St. Philip Neri and the God Who Dwells With Men

May 25, 2019June 6, 2019 / Rick Yoder / Leave a comment

*The Vision of St. Philip Neri*, Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani (Source)

“Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people; and God himself with them shall be their God.” – Revelation 21:3

St. Philip’s feast always falls within that sunny period of the Church’s year when, passing from Easter to Ascensiontide and following on to Pentecost and Corpus Christi, we find our days running over with the majesty of these great mysteries. The days grow longer, and so they seem to grow more golden with the ever-descending light of the Holy Ghost. We are in a season of peculiar glory. The culminating lesson of these mysteries is clear: God has made his dwelling among men, and in the midst of His people shall He reign.

St. Philip receives the Holy Ghost while at prayer in the catacombs. (Source)

St. Philip knew this truth well. His whole life could well be described as a journey between Pentecost and Corpus Christi, the two feasts that most clearly teach us of God’s enduring presence in His Church. It was on the Vigil of Pentecost, 1544, that St. Philip received the grace that would define his vocation and the character of his sanctity. While praying in the catacombs of San Sebastiano, the Holy Ghost descended into St. Philip’s heart visibly and sensibly in the form of a ball of fire. This experience, which provided as much heat and pain as rapturous joy, marked the true beginning of St. Philip’s active ministry. In St. Philip, the Holy Ghost once again made His dwelling among men.

*St. Philip Neri Receiving the Holy Spirit in the Catacombs of St. Sebastian*, Francesco Solimena (Source)

From then on, St. Philip’s whole life would be marked by a singular union with the Holy Ghost. He became the “tabernacle of the Most High” and a living fountain of graces. His many miracles testify to the indwelling of the Spirit within him. So does his manifest oddity, his clear and salutary estrangement from the ways and works of ordinary men. The prophet writes, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord.” So does the Holy Ghost speak from the heart of St. Philip. For this reason, the Church applies the words of St. Paul to the new Apostle of Rome:

The love of God has been poured into our hearts
through the Spirit of God dwelling within us
Introit for the Feast of St. Philip Neri

St. Philip’s priestly life was marked by the overwhelming presence of God. Everything about him spoke to the present reality of the supernatural. This reality took two chief forms. The most famous were the astounding miracles wrought by St. Philip – most notably the raising of Prince Paolo Massimo from the dead. But there was also St. Philip’s profound adoration of the Eucharist. His popularization of the Forty Hours’ Devotion was but the visible extension of his love of the Blessed Sacrament. So too were the Eucharistic ecstasies to which he was increasingly susceptible as he became older. St. Philip knew no sweeter hours than those that he spent at Mass as an old man, kneeling in darkness before the altar, lost in the rarefied heights of a contemplation we can barely begin to fathom.

Engraving of St. Philip Neri, Hieronymus Frezza (Source)

One particularly perceptive observer has written:

In recalling the holiness of Saint Philip, it occurs to me that it was essentially this: he was all priest. He was always and everywhere a priest. His priesthood suffused his very being, making him incandescent with the fire of the Cross and of the altar.
Vultus Christi

St. Philip’s extraordinary endowment with the Spirit was ordered towards his life as a priest – namely, towards the glory of God in the Eucharist. This is the case with all of us. The Spirit, God in us, is given precisely for us to receive the Eucharist, God with us. Confirmation, like all the other sacraments, exists with the Eucharist as its proper telos.

*The Mass of St. Philip Neri*, Circle of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Source)

How fitting, then, that St. Philip should pass into eternal life when he did. May the 25th, 1595, was the feast of Corpus Christi. As Fr. Faber has it,

Day set on Rome! its golden morn
Had seen the world’s Creator borne
Around St. Peter’s square
Trembling and weeping all the way,
God’s Vicar with his God that day
Made pageant brave and rare!
“St. Philip’s Death,” F.W. Faber

Providence often grants the saints a Christ-like death. It is a sign that, even in suffering and death, God is still dwelling with us. St. Benedict died in choro during a liturgy, just as Christ died in the fulfillment of His high priesthood. Many martyrdoms were accompanied by strange signs and mystical evocations of the Sacrifice of Christ. It should be no surprise that God would take St. Philip in a similarly edifying manner.

*The Death of St. Benedict*, F. Rosaspina, 1830, after D.M. Canuti. (Source)

In his death, St. Philip reminds us that we are all meant to imitate Christ in His Sacrifice, that is, in the Blessed Sacrament. There is no more perfect pedagogue in the life of the Spirit than the Son, who has presented Himself to us on all the altars of the world. Would that we might take this lesson to heart!

