In the cemetery of Loyasse on the hill of Fourviére, overlooking the great city of Lyons in France, there is a special plot reserved for departed priests. Here last September I came to pray at the grave of my friend Abbé Paul Couturier. He died on March 24th, 1953, aged seventy-two. ‘Il fut un Apôtre de l'Unite des Chrétiens', so runs the inscription on his gravestone. But the past tense is surely a little deceptive and out of place. For to thousands of Christians all over Europe, in these isles and in America, whether Roman Catholic or Anglican, Orthodox or Protestant, the Abbé Couturier is still a messenger sent by God awaken them to the intolerable scandal of disunity and to proclaim the way to hasten its end—a way all can follow without denying anything of God's truth as it has been shown to them, and without any disloyalty to their respective traditions. For it was the special grace of this humble priest of Lyons to see that the cause of Christian Unity is primarily a matter of the spiritual life.

The Abbot Joachim, who founded the Abbey of Flora among the mountains of Calabria in 1189, is one of the most original and interesting figures of the Middle Ages. He was famous in his own generation for his prophetic vision and saintly life, and was a source of inspiration to his followers for two hundred years. Dante assigns him a place with the great teachers of the thirteenth century, in his Paradiso, where Saint Bonaventure points out the shining spirit at his side as:

The great Florentine had lost his faith in Papal and Imperial powers to enlighten the darkness of those times, and may well have embraced Joachim's hope of a spiritual renewal of Christendom by a sudden illumination of the divine purpose in history.

A technique of freedom? The expression is, quite certainly, too strong. A title says what it can, as briefly as it can. Properly speaking we have no right to hope from our own efforts anything but conditions favourable to the play of our freedom—let that be clearly understood from the start. Nevertheless we shall see better what we ought to hope from the means, and what cannot be expected of them, if we take up the matter in several different ways.

The word ‘means’ is wholly valid only when applied to material things. You hit a nail with a hammer and you (who are not clumsy) drive it in, and even do so in such a way that the effect is exactly proportionate to the communication of your energy to the nail and the resistance of the wall.

The ‘means’ is sufficient to the ‘end’. But when you ask yourself what you are going to do to become more vitally, more fully free, no-one will teach you the great means of all the means: it is simply to be free. There is no other means, and all that you can do will be worthwhile only in order to vary this means according to the particular case.

To thee dear brother in Christ our Lord send the spirit of counsel and of ghostly strength. Thou writest to me that thou art troubled and tarried of thy might and married in thy conscience for thy shrift, for thou would shrive thee plainly of ail thy sins and thou cannot, and therefore thy grace is withdrawn from thee. And thou makest this skill thereto. Since shrift is the gate of all the sacraments and of grace also, and thou mayst not come to clear and plenary confession, how shalt thou then come to any other grace? And therefore I wot well thy soul is tormented and thy mind is in great bitterness. Forsooth nevertheless our Lord Jesus shall soften thy sorrow by his mercy when him likes. The sorrow that thou sufferest is great, nevertheless it is wholesome. Look that thou be strong of grace neither mistrust nor despair. Thou feelest thyself full of pride, thou canst not void nor tell it. Thou shrivest thy sins as they come to mind in time of confession, and nevertheless thou trowest not that thou art verily shriven.

To the eyes of faith all sickness is a trial. God is there offering us a special grace of purification and of sharing in his redeeming death, but a grace hidden and hard to discern and live. Yet the trial is still more formidable for the man whose sickness is mental, especially when, as is the case with neuroses, the sickness only partly destroys liis balance and control. His agony at feeling himself partly ‘alienated', a stranger, that is, to himself, is intense. Something deep inside him is escaping his inner attention and worse still his power. And on top of that those about him most often, even when they are full of good intentions understand nothing at all, heap one ineptitude on another and (when they have not provoked it) aggravate the disease. The sufferer feels himself excruciatingly alone, not understood, essentially helpless. Very often his faith seems to him unsettled, without strength or efficacy; all is clouded over with pain and despair.

