What is a priest? He is a mediator between God and man (Summa III, 22, 1), that is, he stands halfway between God the Creator and man the created, giving the sacred things of God to the people and offering the prayers of the people to God. Says St Paul, ‘Every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in the things that appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices’ (Heb: v. 1). A priest then has duties to God and man, and these duties are duties of love.

First let us look at his duties of love to God. And here I would speak not of the whole of a priest's duty to God. I would put aside for the moment his daily divine office, his prayers and meditations and benedictions, his officiating in the sacraments of baptism, penance and the rest. I wish to limit myself to one single act with which the priesthood is infinitely bound up. I mean of course the Mass. What is the Mass? It is Calvary.

There is a verse from the New Testament which begins with that same word. Unless: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth great fruit’. We have been stricken in recent times with especially grave losses, the deaths of those who in a special sense could be called the builders of the English Dominican Province of today: Fr Bede Jarrett through his years of provincialate, Fr Vincent McNabb through the leadership and inspiration of his teaching and his personality, Fr Hugh Pope through his work for the studies of the Province. Grains of wheat. They died in God as they had lived in God; and so from their deaths as from their lives new life is given to us. And now another builder is taken from us, and taken at a time when his wisdom and strength and prudence were most urgently needed, so that those of us who lived with him and depended upon him feel very lost; and yet his building too is not in vain but will go on, because Christ lived in him, and when he built the house it was the Lord that built it.

Just as any person's career becomes more individual and outside species and classes the more developed and specialised he becomes, so in the spiritual life the holier a man becomes the less easily will he fall into any preconceived categories. The first stages of the life of the spirit are easier to follow, just as a man's career begins with his schooling when he learns the same subjects and undergoes the same discipline as all his schoolfellows. When he has left school or university and has begun to live his own life, then he should tend towards uniqueness until, rising in his profession, he has fewer and fewer men with whom he may be identified. So as the soul rises from the schooling of the purgative way and the night of the senses she begins to live the divine life in her own unique way, until passing into the night of the spirit she emerges into the unitive way where only the most general characteristics are shared with others who are yet in the same ‘way'. ‘Star differeth from star’ among the saints as well as among the angels.

Dear Friend,—Know thou well that the end and the height of perfection lieth in a true union of God with the soul of man in utter love. This end, then, is verily achieved when the powers of the soul are reformed by grace to the dignity and condition of their first state, that is, when the mind is firmly fixed in God and in spiritual things without shifting or wandering away and when the reason is cleared of all worldly and fleshly contemplations or imaginings and of the figures and fantasies of men and is illumined with grace to behold God and spiritual things, and when the will and the affection are purified and cleansed of all fleshly desires, natural and worldly loves, and are inflamed with burning love for the Holy Ghost. But this marvellous union may not be perfectly and continually and wholly reached in this life, by reason of the corruption of the flesh, but only in the joy of heaven. Nevertheless, the nearer that a soul can come to this union in this life, the more perfect that soul is.

Alpha and Omega—these, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, are used to signify that Christ include within himself all. He is the beginning and the end, the sum total of all things, from which all creatures derive, to whom they all tend. This title is true of Christ because he is God from whom all creatures derive and towards whom they all tend. God is the sum total, the beginning and the end. But he is not the sum total or the beginning and the end in the Eastern sense that creatures are an emanation from God, that history is the slow return into God of all that came out.

We all derive from God as things made from nothing by the act of his power, we tend towards him as creatures who behave as he designed us to behave, and as godlike men with grace who will see God as he is in himself.

The books of the Hebrew Bible may be divided into three groups: the Torah, the Prophets and the ‘Writings'. This latter part is made up of works composed, collected or published for the most part after the return from exile to Babylon. One of the books it contains has as its title the single word Job. It is the name of a person who from the very first lines is presented to us as a just man, a believer, one who is rich and fortunate in life. The reader then leaves earth to catch a glimpse of what is taking place in heaven. Job is accused by Satan of self-interest in his piety. Yahweh allows S'atan to afflict Job in the first instance in his material possessions, and his family. Job accepts this trial. Still sceptical in the face of this proof of disinterestedness, Satan obtains from Yahweh permission to strike Job in his person, by disease.

The psalm just sung, dear brethren, is a short one, and its meaning is quite plain. I say this to put you at ease; there is nothing heavy here. However, just because the matter is so straightforward we must be as attentive and alert as we can. The spiritual meaning underlying the open sense, that is what we want to get at, as far as God gives us grace to do so. God's voice—use whatever medium he will— is always God's voice, and none other can please him. Thus, would we please him, when we speak it must be he speaking through us.

A psalm of praise—such is the inscription: few words, but big with meaning: may they lay such seeds within your hearts as to yield a big harvest and fill a storehouse of good grain for the Lord. The psalm urges us to rejoice in the Lord—that is its bidding: and, because the seeds of blessing have been scattered everywhere, the psalm demands world-wide jubilation, not simply from one isolated corner of the world, or one household or one community.