The Mystic, says St John of the Cross, is a loving an enamoured, soul—alma enamorada. And he describes this love as the ‘labour to divest ourselves and to detach ourselves for God's sake from all that is not God’ (Ascent, ii, 5,7). When we come to analyse the immense and complex meaning of such sentences as this in the work of the Mystical Doctor we discover the two great influences that went to make up his theology, as in a lesser degree they made up the theology of nearly every Christian mystical writer. The first tradition may be called the philosophic background which was earlier in history, coming from the far East and from the purity of Greek thought, and the second, the fundamental Christian theology of love was explained rather than implemented by the former tradition of thought.

Hallowed be thy name. Hallowed—a Saxon word meaning ‘Blessed, honourable, held holy'. May thy name then be blessed: may it be held holy:'may it be adored. Our prayer should not be all prayer of petition, all self-regarding; we should have some prayer of adoration, prayer just about God. The book of the Apocalypse gives us a description of this kind of prayer where it says, ‘And there was silence in heaven for about the space of half-an-hour'. Is there enough of this prayer in my life? This is the one thing necessary.

The early Church, all over the world, in perfect agreement, always greeted God's Mother in this angelic manner: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace'. And our Rarest ancestors, following in pious harmony the hallowed tashion of their forefathers, sang the ‘Hail Mary’ everywhere and at all times. They thought by reverently honouring his Mother to make themselves very pleasing to the heavenly King. They knew no more fitting way of paying her this honour than Stating the respect and distinctions decreed and bestowed upon her according to his good pleasure by God himself. This was to do her honour on the day that his divine Majesty wished so greatly to honour the rest of mankind this Virgin as to become man himself. Holy greeting! Genuine praises! Splendid and unique homage! The great God inspired them; a great angel pronounced them; a great evangelist recorded them; the earliest ages have used them; our forefathers have taught them to us.

The psalmists were the singers of Israel; daily they magnified the name of the Lord, crying Hosanna!, Hosanna! … Today the crooner has become one of those psalmists. By means of the microphone, to a billion families and homes, he sends the same message—I believe, I believe. … His has become the voice of Sunday morning religion. His Nicene Creed is a short catalogue—a simple reverence of Nature's holiness, a worshipping of trees and stars and clouds, a palpitating delight in the first cries of newborn babes. Doubtless such sentiments are easy to ridicule; they can be dismissed as clichèd or Pantheistic—or even if they are conceded to have a Christian note of optimism, then the Christianity which they celebrate may be considered rather wishy-washy. Nor is it hard for those who argue thus to add examples.

As October, the month of the Rosary, is here, our thoughts may well turn to the consideration of the position of our Blessed Lady in the life of the Church as a whole and in our own. In some minds this consideration arouses misgivings. Does the trend of modern Mariology tend to give her an exaggerated prominence, they ask? This fear is almost as old as heresy, yet it troubles even devout Catholics today. Are popular forms of devotion to our Lady such as the Family Rosary, Perpetual Novenas, the Fatima cultus, being used as escapes from the basic obligations of religion, leading away from God and not to him? Does the widespread de Montfort consecration with its stress on ‘All through Mary’ conflict with a spirituality which seeks to centre everything on the Mass? Isn't the use of the Rosary at Mass an obstacle to the spread of the liturgical spint through a wider use of the Missal? Queries such as these may be only academic difficulties of the theorists.

The Lord is my Light.’ These words from the psalm form the device of our senior University. Come back with me a moment to the early years Of the twelfth century. Come to Oxford, to the vicinity of St Mary the Virgin's Church in the High Street. A certain Theobald, a master from Normandy, arrives here with his own group of disciples. Later his place is taken by Robert Pullen and Vacarius of Bologna.

In the second half of the century, there comes a whole migration of masters and disciples, driven back from Paris because of discrimination against their countrymen. Oxford was then an island town, surrounded by marshland and rivers, at the spot where the Cherwell joins the Isis or Thames: an important river crossing with easy access to London. The food supply was good, and it was in the centre of England's population.

The following pages merely give a few glimpses of the spiritual teaching of Blessed Angela of Foligno. Apart from her Instructions and Letters we owe what we have to a certain friar Arnaldo. He was, it seems, her cousin; and he appears first, in anything but an appreciative mood, on the occasion of Angela's mystical experience in the church of San Francesco at Assisi. Fortunately he was spiritual enough to see beneath the surface, which appeared mere hysteria to others, and to appreciate Angela's genuine holiness. Later on, as director and secretary, he drew from her an account of her spiritual experiences and thoughts, and set them down; but not in the contemporary Tuscan that Angela would have used, but in Latin. His task was no easy one. Much of what Angela spoke must have been hard to grasp in any case—she once told him she could not recognise what he had written down as hers—and everything had to be done rapidly.

Our Lord unfolds to his disciples the hidden depths of his teaching, and by these words shows how important and helpful it will be to them.

The value of his teaching lies in the peace that it brings to man. In this context, it is as if our Lord were saying: I know well that very soon you will all leave me; but I know that if you really understand my doctrine you will not harden your hearts in desertion. The reason for every thing I have spoken about in my sermon, all that I have taught you throughout the Gospel, is this: that if you do return to me In me you may have peace. For the whole purpose of the Gospel is that we should find peace in Christ alone. ‘Much peace have they that love thy law’ (Ps. 118, 165).

