Friday 4 February 2022
Friday of week 4 in Ordinary Time
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Friday of week 4 in Ordinary Time
From a homily by a spiritual writer of the fourth century
May you be filled to the complete fullness of Christ
Those who have been found worthy to become children of God and also to be born again through the Holy Spirit, those who carry Christ within them, shining within them and renewing them – these people are guided by the Spirit in various ways and led forward by grace working invisibly in the inner peace of their hearts.
Sometimes they are, as it were, in mourning and lamentation for the whole human race. They utter prayers for all mankind and fall back in tears and lamentation. They are on fire with spiritual love for all humanity.
Sometimes they burn, through the Spirit, with such love and exultation that they would embrace all mankind if they could, without discrimination, good and bad alike.
Sometimes they are cast down by humility, down below the least of men, as they consider themselves to be in the lowest, the most abject of conditions.
Sometimes the Spirit keeps them in a state of inextinguishable and unspeakable gladness.
Sometimes they are like some champion who puts on a full suit of royal armour and plunges into battle, combats his enemies fiercely and at length vanquishes them. For in the same way the spiritual champion, wearing the heavenly armour of the Spirit, attacks his enemies and, winning the battle, treads them underfoot.
Sometimes their soul is in the deepest silence, stillness and peace, experiencing nothing but spiritual delight and ineffable power: the best of all possible states.
Sometimes their soul is in a state of understanding and boundless wisdom and attention to the inscrutable Spirit, taught by grace things that neither tongue nor lips can describe.
And sometimes their soul is in a state just like anyone else’s.
Thus grace is poured into them in different ways, and by different paths it leads the soul, renewing it according to God’s will. It guides it by various paths until it is made whole, sinless and stainless before the heavenly Father.
Therefore let us pray to God, pray with great love and hope, that he may give us the heavenly grace of the Spirit. Let us pray that the Spirit may guide us and lead us, following God’s will in every way, and may re-make us in stillness and in quiet. Thanks to his guidance and spiritual strengthening, may we be found worthy to attain the perfection and fullness of Christ. As St Paul says: that you may be filled to the complete fullness of Christ.
________
In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Blessed Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus Grialou, Priest and Founder
From the writings of Blessed Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, priest
The saint in the whole Christ
It is especially in their common work that the Holy Spirit glorifies the instruments He has chosen. The Holy Spirit makes Himself lowly with saints in order to glorify them. Inspirer of the work by His light, efficacious agent by His omnipotence, yet He hides Himself under the human traits of the apostle. Anyone wanting to analyze the character of the works could, in fact, find the raison d’être of each one of them in the personality of the saint. The manifold works and institutions in which the Spirit has put His leaven of immortality and in which the Church takes just pride, show forth admirably the gifts, the desires, the diverse genius of their founder. The Holy Spirit appears in this world under a thousand human faces that reflect the power and grace of His hidden presence. The Spirit never repeats Himself in the exterior forms He chooses. Is this not the reason why Saint John of the Cross asks us never to take a saint for our model? This would be to expose oneself to failure in suppleness, in fidelity to the movement of the Spirit, who manifests His power and perfection as Spirit in the variety of His works and the perfection of His incarnation in each one of His instruments.
The delicate charms of this loving collaboration of God and the soul, these playings of the love that unites them, in turn, brilliant and hidden, all these splendours of lowliness and of power are only beauties of here below, a reflection that reaches us from the beauty of the work the Holy Spirit is building. This work is the Spouse who comes up from the desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her Beloved; this is the masterpiece of Divine Mercy, the whole Christ in whom God has brought together and orientated all things. For the beauty of the Church of God, Jesus gave His blood; and the Spirit continues to immolate His victims after filling them with the marvellous gifts of His grace. We are all dedicated to the consummation of this work. Our gaze must rest on it lovingly and there remain fixed.
The saint is such only because he has entered by transforming union in the whole Christ. Identified with Christ Jesus, he continues Christ’s priestly prayer for union. With the Spirit of Love, he groans within himself, “waiting for the adoption as sons”; and under Love’s captivation, works to consummate in unity all those whom God has “predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son.”
Copyright © 1996-2022 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.