If you live by mountains or the sea your life is moulded by them. It may be that they are out of sight and that it is only in the lie of the land, in a wind that blows over you cold from the snows or warm and salty from the sea that you are made consciously aware of them; perhaps you remember from time to time to make an expedition to refresh your memory of the way they look. But in some way or another they are a presence in your life. Although we’ are not always aware of her, our Lady is always present to the Church, is present in the life of each one of us; when we are aware of her it is not by the senses of the body but by the spiritual sense of faith.

From the sonorous periods of the eighteeneth and nineteenth centuries to the friendly intimacy of Billy Graham, preaching has always held a central position in protestantism. The sermon, for many, is the major attraction of the service, and often the quality of a man's preaching seems the chief determining factor in the size of his congregations. The clergymen of detective stories are so often in their studies on Saturday afternoon preparing the next day's sermon that we should suspect the worst if we found them doing anything else. But though we are quite accustomed to priests’ excusing themselves from our dinner parties to finish their Office, I think most people would be astonished if a priest said he must leave to work on a sermon. Somehow, apart from special occasion sermons (such as weddings and funerals), most of us don't seem to take preaching very seriously.

Those of us who are called upon from time to time to teach the faith to children are often perplexed about what we should in fact teach. The Catholic faith, of course; the catechism seems the obvious choice, it is clear and easy to learn. But then what are we to do about the scriptures? It is not always very clear how we can combine the two, they follow their own rhythms.

When I was sent to teach at a Catechism Camp last summer the problem Was very much in my mind—the very name ‘Catechism Camp’ seemed to indicate the method; and yet I had found, the previous year, that catechism teaching is far from satisfactory in itself. The children know the answers on the whole, and the meaning behind the answers tends to confine one to the logical steps of a remote theology.

The Canticle of Canticles of our Douay version very literally represents a Hebrew superlative. We could translate it ‘the most lovely song’ or the ‘fairest of songs'. Over the centuries innumerable books have been written about this great poem. There has been, and there still is, much disagreement about its interpretation; there is no disagreement about its consummate beauty. But there is far more than beauty, for the book is part of scripture and as such is inspired or has a divine character. The more central Hebrew tradition was firm about this. Rabbi Akibah, about A.D. 130, wrote: ‘No one in Israel has ever questioned the Canticle's divine character; indeed the whole world is not worth the day on which the Canticle of Canticles was bestowed upon Israel. All the books of scripture are holy, but the Canticles most holy.’ (Yadaim 3, 5.) The Church teaches that Canticles is part of scripture, and that teaching can be traced to the list of scripture compiled by St Cyril of Jerusalem, when Canticles is explicitly mentioned.

Born at Trawsfynydd, a remote lake-side village in North Wales, in the year 1577, John Roberts was, in the words of T. P. Ellis, ‘heir of a thousand years of “Welsh history and Welsh Catholicism'. The awareness of historical continuity displayed by the martyr at his death sprang, no doubt, from the impressions made upon the child John, not only by the stories he must have heard of the kings and princes of whom he was a direct descendant, of the saints who had sprung from the same line as himself, but also from the history implicit in the country-side around him, from the nearby and ruined abbey, and from the desecrated altars of the parish church. Thehistory of Trawsfynydd, a village bearing one of the Welsh names for the cross, embodies in itself the whole history of Wales.

It is in the stillness of our hearts and in the stillness of our minds, in a perfect presence to ourselves, that we rise up—not of ourselves, but through him to whom alone we say, ‘Raise us, Lord, that we may see’. This rise of ours is ‘offering’, achieved in understanding and in loving; we do not rise in any simple way outside our normal selves, but remaining within and yet increasing, growing, rise up upon ourselves to know and see, as yet however darkly, God present in our souls, from whom we have our all; our being, life and understanding; our own true actuality.

If, then, we recognize the tumult of the shifting nature of our thoughts, the milling crowds of our conflicting fantasies, by calming and by ordering these which hold us down we may proceed and may attain to that pure silence of the spirit, where in the rise upon itself of understanding we will see and know and feel, though fleetingly, the presence of him alone who is. ‘Be still and know that I am God.’