternal care and devotion it's common to all of you who do the will of the Lord it is of course clearly an evangelical doctrine and we should remember its connection in Gerek's mind with the reception of the word into the believer's heart for all of you are indeed mothers of the Son who is born to you and in you in so far as you have conceived in the fear of the Lord and brought forth the spirit of salvation take care then Holy Mother take care of this newborn child until Christ be formed in you who is born to you for the tinier he is the more easily he can die to you who never dies to himself if the spirit

[46:50]

which is in you is extinguished in you it returns to God who gave it so you brethren in whom the faith that works through love is born of the Holy Spirit keep it feed it nourish it like the child Jesus until there is formed in you the child who is born for us who not only in his birth but in his living and his dying gave us the model on which we are modelled at the beginning of the final paragraph of the second of his Annunciation Sermon Skoik says something similar in more explicit reference to the role of the Holy Spirit in these developments I give you thanks to this spirit whose breath will breathe where you will I see not one but countless faithful souls pregnant with this glorious seed watch over your work lest it miscarry and you happy mothers of so wonderful child

[47:50]

care for yourselves until Christ be formed in you evidently it is to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives that we must turn this evening but I cannot close this morning without saying how sad it seems to me that devotion to Our Lady and even to the Holy Spirit sometimes seems to work in a divisive and negative way in the Church and in the world in our own times I cannot help thinking this is due not only to a certain want of the true spirit of prayer but to a loss of those broad theological perspectives which impart such firmness and security to writers like Garrick if we cultivate not only a sense of the mysterious dignity of each human soul especially its hidden depths where God desires to work but also a sense of our duty to the faith of the undivided Church which we've inherited we shall hesitate I think to contaminate our holiest enthusiasm with thoughts and words which do not

[48:51]

further the work of God which is both less limited than our vision and often more mysterious than anyone except the spirit of God himself can safely judge All Holy Mother of God pray for us that your Son Christ our Lord may be formed in us now and always Amen

[49:13]

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