Quite normal people sometimes experience strange communications from a realm beyond their ordinary comprehension. Perhaps once or twice in their lives they will have a very vivid dream or a waking vision in which they see Christ himself, or angels or saints. These experiences are often inexplicable at the time, but they bring with them a certain assurance of having a real meaning, particularly when they are so unusual and unexpected. Such would seem to have been the experience of Mother Julian in her Revelations. But it is always necessary to examine such experiences critically and no one should readily accept them as of heavenly origin without a diligent testing of their nature and origin. St John of the Cross's writings make all this quite clear.

Let us now scrutinise more closely the happenings on that celebrated eighth of May. Were these shewings historical facts of divine origin or merely the dreams of a sick woman? This raises the question of the natural basis of mystical experience.

For hundreds of years, it would seem, God left the revelation as it was at the time of the great Patriarchs. Even in the time of Moses there is no explicit reference to the Messias until we come to the most mysterious ‘ of all the scenes connected with prophecy: the oracles of Balaam (Numbers 24, 14-19). Bala King of Moat), asked his local prophet to curse the Israelites who were threatening his borders. Instead of cursing, Balaam blessed them. The fourth blessing runs as follows:

‘I see it (the people of the Israelites), but not as present. I contemplate it, but not as immediate. A star proceeds from Jacob, ft sceptre rises out of Israel. It shatters the temples of Moab. It exterminates all the sons of tumult. Edom is its possession; Seir, its enemy, is its possession. Israel does exploits’ (Num. 25, 17-8). This could be referred to David or to any conquering king of Israel. That was done; but generally, by Jews as well as Christians later, it was seen to refer truly and completely only to a spiritual Messias.

The opening words of the Catholic Catechism give a very simple answer to the enquiry concerning the origin and purpose of man. ‘Who made you? God made me. Here we are immediately confronted with the problem of our own origin, since as soon as our minds awaken from the slumbers of unconsciousness, we become supremely aware that we are alive, and seek for an explanation. The question then arises, ‘Why are you alive?’ And the correct answer must be, ‘Because God loves me'. God's love is creative and the cause of things. But it may be asked, ‘Why does God love you?’ The answer to this query is found in the fact that God is what he is. He is infinite goodness, and wills to communicate himself to others. St Thomas has said, ‘to love anything is nothing else than to will good to that thing'. (I, 20, 2.) It was by an act of love that ‘God made me out of nothing by his word'. Moreover not only does God create, but he preserves in being whatsoever he has made; ‘In him we live, and move, and are', says St Paul (Acts. 17, 28).

Life today is puzzling for many men and women. The problems and the answers to them are far from clear-cut; nor are they confined to those living entirely worldly lives; there are many seeking the things of the spirit who are having a time of difficulty and perplexity. The lay contemplative comes in for his or her fair share of these difficulties. It seems to these men and women that they have been given a very clear mandate by God. They are to live in the world and yet give him whole time service; thev are to follow as closely as they can yhe way of life that our Lord and his blessed Mother trod. They are increasingly aware of our Lord's words that some devils are only cast out by prayer and penance. It becomes more and more clear that most of our devils today are of this category and that God is leading these souls by a way of prayer and penance which is literally demanding whole-time service.

Beres Universorum’ occurs in the accusative case in the first sentence of the Epistle to the Hebrews. St Paul is intensely conscious that Christ's coming is the summing up of the past, the completion of an immense cycle, the climax of a great series of stupendous events, the crowning act of a drama, the final interference of God in his own creation. Not only that; Christ's ‘coming, for St Paul, gathered up all the past, gave it shape and substance, explained it, since all things pointed to or prepared for him. He was the heir of all things. In this title we have a glimpse of the Augustinian vision that history was summed up in Christ, that all the golden threads in pagan life and worship led ultimately to heredem universorum Christum. Thus there are two lines of thought: Christ heir to the Jewish tradition, and Christ heir to the pagan tradition.

When our Lord addressed these and similar words to the Jews, he was contradicted and attacked by his hearers. They said, he is a Samaritan, he has a devil. In today's Gospel, on the contrary, it is recorded that after our Lord had miraculously fed the crowd with five loaves and two fishes, he was surrounded by the Jews who were enraptured with the great miracle, and they said: ‘This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world'.

It has seemed to us opportune to speak briefly of that light which our Lord claimed to be. That light has enlightened all created lights. The sun, moon, stars, man's bodily senses, the intellectual light of reasonable creatures, in other words reason and intelligence draw their brilliance from it; by that light, all creatures are led and brought back to their origin. And if they did not. return to it, considered on their own without this true and essential light, they would assuredly be but thick darkness. Again our Lord said to every faithful soul: Give up your own light for my sake; compared to my light it is but darkness, the very opposite of my splendour.

