When Pius X restored the ancient praction of frequent Communion he brought new opportunities for a full Christian life to countless members of the Church. Today we owe that saintly Pope a great debt for his wisdom and charity in opening wide the channels of God’s grace through this the greatest of sacraments. But such benefits always bring with them further responsibilities, and one of the ways in which Catholics today could show their gratitude to Pius X is by insisting upon the whole of his teaching on this subject which embraces the responsibilities as well as the benefits. The sacrament of Christ’s body is now of such easy access that is is possible to approach the alter without much preparation and even out of routine. Pius X insisted that the more frequent our holy Communions the more careful should be our preparation for the reception of Christ’s body.

God not only loves his creatures as a craftsman does his work, but also by a kind of social friendship, as a friend does a friend, inasmuch as he attracts them into the society of his own enjoyment. This he does that their glory and blessedness may be that which is his.

Saint Thomas is here speaking of the amicable society. between God, Three in One, and the soul endowed with grace, which finds its full enjoyment in the communion of saints to which God’s love attracts. This companionship in holiness is entirely suited to man’s social nature, though it transcends the powers of nature, and every human hope and aspiration. According to St John, those who see God have eternal life.—This is eternal life, that they may know thee, the only true God. (Jn. 17, 3.)

In spite of this, Christians frequently do not live up to the ideals of their Master. The antidote for such human weakness cannot be to water down those very ideals so as to make them more acceptable to unbelieving critics.

We all of us realise that our supreme purpose in God. We have no other end; this is our natural end, our purpose, why we exist—union with God. It is the only thing we are here for. Also we believe that the union begun here is only fully got at seross death—attained on the sher side of dust. Union with God is reached when we reach him is heaven—then only. We live by faith, we don’t know here, we do hereafter. We cannot help the sought sometimes, ‘supposing it isn’t true! Only the dead know—se live by faith.

God is our purpose. It is our one business to get nearer to God. You know yourself, don’t you? Your insufficiency, temptations, sina. You have examined your conscience, unfessed your sins of com ission and perhaps greater sine still of omission, you know what you could and should have done, the great gulf that separates and shrouds God—God in his wisdom, God in his beauty, God in his love. And yet you have got to meet—you and God. Absolute Truth with your miserable untruth, Wisdom with your blindness, Strength with your winning and shrinking, Generosity with your desperate selfielt.

The coming of Christ our Lord is an end and a beginning: an end to the world of waiting, of the promise that is to be fulfilled; a beginning of the world of the new creation that springs from his birth in human flesh.

It is at Vespers, at the evening prayer of the Church, that his coming is solemnly commemorated on the seven days before Christmas. Each evening he is named and praised and invoked in the Magnificat antiphon, gracing the words of his Mother, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit has found joy in God, who is my Saviour’.

O Sapientia. The first evening names our Lord as Wisdom, ‘coming forth from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to another, ordering all things mightily and with sweetness: come to teach us the way of prudence. The pattern for each of the seven antiphons is the same: the naming of the Lord who is to come, the expansion of that name and then the supplication.

Prayer is the uplifting of the human personality to God. We not only uplift our minds by submission through Faith to his revealed truth, and our wills in acknowledgment of his divine sovreignty, but also our bodies. In prayer the whole man ‘empties himself’ in union with our Saviour to the glory of God. (Phil. 2; 7-11.)

‘But also our bodies’. ‘The antithesis of mind is body’, writes Father Vincent McNabb, and therefore the ‘antithesis to mental prayer should be bodily prayer. But by a figure of speech the whole range of non-mental prayer is called after its chief part, vocal prayer. It would be incorrect to think that the other forms of bodily prayer are neither greatly practised in the Church nor greatly valued. The Church, like her divine Spouse, “knows what is in man” too well to neglect any object or function whereby the impact of the world may be deadened and a new force added to the world of unseen realities.

Sine intermissione orate (I Thess, v, 17)

The following notes have been suggested to the writer by the reading of Récita sincères d’un pélerin à son père spirituel, a French translation of a MS. found on Mount Athos and published at Kazan in 1882. They are set down here as they may be not without interest to others. Of this book Professor Arseniev writes (Mysticism and the Eastern Church): The experience of the old Oriental Fathers, those guides to the ascetic mystical life, as they are collected in the Philokalia, spring into fresh life in that remarkable monument of Russian folk mysticism of the middle of the nineteenth century… The Candid Narrative of a Pilgrim to his Confessor… is by a man of great capacity for intense inward prayer. This pilgrim is possessed by the sweetness of inward prayer and thereby his life is transfigured.

