Dies Iræ – Day Four

Mors stupebit, et natura,
Cum resurget creatura,
Iudicanti responsura.

Death is struck, and nature quaking,
All creation is awaking,
To its Judge and answer making.

We must recognize that after death comes – whether we like it or not – our unavoidable recognition of our sins and their inevitable consequences. All we can pray for now is that by recognizing this we may yet be able to act and pray so as to spare ourselves from the worst consequences of our lives.

How do we do what God wants . . ?

In the Sermon which forms the Second Lesson in this morning’s Office of Readings, S. Charles Borromeo suggests that - if we want help in our spiritual lives - ‘the Lord God has given us the means to find it easily’.

The means which he gives us is perhaps slightly surprising, though : it is to not involve ourselves in things which may distract us, but instead to focus on God’s will for us, and to meditate upon that ‘before, during, and after everything we do’; and he tells us this because by it‘we can easily overcome the countless difficulties we have to face day after day, which, after all, are part of our work’; and we do this, he says, because ‘in meditation we find the strength to bring Christ to birth in ourselves and in other men’.

A salutary thought for all of us : to need to focus on what God wants, not on what we think may be helpful, and by focussing on God be certain that He will provide us with the means, and the energy, to achieve His will.

Dies Iræ – Day Three

Tuba, mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.

Wondrous sound, the trumpet flingeth,
Through earth’s sepulchres it ringeth,
All before the throne it bringeth.

We have to remember that the moment will come – and it is not a moment over which we will have any control – when everything will finally focus, for eternity, on what we have actually done . . . and when that moment arrives it will be too late for us to change anything : the seed is sown.

Oh Good . . .

I notice that there have been one or two posts in the last couple of days on Fr Mildew’s blog : so let me encourage you to keep an eye on this, as it would appear that it may not have disappeared completely . . . a very reassuring thought.

S. Martin de Porres

Today is the Feast Day of S. Martin de Porres; a Dominican Lay Brother who achieved a huge amount in South America in his sixty years.

This picture is apparently a contemporary, and accurate, picture of him; which leads one to realize that many of the statues and pictures which one sees - being conspicuously negroid - perhaps contain a discreet, and excusable, but nonetheless inaccurate, message about race . . .

In any event, he contributed greatly to the well-being of many of those about him in distressed and difficult circumstances, and should remind us of our obligation to offer our care to all those about us who need our assistance and support.

Dies Iræ – Day Two

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus !

O, what fear, man’s bosom rendeth,
When from heaven the Judge descendeth,
On Whose sentence all dependeth !

Whilst one is alive, and one’s attention is distracted by more or less anything, it is so easy to ignore the fact that at the end of the day what matters is not how one’s behaviour relates to today, but how it relates to the eternal standards of God . . . and that it is on that view of our life and behaviour that all will depend.

For the Month of the Holy Souls

I propose to work slowly through the Dies Iræ in the mornings of this month, with a very short meditation on each verse . . . just as a slight change from my usual vapid wanderings !

Dies iræ ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla !

Day of wrath and doom impending,
David’s word with Sybil’s blending !
Heaven and earth in ashes ending.

The beginning of the Sequence focuses our minds on the fact that death brings a clear change : an end of one period of existence, and the start of another in which there is nothing left to focus upon except the inevitability of retribution for sin, and resolution of our shortcomings before we may be possibly be admitted to Heaven.