EXCERPT:

In our prayer today there is a theme of continuity. We even have a form of the word continuus. In the beginning of the Post communion Father refers to the constant helps we depend on from the actual graces God confers upon us. The effect of redemption will be eternal and unending. In the final line we hear of that eternal effect linking and yoking together our participation in the sacred sacramental mysteries we experience in Holy Mass, on the one hand, with the conduct and mores of our lives on the other. For the baptized Catholic Christian there must be continuity between our reception of the sacraments and the way we live. Continue reading →

EXCERPT:
In Latin prayer there is a strong link between reception of the Eucharist and the proper practice of the faith we profess. We are to grasp in the heavenly sacraments (sacramentis caelestibus) what we are professing in “dutiful conduct of faith” (quae fidei pietate profitentur). That word pietas, when it refers to God, describes something of His goodness and His mercy towards us. When pietas is applied to us, it concerns the duty which we owe to God and neighbor. In other words, pietas brings our interior sentiments and the words we use to express them into the realm of the concrete. What we profess must be expressed in our actions and not just our words. You might remember the famous phrase of St. Francis of Assisi that we must preach the Gospel always and sometimes even use words. Continue reading →

EXCERPT:
Where are the merchants and the money-lenders
Whose love sang in the wires between the seaports and the inland granaries?
…

Where are the generals who sacked sunny cities
And burned the cattle and the grain?
Or is the politician any safer in his offices
Than a soldier shot in the eye?

Take time to tremble lest you come without reflection
To feel the furious mercies of my friendship,
(Says death) because I come as quick as intuition.

…
Flesh cannot wrestle with the waters that are in the earth,
Nor spirit rest in icy clay!

More than the momentary night of faith, to the lost dead,
Shall be their never-ending midnight:

Yet all my power is conquered by a child’s “Hail Mary”
And all my night forever lightened by own waxen candle!

(Excerpted from Death by Thomas Merton (1944))
Continue reading →