The world has little belief nowadays in the existence of a personal devil. If you meet Satan only, let us say, against the background of the Parisian society of Baudelaire's day you may be tempted to dismiss him as just part of the paraphernalia of a fashionable dilettantism; if you know him only in terms of medieval gargoyles and illuminations you may think him just one of the many childish fancies of a superstitious age. But in fact it is very unsound and unscientific to leave the matter there. Underneath all the superstitions of the Middle Ages, the fashionable posings of a later society, the unreasoning panic of the recurrent periods of witch-baiting, there does lie a world of a very different sort: a world of deadly and horrible seriousness where men know exactly what they are doing and do it and effectively, a world that you know to be real because of its horror. That world is with us still.

If we consider objectively the question of whether in practice meditation should be the proximate or remote preparation for prayer, what are we to say? In deciding, two factors should be taken into consideration:

(i) In practice when following formal meditation it is difficult, frequently impossible, to decide such questions as: When should I begin to make acts and for how long? Am I using my imagination enough or too freely? Am I thinking too much or too little? When I cannot think at all what shall I do? This last question is the nodal point of the whole problem. Most of us find it possible to pray when it is quite impossible to think. At morning prayer simple ideas in the form of acts can be elicited by the will, whereas constructive thinking often cannot. We have control of the one, too little control of the other. For this reason formal meditation imposes such a strain on average Catholics (and not least on over-worked religious sisters) that they give it up in despair, either because they cannot think or else because they want to pray; often it is both.

In giving us the way in which we should serve God, our blessed Lord laid down a principle that the disciple is not above the master and that presumably no one should be surprised if they found that a way of life good enough for the Son of God was good enough for them, and so he effectually put a stop to any complaint on our part. The highest way of life is the way of the Master; there is none higher. By such a standing only are we to judge our own lives. We talk of the success and of the failure of our life or of the lives of others; we are accustomed to speak of one life as happy, of another as full of tragedy.

The supreme ideal of Christian life was the Master’s; would the people of his own time have said that his life was a failure or a success as they stood on Calvary? Why !—a failure, of course. Even those in sympathy lost all hope. We have women coming to anoint the dead body with no thought whatever of the risen life.

In addition to the kind of mental prayer we have already considered, there is another which usually goes by the name of Meditation. We have already spoken of vocal prayers in which set words precede and circumscribe the thought. In the mental prayer called Meditation on the other hand it is the thought which precedes and elicits the words or spontaneous acts. There is sufficient truth in the aphorism ‘Vocal prayer is meaning what we say, but meditation is saying what we mean’ to distinguish between these approaches.

In general, we may say of meditation that the closer the soul draws to God through habitual collaboration with his Will, the more ardently will it desire God in time of prayer and the less will it rely on preliminary meditation. This need for meditation varies also with disposition, Penpenient and many other factors. St Teresa of Avila, for instance, found great difficulty in collecting her thoughts and for many years used a book to start her prayer. ‘I could not meditate without a book’, she says. This does not mean she made formal meditation.

I Pass on now to Mental pain which is a condition of the soul, and yet I do not wish to put this under the category of actual Spiritual Pain, because I wish to reserve for that category the pain which is entirely due to the actual intervention of God directly, and not due to the ‘growing pains’ of the soul.

We are probing deeper now into the mystery of pain, probing deeper, and at the same time, paradoxically, mounting higher. I speak of the condition of the soul caused by the mental pain of aridity, isolation, desolation, and the insatiable hunger of the soul for God.

Aridity is dryness in the life of the spirit. It sometimes seems as if the very colour, and music, of prayer were dead and silent. We pray, and our very words seem meaningless and hollow; there seems no response from God. We may be even utterly bored and unable to concentrate; vocal prayer seems meaningless, like speaking to a blank wall; mental prayer is impossible. It is indeed as if all the colour of life had turned grey, and all the music was mute. ‘Surely’, the wretched bodies out, ‘I must have sinned very greatly, have displeased God in some terrible way.’

In leaving the life of sin the ‘convert’ now enters the service of God. Eventually he aspires to the embrace of God through love, but his immediate concern is to become an obedient servant. He seeks to render what is due to his Lord, to recognise the worth of his Lord, to perform his religious worth-ship. All worship is service; it falls short of the perfect virtues, the so-called theological virtues, which thrust their points straight into the heart of the Godhead. Religious worship is the concern of a moral virtue; the creature as a creature in face of his Creator behaves as he should, as a dependent, one of God’s dependents. Prayer, adoration, sacrifice, all these activities are activities of dependents, they ure part of their tribute, their service. Later the religious service begins to become absorbed by the broader virtue of love which pervades every action and gradually comes to predominate. At that time the Lord will say, ‘I no longer call you servants but friends, as he said to the apostles after the first part of their apprenticeship had been fulfilled.

