‘Sent into the world on my errand.’ The word apostle signifies one who is sent.

Who sends, to whom, and why? Christ is the sender. To whom does Christ send his apostles? To the whole world. The Kingdom of God has no visible frontiers, it is within the heart of each human being. ‘Go out all over the world and preach the gospel to the whole of creation’ (Mark xvi, 15). What is Christ's errand? To deliver the message 'which concerns the Word who is Life'.

‘What he was from the first, what we have heard about him, what our own eyes have seen of him, what it was that met our gaze and the touch of our hands.’ (I John i, 1.) Why is the message delivered? ‘That you too may share in our fellowship … with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.’

Lubac, in his book Catholicism, has rightly pointed out that the term Catholic as applied to the Church since the second century is basically an intrinsic note. Nonetheless it has a popular use in our day as denoting the Church's worldwide commission: ‘Going, therefore, teach ye all nations’ (Douai) or ‘Making disciples of all nations’ (Knox). So, if we are asked what religion we belong to we invariably reply—'the Catholic'. By this we mean we do not belong to a merely national church or religion, such as the Anglican, but to the Church Universal. Yet our first name, given to us at Antioch, in the days of the Apostles, was Christian, i.e. the followers of Christ. Hence, Christian is our fundamental name, and the Christian Church is Catholic because she is meant to reunite all men in Christ.

During our study of the ‘Patristic Heritage’ in the second of these articles on the ‘History of Spirituality’ we considered the fulfilment of that heritage as reaching to St Benedict (ϯ547), for in St Benedict and his new Western monasticism we can see as it were summed up the ideals of the patristic age on Christian perfection. And with St Benedict we are on the threshold of the middle ages in Europe: the Roman Empire of the West had ceased to be, and the new nations created by the Goths and the Franks were emerging and leading to the Holy Roman Empire that was the political background of so much of medieval Christianity.

Pope Leo XIII once called the Heart of Christ ‘a new Labarum, a battle standard in our war not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, the rulers of the world of this darkness'. It might look like a Mazdean symbol, the winged sun disc that the prophet Malachias sings about: ‘the Sun of Justice shall arise with healing in his wings.'

Surely our world is sick; healing is to be found in the Heart of Christ. Nervous breakdowns are all too common. They follow the formula: where P stands for predisposition, S for stress and R for resistance. The predisposition is our character which is an integration of habits on temperament. Now the temperament part of character is inherited. It is physical, or if you prefer, chemical, glandular. Medical science is learning to manage it more and more, but whether any complete cure will ever be found for a difficult temperament, other than getting a new set of grandparents, yet remains to be seen.

You may have wondered why this title consisted of the word relationship in the singular, instead of relationships, in the plural. There is a significance in it. The baby is born into one relationship, that with the mother, and ends up, if all goes well, in one relationship, that with God. All that happens in between is a development from this first simple relationship and at the same time a preparing for the very different sort of simple relationship in which we all hope to end, and for which this life on earth is a preparation. It is intended today to examine the psychological development of relationship in this life in the light of its function in preparation us for the final relationship in the life to come, with special reference to the position of young students in their last few years at school.

In the state papers of the Kingdom of Aragon is to be found this record: ‘1275. On the day of the Epiphany Raymund Peniafort of Barcelona departed this life in the convent of the Friars Preachers, than whom in Spain at this time there is no more illustrious example of a perfect religious life and longstanding holiness.'

In 1175-76 Raymund was born, probably at Villafranca de Banades, the family estate of the Penafort. His parents came of knightly stock, being descended from the royal family of Aragon.

From childhood, Raymund was serious and mature. Like so many saints and great men of the Dominican Order in its early days. he preferred study to amusement. He was a precocious student and by the time he was twenty years old had graduated in the school at Barcelona and had his own class of pupils to whom he taught the liberal arts, accepting no payment.

This is a short psalm, so it can satisfy your listening minds without irking your fasting stomachs. May it feed the soul of every one of us, which is said to be sad by the psalm; sad, it seems to me, because it is fasting in some way, or rather because it is hungry. The Church is hungry, the body of Christ is hungry, that man, the whole Christ, who is all over the world, his head up above and his limbs down below. His voice singing or sighing in all the psalms, happy in hope for the future Or sighing at the sadness of the present, his voice should be well known to all of us, so familiar that we can make it our own. So I won't take up any more time reminding you who is speaking here. Let each of us be in the body of Christ, and so let it be each of us speaking here.