Dearly beloved, today in our sacred celebrations we are paying the tribute of honour due to the day when Christ the Saviour of the world first showed himself to the nations of the world. Today there should be born anew in our hearts the same joy that once filled the breasts of the three Wise Men when, having journeyed in accordance with the message of a new star which had become their guide, they worshipped to face the King of heaven and earth, whose promised coming had been the object of their faith. Nor in truth is that day to be considered as belonging entirely to the past, as if the power of the mystery then revealed were something finished and done as if nothing reached down from then to our own times except an event belonging to the sacred history, an event which while it forms part of what we must believe, is yet to be celebrated only in memory. No: God has willed that the Epiphany of Christ be a gift that lasts and bears ever-increasing fruit, so that we can experience in our days what had but its beginning then.

In the last few centuries before the coming of Christ the Greek influence began to make itself felt. It reached Judea through Egypt where there was a great number of Jews centred Alexandria. But there was also a direct influx of the non-sacramental hellenic view of religion from the cities which Alexander himself founded in Palestine. The Jews were introduced to the families of the gods, and the Machabees revolted against this attack on their allegiance to Jahwe, for the hellenic familiarity with the gods naturally offered its attractions. But it was not from the Greek myths that the greatest influence was felt. These were rejected. But the intellectualization of Greek philosophy was spreading all over the near East, and it was this that was wedded to Jewish thought in the Wisdom literature.

Those who have laboured and prayed specially for Christian Unity will read, reread, ponder and treasure this book with great gratitude. We pray that it will be very widely read and studied. Such writing has been awaited by Anglicans for at least a century: we could hardly expect it before when the nation which we represented was still persecuting the Church of Rome in our land. Perhaps it is in the fulness of time that it has come: for the work seems to be in striking concord with the teaching and spirit of Pope Pius XII, the inspired leader whom Providence has given to edify and guide the Church of our day. One of its excellences would seem to be that it indicates practical applications of the latter's counsels in the special conditions of our land.

Nevertheless we must pay attention to what there is, so to speak, legitimate in our contemporaries’ pretence. Let us listen to their complaints.

Appeals like that of Katherine Mansfield to her husband awake in us an emotion which demands to be taken seriously. ‘Do you like living the old mechanical life at the mercy of everything? Living only with a minute portion of yourself?' There is incompleteness, as if non-existence in the personal sense, division, if the modern world encourages ‘personages’ and excites push', if it gives too much weight to too much of the ego-one set of selves coming into conflict with another set, and all obscuring the self deep within us—if the abundance of shoots, going off anarchically in all directions, is exhausting the sap of the tree of life in us, we are not wrong to hope from religious practice some remedy for this evil, nor to be astonished and disturbed if, on the contrary, the evil overtakes religious practice itself.

In men's inheritance, the most famous of the techniques which set free spiritual energy and lead us beyond the limits where we commonly vegetate is clearly yoga. The word indicates a whole world of practices and doctrines in which it is necessary from every point of view to distinguish very diverse tendencies.’ It may even happen that these tendencies are contradictory. The complete ensemble is in fact the heritage of the past five thousand years in an abundant civilization, where some go as far as treaties opposites as the same.

We have now good guides to clear our way in this astonishing complexity. They lead us to recognize as an axis in it, classical yoga, as codified by Patanjali in the fourth or fifth century A.D., unshaken in spite of the diverse interpretations of it and in spite of, the fact that its very nature as a spiritual technique allows it to be adapted to differing persons and differing groups. Yoga is 'mad with innovation'.

As the liturgical cycle of the Church renews itself, Good Friday and Easter pass in much the same way as they have since the time of Calvary and the finding of the stone rolled back. Seed-time is so perennial that it unites centuries, making little difference between 1620 and 1720, or dates such as 1870 or 1955. The methods of sowing alter as little as those of harvesting: two thousand years bring small change to the shape of cross or sickle. The apparent relationship between religious and agricultural rites might therefore suggest that the Church is as immutable in her outward life as she is in her doctrines. This is not so. The Church is the people; her bishops are their leaders, and in a healthy society the two must work and pray in union. Yet between the people and the bishops stand the priests; beneath the soutane and habit (which have remained the same through the ages) there are men who differ from each other, who grow and develop all the time. A modern sermon preached on the Passion in “Westminster Cathedral will be less flowery than it was thirty years ago; histrionics do not win converts today.