St. Philip died when he did because, by a singular grace of Providence, God was pleased to mark His servant’s passing with the Church’s celebration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. Just as St. Philip honored the Eucharistic God in his life, so did the Eucharistic God honor him in his death.

We, too, can honor the saint best by cleaving to the Lord. St. Philip’s words to a spiritual daughter are as true today as they once were:

“Let us concentrate ourselves so completely in the divine love, and enter so far into the living fountain of wisdom, through the wounded Side of our Incarnate God, that we may deny ourselves and our self-love, and so be unable to find our way out of that Wound again.”
St. Philip Neri

God dwells with us just as He once dwelt in the blessed heart of St. Philip. He comes to us just as He came once to the priestly hands of St. Philip. Let us abide in Him, just as St. Philip did once and does forevermore in the heights of Heaven.

Votive image of St. Philip Neri from the British Museum. As they have it: “St Philip Neri kneeling on a cloud in front of altar; angel to right holding tray with burning hearts and ascending towards Holy Trinity; Virgin Mary mediating surrounded by angels, after Maella. 1801 Engraving, printed on silk.” Note the Eucharist enthroned in a monstrance. (Source)

“Love is His Bond”

May 25, 2018May 26, 2018 / Rick Yoder / 1 Comment

St. Philip, pray for us. (Source)

The Mass of St. Philip Neri is a little lesson in joy. The propers again and again stress a common theme: namely, the great saint’s joy, built upon his constant and fiery communion with the Holy Ghost. Holy Mother Church lifts her voice and sings in the Introit, “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us. Praise the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me praise His holy name.” At the Collect, we pray to God to “mercifully grant that we, who rejoice in his solemnity, may be profited by the example of his virtues.” When, in the third reading, we hear of the saint’s overpowering love of “the spirit of wisdom,” we learn as well that “All good things together came to me with her…and I rejoiced in them all” (from Wisdom 7). The Offertory likewise proclaims with the Psalmist, “I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty” (Ps. 118). Everywhere we turn, we find the joy and freedom that alone springs from communion with the Holy Ghost.

And then we come to a remarkable moment. In the Secret, the priest prays over the offerings,

We beseech Thee, O Lord, favorably to regard these present sacrifices: and grant that the Holy Spirit may inflame us with that fire, wherewith he wondrously penetrated the heart of blessed Philip.

The Church has here enshrined a stunning and highly instructive truth. Yet it is easy to miss.

The very heart of St. Philip – that organ claimed so powerfully by the Holy Ghost in the catacombs of St. Sebastian, ever converting those sinners with the happy fortune of touching Philip’s breast, inflaming the saint with the deathless ardor of love, bearing such close likeness to those sacred hearts of Christ, Our Lady, and St. Joseph, beloved by generations upon generations – that heart is set up for us here in parallel to the Eucharist. For just as it is the Spirit who will so shortly transform bread into the most holy and eternal heart of Jesus, so it is that same Spirit who made of St. Philip’s heart a “hostia pura, hostia sancta, hostia immaculata.” Christ gives himself entirely to us by the Holy Ghost in the Liturgy, and St. Philip Neri became entirely Christ’s by the arrival of the Holy Ghost in those dark catacombs. To possess the heart is to possess the whole man.

A plate illustrating the life of St. Philip from a rare 1699 Vita, kindly shown to me and since publicly shared by the Cardiff Oratorians. (Source)

This mutual possession of God and man animates everything for the Christian. The more we are given over to it, the more God allows us to partake of His own life. The more we are His, the more He becomes ours. This spiritual truth was well understood by St. Philip, who enshrined it as the principal of unvowed community life in the Oratory. In the words of Bl. John Henry Newman, “Love is his bond, he knows no other fetter.” This line, written of St. Philip, could apply just as well to Our Savior, Jesus Christ. For it is by His indwelling love that we come to love Him. It is by love that we can join our hearts to His in the Eucharist. It is truly by love that we share “that fire, wherewith [the Holy Spirit] wondrously penetrated the heart of blessed Philip.”

The 83rd Psalm comes to the Church’s lips at the Communion. She sings, “My heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.” These are not only St. Philip’s words, but those of every soul who gives herself over to the indwelling love of God. And at the Postcommunion, the Church prays,

O Lord, who hast fulfilled us with Thy heavenly delights: we beseech Thee, that by the merits of blessed Philip Thy Confessor, and by following him, we may ever earnestly seek after those things whereby we truly live.