I Need first of all to explain my title. The images which I want to think about are primarily images in the mind rather than actual pictures, statues, or such like; or rather I want to think about actual pictures from the point of view of the image which they evoke, and leave behind in the memory, which may live and grow there, and become part—a vital part—of that stock of symbols which in some sense or other exists in all our minds. Because it is in this way that images are part of the life of the Spirit. Or to put it in another way, the activity of the imagination is or should be part of religion—like every other human activity—and needs therefore to be trained and fed. The Church has, we all know, always believed in images; but it is so often thought today that the nature of the image does not matter, provided that it promotes devotion.

Isn't it pleasing to God that my prayer should be just simply Thy Will be done'? But our Lord did not only tell us to treat God like a father who will change his mind; he emphasized it by the story of a woman who asked for bread and was refused, and went on asking, and at last, because she went on asking, she got it. Of course God does not change his mind; but there is something in us that corresponds to that. Every time you pray to God for something, you are equivalently asking him to change his mind.

Ask yourselves, would it really be pleasing to a father or mother if their children never asked them for anything? They want to be asked! Otherwise it would seem their children were lacking in affection for them. I expect it is the perpetual burden of mothers’ and fathers’ lives to be asked again and again. Well! God, Var Father, wants to be asked.

That there is a connection between the Old Testament and Modern Psychology may seem a farfetched idea which has no foundation in fact, but both are related in Judaic roots.

The Old Testament is a divinely inspired book written by Jews about Jews, whilst psychology is the science based on the ideas of a Jew—Sigmund Freud. Freud, who is generally accepted as the father of modern psychology, found recognition first among Jews, but when his method— psychoanalysis—proved to be successful in the treatment of nervous disorders, it spread beyond the small group of Jewish enthusiasts into the circles of Christian psychologists.

It is no mere coincidence that a Jew realized the importance of psychological problems in the present world. Centuries of ghetto life had made the Jews extremely sensitive in their reactions to people who lived in freedom. The enforced isolation shaped their mentality into a set pattern different from that of the surrounding European world which was developing its own particular culture.

For the last twelve years there has been increasingly engaged in France a great new labour-a gigantic labour, indeed, to make both more human and more holy the great, grey, hidden world of the chronically ill or disabled. It began very simply in 1942 when a group of invalid girls met a certain invalid priest at another girl's bedside. There indeed was the archetypal idea, the gathering together in charity and friendliness of the isolated sick, with the hope of priestly instruction in their common and difficult vocation.

The movement of the Catholic Fellowship of the Sick is now fully organized in several dioceses and has the full and formal approval of the hierarchy. Its manifesto is apparently the little book of Fr Thierry-d'Argenlieu, O.P., who, chronically ill himself, is one of the leader of the movement.

There exists an enormous new world of the sick, declares Fr d'Argenlieu, partly as a result of war conditions and poor housing, but more due to the advance of medicine. ‘A heild has been brought into being', he says, ‘that used not to exist when both people's vitality was greater and when mortality was higher, too.'

In her autobiography Margery Kempe reports our Lord as saying to ‘this creature’ (herself): ‘Fasting, Daughter, is good for young beginners, and discreet penance, and for to bid many beads, it is good for them that can no better do, and yet it is not perfect. But it is a good way to perfectionward. For I tell thee, Daughter, that they that are great fasters and great doers of penance they would that it should be held the best life; also they that give themselves to say many devotions, they would have it that that is the best life; and they that give much alms, they would that there held the best life. And I have oftentimes, Daughter, told thee that thinking, weeping and high contemplation is best life in earth. And thou shalt have more merit in heaven for one year of thinking in thy mind, than for an hundred year of praying with thy mouth, and yet thou wilt not believe me, for thou wilt many beads whether I will or not.'

‘Who art in Heaven.’ This is a puzzling expression. Where is Heaven, and how can God be fixed in Heaven or anywhere at all? In old days people really did think that there was a hard-and-fast place in the universe above us. They thought that the sky was a solid dome, a firmament, and that there was water above and below, and that the water poised above the dome of the sky was allowed to descend. They used the expressions of their day. It is the natural instinct in man to look up to God as if he were poised actually, physically above us.

When we talk of Heaven, the Church does not mean us to believe that God is enthroned in one particular place above. God is everywhere in a sense that cannot be described in terms of our experience.

The Virgin enjoys, like her Son, a position of unique pre-eminence in Islamic legend in general and the Koran in particular. Many of the traits with which the story of her life is embellished derive from apocryphal sources, but are nevertheless of the utmost interest in filling in the gaps in the canonical narrative of the Blessed Virgin's life.

In the Koranic version of the angel's salutation, the superiority of Mary (Arabic, 'Mariam'), whom God had 'chosen and purified, over all the women of mankind' (3, 42) is proclaimed. She is even made to share with her Son the singular distinction of being a 'divine sign unto the generations' (21, 91). In popular legend, however, this preminent position of the Virgin is sometimes disputed and so she is made to share this honour with four other women, who include the two favourite wives of Muhammad and his dearest daughter, Fatimah, from whom the 'noble House of the Prophet' descends.