9781644135945

The Light of the World
Our growth in the interior life is to be achieved without slighting or neglecting the duties
and obligations of our state in life. In the first place we must cultivate a life of prayer and meditation,
of abstinence and self-denial, of purity of the heart and the awareness of the presence
of God. If we achieve such an interior life, all the external duties to which we are obliged will
reflect the spirit of our interior life and will be enlivened and made fruitful by it.
Prayer
Let Thy grace, we beseech Thee, O Lord, ever go before us and follow us, and may it make us to
be continually zealous in doing good works. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Wednesday
“The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ [grant you] . . . that Christ may dwell by faith in your
hearts” (Epistle) is the second prayer addressed by the Apostle to God. The Church joins in
this prayer of the Apostle for us.
“Christ may dwell in your hearts,” not as He is in the tabernacle, not as He becomes ours in
Holy Communion, but “by faith.” The Apostle means that Christ should be in our hearts as
the Lord explained in the parable of the vine and the branches: Christ must live in us as the
vine lives and works in its branches, as it causes them to grow and flourish and bear fruit. So
He, the glorified Lord, lives in us, the baptized; and we become the living branches united to
Him, possessing and bearing His spirit. “And I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal
2:20). If we pray to the Father, then Christ prays in us. If we practice poverty as the Lord
taught us to, He lives His life of poverty in us and sanctifies our poverty. If we deny ourselves
in this or that, then His spirit of self-denial supports us and gives full value before God to our
sacrifice. If we become apostles for the salvation of souls, then our zeal is the expression of the
zeal of the Lord, who lives in us and works through us for the salvation of others. If we suffer,
then He suffers mystically in us, His members. He bears part of the pains because He lives
in us, the vine in the branches. “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me.” In me Christ prays,
works, suffers, and loves. These words, “Christ may dwell in your hearts,” give our life a new
meaning and value, one immensely sublime and surpassing all that is human. Of ourselves
we are nothing, full of human weaknesses, capable only of failures; therefore we trust in the
Lord, in His prayers, in His charity, in which all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are
contained and in which the Father is well pleased. How fitting, then, is the Apostle’s prayer
“that Christ may dwell . . . in your hearts.”
“By faith.” Without faith all mere human knowledge, all human effort, all natural endeavor,
is useless. That Christ may dwell in our hearts is possible only through faith. When we confessed
our faith in Christ at our baptism, the Lord began to dwell in our hearts. The more we live by
faith in Christ through the exercise of charity, the more the life of Jesus becomes our life. “I live,
now not I, but Christ liveth in me.” The more we see Him living in us by faith, and the more
attentively we listen to Him and allow Him to work in us, the more we lose ourselves. Then
we no longer lean on the feeble, bending reed of self, but on the Strong One, the Holy One,
who lives in us and prays, loves, and glorifies the Father in us. The more intensely we live this
life of faith, the more vividly we realize our own misery and nothingness. But as we look and
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