St Philip lived a preeminently liturgical life. (Source)

What are “those things whereby we truly live?” The Holy Ghost, the Eucharist, and prayer – those things, if it be not too blasphemous to speak of them as “things,” which were ever St. Philip’s “heavenly delights.” Or, more properly, that mystic unity of the three in the Liturgy. In his own words, “A man without prayer is like an animal without the use of reason.” And it is surely the grand and orderly and perfect prayer of Christ the Priest and Victim that St. Philip means when he speaks of our super-sensual reason.

What, then, does it mean to “truly live?” If I may be permitted to tie together a few of St. Philip’s maxims, we can discern his own answer to this question:

In the spiritual life there are three degrees: the first may be called the animal life; this is the life of those who run after sensible devotion, which God generally gives to beginners, to allure them onwards by that sweetness to the spiritual life, just as an animal is drawn on by a sensible object. The second degree may be called the human life; this is the life of those who do not experience any sensible sweetness, but by the help of virtue combat their own passions. The third degree may be called the angelic life; this is the life which they come to, who, having been exercised for a long time in the taming of their own passions, receive from God a quiet, tranquil, and almost angelic life, even in this world, feeling no trouble or repugnance in anything. Of these three degrees it is well to persevere in the second, because the Lord will grant the third in His own good time.

A departure from the passions and a cleaving to virtue; mortification mixed with convivial, holy companionship; and above all, an overriding joy. These are the manifestations of the indwelling love of God. These constitute a life “truly lived.” These are the fragrant flowers accompanying the fruits of the Holy Ghost. “Thou hast set my heart at liberty;” the saint embodies the song of the Offertory.

St. Philip’s life was marked in every way by such a communion with the Holy Ghost, first in a singular and miraculous way in the catacombs, and then again at every Mass. The love of God made him the most perfect model of the very “angelic life” he described to his sons and companions. Those of us privileged enough to count him among our heavenly friends may, by his merciful intercession, hope to share that one Divine Joy he knew so well. May he so pray for us on this, his feast.

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Aparición de la Virgen a San Felipe Neri, Mexico, detail. (Source)

The Threefold Maternity of Mary

May 11, 2018May 12, 2018 / Rick Yoder / 1 Comment

Our Lady of the Cenacle, pray for us. Photo by Lawrence Lew O.P. (Source)

God seems very fond of doing things in a Trinitarian way. Everywhere we look, in nature, in our lives, in the life of the Church, it seems that we constantly come upon things that speak of threeness-in-oneness. So it is with God’s finest creation, Our Lady. Or rather, with her maternity. She has but one singular motherhood – her highest title, Theotokos, means “Mother of God.” Nothing can surpass this supreme gift. Nothing greater can be said of the Lord’s chosen. Nothing can reveal more about Our Lady’s life and mission. Yet we detect a certain triune quality to this one eminent dignity. We can speak of the threefold maternity of Mary.

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Our Lady of the Annunciation (Source)

First, we encounter Mary’s basic, physical motherhood of Jesus at the Annunciation. In welcoming the will of God into her life, she becomes the mother of the Most High, God Incarnate in Jesus Christ. The Holy Ghost, her divine spouse, conceives the Son in her womb. Her mystical partner and guardian in this parentage is St. Joseph. And in the joy of that maternity, we see Mary and Joseph as two models of chastity. Everything in those joyful mysteries becomes a parable of purity. The sanctity of the Holy Family consists in no small part in the innocence that pervades the hearts of each member. For that innocence is an opening to charity.

Our Lady of Sorrows (Source)

Then, after the three and thirty years, Mary stands mournful beneath the cross. It was there that she became Mother of the Eucharistic Christ. For, offering up the sorrow of her own Immaculate Heart in union with her son’s High Priestly sacrifice, she bound herself to all the altars of the world as first adorer and co-redemptrix. Gone is St. Joseph; in his stead we find St. John, the figure of all priests under Christ. He would share the Eucharistic life with Mary forever after, entrusted with her care. Here, the great virtue uniting both of the hearts below the Cross is obedience. Our Lady obeys the paramount Providence of God in consenting to the sacrifice of her son, and St. John obeys the words of Our Lord in taking responsibility for the Sorrowful Mother.

But it is today’s feast of Our Lady of the Cenacle that points to the full and final extension of these two prior forms of motherhood. It falls on a most interesting point in the calendar, Saturday in the Octave of the Ascension. It is as if we are standing in the middle of a bridge between two shining cities, and can hear the mingled music of both. This liminal quality is important. For the feast we celebrate today has a double meaning. Two feasts of different but equal importance and dignity seem to unite in this celebration.

