Sunday, May 06, 2007

The Priest at Prayer, May 7

The Priest and the Eternal Truths
The Creation

My Creaturely Dignity and Duties


I. God brought all creatures out of nothing by His impersonal command: Let there be light, let there be a firmament, let the earth bring forth, etc.

But when creating man, He begins with Let us make, not Let there be; and, with Himself as Model, -to our image and likeness. But man is not yet, not even after that ample phrase so full of power and majesty. God bends His heavenly Might, no, not to touch the summits of lofty mountains, but down to the depths where, from the slime of the earth, He fashions the body of Adam. So that man alone among all visible creatures can say to God with the psalmist: Tu formasti me et posuisti super me manum tuam: "It is Thou that hast fashioned me, Thy hand that has been laid upon me." (Ps. cxxxviii, 5)

That goes for Adam, you'll say, what about me? In a certain sense, I am more to be wondered at than my first parent. What an immense power God must have given to Adam for him to be the source of all the blood and vital energy to thousands of generations! Omnia ossa mea dicent: Domine, quis similis tibi? Cor meum et caro mea exultaverunt in Deum vivum." The Living God! at His Name my heart, my whole being thrills with joy."­ (Ps. xxxiv, 10; Ps. lxxxiii, 3)

II. Will not that have been sufficient for the fashioning of man? No. That indeed was something beautiful, but lifeless. God contemplated the work of His hands with delight, and, bending over it He breathed into his face
the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
­ (Gen. ii, 7)

My spirit is not, like the heavens, the work of God's Fingers - opera digitorum tuorum - my soul cannot say to its Maker, like the body: Manus tuae plasmaverunt me: my spirit God breathed into me from the depths of His own Being, like a breath that I exhale from the recesses of my lungs; that is what my soul is: spiritus, spiraculum, the Breath of God. Has anything more mysterious, more profound and beautiful ever been said about the nature of my soul? Is it possible to go further without touching pantheism?

If this is testimony from God, what must my soul be but God's own image, cast and molded in His Heart, bearing the marks of God's attributes, and, in a sense, divine?

Recognize, my soul, thy dignity; regret having trailed thy mantle of glory through earthly mire.

III. To the foregoing proofs of ineffable love on the part of God, there is another, tenderer still.

More than a hundred years ago, more than a thousand, a million, a thousand million. . . how will my imagina­tion encompass the thought, the magnificent reality? . . .

From all eternity. . . God thinks of me . . . Before the first break of the first dawn; before the coverlet of the skies was spread, God thought of me!

What is the choicest favor we ask of a friend? "Keep me in your thoughts." And throughout the ever­lasting years, Thou, O Lord, dost keep me in Thy thoughts; not for a moment do I slip from Thy remem­brance. But Thou dost not think of me as the savant thinks of the object of his learning and investigations; Thou thinkest of me, dear Lord, from the dawning of Thy eternal Day as the lover thinks of and keeps in perpetual remembrance the beloved of his heart:
With unchanging love I love thee, and in mercy I have drawn thee to Myself. -(Jer. xxxi, 3)

God loves me, loves me from all eternity! And so often have I complained with bitterness of soul that nobody cares a damn for me! And all the time God was loving me with an unchanging, everlasting love!

O divine Lover, eternal Lover, what wonder that Thou ask for my cold and fleeting love?

The thing that defies all explanation is the miserliness with which I have been refusing it to Thee through­out my whole existence, to squander it, instead, among a host of puny creatures, fetishes of the hour that show me neither gratitude nor reward except to lacerate my heart and hand when I try to clutch them.

Resolution
I have learned that Thou, my God and my Father, though in need of nothing that is mine - quia bonorum meorum non eges (Ps. xv, 2) - hast nevertheless a longing for something which only I can give, just one small thing: my love, my heart; and Thou dost long for this with such intensity as to stoop down and beg it of me, like a lover of his beloved, like a mother of her only son:
Son, give Me thy heart. (Prov. xxiii, 26)

Lord, sever with the sword of Thy Power the bonds that have bound my heart and enslaved it to lower, tyrannical creatures; I wish, at long last, to surrender my heart into Thy hands, that it may become a censer exhaling the immortal fragrances of holy love to Thee who didst create and fashion my whole being with individual care: qui finxit sigillatim corda eorum.­(Ps. xxxii, 15)_________________________
Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.


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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!

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