A convenient text for these notes is provided by ‘A Challenge from the Cloister', printed in the May issue of the Life of the Spirit. It begins: ‘A Carmelite life in the world does not seem to be really possible'. There is much confusion of mind implicit in this statement, but its elucidation does not call for any profound analysis of the nature of man or the nature of grace. The whole matter is stated quite simply and explicitly by St Thomas, in the Summa, not as a personal and novel view. What is found there is the traditional teaching of the Church.

'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart.’ The perfection of the Christian life is the perfection of charity. And this perfection is the highest possible; no one can do better than have perfect charity. Furthermore, perfect charity is the vocation of all, without exception.

In the mind of the average Catholic, especially of the average cradle Catholic, a monk is someone who wears a habit. For this reason one constantly hears of Friars, Canons, and even Clerks Regular referred to as monks. Of course this is completely wrong. The only monks in the Church at present are the sons of Saint Benedict and Saint Bruno. Nevertheless, even the best instructed Catholic would find it hard to say what a monk is and in what way he differs from other religious. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a monk as ‘a member of a community living apart under the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience'. The first part of this definition is all right, but it is hopelessly wrong over the vows. A monk takes a vow of obedience in common with other religious, but he does not take explicit vows of poverty or chastity; in their place he takes the vows of stability and conversation of manners.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.

Mary, conceived without sin, Mediatrix of all Grace, pray for us.

Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, pray for us. (He bowed to the portrait of President Mao, and then to the audience.)

High authorities of the Government, high dignitaries of the Church, faithful Christians, gentlemen:

The subject of this discourse will be: the sacrifice I am making of myself to the two supreme powers.

People who do not believe in the existence of God, nor in the soul, who do not recognise the Pope as the representative of Jesus Christ, nor the Catholic hierarchy, say that the movement for for triple is a purely patriotic movement. They recognise the liberty of the Catholic faith, they agree that there can be relation of a purely religious nature between the faithful and the Pope.

David fulfils the long-hoped-for ambition of all Israel in taking Jerusalem, and establishes himself there with the ark of God, the central, sacramental thing in the religion of the chosen people. He is unaware that his own kingly office is to become a no less venerated centre in the dynasty he founds. For to be king of Jerusalem entailed far-reaching consequences. To be the anointed of Israel gave him an office that could be set in rivalry beside the priesthood of the house of Aaron; and to the general populace of Israel (especially the tribes that had no love for Levi and what they deemed its pretensions) he, not the successor of Aaron, was the spiritual head of the nation.

Speaking of the life which aims at full union with God in prayer, one who is a ‘master’ in the knowledge and practice of such a life said, with a rueful smile: ‘The interior life has many disadvantages'! He did not refer to the self-evident disadvantages, as they might be called, which are the natural result of giving up certain things incompatible with the life of the spirit. He meant rather ‘disadvantages’ that are part and parcel of the interior life even for those who willingly embrace it. Such disadvantages imply, for example, the absence of certain consolations; the lack of any certainty of real progress and of any personal satisfaction in advancing along the way to God.

So often, those who are really striving to start out on the way which seems to lead to union with our Lord apparently get lost on the road; they seem to be held back from making progress by a kind of ‘mist’ which surrounds them and dispels the clearness of vision experienced when they started out.

‘Ut Omnes Unum Sint.’ Why was it that our Lord did not include this prayer among the petitions of the Our Father? Surely it was because its content is too holy and its meaning too delicate and full of mystery. This petition could only be presented to the Father with the required purity and value by the lips of our High Priest, the God-Man, and by the infinite love of his heart.

Ut omnes unum sint. The prophetic eye of Jesus scans time and eternity. The faithful appear before him in their millions—men of the most diverse tongues and lands approach him, desirous to find in him deliverance and eternal salvation, love and peace, eager to live according to his will and example, to be like him in all things, forming a host of glittering stars. Each One in himself, separated from the rest, is a world of his own.

In the May issue of Life Of The Spirit, ‘A Challenge from inside the Cloister’ by a Carmelite nun denied with considerable force that there could be any real contemplative life in the world—mainly ‘because the essential “stripping” could never be accomplished outside Enclosure or the Rule nor could it be born', (p. 556.) It is true that the writer says that it is ‘A Carmelite life in the world’ that does not seem possible, but she goes on to say: ‘May I suggest that it is a great pity so much is made of “contemplative fife” in the world now'; so that evidently it is not only the Carmelite form of that life which is considered impossible outside the cloister.

This ‘challenge’ has given rise to a series of replies—some of which have appeared in the following numbers of Life Of The Spirit—all of which have protested quite decidedly against the theory expressed in the ‘challenge'.