We have just left Christ in his Ascension. The Ascension is a memorial of Christ’s High Priesthood. It is like the prayers at the foot of the altar in the Cosmic Liturgy. Pentecost is a glorious theophany, the arrival of the Holy Ghost. We are thus mid-way between a mystery of veiling, and mystery of unveiling. And who do we turn to, but Mary, she who both hid and manifested God in her person?

When we celebrate Our Lady of the Cenacle, we commemorate her vigil of silent prayer with the Apostles in the upper room in those intense days following Our Lord’s Ascension. But we also remember the descent of the Holy Ghost into her own Immaculate Heart and into those of her companions. At the deepest level of reality, these constitute a single event in the History of Salvation. And they give us a sense of Mary’s deepening, widening maternity.

Our Lady of the Cenacle (Source)

Wherever Mary communes with her divine spouse, the Holy Ghost, there is conceived the Body of Christ. First, that meant the physically Incarnate Word. Then it was the Eucharist extended throughout all time. And finally, as a consequence of these two forms of motherhood, we come to Mary’s maternity of the Church. This maternity is the crown of the other two, for it has never ended. The Holy Spirit came to that silver throne, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and has never left. In all the rest of Mary’s earthly life and eternal existence in beatitude, she has never been deprived of that intimate union begun in Pentecost. And so the Church remains. Mary’s union with the Holy Ghost is at the very heart of the Church’s being. That union brought forth Christ once. It brings forth the Eucharist at every Mass. And now, at Pentecost, it brings forth the Eucharistic community, Christ in His members.

Yet in what does this exalted maternity consist? Prayer, offered perfectly in the Immaculate Heart united to the Holy Ghost. Contemplation, adoration, reparation, intercession – in all its forms, prayer rises from Mary’s heart like huge storms of incense blowing across a desert plain, raining down graces to make it fertile. Yet one form of prayer does not. Mary cannot be contrite. She has never sinned. But we turn to her mystic partner in this maternity, and find a pillar of penance. Who else shares in the life of the Spirit in such a fiery way, but St. John the Baptist? Such is the heavenly reality expressed by the Deisis icon. It shows the Blessed Virgin Mary, paragon of prayer, and St. John the Baptist, archetype of penance, adoring Christ the Lord. Both Our Lady and St. John represent the twin realities of the Ecclesial life – prayer and penance – ordered to Christ – the Sacraments. We might thus speak of Mary’s motherhood of the Church as her Sophianic Maternity, for it is entirely drawn from and oriented to the Divine Wisdom.

A typical deisis. (Source)

The feast of Our Lady of the Cenacle is thus a profoundly maternal day in the Church’s liturgy. Let us join her in prayer. Perhaps we shall taste something of that everlasting life granted to her in the Cenacle.

Monstra Te Esse Matrem (Source)

Letter to a Catechumen

March 30, 2018March 30, 2018 / Rick Yoder / Leave a comment

“Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.” (Source )

My Dear Brother Thomas Bede,

Easter brings us from darkness to light, from loss to gain, from death to life. Christ vanquishes the world, the flesh, and the devil. His victory reveals the true meaning of Easter—it is above all the feast of our conversion. The whole of the Christian message is for naught if Christ did not rise from the grave. But He did, and He invites us to share in the superabundance of His sanctity.

We cannot have holiness on our own terms. There is one model—a single life given to us by the Holy Ghost. It is a mercy and a wonder of God that Our Lord impresses His one divine image and likeness into the hearts of so many and so various saints. But light refracted through a prism is still light. We mortals cannot learn the ways of the divine life except by constant recourse to the God-Man.

And where do we receive this sacred pedagogy? Where can we savor the words that bring resurrection? Where do we set our hopes in the long trek through “this valley of tears?”

I think you already know the answer: the sacred liturgy. The Catholic life is drawn from, tied to, and led before the Tabernacle. The final end of our journey is to reach the Tabernacle veil, draw it aside with trembling hands, send forth our last breath in a sigh of consummate joy and relief, and step gracefully into the everlasting House of God. The Catholic life lived well is thus a pilgrimage from font to Tabernacle. Our Lord does not abandon us in this long journey. Like the good father of the parable, He rushes out to welcome His prodigal sons with open arms. He has prepared a great banquet in our honor. Indeed, the Savior who died for you gives you His flesh as feast. Every Mass is a homecoming. Every Holy Communion is a kiss of reconciliation.

