The title of Bible, Liturgy and Family seems at first not only forbidding but fantastic. Scholars throughout the centuries have devoted their lives to the study of these subjects and will continue to do so till the end of time, so what of value can I say in a short talk?

After a little thought I was able to answer my own question. I think that no family should be without ideas on the subject of the Bible and the Liturgy and also that the future of Christian society is being strongly influenced, if not shaped by such ideas as they have. It may also be true that at present, too many people have too few ideas and too few people too many, in which case we shall all benefit by a pooling of resources.

I must admit at once that I am conscious of large gaps in what I have to say, and I hope that these gaps will be filled by those whose learning and experience and vocation have fitted them to do it.

To discover the meaning it is sometimes better to walk round the city like the children of Israel round Jericho than to attack the walls directly with battering rams and force of arms. So we shall be talking about the subject rather than on it, about the growth and effect of the Liturgy in the daily life of a particular lay community and the personal experiences of some of its members.

For many years we lived our life together with no accepted religious beliefs and our background was therefore opposed to anything in the nature of a liturgical action—we believed that a gesture or a word which did not spring from our own personal need or experience was a measure of our insincerity and was to be avoided if at all possible.

The Bible reading which I want to write about, is that which I have practised, the Bible reading of parents and children together; which is indeed the only way in which I have read the Bible—apart from the experience of listening to the lessons in the Church of England as a child, and some rather unsuccessful attempts to read parts to myself in later years. As a family we have read it daily, in principle—though in practice there have been a good many gaps—for ten years or more—that is, from earliest childhood in the case of the youngest, to manhood in the case of the eldest child. In this paper I want to offer some reflections on our experience in the hope that they may be useful to others. Our main experience, that constant Bible reading from childhood is overwhelmingly a good thing, is something which surely goes without saying.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel may perhaps recall the Dwarf in the poem, and ‘how much he marvelled’ to find that the wounded opponent of Lord Cranstoun,

‘ … a knight of pride
Like a book-bosomed priest should ride.’

And the context reveals that he

‘thought not to search or staunch the wound
Until the secret he had found.'

Ignoring the fact that ‘the mighty book’ in this instance was none other than a magic book of spells by Sir Walter's medieval namesake Michael, and attending to the simile alone, we learn from the poet's own explanatory but confusing note, that ‘The book-a-bosom priests were those who went to a distance to baptize or marry with the Mass-book in their breasts'. Without any pedantic head-shaking in the direction of Abbotsford we may pass from the wounded knight to a more familiar modern figure, that of the travelling cleric, not book-bosomed perhaps, so much as book-pocketed or book-brief-cased.

The Mass, and the beauty of the Liturgy of the Mass, was one of the forces which overcame my struggles against the grace of God, and pulled me into the Church. And I could not get to know the Liturgy of the Mass without wanting to know more about the Church's official daily prayer, the jewelled setting of the daily sacrifice, the Divine Office. So, as a convert, newly received, I began to find out more about the Office and attend its choral recitation as and when I could. Then came my reception into the Dominican Third Order and the obligation to say our Lady's Hours, which, simpler and almost unvarying, are yet built on the same plan as the longer Office and provide an ideal guide and introduction to it. Later still came the possession of a Dominican breviary, the first tentative attempts at saying the Office on the bigger feasts, and eventually the time when I found that it was not whether I would or would not say the Divine Office daily, but simply that I could not bring myself to leaving off so doing.

Any treatment of the Incarnation would obviously have to give some consideration to the two heresies which have distorted the truth contained in this mystery. At one extreme lies Arianism, which wanted to treat Christ as if he was exclusively human, with the divine about him no more than superimposed by a sort of adoption. At the other extreme is Docetism, which wanted to treat Christ as if he was exclusively divine, with the human about him only a sort of optical illusion. Both are heresies. The truth hes between the two extremes. Christ is the Word of God incarnate, one person in two complete natures, divine and human.

For an article appearing in a number devoted to Bible and Worship, this excursion into speculative theology will appear less enigmatic if it is realized that Christ was not the first time that the Word of God had become flesh.

In spite of the title of this talk, I do not propose to say anything about everyday life. It is not merely that I can think of very little of value to say about it; above all I want to avoid absolutely the idea that we should adapt the psalms to our own lives. The psalms are not adaptable. They are a divinely inspired, divinely guaranteed expression of a whole range of religious sentiments which we must take as we find them, take as God left them, however crude or alien to our native ways of thought they may sometimes seem. Our thought in using the psalms for our devotions should be to take them simply as they are, and let them enrich and envigorate our everyday religion. We must try to adapt ourselves to the psalms, not the psalms to ourselves. So I shall confine myself to a few considerations about what the psalms are.

The present article continues the study begun in the May number of The Life Of The Spirit under the title of our Lady in Tradition. In that article there was occasion to remark on the benign and gratifying way in which the great organs of the secular press have reported the events connected with the centenary celebrations of the apparitions of our Lady at Lourdes. But I went on to say that this seemed too good to last, and that the year would not pass without a resurrection of the old threadbare objections to Catholic doctrine and devotion concerning the Mother of God. We have not had long to wait. In a recent review of the new book on Cardinal Newman by the French Oratorian, Père Bouyer, we are treated to such judgments as the following:

It is an age-old commonplace of spiritual writers that God is mysteriously nearer to those who would flee ‘the world’ and seek him alone in solitude. Such writers can justifiably point to the orgins of monastic life in the deserts of Egypt, as also to the constant renewal of a monastic ideal by a return to the desert as can be seen in Cîteaux's efforts. In our own day a Père de Foucauld lived and died like an eremite of old; and that precious life and death would seem to have begotten a thriving new spiritual movement in the Church. That solitudes and deserts can foster and nurture spiritual realities is certainly a traditional and valid theme. We can always retain the doggerel-like text ‘O beata solitudo, O sola beatitudo’ ('Blest solitude, our solitary bliss’).

Why does God permit evil? It is a fatal timidity which induces us nowadays to pre-occupy ourselves exclusively with the apologetic aspects of this problem. A significant train of thought in the Bible invites us to see it from a far bolder, and I think from a more sublime, point of view. If we follow this train of thought we shall want not so much to apologize (in any possible sense of the word) for the fact of evil in the world, not so much to ‘reconcile it with God's goodness as to glory in its being there for him to conquer. For it pertains to God's glory that there should be positive forces of evil in the world, and that they should strive actively against his holy will—and not only that they should strive, but that they should seem for a time to prevail against him.

St Laurence Justinian used to say that we do not know what humility is unless we have it in our hearts. Only those who are humble of heart can understand it; that is why our Lord said: ‘Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart.'

In order to acquire humility we must omit none of those exterior actions in which we can practise it on suitable occasions according to our state of life. We should also ask God for true sentiments of humility to accomplish well these exterior actions, which are sometimes performed for vainglory. Then we should very often make interior acts of humility by recognizing our nothingness and deficiencies and by loving humiliations; we should judge ourselves ceaselessly and condemn both ourselves and all our actions.