It is two years since the attention of readers of the Life of the Spirit was first drawn to the Jerusalem Bible—the new French translation of the scriptures, with an introduction and notes to each book, brought out in a series of beautifully printed fascicules by Les Editions du Cerf. Seven of these fascicules appeared in 1949 containing various books of the Old and New Testaments, five more in 1950, and a further eight in 1951 giving us Leviticus, Tobias, Proverbs, Wisdom, Isaias, Jonas, Matthew, I and II Timothy, and Titus. At this rate the series will soon be complete.

The more I see of this splendid and monumental work the more I hope to see it one day available in English for those who have no facility for French. Monumental seems to be the right word here. Not only is the work under the able direction of the École Biblique of Jerusalem (and the learned Dominicans there have allowed fifty years of preparatory research to precede the venturing on such a task as this), but those responsible for the undertaking have show a fine sense of scholarship by inviting from all sides the collaboration of biblical and literary experts, priests and laymen.

Though a study of the liturgy is undertaken to find the meaning of, to get behind, so to speak, the elements (the words, actions, things) of the Church's ceremonies, it may seem a little strange that we should look for a symbolical meaning of necessary a receptacle as a chalice or cup in any religious rite in which a liquid is used. But man's knowledge begins with the senses. Metaphors, sensible (corporeal) representaons or similitudes are not only natural to man but naturally pleasing to him—for which reason St Thomas says, it is fitting that pmtual things are given to us by means of metaphors drawn from corporeal things, sub metaphoris corporalium.

Man has always tended to express his religious or spiritual ideas in terms of his physical environment and his reactions to it, in terms of things that are vital and familiar to him. Though this anniiarity has perhaps clouded the modern sophisticated mind, the Principle remains fundamentally true.

Acritic suggested that Dom Gregory Dix in his monumental The Shape of the Liturgy had some brilliant liturgical intuitions, even though he was not always accurate or Profound in his details. This criticism may or may not be justified of the book as a whole; but there was surely a brilliancy of intuition in Fr Dix's treatment of St Cyril of Jerusalem and his relation to the development of the liturgy in the West as well as in the East. The realisation that St Cyril introduced a new type of symbolism into the universal prayer of the Church was surely something of a discovery and all its implications may not have been fully appreciated even by Fr Dix himself. At all events, it may be useful to summarise his discovery for the benefit of those unacquainted with this book, and to point to one important implication which bears upon the whole question of the way Christian men express themselves in prayer together.

Paganism, that is ethnic religions, can only be understood historically. They are the precipitate of a tribe's, a people's, group-experiences during its process of formation. They are passed on from generation to generation by way of tradition and are expressed either as customs, as mythology or as cult—the distinction between these three kinds of thoughts, words and deeds always remaining pretty vague. Moreover, all these group-expressions are in a constant flux; new experiences are added, modifying and perhaps logically contradicting, the previous forms of expression, possibly superseding them altogether.

Nothing, therefore, could be more misleading than wanting to explain a pagan ideology, an ethnic religion, in the same manner as that of a religion based on a depositum fidei, from which everything can be logically deduced. An ethnic religion never starts as a system, though in the end, at a certain point of intellectual development, systematisers arise that try to arrest the growth of amorphous agglomerations of group-experiences in the rigid moulds of a static ideology.

Father Gerald Vann, o.p., in an article in a 1951 Blackfriars accused the modern world of flight into phantasy and counselled a return to reality. The Editor, in a later number, suggested forming some sort of Blackfriars Group, where questions so raised might be discussed in the light of what many of us are calling the Dominican Way. The Editor of The Life Of The spirit has been suggesting for some time that I should write something on diet, and especially fasting.

Can I, no philosopher, put all these three indications together and write on that one aspect of reality to which I give most of my study, nutrition?

We may phantasise a good deal about many practical matters and get away with it, but the fundamental things of nature pay a quick dividend, in good coin or bad, according to how we deal with their crude reality.

When a man is granted a vision he is always, at least at first, worth listening to. He may later obscure the vision by his own petty fanaticism, but so long as the sight is granted him and so long as he is the receiver rather than the generator he will have something of value to say. Men should therefore bear him with patience and with an open mind, and they will surely learn from him. The danger of brushing visionaries aside comes in particular to those who consider themselves to be so entirely possessed of the truth, that they have nothing more of value to learn—and there are numbers of such complacents.

These remarks are occasioned by two books which have indeed been received with an open mind by many, but which run the risk of being set on one side by those who would most benefit by them, namely the fervent Christian who looks once again for a united Christendom.