I know all of this from experience, having already walked the path you are about to take. And I speak from experience when I say, dear brother, that everything in the Christian life must be brought back to the Tabernacle. If we don’t center our lives on the Blessed Sacrament, we shall be like ships adrift in a stormy sea. What fruitless turbulence enters the soul of one far from the Eucharist! What celestial treasures do we miss! Treasures given to us anew every year in the Sacred Triduum. Soon it will all be yours—yours the Supper, yours the Cross, yours the sojourn in the Tomb, yours the descent into Hell, and yours the Triumph in the Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord. In all of these mysteries, Our Lord wishes to imprint His image onto your soul. He will fashion you to be His servant. Pray that in the latter end, you may also be His saint.

You have no idea how long and how ardently Our Lord has desired your first Communion. From the very fathomless heights of eternity, He saw and loved you. As the whips broke His spotless flesh and the hateful wood of the cross bit into His back, He bore your face in mind. And when He hung there, dying, and said the blessed word—Sitio—“I thirst”—He spoke of your union with His heart. There is no point at which Christ did not desire you. He seeks to possess you in your entirety: body, blood, soul, and spirit. In the Eucharist, He offers Himself to you in precisely the same way. And as His gift of self is perfect, He shall make yours perfect, too.

When Dame Julian of Norwich was given a mystic vision of the world, she did not see sin. I believe this is because she was afforded a fleeting glimpse of the world as it will be in the Eschaton, the world as God sees it. Think of that, my brother. All the sins committed by you and me and every human being we have ever met, all the crimes that have soaked the pages of history in blood, all the atrocities that rightly call out to God for vengeance—all will be washed away. The past will be wiped clean.

Your conversion reproduces this grand act of divine mercy in miniature. You come to the altar of God a mere mortal, and a sin-sick one at that. Your burden would torment and crush you. The world of sin affords no rest. But my brother, you have chosen the path of freedom. You have set down one burden, but you are to take up another. Only this one is light and free and easy, giving strength to whoever bears it. It is the Cross, a deadening foolishness to the world, but the “pearl of great price” to those illumined by Divine Wisdom.

At the Easter Vigil, everything will change. When the water flows over your brow, when the oil touches the same spot, and when the Host alights on your lips, you will no longer be the same person you have been all your life. You will become instead one body with Christ crucified. Your life will no longer be yours; the act of surrender must be total. Your words, your breaths, your steps, your very heartbeats will belong to Christ. And He will use you to bring His peace into this world. By that whitest of magic, the sacraments, you will start to become a “little Christ,” a Christian. What an awful, beautiful fate.

I will not give you advice. There will be many closer to you who have a fuller knowledge of the Catholic life than I do. Go to them. Seek the wisdom grown only in many years of faith. And keep close to Mary. Remember that you are but an infant, and she is your mother. She will guide you.

Now, my very dear brother, it is time for you to take up your cross and know the Life Eternal.

In Christ,

Rick

The Music of the Holy Ghost

November 30, 2017November 30, 2017 / Rick Yoder / 2 Comments

A still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). Clips from Tarkovsky’s films are often incorporated into the Rev Army’s music videos. (Source)

Not long ago, I came across a new band. What a singular group it is. Their music crosses and confuses genres. They produce content at a far scarcer rate than other musical acts. Even their name, taken from a Buñuel film, sets them apart from most of the offerings one comes across today.

Little did I know that I had stumbled upon a cult gem. The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus has been on the scene for quite a while. Almost thirty years ago, they released their first album, The Gift of Tears (1987). Since then, they have only come out with sporadic releases, such as 1990’s Mirror and 2015’s Beauty Will Save the World. The long hiatus has well earned them the title of “One of music’s most elusive and enigmatic acts,” as we can read on their BandCamp site.

Tim Cooper has a great review of their work over at The Quietus:

…the attention-averse trio, who regard themselves as a creative collective rather than a band, make wildly eclectic music rooted in liturgical texts and ecclesiastical iconography, contrasting ethereal beauty with stark brutalism. Celestial choirs rub their cassocked shoulders with squalls of industrial noise, political speeches are interwoven with celluloid dialogue, instrumentation ranges from sombre neo-classical piano to pounding dance beats by way of folk, free-form jazz and experimental psychedelia.

