In the last issue of The Life we had occasion to point to the importance of the changes in the Holy Week liturgy in that the Holy See has in these changes insisted on the liturgy becoming once more the primary method of prayer for every member of the Mystical Body. By now the liturgy has ceased to be the preserve of the aesthetes and cranks who decried all popular devotions in such a way as to antagonize the people whose principal source of communal prayer was the non-liturgical service ‘devotions'. The trouble with the specialists was that they sank into a morass of historical facts and conjectures. They were so intent on looking backwards that they missed the path of prayer altogether and disappeared into this historical bog. The services they enjoyed were not liturgy, for liturgy is the public work worshipping God, a public work that is alive today, drawing its vitality from the spiritual life of the people who take part in it. The worship practised by the specialists was drawn from the dead pages of manuscripts and books.

In 1955 Italy in general and the provine of Novara in particular have been celebrating the Centenary of the death of Antonio Rosmini. While some point to his sagacious views on the Risorgimento, and others turn back to his philosophy which anticipated the revival of Thomism, others venerate him as the founder of the Institute of Charity and a master of spiritual life.

His work in this direction was indeed inspiring: and one could hardly find a better example of it than what he wrote on the Magnificat for his Convent at Domodossola, that the nuns might recite it with fuller attention, deeper faith and fuller joy. The essay gains in interest when we know that he wrote it in 1849 after he had failed in a negotiation with Pius IX who had felt compelled to flee from Rome and who then turned against the conciliatory policy he had shared with Rosmini, allowed his works to be attacked, and refused the Cardinalate he had previously offered. None of these disappointments shook the profound spiritual life of Rosmini.

I spent this morning preparing some lectures on John Locke. He is, I think, a dull writer but I found a passage in his Introduction to the Essay which expresses very nearly my own feelings in reading this opening paper. ‘Everyone’, he says, must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham, and in an age which produces such, masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr Newton, with some other of that strain, ‘tis ambition enough to be employed as an underlabourer in clearing the ground a little.’ At this conference then which has brought together so many Boyles and Sydenhams of the spiritual life I shall try only to clear the ground a little.

Let us begin—in the fashionable manner—with our present situation. Many of us have not met before. Suppose we engage upon our first conversation. There is an imperative need to find pics of conversation no matter how inconsequential. As acquaintance grows into friendship, however, small talk becomes unnecessary. Pauses in the conversation cease to be embarrassing.

I once had the good fortune to attend a small chapel for Mass where children were no problem. There were always lots of them, from babies upwards, and they loved to go because they were not restrained, scolded, or made to feel out of place. Toddlers staggered up and down the short aisle, babies climbed on the chairs and cooed, older children watched attentively, moving forward to see more easily what was happening. If a child came too near the priest he was gently moved out the way by a parent or the server, but they often sat on the altar steps, and no one bothered them. The result of all this was that they seldom gave trouble, and if a baby did cry its mother took it outside for a minute without being made to feel that she was a criminal for having brought it at all. Parents could come to Mass together, and the children learnt to love the House of God because they were made to feel at home there.

This stimulating and provocative book is an adaptation of the latest French edition of Au Coeur des Masses, for which Willard Hill deserves to be congratulated, because the reader is hardly conscious that the greater part of the text is a translation. It is definitely a book which ought to be on the shelves of every religious community, and read aloud in every refectory. But, like the disciples of Charles de Foucauld themselves, there is nothing violent about these seeds blown from the Sahara. They might be compared to a spiritual atomic bomb, likely to have far-reaching effects on the religious state in years to come. In a long introductory chapter Pere Voillaume sets forth what are the ideals of the Little Brothers of Jesus. These may be summed up as trying to live as poor religious, and contributing to the Church's invisible apostolate by ‘entering into Jesus's work of redemption', through prayer and sacrifice; what is more, without any enclosure—small groups actually ‘inserted’ into the world of the poor, sharing the hard life of that world.

I suppose we must all, at some time, have been disturbed by the thought of how seldom we pray. We find, when we think it over, that we ‘never seem to have time to pray’, or even that we just ‘never feel inclined to pray’. It does not ‘come naturally’, we realize; perhaps because there hardly ever seems to be any real ‘occasion’ for it; and all this can worry us. We feel, somehow, that we ought to pray more often, and more wholeheartedly, than we ever manage to do.

The fundamental reality of all early religions is that of union, union with the family, with the tribe, with the rest of creation, with God. There is a general consensus of opinion on this point among anthropologists and other students of the prehistoric and the primitive. Thus, ‘The savage seldom or never thinks of the individual as having a distinct personality; all tends to be merged in collective or corporate personality, or is dissolved in fortuitous relationships between men, animals, plants and cosmic and other inanimate objects and forces.’

Once the central position of the liturgy in the plan of redemption is recognized and when it is distinguish from the protocol of its administration (the rubrics), then it is seen, not as an end in itself, but the function of communication for divine life so that we, who come from the Trinity, may live by the Trinity and go to the Trinity. All definitions of liturgy imply its divine source, the Mass.

The Liturgy is the official dispensation of the Mysteries of Christ. It is ‘the whole body of official prayers and sacramental actions whereby the communication of men with God is carried on in the Church', ‘the life-dispensing, life-preserving and life-restoring activity of Ecclesia, the mystical Christ'. It is the official distribution of Christ's life by which through the Church he communicates grace to individuals by means of the four inter-related parts: the sacraments, the sacramentals and ritual prayers, the Divine Office, and the Liturgical Year—all centred about an finding their source in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

It is with the intellect that we contemplate. Christian contemplation is an activity of faith, and faith is an intellectual virtue. The gift of the Holy Ghost which plays a leading role contemplation is wisdom, because, as St Thomas says, it belongs to wisdom, according to Aristotle, to consider the Highest Cause; and wisdom is obviously rooted in the intellect. But contemplation is also intimately linked with charity and is therefore an activity of the will. This is due, St Thomas explains, to the nature of the gift of wisdom; it implies a connaturality with divine things, and this connaturality can come only from charity. He writes: ‘Wisdom denotes a certain rectitude of judgment according to the Eternal Law. Now rectitude of judgment is two-fold: first, on account of perfect use of reason, secondly, on account of a certain connaturality with the matter about which one has to judge. Thus, about matters of chastity, a man after inquiring with his reason forms a right judgment, if he has learnt the science of morals, while he who has the habit of chastity judges of such matters by a kind of connaturality.

’The Revelation of Jesus Christ.’ Those are the first words of John's message to the persecuted Churches. He wished to give them a teaching that would enlighten and comfort them. Although not new, it would be more developed on the person and role of Jesus, ‘the faithful witness, Firstborn among the dead, Prince of the kings of the earth’ (1, 5). To give them confidence in the midst of trials, he would make manifest the active presence and entire mastery in temporal history of the risen Lord.