A recording of today's reflection can be accessed here.
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Both the gospel of today’s feria and today’s memorial have
been the subject of commentaries already on this blog. If you are reading this
entry, you can follow these links to reflections on the
ferial and to the
memorial gospels. Instead, today’s reflection concerns the first reading of
the memorial of St Bruno, Philippians 3: 8-14. All Scripture is good for our
meditation, but today’s memorial concerns a saint whose vocation to contemplation
is echoed in COLW’s own charism and its commitment to the interior life, the
soul of all the apostolate, as Dom Chautard so famously said.
In these words, Saint Paul shows us the two polarities or dimensions
of contemplation. The first and primary dimension of contemplation is to know
and behold the truth about God. This contemplation begins with the theological virtue
of faith which enables us to believe everything that God has revealed about Himself.
It is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things that appear
not, as again St Paul tells the Hebrews. This contemplation deepens as the
Holy Spirit activates his gifts in us, most especially the gift of understanding
and wisdom. It is this purpose that St Paul evokes as the surpassing worth
of knowing Christ Jesus. Then we will know even as we are known, he
tells the Corinthians, referring to the beatific vision of the saints in heaven.
But the light of glory then is anticipated by the light of faith now, and it is
as well to remember but while the gifts of the Holy Spirit perfect the
theological virtue of faith, they do not replace it. We must walk by faith in
this life. We are travellers on His path but not yet beholders of His beauty,
so touchingly evoked by the devotion to the Holy Face. Everything in our prayer
which reaches out for light can be associated with this surpassing worth of
knowing Christ Jesus. We see it too in many instances in the Gospel, for
example, when Philip asks Jesus at the Last Supper: show us the Father and
it is enough for us. Our souls must seek the Lord, like the hind that seeks
the water, for if we ask Him, He will give us the living water, as he did to
the woman at the well.
The other dimension of contemplation, however, belongs to the
gift of knowledge which enables us to understand created things in relation to God.
For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as
rubbish… But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining
forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal. So speaks St Paul,
not because all things are rubbish - this is the kind of rabbinical hyperbole
that Jesus was given to also - but rather because the value of all created things
is relative when seen in the light of the eternal and glorious Trinity in whom
all things have their being. Wealth, health, reputation, comfort, loss, pain, confusion,
upset: these too will pass before the infinite and eternal majesty of the One
who created this world and not only suffers its waywardness but redeems it in
His blood. It is this divine appreciation of the relativity of this world that
paves the way for accepting the sufferings that come to us and for which we
also need the gift of fortitude: that I may know Him and the power of His
resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like him in His death, that
by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Our minds are often a tangle of meanings, acquired through
our learning and through our experiences, compounded by our duties and our
busyness. In contemplation, we seek God's help in untangling the mess, in
letting in His light, in coming to maturity, and in seeing all things that
belong to this world - our possessions, our relations, our many
responsibilities - in the eternal light of the divine face. It is His light
alone that can illumine the darkness within; and it is His light alone, given
by grace and by nature, by which we must try to see through the darkness around
us.
I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has
made me his own, says St Paul. In St Paul, St Bruno, indeed in our Carmelite saints, we have examples enough for the journey.