They draw together a variety of spiritual and cultural influences: folk Catholicism, peasant mysticism, Russian Orthodoxy, the experience of post-Soviet Europe, Simone Weil, Welsh poetry. Their work can, I think, be described as sophianic, but it is a sophanicity carefully drawn through the harried cracks of the fallen world. The truth that the Rev Army grips and holds up to the light gleams all the more for being refracted in the shards of our earthly mirror.

Here are some favorite songs with their proper music videos, many of which are just as important for the meaning of the piece as the score itself.

“Come Holy Spirit” – the very first Rev Army song I discovered. A bit too much flute and too many drums for me, but it was different enough from anything I had ever heard that it caught my attention.

“Bright Field” – the first one that captivated me. The upward lift of the music combined with R.S. Thomas’s stirring paraphrase of the Gospel, not to mention Tarkovsky’s silken, dreamlike visuals, all together inspire something like wonder. Whenever I listen to it, I am reminded of a poem by Rilke.

“After the End” – a simple and haunting French ditty set to the grainy images of villagers at prayer. They seem to be visionaries.

“Psalm” – a few women chant in English against an increasingly dissonant shower of quasi-industrial background noise. The juxtaposition strikes me as an artistic model of transcendence through persistent prayer.

“Repentance” – the most Flannery O’Connor thing you will ever see or hear. I’ll just leave it at that.

“Théme de l’homme qui n’a pas cru en lui méme” – a Latin-flavored and occasionally jazzy piece featuring footage from a (staged?) Spanish Lenten procession. In case you hadn’t already noticed, the band is extremely Catholic.

“Joy of the Cross” – another Lenten procession, but this time with a soft-edged folk music that makes me think of Fleet Foxes.

“Before the Ending of the Day” – the Compline hymn surrounded and supported by an airy yet pulsing larger song. Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev provides the meditative visuals. Note that one of the commenters on YouTube wrote, “Please keep making more of these. This helped still my soul.”

Something epicletic moves through their music. But one can find that quality in lots of other work. What sets the Rev Army apart isn’t just their obsession with the Holy Ghost, nor their stylistic eclecticism. It’s their powerful sense of mystery. They never shy away from the divine darkness with which the Holy Ghost enshrouds His manifold works of grace. How refreshing, in an age of “Spirit of the Council” muzak and shallow “praise and worship,” to find music that is overtly Christian and even mystical without ever becoming preachy, dated, or emotivist. They treat their subject, the perennial and universal longing of the human heart for God, with a rare artistic and spiritual sophistication.

Caught up in marvel at the saving mystery of the Holy Ghost, the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus is the real Catholic charismatic revival.

An icon of the Descent of the Holy Ghost. (Source)

Three Poems for Whitsunday

June 4, 2017June 4, 2017 / Rick Yoder / Leave a comment

The Dove Descending…(Source)

Inspired by and borrowing from Artur Rosman’s similar post, I offer you some Pentecostal poetry.

“Little Gidding” IV, by T.S. Eliot

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

“God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

“Epigrammata Sacra XIII” – The descent of the Holy Spirit – Richard Crashaw

Bear, o bosoms, bear ye what Heaven’s vintage showers,
Sacred clusters pouring from ethereal bowers.
Too happy, surely, ye who drink of wine so good;
It comes into your bosoms a sparkling, cooling flood.
Behold, with nectar’d star, each head is shining, shining;
Around your purpl’d locks a crown of life entwining.
O Spirit of all flesh, to drink who’d be denied,
Since Thou, lest they should falter, mak’st wine a torch to guide?

Veni Sancte Spiritus! (Source)

Elsewhere: Dom Mark Daniel Kirby on the Holy Ghost

June 4, 2017 / Rick Yoder / 1 Comment

descent-of-holy-spirit-on-the-apostles-1885MikhailVrubel

“The Descent of the Holy Spirit,” Mikhail Vrubel. 1885. (Source).

Dom Mark Daniel Kirby of Silverstream Priory has a phenomenal piece out today about the cosmic and intimate indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Imagine Teilhard de Chardin, but without all the heretical bits. Just a great, poetic doxology of praise for the Third Person of the Trinity.

The Holy Ghost impels apostles and missionaries in every age;
He is the invincible faith of the martyrs;
the shining light of doctors;
the incandescent purity of virgins;
the joy of monks;
the abiding friend of solitaries;
the consoler of the bereaved.
The Holy Ghost is a father to the destitute;
a storehouse of infinite resources for the penniless;the uncreated Light all ablaze where no created light shines.

Read the whole thing here.

The Amish Catholic

Ora et Labora

Holy Ghost