While the active life is the life of the soul acting as the form of the body (that is, the life of the individual as a member of the human race), the contemplative life is the life of the soul in its purely spiritual reality,, the life of the person, the complete being, the ‘whole'. For by definition the ‘whole’ suffices to itself. It has all.

It lacks nothing. The contemplative life is the perfect life: in itself it has neediof no assistance. It can be entirely solitary.

But, it being granted that the human person is a person created, a part of the divine ‘whole'; it being granted also that it has been multiplied by the Creator, are we not going to discover that the nature of the person implies an ‘order’ or organisation, a ‘spiritual society'? It is certainly true that there exists an ‘order’ of persons, and even an order of creatures purely spiritual—the angelic hierarchies. But it is only a question there of a ‘communicatio in forma', an analogical similitude, in the fact that all these creatures possess an intelligence which has for its final perfection the contemplation of God.

Man's soul is so wonderfully elevated above the condition of the body that it might be said to approximate more closely to the God who made it than to the body to which it is attached, and it is true that in the soul, alone of all created things, can be traced certain traits and lineaments of God's perfections. It is spiritual like God, and like God it is incorruptible and everlasting. It is free, it is able to foresee and provide, it has its will of which it disposes. Does it not appear to enjoy the privileges of eternity, when it looks into the future, makes the past live again and disposes of the present?

But never does it seem more like to God than when, soaring above all that is created it loses itself in the vast abyss of his infinite perfections, and, realising that it cannot comprehend them, is content to remain lost in them forever with no desire to return.

Just as any person's career becomes more individual and outside species and classes the more developed and specialised he becomes, so in the spiritual life the holier a man becomes the less easily will he fall into any preconceived categories. The first stages of the life of the spirit are easier to follow, just as a man's career begins with his schooling when he learns the same subjects and undergoes the same discipline as all his schoolfellows. When he has left school or university and has begun to live his own life, then he should tend towards uniqueness until, rising in his profession, he has fewer and fewer men with whom he may be identified. So as the soul rises from the schooling of the purgative way and the night of the senses she begins to live the divine life in her own unique way, until passing into the night of the spirit she emerges into the unitive way where only the most general characteristics are shared with others who are yet in the same ‘way'. ‘Star differeth from star’ among the saints as well as among the angels.

When God gives his graces to a soul, these graces are never restricted exclusively to the individual. They are bestowed also on the whole Body of Christ. No one can hope to receive graces selfishly, nor can he ascend the Scale of Perfection alone. He may look only towards God and seek him alone, as the three kings journeying to Bethlehem following the beam of the star. But when they have reached their goal and have held the Lord of the whole world in their embrace, they may not stay there alone with him. They are sent back to their country by another way. They return transformed, carrying back what they have received to their own kith and kin. When the soul has reached the heights of perfection, she may not rest there; in one way or another she is sent back to her own folk but to take up a new position, as mediator of the grace she has received.

As the first, original sin was committed through the sinful mediation of a woman, so it was through a woman's consent and just mediation that we were redeemed from the guilt of this sin. Conceived without the stain of original sin, our Lady was the second Eve. She was the perfect tabernacle of God, simply the mother of Jesus, because she was utterly selfless, because in an old metaphor of the Fathers revived in a recent book, she was like a pipe which waits for the air to blow through it to make music, the Reed of God.

Our Lady was the throne of Wisdom because she can be perfectly described as the Woman who was poor. Here at last was the complete gift of self, the unconditional sacrifice of the creature which God looked for in Adam and Eve, and looked for in vain. So our Lady became infinitely rich, Sedes Sapientiae, and entered upon the earthly motherhood with that perfection which she carried on to her eternal motherhood wherein she dispenses to man the same Wisdom whom she mothered in Palestine.

Here is a man, forty years old, with a mother whom he respects and venerates. In spite of his own absorbing occupations, he visits her every day for exactly half an hour. He talks as a son should about this and that, always going away at the same hour and returning the next day at the stroke of the clock. More cannot be demanded of him, and from a mother's point of view one could wish that all men did at least as much.

That is a picture of the beginning of the life of prayer—each day the Christian making his or her meditation, and following a method point by point—this is necessary at the beginning. It is already something, but that something is only a beginning, although there are those who think they are doing wonders with their fine thoughts and meditations.

Let us suppose then that the person remains faithful, and that God increases his grace. Oh, how young the soul becomes! It is no longer like a man of forty giving just half-an-hour each day to his mother.

