He says, ‘he comes down’ from on high from the Father of lights.” :What does he mean? The Son and the Holy Ghost have one source in the Father, and the Holy Ghost and the Son are one light and they are both of them lights. God is the Father of lights. St Augustine tells what the soul is tasting in God. He explains that in that food the tongue ‘is savouring the invisible light ; he says the soul is not a thing of sensible appetites and pleasures ; she has a hidden energy and luminosity.
According to the masters, the angels are a light: God is the entire light, with whom is no-change nor time nor turning. The nobler the creature the more akin to God. All creaturely being- and-doing is in time. But the angels, who are higher, are in essence timeless and without alteration in themselves. Their wonted activities in God are free from time, but in that they look down they have an aspect (or shadow) of time. But in none of his works has God any shadow of time nor of change. So far as there is no changing, no shadow in man, so far he compares with divinity. Creature has ever this and that, one thing and another ; but in God exists neither this nor that, neither one nor tother ;
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and unless there be in us what two and two are, what is one plus other, the happenings within us remain just good and ill. There is no one or other with the Father of lights. May we be given every good gift and every perfect gift wherein we are exalted above time to the Father of lights with whom is no variableness nor temporal nature, So help us God. Amen.
Every Good Gift
Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum de sursum est descendens a patre luminum (Jac. 1,,). St James says in his epistle, * Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from above from the Father of lights.’
Now ye must know that people who resign themselves to God and diligently seek to do his will, to these, I say, whatever God may send will be the best. As God lives, be sure it is the very best, and there can be no better way. Some other may seem better yet is not so good for thee; God wills this way and not that, therefore this way is bound to be the best. Sickness or poverty, hunger or thirst, what God does give thee or what he does not, that is the very best for thee, aye, though it be fervour or the interior life which, alas! thou dost lack. Whatever thou hast or hast not, accept it all to the glory of God, and then whatever he sends thee will be for the best.
Peradventure thou wilt say, How can I tell whether it is God’s will or not? If it were not God’s will it would not be. Neither sickness nor anything else dost thou have excepting God wills. And therefore knowing it to be God’s will thou oughtest to rejoice in it and to be so content therewith that any pain shall lose its sting for thee; aye, even in extremity of pain to feel the least affliction or distress were altogether wrong: accept it from God as the best since it is bound to be the best thing for thee. It is of the essence of him to will what is best. Let me then will it too; there is nothing that should please me better. Supposing there was someone I tried hard to please and whom I knew for certain liked me in a grey coat more than any other; doubtless that coat would please me too, and I should prefer it to any of the rest however nice they were. Given then my wish to please a certain person, the things I know he wishes both of word and deed are the things that I would do and those alone. Judge for yourselves then of your love! If ye do indeed love God ye will like nothing better than that which best enables him to work his will in us. However great may seem the pain or the privation,
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except thou take delight therein as great as in thine ease and plenty, it is wrong.
One thing I am wont to say, and it is the fact, that daily we cry in our pater noster, Lord, thy will be done! and when his will is done we grumble and are discontented at it. Whatever he does let us deem that the best and like that best of all. Those who do take it as the best always remain tranquil. Sometimes ye will say, Alas! ’twere better something else had happened, or, had that not been, things would have turned out better. As long as thou dost think so thou wilt never be at peace. Accept it all for the best. That is the first moral of our text.
There is another meaning, mark it well. He says ‘ every gift.’ The very best and the very highest, these are innate gifts and in him the most innate of all. God gives nothing so gladly as great gifts. Once in this very place I said, God likes forgiving big sins more than small ones. The bigger they are the gladder he is and
_the quicker to forgive them. It is the same with graces, gifts. and virtues: the greater they are the greater his pleasure in bestowing them, for the giving of largesse is his nature. . The bigger the things and the better the more shall ye get. [The noblest creatures are the angels who are minds and nothing else; they have no carnal nature and they are in number infinitely more than all the corporal things. ]
Once upon a time I laid it down that to be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form: it must come, not in from without but out from within. It really lives in the recesses of the soul. There all things are present to thee, subjectively alive and active in their zenith, in their prime. Why art thou unaware of it? Because thouart notat home. The more noble a thing the more common it is. Feeling I have in common with the beasts and life in common with the trees. Being is still more innate in me and that I have in common with all creatures. Heaven exceeds all neighbouring things, and it is nobler also. The nobler the thing the bigger it is and the more universal. Love is as noble as it is universal. It does indeed seem hard, as our Lord commands, to love our evenchristians as ourselves. The unenlightened say that we ought to love them just the same as they love themselves. Not so. We ought to love them no more than our own selves, which is not difficult. If you come to consider, it is matter for reward more than a behest. The command seems hard but the reward desirable. He who loves God as he ought and must (whether he would or not), and as all creatures love him, will love his evenchristian as himself, rejoicing
~ in his joys and hoping for his honour as much as for his own and
treating the other like himself. By this means he is always happy
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whether in honour or in need, just as though he were in heaven and withal has more enjoyments than the blessings of himself alone.
