Bede on Pentecost

When the children of Israel had been freed from slavery in Egypt by the immolation of the paschal lamb, they went out through the desert so that they might come to the promised land, and they reached Mount Sinai. On the fiftieth day after the Passover, the Lord descended upon the mountain in fire, accompanied by the sound of a trumpet and thunder and lightning, and with a clear voice He laid out for them the ten commandments of the law. As a memorial of the law He had given, He established a sacrifice to Himself from the first-fruits of that year, to be celebrated annually on that day… It is obvious to all who read what the immolation of the paschal lamb and the escape from slavery in Egypt meant, for “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” He is the true Lamb who has taken away the sins of the world, who has redeemed us from the slavery of sin at the price of His blood, and by the example of His resurrection has shown us the hope of life and everlasting liberty. The law was given on the fiftieth day after the slaying of the lamb, when the Lord descended upon the mountain in fire; likewise on the fiftieth day after the resurrection of our Redeemer, which is today, the grace of the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples as they were assembled in the upper room. Appearing visibly and externally as fire, He shed rays of the light of knowledge invisibly on their inmost thoughts and kindled in them the inextinguishable ardor of charity…

There, on Sinai, the crashing of the thunder and the blasts of the trumpet resounded in the midst of flames of fire and flashes of lightning. Here, in the upper room, along with the vision of tongues of fire there “came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind.” But although in both bestowals, namely of the law and of grace, a sound was heard outwardly, yet here by a more extensive miracle, when the sound was heard there was present the power of a heavenly gift, which would teach the hearts of the disciples inwardly without a sound. There, after all the legal decrees had been heard, the entire people answered with one voice, “All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.” Here, after the assembly of the Church, which was being born, had received the enlightenment of the Spirit, they spoke of the wonders of God in the languages of all countries.

– Bede the Venerable, Homilies on the Gospels II.17

For the Shepherd Who Is Also the Path the Sun Makes in Daytime

A good shepherd is a wonder in contrapposto, an artist
mapping the Serengeti with kingdom lines.

A good shepherd angles a lion’s eye, traps gazelles
in dry fields, copies a cheetah’s spots one leg at a time.

A good shepherd does not give you stones
when you ask for toast, does not ask you to work

without a burning bush—but owns a gate, uses a gate, pulls
the weeds and leaves the wheat on an altar of choices.

A good shepherd is a prince of peace when terror finds its full echo,
a creator in the wild where a predator, providentially, becomes prey.

– Komal Mathew

I Am the Door of the Sheepfold

I am the door of the sheepfold.
Not one that’s gently hinged or deftly hung,
Not like the ones you planed at Joseph’s place,
Not like the well-oiled openings that swung
So easily for Pilate’s practiced pace,
Not like the ones that closed in Mary’s face
From house to house in brimming Bethlehem,
Not like the one that no man may assail,
The dreadful curtain, the forbidding veil
That waits your breaking in Jerusalem.

Not one you made but one you have become:
Load-bearing, balancing, a weighted beam
To bridge the gap, to bring us within reach
Of your high pasture. Calling us by name,
You lay your body down across the breach,
Yourself the door that opens into home.

– Malcolm Guite, “I Am the Door of the Sheepfold,” The Yale ISM Review: Vol. 1: No. 2, Article 8.

I know my sheep and am known of mine

During the riots in Palestine in the middle thirties, a village near Haifa was condemned to collective punishment by having its sheep and cattle sequestrated by the Government. The inhabitants, however, were permitted to redeem their possessions at a fixed price. Among them was an orphan shepherd boy, whose six or eight sheep and goats were all he had in the world for life and work. Somehow he obtained the money for their redemption. He went to the big enclosure where the animals were penned, offering his money to the British sergeant in charge.

The N.C.O. told him he was welcome to the requisite number of animals, but ridiculed the idea that he could possibly pick out his “little flock” from among the confiscated hundreds. The little shepherd thought differently, because he knew better; and giving his own “call”, for he had his nai (shepherd’s pipe) with him, “his own” separated from the rest of the animals and trotted out after him. “I am the Good Shepherd and know my sheep—and am known of mine.”

