There is something more here

- Father Gerald Vann, O.P.

It is not the magnitude, or otherwise, of the work we have to do that should concern us, but the magnitude of the love with which we do it. It is a terrible mistake to suppose that if we simply carry out the commandments externally we have nothing to worry about. That can be no more than lip-service; it can be simply self-culture, the service of the self; and it can be a form of self-complacency and the kind of practical pelagianism which thinks it can get on very well without worrying too much about its radical sinfulness and need of God. Of course we have to try to keep the commandments; but the essential is to try to keep them in such a way that we learn to see more and more clearly our true Center, to keep our eyes more and more on God and less and less on ourselves, to say "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me." There are, in fact, two opposite heresies here which we have to avoid: the one says, If I am right it doesn't matter what I do. We have to try to live in God, to be right; but we learn to be right only through slowly and painfully trying to do right; and on the other hand if we were really living in God then inevitably we should, as a matter of fact, do right, for we should hunger and thirst after righteousness.


Like so many of the great meditations one finds in The Magnificat this quote opens us up to many reflections.  I just want to raise up this thought: "our true Center" is not in us as much as it abides in God. It is as St Paul said, "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me."  Suddenly "I" refers to something more than myself. 


... the essential is to try to keep them (the commandments) in such a way that we learn to see more and more clearly our true Center, to keep our eyes more and more on God and less and less on ourselves, to say "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me."  We have to try to live in God, to be right;  if we were really living in God we should hunger and thirst after righteousness.



So what are we really hungering and thirsting for today, this moment?