Once the central position of the liturgy in the plan of redemption is recognized and when it is distinguish from the protocol of its administration (the rubrics), then it is seen, not as an end in itself, but the function of communication for divine life so that we, who come from the Trinity, may live by the Trinity and go to the Trinity. All definitions of liturgy imply its divine source, the Mass.

The Liturgy is the official dispensation of the Mysteries of Christ. It is ‘the whole body of official prayers and sacramental actions whereby the communication of men with God is carried on in the Church', ‘the life-dispensing, life-preserving and life-restoring activity of Ecclesia, the mystical Christ'. It is the official distribution of Christ's life by which through the Church he communicates grace to individuals by means of the four inter-related parts: the sacraments, the sacramentals and ritual prayers, the Divine Office, and the Liturgical Year—all centred about an finding their source in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

In the Gospel the Lord commends three practices: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Fasting restores man to himself; almsgiving restores him to his neighbour; prayer restores him to God. Nothing so takes man away from himself as impurity; nothing so alienates man from man as cruelty, and nothing so separates man from God as ingratitude. Fasting prepares the way for temperance which overcomes impurity. Almsgiving enkindles mercy which crushes cruelty. Prayer brings devotion and fervour which foster gratitude. This is the armour of God whereby we withstand the attacks of the devil. Fortified by these weapons, Moses turned the wrath of God from the people, put Amelech to flight and merited to receive the divine revelation. With this armour, David escaped the plots of Absolom. Elias, using the same weapons, freed himself from the hands of Jezabel. Ezechias laid low the army of Sennacherib by fasting and prayer more than by lances and spears. The Lord consecrated the very beginning of his public life with fasting and Prayer.

In that most helpful little book by Fr Bede Jarrett, No Abiding City he gives us the key to what is meant by ‘Detachment‘. We are pilgrims in this world, travellers; ‘here we have no abiding city', and so we must ‘travel light', as the saying goes. There is a great temptation in the modern world to accumulate more and more things—they all seem necessary somehow, and the advertisements in any paper or periodical that we open try to persuade us that we must have this or that—and so perhaps we get it and then persuade ourselves that we cannot possibly do without it.

Or if we are not attached to ‘things', we may become attached to sitting in a special chair, a special way of doing things, a special seat in church. We can become attached to our comforts and our food. In religious life, we can become attached to some devotion, some particular way of singing the Mass, or to some ‘feelings’ we experience when taking Holy Communion or saying some prayer, and then one day the feelings are taken away and we realize that it was the ‘feelings’ to which we were attached and which were so important, and not Holy Communion or prayer.

To the eyes of faith all sickness is a trial. God is there offering us a special grace of purification and of sharing in his redeeming death, but a grace hidden and hard to discern and live. Yet the trial is still more formidable for the man whose sickness is mental, especially when, as is the case with neuroses, the sickness only partly destroys liis balance and control. His agony at feeling himself partly ‘alienated', a stranger, that is, to himself, is intense. Something deep inside him is escaping his inner attention and worse still his power. And on top of that those about him most often, even when they are full of good intentions understand nothing at all, heap one ineptitude on another and (when they have not provoked it) aggravate the disease. The sufferer feels himself excruciatingly alone, not understood, essentially helpless. Very often his faith seems to him unsettled, without strength or efficacy; all is clouded over with pain and despair.

In men's inheritance, the most famous of the techniques which set free spiritual energy and lead us beyond the limits where we commonly vegetate is clearly yoga. The word indicates a whole world of practices and doctrines in which it is necessary from every point of view to distinguish very diverse tendencies.’ It may even happen that these tendencies are contradictory. The complete ensemble is in fact the heritage of the past five thousand years in an abundant civilization, where some go as far as treaties opposites as the same.

We have now good guides to clear our way in this astonishing complexity. They lead us to recognize as an axis in it, classical yoga, as codified by Patanjali in the fourth or fifth century A.D., unshaken in spite of the diverse interpretations of it and in spite of, the fact that its very nature as a spiritual technique allows it to be adapted to differing persons and differing groups. Yoga is 'mad with innovation'.