Beware man of thyself,
Self burden thou wilt rue.
It will impair thee more,
Than thousand devils do.
Three enemies has man:
Himself, Satan, the world;
The first will be the last
That to the ground is hurled.
Angelus Silesius ‘The Cherubinic Wanderer’
…we are called to be Church in, to, and for the world; to the culture, and the society in which we find ourselves.
This does not mean that we have to reject everything about our modern culture. It does mean that we have to look at it critically, and unmask the reality of the way we live, and in particular, how the way we live has consequence for others. Arise Together in Christ. Season 3: In the Footsteps of Christ.
No Man is an Island
“The Church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for the child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; for all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some lives are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some lives by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation, and His hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall open to one another…..
No man is an island, entire of himself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manner of thy friend’s or of thine own family were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” —John Donne (1572-1631) from Meditations XVII taken from the Arise booklet quoted above.
Angelus Silesius, Franciscan Third Order, medical physician to the courts, poet.
“MYSTICISM is, as it were, a short cut of sentiment to reach a truth otherwise inaccessible under given conditions…I have devoted more time to a renewed perusal of one of the most prominent and interesting mystics of Germany, Johannes Schener, or as he is better known by his adopted name, Angelus Silesius, who was born in 1624 at Breslau, and died in 1677. While mystics of the type of Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg present their views in long essays of a philosophical nature which read like the dreams (or you prefer, the vagaries) of a prophet, Angelus Silesius condenses his views in short apothegms, written in a somewhat archaic style, mostly in simple verse, and often with crude rhymes….
Johannes Scheffler was born of Protestant parents at Breslau, the capital of Silesia, in 1624, and was baptized in the same year on Christmas day. Having passed through the usual course of education at a he went to the Universities of Strassburg, Leyden and Padua where he studied medicine and philosophy. At the last mentioned place he took his doctor’s degree in 1647. For three years, 1649-1652, he served as Court Physician to Duke Sylvius Nimrod of Oels, who was a pious but decidedly onesided Protestant.
Scheffler’s mystic inclinations had long before alienated him from the dogmatic and anti-artistic spirit of the religion of his birth which during the middle of the seventeenth century was more severe and bigoted than ever before or afterwards. At the same time there was a religious revival in the Roman Catholic world which proved attractive to him, and so it was but natural that finally in 1653 he severed his old affiliations, and joined the Church that by the mystical glamor of its historical traditions was most’ sympathetic to him. The zeal with which Scheffler embraced Roman Catholicism made him unjust toward the Protestant persuasion and implicated him in very unpleasant controversies. Introduction to ‘Cherubinic Wanderer’ by Angelus Silesius
More words by doctor of man Angelus Silesius
The first spasms shake the body already mercilessly torn by the scourging and by a night of torment; the victim has been raised roughly upon His gibbet; the blood flows in thin streams from His hands and feet, oozes from His forehead, and stripes His breast and members along the marks of the lashes. The cruelly strained position allows no movement but the soul is unfettered, and the great shudders that rack the body leave the mind in full possession of its powers.
There is still a little more of this great life to be lived, a life which in the narrow confines of Judea embraces all the world: a cry or two more, a few more words of sovereign power, and one more lament that asks compassion of earth and Heaven: of earth, to recompense it with mercy to us, of Heaven, to grant us its blessings. And through it all is that glance which sees beyond all things, that glance which we shall follow as far as our sight can reach. But it goes infinitely beyond our vision, for it passes through the visible and invisible worlds and penetrates to their source, to the very depths of God. –Father Antonin Sertillanges ‘What Jesus Saw From the Cross’
How terrible when people are led to believe, or left to believe, that once they are in love they have nothing to do but live happily ever after, they have nothing further to learn. –Father Gerald Vann
It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth. –-Father Antonin Sertillanges
When, therefore, the soul reflects that God is the principal agent in this matter, and the guide of its blind self, who will lead it by the hand and lead it where it could not of itself go (namely to the supernatural which neither its understanding, nor its will, nor its memory, could know as they are), then its chief care will be to see that its set no obstacle in the way of the guide, who is the Holy Spirit, upon the road by which God is leading it, and which is ordained according to the law of God and faith… –St John of the Cross “Living Flame of Love’
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