9781644135945

The Light of the World
The treatment of the Sunday Mass has a more detailed liturgical introduction. This introduction
will explain the inner meaning of the Sunday Mass and is intended as a preparation for
the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice rather than as a meditation.
Strict adherence to the text creates no small difficulty. The liturgy makes frequent use of repetition,
even delights in repetition. In fact, this is not harmful to our life of prayer. We are more
likely to get results if we are not given new material for thought each time. We can and should
always exercise a new faith, confidence, and love, and offer ourselves anew to God; with joy we
should adore, thank, and praise God, repent of our sins, and pray for pardon, light, and grace.
Generally the liturgy follows the manner of affective prayer rather than that of mental exercise.
Prayer is not in the first instance a matter of doctrine or knowledge, but an action. It is the
continuation of our Lord’s life in His mystical body, the Church. The members of this body
continue to pray and struggle, and He who is the head gathers them together and offers them
to His Father in His own prayers and offerings. Hence the piety of the liturgy is regulated by
externals, by objective facts, by the supernatural relationship of God with humanity. It deals
with the fact of the Incarnation of the Son of God, with the mysteries of His life and death, with
His humiliation and exaltation, and particularly with His continued operation in His mystical
body, the Church. Liturgical prayer is, therefore, primarily a matter of contemplation, adoration,
thanksgiving, and participation in the life of Christ. The soul that is nourished by the
liturgy must soon become absorbed with Christ in God and yet remains intimately bound to
the Church. It cannot fail to make fruitful in its own life what it has observed and learned to
treasure in the life of Christ. It will make use of what it learns for its own spiritual advantage, for
the sanctification of the whole Church, with the growth of whose life it is intimately associated.
Through beholding the glory of the Lord it will be transformed into the same image.
Christian Life and the Ecclesiastical Year
The spiritual life of the Christian is merely the participation in divine life. It is God living in us.
We obtain this life through a spiritual rebirth in the sacrament of baptism.
The world came to know this divine life for the first time in the Incarnation of the Son of God,
when Mary spoke her fiat at Nazareth. Since that time this life has continued to come to us
through Christ. He came that we “may have life and may have it more abundantly” ( Jn 10:10).
The germ of this divine life is planted in our soul at baptism, but this germ must be developed
and brought to perfection. Both in our conduct and in our character we must be transformed
into the likeness of the Son of God (Rom 8:29). Christian holiness consists primarily in the
perfect development of the germ that was planted in our soul at baptism. This development may
be accomplished by perfect participation in the life of Christ. He who is the vine gives life to
us who are the branches ( Jn 15:5). Our personal task in this work is to prepare ourselves with
joy and confidence for the reception of a full measure of this life. We must protect it, nourish
it, and perfect it.
The divine life that we received at baptism is nourished and developed by our participation
in the sacramental life of the Church. Christ opens the fountains of the supernatural life for us
by the sacraments and particularly by the Eucharist and the Sacrifice of the Mass. Sanctity on
earth and its consummation in the eternal bliss of heaven are both within the reach of the soul
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