We are concerned with the virtue of temperateness…the word has become attenuated and degraded in our modern speech, and the nature of the virtue seriously misunderstood.  It is not synonymous with total abstention from alcohol; it is not, in any case, restricted to a right use of food and drink; and, most important, it is not simply a negative thing, a restraint, but a positive and creative quality, an essential quality of love.

Temperateness has two aspects.  First of all, it is what gives the quality of humility and reverence to our attitude to material things.  It is what enables us to love things instead of grabbing, mauling, and battering on them; it is what enables us to contemplate and not to devour.

You can see an example of what this means—through the example of a man who is alive to beauty and how he savors a glass of wine: the Christian virtue of temperateness differs from this because the motive is different—not the appreciation of beauty as an end itself, but the curbing and training of the appetites for the love of God and His justice and therefore the restoring of the rule of spirit over flesh…(material things) are not just the means to man’s pleasure; they are of value in themselves as the handiwork of God, created to glorify Him; and so we have to learn to love them without greed and treat them with reverence.

–Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

We might say that the key to the whole problem is the omnipresence of God.  “He sees God aright who sees Him in all things”; and he sees things aright who sees God’s presence within them.  The burden of what the men of prayer have to tell us in this connection is just this; that if you fail to see God in things you fail to see the things themselves; and in consequence, if you love them, you are not really loving the things themselves but a part of them.  And when you isolate this partial vision, and love it, you tend to make your love a form of self-love—you tend to love things for what they can give you, you, and always you—and so indeed you set yourself up against God, and so indeed creatures are a stumbling-block.  But if, on the other hand, you realize that God is “all in all,” that He is what is inmost in things as well as what is infinitely apart from them, and that they are meant precisely to bring you to know Him—the visible things, as St Paul tells us, are meant precisely to teach us of the invisible—and if, therefore, you learn to love things not partially but wholly, then indeed you love all things, and love them the more passionately for loving them wholly, but at the same time you love nothing but God; there is no rivalry, there is only the all-inclusive universality of the Divine Love Itself.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

Father Gerald Vann

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

The quality in our relations with our fellowmen which, says Saint Thomas, immediately disposes us to the life of vision is love of peace. And why? Because the life of vision (contemplative life)—is incompatible with agitation. You cannot adore God in self oblivion, you cannot, ”cast all your cares away,” during prayer, if you are tossed about on a sea of worries and solicitudes about external things, nor can you if you are not yet at peace within the mind itself because of a lack of complete identity of personal will with Divine Will (obstinance and immaturity inflicting blindness). “Wisdom,” says Saint Augustine, “is to the peace lovers, in whom there is no movement of rebellion, but obedience to Reason.” But wisdom is the end.

…wisdom reduces the manifold of life to God, and therefore makes things intelligible as a unity…the vision, the intuition or awareness, of all things in all their concreteness, their goodness and beauty as well as their truth; above all, you need some degree, at least, of direct knowledge of the nature of God; and when you have that vision in its plenitude, able to see all things in Him and Him in all things—and at the same time the wisdom which judges all things in the light of the highest of all causes, the Cause of all Being Itself, then you have wisdom, the fullest and deepest perception; seeing things as it were with the eyes of God, then you share something of the peace of God.

….supreme wisdom is “from above” (infused), given to those who have the humility and the docility to receive it; it is given to those who have learned to be as little children…it is the joy, peace, and exhilaration of learning from love.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

Father Gerald Vann

…they that mourn, they shall be comforted; and they shall be comforted, not simply by a subsequent reward, a belated consolation prize for what they have suffered, but because their sorrow itself will be turned into joy even on earth, the sort of joy that gives life, strength, courage, and exhilaration.

…The Paraclete, the Comforter, is not primarily a soothing influence. The word itself means a strengthening: it is, if you will a soothing influence—this is sometimes a necessity—but only in order to give a renewed courage and strength to face the reality which has overwhelmed the sufferer. And perhaps here there is a clue to our Lord’s apparent paradox. Blessed are they who are ready and anxious to go to great lengths, endure great discomfort, in order to bring strength and courage to others: for in their giving to others of these things they will themselves receive them. To encourage another to great deeds is to be strengthened yourself. And—lest we lose sight of the gentler side of comfort in stressing the stronger—there are a few things that bring greater balm and peace to the soul than to bring them to the soul of another.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

Faith walking into the unknown,
Hope arising from the core of being,
Nothing made up, nothing unknown,
Existence within stillness, a quietness within cognizance,
Love guiding every breath, soothing every step, strengthening inner resolve,
Everything and anything can be done in the name of Christ,
Morality arises as a reality rather than an infliction,
Sentience sublime, one understands able to exercise wisdom,
The simple naturally ascends,
Going up appears as the only path,
Divine in presence,
The easing of burdens becomes a way of giving,
Need, delusion, desire, self-serving, hiding behind that which is good distresses,
Religion is not self-absorption, nor the expanding of pride,
Nothing superior, ethos inferior,
No despair as one becomes little, as one learns to do less,
Monstrosities form grandiose, they always will, yet a true way returns to the center,
Faith, hope and charity created by the Creator as an interior,
A source, an image and likeness.

The Christian must die in order to be re-born; and the death is the death of the self that sets itself up to be independent; to be a God, and to use all things as its creatures, for profit or pleasure: you will use all things, and be quite prepared incidentally to be fond of them, just so long as they fit in with your scheme and minister to your comfort. But that is not the Christian attitude. It is on LOVE that the “whole law depends”; and this condescending affection which will use things on condition is not love. In LOVE every getting is a form of giving; this other attitude is a sort of lust, where every giving is only a form of, or a means to, getting. The center is yourself; in LOVE the center is always the other, and yourself only identified as with the other. The pleasure-seeker in this sense is enslaved to the original sin: he has yet to die, to make the long journey and slay the serpent, and find himself anew and truly in the Other (GOD). There is no LOVE without reverence; but reverence consists in saying, “It is you who are important”.

…Passion cannot be worship of God unless it is reverence towards its immediate earthly object; and just as piety towards creatures is the test of piety towards God, so with reverence. If you want to be among those who mourn, you must start by making sure that you are temperate in your attitude toward creatures: that you are reverent towards men, women, animals, and inanimate things. You must not be sentimental: you must not make reverence synonymous with fear or softness or blindness. –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

Reverence: They that mourn…