Friday 28 May 2021
Friday of week 8 in Ordinary Time
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Friday of week 8 in Ordinary Time
The Moral Reflections on Job by Pope St Gregory the Great
The interior witness
He who is mocked by his friend as I am will call on God, and God will answer him. Often the frail mind, when it gains a good reputation among people for the good actions it has performed, dissipates itself in outward delights, thus putting to one side what it inwardly desires and sprawling happily in the luxury of hearing good things said about it. It is not becoming blessed that makes it happy, but being called blessed by other people. As it longs for the applause, so it abandons the very thing it was beginning to be. What made it deserving of praise in God ended up separating this weak soul from God.
Sometimes, on the other hand, the soul perseveres in good works with constancy, and yet is buffeted by derision; it does great things but receives only abuse for them. In the end he who might have come out of himself, given praise, is thrown back into himself by insults. Thus he establishes himself more firmly in God, since outside there is no rest for him. All his hope is fixed in his creator and amongst external ridicule and abuse he wants only the good opinion of the interior witness. The further he is pushed out of human favour, the closer a neighbour he becomes to God. He pours himself out in prayer and, under attack from without, is refined with a more perfect purity so as to enter more deeply into all that is interior.
So it is well said that He who is mocked by his friend as I am will call on God, and God will answer him. The good may be reproached by the wicked, yet they are showing them whom to seek as witness of their actions. While the soul is strengthening itself in prayer, it is uniting itself within itself in the hearing of the Most High by the very act which severs it from the approval of those around it.
But that “mocked by his friend as I am” is important. Some people are indeed downcast at the ridicule of their fellow-men, but not as Job was: they are not the kind of men to be heard by the ears of God. When the ridicule they receive comes from their sin and not their virtue, they will get no virtuous merit from that derision.
For the righteous man’s simplicity is laughed to scorn. It is the wisdom of this world to conceal one’s feelings behind pretence and veil one’s meaning with words, to show things that are false to be true and to show what is true to be fallacious.
It is the wisdom of the righteous, on the other hand, to have no pretence, to use words to mean and not to hide meaning, to love the truth as it is and to avoid falsehood; to do good free of charge and to bear evil more gladly than to do evil; to treat a bad reputation resulting from faithfulness and truth as a reward and not a curse. But this simplicity of the righteous is laughed at, because the virtue of purity is considered to be folly by the wise of this world. Whatever is done in innocence seems to them to have been done in foolishness, and whatever act is commended by faithfulness seems nothing but weakness in the sight of worldly wisdom.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Blessed Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Martyr
Portrait of unknown sitter (c.1535), traditionally thought to be Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury. National Gallery, London.
From the Life of Cardinal Reginald Pole by his secretary, Luigi Beccatello
We have one more patron to intercede for us
This is how the Cardinal received the news of his mother’s death. He had received several letters from France, Spain and Flanders, and having read them, he called me, as his custom was, to return the answers. As I was putting them together I perceived one to be in English, and told him I need not take that with me, as I did not understand the language. To which he replied, with perfect equanimity, “I could wish you did, that you might read the good news it contains”; and on my replying, “I hope your Excellency will make me partaker of it”, “Hitherto”, he said, “I have thought myself indebted to the divine goodness for having received my birth from one of the most noble and virtuous women in England; but from henceforward my obligation will be much greater, for I understand that I am now the son of a martyr. May God be thanked and praised.” I was distressed at his news, but he consoled me; saying, “We must rejoice, because now we have one more patron, to intercede for us in Heaven.” He then retired to his oratory for the space of one hour, after which he emerged in his usual good spirits. It was not that he did not love his mother, for he always spoke of her with great affection, but rather that he was given the grace not to be sighed down by such sad news.
Copyright © 1996-2021 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.