Today, my beloved children, we are celebrating the first fruits of the coming of our Lord. For the Church, there is no more desirable period than this one. It is the time when she gives us the most magnificent pages to read, when she sings her most beautiful hymns. Just as spring is of all seasons of the year the gladdest and sweetest, so of all solemnities the most touching and the holiest is this time of Advent. This is the time for which the patriarchs of the Old Testament sighed with such ardent longing, as did all the holy souls who succeeded them for nearly five thousand years. They cried out for it with all their hearts: ‘Lord, oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down.’ (Is. 64, 1.) ‘To enlighten them that sit in darkness and ill the shadow of death.’ (Luke 1, 79.) All the happenings, all the types of the Old Testament had no other object but to proclaim the greatness and excellence of the one that they were always desiring and whose coming we are now about to greet.

We have seen that all true prayer is in Christ and is in the form of petition or desire, the ‘ground of our beseeching’ being the Incarnate Word who is semper interpellans pro nobis, making unceasing petition on our behalf. In order to recognise the full import of this healing doctrine we must go deeper to discover the ground of the whole spiritual life, particularly the ground of the full Christian life of union. And when we come to consider this ground we have always to insist on its subjective element. Of course the ground of the Christian life is Christ, of course it is life per Christum in Trinitate; and yet it is possible even with this realisation to be carried away into a misty conception of the spiritual life which is really no more than some high poetic, or perhaps neo-platonic, yearning for the One, the super-essential Being in whom we live and move and have our own being. Therefore it is necessary to purify this objective conception of the Christian life of union with the subjective: in other words the ground of all Christian life and all Christian experience and perception is the Faith. Nothing. neither visions nor experiences, neither the gifts nor the heights of prayer, can supersede in this life the faith which alone puts us in direct relationship with the intimate life of the Godhead.

What we are having to go through during these years, so full of war's unprecedented waste, drives us to seek ever more closely for the meaning of such happenings. However many and varied the answers which are given, one thing stands out clearly, that there is discernible in these events not only a world-wide call to reflection and repentance but a special message from God. Rearing upon the present, lighting up the past and foreshadowing the future, this message lays bare the causes of what is happening and so points out the way to victory, just as the keen-eyed doctor looks at the symptoms of sickness in order to come upon the cause of the evil and the means of healing at the same time.

In all the discussions recounted between our Lord and the Jews in the fourth Gospel we should note that St John the mystic, the lover, gathers up the sharp details of human reasoning, the clear natural replies of the unbelieving mind. And his record of them in the Gospel can be said to clothe them with a certain dignity and finality. They are at least human replies to God, intellectual, rational; no better perhaps have ever been made; and in symbol they stand as the earliest evidence of the human mind face to face with God revealing—two orders, the reason of man over against the revealed word of God. The doctrines Christ announces are truths beyond the natural understanding of men; but they are truths nevertheless proposed to human assent. In the records of his ministry we find him hearing, and we ourselves can read, the questions, replies and criticisms that men, judging by their own intellectual measure, could give in objection to his mysterious dogmas.

Saint Nilus's characteristically balanced view of the life of prayer and action leads him, like St Thomas at a later date, to prefer the ‘mixed’ or apostolic life. ‘bishop,’ he says, ‘is a man accomplished both in action and contemplation (praxei kai gnosei), more perfect than the ascetics in the desert’ (Oratio ad Albanum, 704A). It is a high ideal, difficult to attain, and calling for expert guidance. In his Liber de monastica exercitatione St Nilus traces the portrait of the perfect spiritual director which is as valid today as it was then. ‘Those’, he writes, ‘who would undertake the guidance of others must first have fought their own passions and prudently stored up in their memory the experiences of this warfare so that they may hand them on to others and thus make victory easier for them.’ (Mon. Exerc, 25; 752A). This ‘tight against the passions’ is a typical conception occurring in many of the Greek Fathers who are influenced by Stoic philosophy.