Daily Reflections

2 Corinthians 4:6; Deuteronomy 5:24

God has said:
Let light shine out of darkness.
– He has shone in our hearts
that we might make known
the glory of God shining on the face of Christ Jesus.

The LORD our God has shown us His Glory and Greatness,
and we have heard his voice.
– He has shone in our hearts
that we might make known
the glory of God shining on the face of Christ Jesus.

Thursday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Saint Panteleon, Martyr (Traditional)

The children of Israel have been liberated from slavery in Egypt, and now God comes down to the top of Mount Sinai. God’s face is veiled in smoke and fire, and His Voice is covered with thunder. In Jesus Christ, God is made man and now we are counted among the blessed “who gaze into the depths”. The LORD comes to us in the Sacraments and teaches us by His Word: “happy are your eyes because they see, your ears because they hear!” (Mt. 13:10-17).

ST. PANTELEON, MARTYR

St. Panteleon was a physician of Nicomedia. His name signifies in Greek “many shall obtain mercy“. It was giving him time crisis with this promise. During his martyrdom, our LORD appeared to him as he was tortured on the rack and burned with flaming torches during the persecution of Diocletian in 303. He is the principle patron [after St. Luke’s] of the medical profession. His blood liquefies on his feast day in the phial in which it is preserved at Ravello near Amalfi.

From the Explanations of the Psalms by Saint Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
(Ps. 43:89-90: CSEL 64, 324-326)

We are sealed with the Glory of Your Face

Why do you turn away Your Face? We think that God is turning His face away from us when we find ourselves in such distress that our senses are clouded in darkness and we cannot see the glory of Him Who is Truth. We are convinced that if God would pay attention to our condition and be pleased to visit our souls, nothing could plunge us in gloom. If a person’s face is more enlightening than other parts of his body—so that when we look at someone we either see him as a stranger or recognize him as someone we know, whom our glance will not allow to pass unrecognized—how much more does the face of God enlighten those on whom He directs His gaze.

In his usual way Saint Paul has something striking to say on this subject. He employs his gift for making Christ better understood to bring Him closer to us through the use of appropriate ideas and expressions. He tells us: God, who commanded light to shine out of darkness, has caused light to shine in our hearts, so that we might receive the revelation of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. We know, then the place where Christ is shining within us. He is the Eternal splendour enlightening our minds and hearts. He was sent by the Father to shine on us in the glory of His Face, and so enable us to see what is Eternal and Heavenly, where before we were imprisoned in the darkness of this world.

There should be no need for me to speak of Christ when even Peter the Apostle said to the man born lame: Look at us. He looked at Peter and was enlightened by the grace of Faith. He would not have received healing had he not believed with Faith.

Such was the glory possessed by the Apostles. Yet Zacchaeus, hearing that the LORD Jesus was passing by, climbed a tree, for he was small in stature and could not see Him because of the crowd. He saw Christ and discovered the Light. He saw Christ and gave up what was his own, though he was a man who took what belonged to others.

Why do You turn away Your face? We may say it in another way. Even if, LORD, You turn your Face away from us, yet we are sealed with the Glory of Your face. Your Glory is in our hearts and shines in the deep places of our spirit. Indeed, no one can live if you should turn away Your Face.

Blessed Are Your Eyes

Dear Mama, It is pouring rain in the courtyard where we take our walks and it is grey in my cell, but fortunately not in my heart…. It is quite early and so I can chat with you at greater length than yesterday. I have come across some thoughts in an anthology which seem made for you, so I can’t resist the pleasure of sending them to you.

“Grant that I may say with confidence: O my God, forgive me as I forgive others. Grant that I may pray to you with a peaceful heart for those who have hurt me, teach me to conquer myself and to check the impulse which would lead me to take revenge” (Saint Augustine). And again from the same author, “Happy the man who loves You, O God, and his friends in You. He alone loses no one who is dear to Him, because He loves them in the One who is never lost.” These are two beautiful thoughts which should restore your courage.

You will perhaps think that I have become a bore with my fine lectures and maxims, that I am out of my depth and am reading a lot of things I don’t really understand. But you know, I have been in agony for a month. Little by little I leave the earth to draw near Heaven, and I see everything from above and with sharper clarity. This is why I can’t help crying “Watch out!” when I see others walking a tightrope over a sea of fire. I would like to show them the danger, but they are wearing blindfolds and can’t see anything. The Truth is so brilliant that it is blinding. Like a butterfly fluttering around a lamp, people whirl around and around it without knowing how to stop. Saint Augustine said: “Those who do not know how difficult it is to find the Truth may be severe with you, but I, who know from experience what it is, can only feel pity for you, and love.” As for me, I feel that I am about to descend again to a second stage of abandonment which will cause me much suffering. It will be more or less lengthy, and afterwards I shall find Grace again in unimaginable fullness. You see the purification which is being required of me. I pass from heat to cold, and the contrast causes me a suffering like the pain of the damned. To know the love of God and not to be able to enjoy it! Well, soon the veil will be torn…. I have a bad arm again as you can see from my uneven writing, so I will leave you. Until tomorrow, then, I hug you with all my heart.

Servant of God Jacques Fesch

Jacques Fesch († 1957) was a murderer who experienced a profound conversion before his execution in a French prison. [From Light over the Scaffold: Prison Letters of Jacques Fesch and Cell 18: Unedited Letters of Jacques Fesch, Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, o.p., Tr. © 

DAILY MEDITATION 

Perhaps, for many, the terrors of death are as nothing compared with the terrors of judgment, for all that affrights us in death is found far more fully in the awful moment that succeeds it. The loneliness of death, which is its chiefest horror, its most overwhelming fear – that utter separation from our life and from that part of us, our bodies, which we have come to regard as so particularly ourselves – is followed by a still more bitter separation, and more cruel divorce: for our judgment must be solitary, isolated, alone. Even the saints can do little for us, for the judgement must be righteous and just, and this means assuredly that God cannot go out of His Path of Justice because of the pleading even of those whom He holds dear.

What else, indeed, is the judgment, as far as we can grasp it, but the naked setting of our soul as it is now at this moment in the sight of God? He knows absolutely the state of our whole being. He knows what I do not, whether I am worthy of love or hatred. To me, that blinding vision may be a tremendous revelation, a rolling back of all sorts of hidden curtains with which I had shrouded my soul from my own gaze – all the little deceptions that I have practised on myself, the little ways in which I had hoodwinked my conscience and pretended to myself that I did not really think that, in certain things I had done, there was any great sin. Many times I had salved the conscience pricks of my heart by distinctions and devices. Now, in a flash, these are all laid bare.

Yet even so is there consolation for us. There will be One Who will be to us, then, a Comfort, a Refuge, and a Hope.

Fr. Bede Jarrett [d. 1934] – Dominican historian, lecturer, and longtime provincial of Saint Dominic‘s in London.

2 Corinthians 4:6; Hebrews 10:32

God has said:
Let light shine out of darkness.
– He has shone in our hearts
that we might make known
the glory of God shining on the face of Christ Jesus.

Remember the days gone by,
after you had been enlightened,
how you endured a great contest of suffering.
– He has shone in our hearts
that we might make known
the glory of God shining on the face of Christ Jesus.

“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.” – Ven. Archbishop Fulton Sheen