The plain truth is that it is wrong for thee to hold thine honour dearer than another’s. Remember, an thou seekest aught of thine thou never shalt find God, for thou art not seeking God merely. Thou art seeking for something with God, making a candle of God, as it were, with which to find something, and then, having found it, throwing the candle away.. Thus shalt thou fare: aught that.thou findest with God is naught, whatsoever it be, whether profit or wages or the interior life or anything else: naught dost thou seek and naught shalt thou find. Thou shalt find naught because it is naught thou dost seek; that is all. All creatures are a mere naught. I say not they are small, are aught : they are absolutely naught. A thing without being is not (or is naught). Creatures have no real being, for their being consists in the presence of God. If God turned away for an instant they would all perish. I have sometimes said, and it is true, that he who has gotten the whole world plus God has gotten no more than God by himself. Having all creatures without God is no more than having one fly without God; just the same, no more nor less.
This is a true saying. The man who gives a thousand marks of gold for the making of convents or of churches is doing a great deed. But that man gives a great deal more who gives a thousand marks for naught: he is doing far more than the other. When God created all creatures he could not move in them, they were so small and narrow. But the soul he made so like himself, so nearly his own peer, on purpose to give himself to her: nothing else that he could give her would she care for in the least. God must give me himself for my own as he is his own, or I shall get naught, nor is aught else to my taste. Whoso receives him thus outright must wholly have renounced himself and gone out of himself ; he gets straight from God all that he has, as his own just as much as it is his, and our Lady and all the habitants of heaven. All this is meet and proper to this man. Those who have renounced themselves and are in this sense dead unto themselves receive the same, no less. .
Thirdly, the term ‘Father of lights.” The word father implies ‘to us a son. Father stands for abstract generation, and is an expression for the universal principle of life. The Father generates his Son in his eternal intellect and the Father generates his Son in the soul just as he does in his own nature ; he bears his Son in the soul as her own, and his existence depends on his bringing his Son to birth in the soul, whether he would or no. On one occasion
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I was asked what the Father is doing in heaven? I said, He is begetting his Son, an act he so delights in and which pleases him so well that he does nothing else but generate his Son, and these twain are flowering with the Holy Ghost. When the Father gives birth to his Son in me I am his very Son and not another: we are another in manhood, true, but there I am the Son himself and no other. As sons we are lawful heirs. He who knows the truth wots this right well. The word father connotes just be- getting and having of sons. We are sons in his Son and are the Son himself.
Now consider the words, ‘they come from above.’ I said, referring to this very thing, Whoso desires to receive from above must needs be below in true humility. Know in good sooth, if a thing is not right underneath it receives nothing nor conceives nothing: not a single thing however small. Hast thou an eye to thine own self or to any thing or person, then thou art not right under and thou receivest nothing ; but being brought right under thou receivest all at once and in perfection. It is God’s nature to give, and his existence depends on his giving to us when we are under. If we are not, then we get nothing: we do him violence and kill him. Or if unable so to do to him, we do it to ourselves as far as in us lies. If thou wouldst really give him all, see to it thou dost put thyself right humbly under God, raising up God in thy heart and in thy understanding. The Father sent his son into the world in the fullness of time of the soul, when she had finished with time. When the soul is free from time and place the Father sends his Son into the soul. This is the explanation of the words, ‘the best gifts come from above from the Father of lights.’ Let us be ready to receive these same best gifts, So help us God the Father of lights. Amen.
- XLI A LITTLE AND YE SHALL NOT SEE ME