St John tells us in his gospel that St John the Baptist, when he saw our Lord coming to him, cried out: ‘Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who taketh away the sin of the world’ (John i, 29). The voice of the Baptist has from that moment challenged the world, for though John the Baptist died his martyr's death, the living voice of the Church still proclaims his message. To the world, to all mankind, she says: ‘Behold the Lamb of God'; and in saying this she forces the human race to make some answer to the question: ‘Whom do men say that I am?’ (Mark 8, 27.)

Habit, or ignorance springing from indifference, seems to have made the question almost meaningless; or—and here, I think, we get a little nearer to the bone—it is half listened to, its implications half grasped, and then half uneasily, by a secret act of will, which is almost masked, even from ourselves; we avert our attention onto some less disturbing subject.

Padre Pio da Pietrelcina is not widely known, in England, and the occasional references to him give the wrong emphasis. If he is mentioned, it is usually as ‘that supposed stigmatist somewhere in Italy'; so that the immediate impression is adverse, even damning. Now that is as it should be. The masters of the spiritual life cry out to us: Beware of hysteria! Avoid strange phenomena! Live by Faith!

Early in the morning, before five, the sacristy door at St Giovanni Rotondo, near Foggia, opens and Padre Pio comes in to say Mass. He comes in slowly, almost shuffling. A tired face, the beard tinged with grey; a large nose, slightly splayed-out from suuff-taking; eyes that pierce and laugh, while the mouth and cheeks follow the eyes; a face serene, radiant, simple. Quite stout, quite short—you see such figures every day on the roads of Italian towns and countryside—the Cappucini.

The christian liturgy is first and foremost an opusoperatum. It is something much bigger than the deed of any one of us and than our own personal devotion. It is something that is first of all done apart from us, that has its own worth and power independently of our effort. We enter into its mighty current and allow ourselves to be borne along by it; our part, the opus operantis, is to allow ourselves to be subject to its power, to be covered over with its glory.

It should not surprise us that the christian liturgy is thus primarily an opus operatum. The christian liturgy stands at the heart of the christian religion; and the christian religion is first and foremost an opus operatum. It is not just a technique of spiritual culture; many pagan religions are that. Nor is it just a way of worship; that too can be found outside the Church. No, it is first and foremost the mighty act of God who in Christ is reconciling man to himself, and giving us in Christ a mediator and a great high-priest.

A total view of Scripture shows that Genesis tells of the emanation of all, of the Fall and the Promise; the apostolic writings speak of Redemptive Incarnation as relevant to all; now there remains the Apocalypse to throw light on the return of all, as it now is, and as it will be, fulfilled. Too often the prophecy is inadequately appreciated, precisely because of its apocalyptic character and the difficulty of its imagery. The difficulty of the book is lessened by a triumph of Catholic exegesis; its inner lessons are indispensable. Despite its utterly judaistic dress and a riot of oriental imagery, it is intensely realist in its deep doctrinal content, which is no less than Jésus-Christ vu et écouté dans sa gloire. It is a fifth gospel.

'…Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God in the blooo out of every tribe and tongue, and people, and nation, and hast made us to our God a kingdom and priests, and we shall reign on earth.’

The attention Islamic Mysticism has so far received in this country presents to the Catholic a study of no little interest. Unlike some of the Indian ascetic practices, it has largely been the object of a purely professional, rather than of a popular and slightly bizarre enthusiasm; but, within the field of scholarship, that enthusiasm has been whole-hearted and uninhibited to a degree not witnessed in our time outside the natural sciences. From the middle of last century onwards, a whole range of scholars—Palmer, Browne, Nicholson, Arberry and Margaret Smith, to name only some of the outstanding among them—have found, and unmistakably gloried in finding, a satisfaction in their studies wider and deeper than the purely academic. It is perhaps not surprising that most of these scholars ‘discovered’ Islamic Mysticism either (in the case of the earlier ones) when living in an atmosphere of confidently well-bred agnosticism, or (during the present century) when their religious appetite no longer found anything like satisfaction in their own accepted faith.

Everyone who considers himself a Christian does in some way admit the divine authority of the Bible, and in it brings to mankind. In view of this, the fact that very many Christians never read the Bible constitutes a peculiar problem. Why do they not read it? For some, the position of the Church as a teaching authority seems to stand between them and the Bible; for others, to read the Bible suggests a host of technical teaching authority seems to stand between them and the problems, which they feel only scholars can resolve. But these obstacles have their origin in the history of men's attitude to the Bible in recent centuries, and to explain these questions is perhaps a useful way of clearing people's minds of these hesitations. I. The ‘jansenistic’ Attitude The chief obstacle is ignorance. St John Chrysostom in a well-known homily deplores the fact that many good and pious folk did not even know how many Epistles St Paul wrote.