Judged in the light of human standards the answer to this question may well be in the negative. But it is unsatisfactory to measure the value of human life simply by natural standards, since the standards set by God for man are supernatural. The real, true end of man is supernatural, that is, beyond his natural reach, and the means thereto must needs be supernatural. To be raised above one's nature signifies to be elevated beyond one's natural capacity. In a sin-laden world and in a nature broken by a fall, man cannot be lifted up into a realm that is not his, into God's own kingdom, without grace bestowed out of the divine bounty, which is both life-giving and healing. Even so the downward drag and fret are so great in making the ascent that no one can scale the heights without intensive effort of his own and more than his own.

X is usually taken as the symbol of the unknown in modern thought. If a man wishes to discover an unknown figure or fact, he begins by positing ‘X’ as the object of his enquiry and then he proceeds to argue in such a way as to reveal the nature of that unknown. In the ‘argument’ of the spiritual life the process is largely reversed. Having begun with a ‘clear idea’ of God, derived partly from reason and partly from faith, the Christian gradually ascends the holy mount until this sun disappears behind the luminous cloud and he finds himself surrounded thickly on all sides by the Unknown. It is in many ways the conclusion of his search.

But having become aware that he is enveloped in this cloud of unknowing, the Christian may well take the opportunity to run over in his mind the way he came into this place and the means he had taken to ensure that he should ascend at every pace.

One of the more important aspects of the growth of the spiritual life is the way in which the higher stages, far from leaving the lower entirely behind, do in fact reproduce the earlier virtues and activities in a new milieu; a higher synthesis is reached. Thus it would be a mistake to imagine that merely because progress in grace means first the predominance of the moral virtues and then the theological, that therefore such virtues as religion, obedience and various forms of asceticism fade away in the wings as faith, hope and charity take the stage. There are some who consider that they have reached a degree of perfection where obedience hardly applies; love predominates so that they are free from the hindrance of the moral virtues, particularly from the inconvenience of having to do what with other men they are told. They feel themselves above the law.

But in fact these ascetic virtues are raised to a far more perfect and instinctive mode hy the grace of unitive prayer and the flowering of the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

Christ's message, being for every man, is for the large body of unthinking as well as the more intellectual. In these days it must be admitted that the average man is not disposed to reason much; he prefers to accept mental fare that is given him without examining too closely its quality. He does not necessarily accept the conclusions of others, but that is because he has not troubled to make judgments about them. His mental attitude is more that of one who is willing to be entertained as an observer at an intellectual feast, and with a pronounced respect for the dictum of the expert. There is a general mental laziness making for mass-passivity, which provides the grand opportunity for the demagogue and dictator.

The unresponsiveness of the man in the street to a message that. demands mental exercise on his part has led us, in our campaign for the conversion of others to the Faith, to appeal more particularly to the intellectual.

The author of the Acts of the Apostles tells how one day Philip the deacon was travelling south on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. He caught up with an Ethiopian eunuch driving along the same way in his chariot, and, as he did so, he overheard him reading aloud to himself the prophecies of Isaias. Philip asked him whether he understood what he was reading, and the Ethiopian replied: ‘How could I understand unless someone tells me what it is all about?’ He had got as far as: ‘He was led away like a sheep to be slaughtered, like a lamb that is dumb before its shearer, he would not open his mouth. He was brought low and all his rights taken away; who shall tell the story of his age? His life is being cut off from the earth.’ Said the eunuch: ‘Who is the prophet speaking of here? himself, or someone else?’ Philip answered by telling him all about Jesus.

In his Summa Theologica (II-II, 81, 7) St Thomas Aquinas lays clown a principle which is fundamental for both the theory and the practice of divine worship: ‘We show reverence and honour to God not for his own sake—for he is himself full of glory, and to that glory nothing can be added by any creature: but for our own sake, in as much as by the very fact that we worship and honour God, our minds are put into subjection to him. And in this consists their own fulfilment, for everything attains its fulfilment by being subject to that which is above it: thus the body attains its fulfilment by being made alive by the soul, and the atmosphere by being lit up by the sun …’

Dear Friend,—Know thou well that the end and the height of perfection lieth in a true union of God with the soul of man in utter love. This end, then, is verily achieved when the powers of the soul are reformed by grace to the dignity and condition of their first state, that is, when the mind is firmly fixed in God and in spiritual things without shifting or wandering away and when the reason is cleared of all worldly and fleshly contemplations or imaginings and of the figures and fantasies of men and is illumined with grace to behold God and spiritual things, and when the will and the affection are purified and cleansed of all fleshly desires, natural and worldly loves, and are inflamed with burning love for the Holy Ghost. But this marvellous union may not be perfectly and continually and wholly reached in this life, by reason of the corruption of the flesh, but only in the joy of heaven. Nevertheless, the nearer that a soul can come to this union in this life, the more perfect that soul is.