Shedding a little light

 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.