Knowing his end to be drawing near—it was in fact the day before his death—Fr Vincent McNabb was concerned to make certain provisions for his funeral. Calling one of the younger brethren to him, he said to him: ‘Dear Father, I may well be dead tomorrow and there is a service I would ask of your charity. I don't want a shaped and polished coffin such as they usually provide, nor should I like to have a brass factory-made cross on it nor be labelled with a brass label. I want an ordinary box made of the same sort of wood as this floor'—and he pointed with a smile to the common deal floor, uneven and knotted, which he had swept day by day with his bare hand, a floor such as had been his only bed for forty years and more.

It is the business of the angels to mediate between God and mankind, to make his wishes known to us by enlightening our intelligence so that we may see more clearly what God wants of us, and thus may run more freely in the way of his holy will. It is their office to draw us ever closer to that love and praise of God which is their very existence; but whatever they are doing to help us, their gaze remains fixed upon the eternal Godhead, the Blessed Trinity. We are told in the scriptures that the angels have eyes at the back of their head as well as the front; in fact, in Ezechiel's vision the cherubim and the very wheels upon which they move are studded with eyes: ‘And their whole body and their necks and their hands and their wings and the circles were full of eyes, round about the four wheels.’

St Thomas reminds us of the following words of St Bernard: ‘The first and chiefest contemplation is the marvelling of God's majesty'. We learn from St Ambrose that ‘Glory is the shining Fact praised', and that the splendour of the Holy Trinity is the glory of God in himself. It therefore follows that man's end of life, which is the rendering of glory to God, is at once the most beneficial mode of ministering to his own happiness—and that of all others, since his relationship to God involves his relationship with all other men—and the greatest act of friendship ship he can render to his Creator. ‘Charity', says St Thomas, ‘inspires the soul with a sovereign love of him, who is supremely the object of love.’

As October, the month of the Rosary, is here, our thoughts may well turn to the consideration of the position of our Blessed Lady in the life of the Church as a whole and in our own. In some minds this consideration arouses misgivings. Does the trend of modern Mariology tend to give her an exaggerated prominence, they ask? This fear is almost as old as heresy, yet it troubles even devout Catholics today. Are popular forms of devotion to our Lady such as the Family Rosary, Perpetual Novenas, the Fatima cultus, being used as escapes from the basic obligations of religion, leading away from God and not to him? Does the widespread de Montfort consecration with its stress on ‘All through Mary’ conflict with a spirituality which seeks to centre everything on the Mass? Isn't the use of the Rosary at Mass an obstacle to the spread of the liturgical spint through a wider use of the Missal? Queries such as these may be only academic difficulties of the theorists.

‘Who art in Heaven.’ This is a puzzling expression. Where is Heaven, and how can God be fixed in Heaven or anywhere at all? In old days people really did think that there was a hard-and-fast place in the universe above us. They thought that the sky was a solid dome, a firmament, and that there was water above and below, and that the water poised above the dome of the sky was allowed to descend. They used the expressions of their day. It is the natural instinct in man to look up to God as if he were poised actually, physically above us.

When we talk of Heaven, the Church does not mean us to believe that God is enthroned in one particular place above. God is everywhere in a sense that cannot be described in terms of our experience.

Those chosen to judge the ‘Political Prisoner’ competition in London disagreed about the respective merits of the different entries. But on one point they were unanimous: that merely factual models (of prisoners looking out from behind barbed wire, for instance) are quite inadequate; and that only something symbolic is capable of re-presenting the reality of the political prisoner situation. Their insistence that it requires a symbol, not a mere photographic reproduction or sign, to re-present reality is but one example of that search for adequate symbols in which the most sensitive minds of our times are engaged. The number of those engaged in this search, and the intensity of their efforts, is easily under-estimated because the persons concerned do not fall into the customary political, religious or artistic categories; and so one fails to observe what they have in common until one becomes aware oneself of the search that is on.