The passages from Psalm 119 (118) which follow the reading from Deuteronomy in today’s liturgy are part of a very long meditation, the most extended in the entire Psalter, on the wisdom of following God’s commands and laws in every circumstance in our lives. Again and again this is brought home to us: the very insistence of the wording of the psalm seems designed by the Lord himself to overcome our own inclination to disregard the idea of obeying his laws when they conflict with our own personal habits and desires. But the inspired psalmist is in grave earnest when he says: ‘Blessed are they whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. Blessed are they who observe his decrees, who seek him with all their heart.’ Unfortunately sinful human beings often find it irrational and illogical to keep to God’s laws, given to us partly in the Old Testament, and even more perfectly in the Gospel of Christ himself in the New, when it would seem in our own self interest to do exactly the opposite.
I have been rereading the ‘Meditations’ of William of St. Thierry, a 12th century Cistercian monk and mystic, who has this striking thing to say about the limits to using our reason and human understanding alone when it comes to trying to live a fervent life in Christ: ‘Neither does that understanding which, as a product of reason, has lower matters for its sphere of exercise, go any further than does reason’s self; it is as powerless as reason to attain to Thee. But the understanding which is from above carries the fragrance of its place of origin; there is nothing human in its operation, it is all divine. And where it is inpoured, it carries along with itself the faculties that are akin to it, the faculties, that is to say, that function independently of the inferior reason, except in so far as the obedience of faith requires its exercise…Thus the Spirit of the Lord of a sudden so clothes the tranquil, humble soul on whom He rests, and so changes him into another man.’*
Let us pray earnestly for the understanding which comes from above, then, so that we might truly put into practice what Jesus teaches us in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 5: 43-38: ‘But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.’
*From ‘The Meditations of William of St. Thierry’, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1954, pages 29-30.
Nordic Mountain Reflections 