– Eric F. F. Bishop, Jesus of Palestine, pp. 297–298

The Living and True Bread

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, God the Lord of knowledge, who gives His wonders and orders all things well, who rides upon the clouds, the Lord is His name: may He, the living and true Bread, who descended from heaven to give food to the hungry, indeed still more to be Himself the food for the living, come into being for us in this bread, through which the hearts are strengthened, so that through the power of this bread we are able to fast during these forty days without the impediment of flesh and blood: now that we have the Bread Himself who nourishes the poor with loaves, who consecrated the forty-day fast through Moses and Elijah when they fasted for forty days, who later in His own fasting for us marked the same numbers of days with the solemn practice of fasting, let us strive to imitate what the Lord Himself accomplished for us in the weakness of our body in forty days without interruption, albeit little by little with the same calculated number of days by observing the arrangement of the evening meals: through our Lord Jesus Christ, Who on the day before…

Missale Gothicum, Prayer after the Sanctus in the Beginning of Lent

Give us this Bread during these forty days

It is truly meet and just, right and salutary that we give thanks to You, O Lord, Holy Father, Almighty, Everlasting God, through Christ our Lord, who is Your only-begotten Son and who abides in Your glory, in whom the faith of those who fast is fed, hope is carried forward and love strengthend: for He is the living and true bread, who descended from heaven and always abides in heaven, who is an eternal being and the food of virtue: indeed Your Word, through which everything came into being, is not only the food of human hearts but is also the bread of the angels themselves: with the nourishment of this bread Your servant Moses fasted for forty days and nights when he received Your law, and abstained from the food of the flesh in order to be more receptive to Your sweetness, living from Your Word: he lived in the spirit from His sweetness, and on his face he received His light: therefore he felt no physical hunger and forgot the food of the earth, because the sight of Your glory brightened him and the Word of God, infused through the Spirit, fed him: deign, O Lord, to give us this Bread during these forty days, which we enter today by beginning with the mortification of the forty-day abstinence, and enkindle us, so that we thirst for it unceasingly: when we eat His body, which is sanctified by You, we are strengthened, and when we drink His blood with a longing draught, we are cleansed: through Christ our Lord, through whom…

Missale Gothicum, Prayer of Sacrifice in the Beginning of Lent

Lent – George Herbert

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is composed of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou would allow
To every Corporation.

The humble soul composed of love and fear
Begins at home, and lays the burden there,
When doctrines disagree.
He says, in things which use has justly got,
I am a scandal to the Church, and not
The Church is so to me.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
When good is seasonable;
Unless Authority, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it less,
And Power itself disable.

Besides the cleanness of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fullness there are sluttish fumes,
Sour exhalations, and dishonest rheumes,
Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
And goodness of the deed.
Neither ought other men’s abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; left by that argument
We forfeit all our Creed.

It’s true, we cannot reach Christs forti’th day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better then to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior’s purity;
Yet are we bid, Be holy ev’n as He.
In both, let’s do our best.

Who goes in the way which Christ has gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, then one
That travels byways;
Perhaps my God, though He be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast,
As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
And among those his soul.

*spellings modernized

George Herbert, from The Temple

The whole life of men is but one day

It may be said that the whole life of men is but one day, according to the parable, and that they who are called by the Master of the vineyard in the morning early, are they who from their childhood were called to do the things of the kingdom of God. They who, after they had come to adolescence, begin to serve God are they who are called about the third hour. They who begin as men fully grown are they who were called at the sixth hour. They who in mature age are converted to the work of God are those of the ninth hour, who after the heat of youth, and before the burden of old age, take on themselves the word of the Lord. And the old, who are near to death, are signified by those called at the eleventh hour to labour in the vineyard. 

Since it is the purpose that governs life and not the time, which is scrutinised, and in which a man labours in hope: therefore, to every man who labours earnestly, from the time of his calling, an equal reward will be given. Hence they who were faithful from their childhood, who have laboured much, enduring the temptations and difficulties of youth, are grieved at seeing themselves receive an equal reward of salvation with those standing idle from their childhood till old age: standing as it were idle in unbelief, they have come now for but a brief while to believe and to labour. 

– Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on Matthew

The Death of the Moth

Two years ago I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. I had hauled myself and gear up there to read, among other things, James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again. So I read, lost, every day sitting under a tree by my tent, while warbler swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.

Moths kept flying into the candle. They hissed and recoiled, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they singed their wings and fell, and their hot wings, as if melted, stuck to the first thing they touched—a pan, a lid, a spoon—so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water. And replenished candles, and read on.

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked p when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax—a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool….

And then this moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out. She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burned out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet….

How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you’re not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the altar but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that’s burnt out, any muck ready to hand?

His face is flame like a seraph’s, lighting the kingdom of God for the people to see; his life goes up in the works; his feet are waxen and salt. He is holy and he is firm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with, spanning the gap from here to eternity, home.

– Annie Dillard, from Holy the Firm, part three

More replendent than day, more radiant than light

Let us joyfully revere this holy day of the blessed birth, on which, through the birth of the Lord, the secrets of the Virgin’s womb are revealed and the burden of that unspoiled body has flowed out for the relief of the world, as we have longed for this day through our prayers. For this Newborn is more resplendent than day, more radiant than light…

– Missale Gothicum, Preface for the Nativity of Our Lord