Christian worship began with the bestowal of a Name. It ends with the adoration of that Name. When the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mother what her little son should be called he started a devotion that has run like a red thread through all the worship of the Church and seems destined to last while time shall last and till time shall be no more. One surmises if among the things the wondering shepherds and the adoring magi asked was the name by which he should be called, and if the Virgin Mother in her graciousness entrusted to them that high secret which they carried so joyously back with them as they returned to their own fields or their own country by another way. Anyway, eight days after he was born, he was publicly given that Name which is above every name and before which every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and of things on earth and things under the earth.

‘Welcome Sister Pain,’ sang the Seraphic Father seven centuries ago, and his words did not sound so strange in the ears of those around him, as they would have done today. For this is an age that regards pain as in itself an evil thing, something to be avoided at all costs, something ugly, something to which death itself is preferable, even if by death the materialist means darkness and annihilation. Even many Christians take up this attitude to a certain extent, and the majority outside the Catholic Church are vastly perturbed at what is termed ‘the problem of pain.’

But the Catholic child, brought up as he is to ‘offer up’ his toothache and the sting of his grazed knee or his cut thumb, finds less difficulty, as he grows up, to face the ‘problem of pain.’ It all fits into the scheme of things, so to speak, and he has learned, if not to understand and even puzzle about it, at least to accept it and use it.

Langland’s outlook is really centred in the doctrine of the Mystical Body, though he nowhere employs the term itself. He conceives of the Church and her members in this living corporate way. From the very fact of to the Incarnation, all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church.

But my nature shall move me to be merciful to man For we are brethren of one blood though not in baptism together are words of our Lord at the harrowing of hell (Passus XVIII, 397-8). Men are not only blood brethren because they bear the same nature with the same human blood coursing through their veins, but also because they have been bought by the outpouring of that blood made precious in union with the divinity:

“They are my blood brethren”, said Piers, ‘for God bought all men”. (Passus VI, 212; cf. XVIII, 348 sqq.)

Religion’, says St Thomas, ‘denotes properly a relation to God’ and ‘consists essentially in those acts by which man worships God by subjecting himself to his lordship’. (Summa, II-II, 81, 1). Whenever there is a special kind of lordship, there must be a special kind of service, and it is evident that lordship belongs to God in a special and singular way, because he made all things and has supreme dominion over all. Therefore a special kind of service is due to him, called ‘religion’, ‘piety’, or ‘worship’ (Ibid. ad 3. Cf. In Boeth: 8, 2).

But this worship must be of a fitting nature both as regards its object and as regards the one by whom it is offered. Its object, God, is a spirit, and therefore his worship must consist essentially in acts whereby the mind or soul is directed to him. But the worshipper is man composed of body and soul; wherefore his acts of worship must include a bodily element, both to give God the service of the whole man, and to incite himself to internal acts of religion by external ones—‘from things seen to the love of things unseen’.

There was recently discovered in the library of Llanarth Court, Raglan, a Book of Hours of the early fifteenth century which is of more than usual interest. The chief contents of the book are those customary in a Book of Hours of the Sarum Use, namely, the Little Office of Our Lady, the Penitential Psalms, the Office of the Dead, a collection of prayers to our Lord, and one to a Guardian Angel. A considerable number of leaves is missing from the MS., which in its present state begins at once with Lauds and lacks part of Prime and the whole of Terce and Sext. There are no miniatures, but there are a number of elaborately decorated initials, with floriated designs in gold, blue and red, some of which have been damaged by a later binder's trimming of the upper margins. Twenty leaves have been heavily annotated in the lower margins by a sixteenth century Protestant owner of the book. Presumably the same owner was responsible for the erasure of the commemoration of St Thomas of Canterbury at Lauds, in conformity with Henry VIII's suppression of liturgical honour to that saint.

It is not only out of affection for our English brethren that we have so willingly agreed to write the editorial of this first number of The Life of the Spirit. It is also an opportunity to put into Practice a dogma, which is dear to us and which We strive constantly to bring home to our readers in La Vie Spirituelle: the dogma of the Communion of Saints. As Fr Congar pointed out recently (Vie Intettectuelle, April, 1946), the fact that we belong to one Church, to a Communion of Saints, not only means that we have one head, or that we live, each on his own, by one faith expressed in the same acts of worship; it also means that between the parts of this whole which we make up, there exist relations of exchange, intercommunication, mutual help, etc… . Can we imagine a body in which the members, although linked to the same head, have no vital connexion with one another? Such a thing is unthinkable.