Mystagogy: The Rod, the Root, and the Flower pt IV

Part three of my reflections on Coventry Patmore's short religious thoughts in The Rod, The Root, and the Flower [Part I, Part II and Part III]

From Magna Moralia:

IV - 'Merit', as the word is used in Scripture and by the Church, means rather capacity than right. Faith 'merits' because, without faith, there can obviously be no capacity. Christ took upon Himself the flesh and human nature of the Blessed Virgin, 'through whom we have deserved' (or been made able) 'to receive the Author of Life.' Emptiness of self is the supreme merit of the Soul because it is the first condition of her capacity for God. 'My soul shall make her boast in the Lord: the humble shall hear thereof and be glad.' The Soul's boast and merit, as it were her vanity, is the God-seducing charm of her conscious nothingness. She becomes through her

Mere emptiness of self, the female twin
Of Fullness, sucking all God's glory in.

The Secret of obtaining and maintaining this humility, which is capacity, is not to deny the graces you have received, but to consider and be thankful for them all. If a sudden splendor shines about you in the night, and you see your Soul 'in the light of God's countenance', as beautiful as a Goddess, never forget it, but remember that you are verily that Goddess for Him so long as you acknowledge yourself to be of yourself nothing but dust and ashes and a house of devils.

Connections with recent readings: emptiness as capacity for grace ties nicely to Houselander's reflections on the Blessed Mother in The Reed of God; and "self" as block to love in Vanauken's A Severe Mercy. "He must increase, but I must decrease," said St John the Baptist, and in his decrease he gained so much more.

But it is the thankfulness, "eucharist," that catches my heart as the means to increase this emptiness. This makes sense the more you place gratitude for anything outside of yourself, and above all in God, it creates the space for grace to work. As long as you are either ungrateful, or thankful only to the self, then there is no room for God. "Humility is nothing thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less." -C.S. Lewis. This focus on thankfulness only increases the importance of Thankfulness at the beginning of the Examen, but changes the focus as I understood it. Thankfulness in the Examen is not so much about avoiding focusing on the negative in one's day, but empties the self up front in order that seeing God's Trinitarian love in the day is not blocked by your own ego.

XXII - God is the only reality, and we are real only so far as we are in His order, and He is in us. Hell, or Hades, was truly regarded by the ancients as the realm of shades, or phantoms and frightful dreams. We may know this by considering what phantoms, terrified by other phantoms, even the best of us are, in those seasons in which God withdraws His sensible presence and courage from our hearts, and we are frightened out of our wits by shadowy evils which our reason tells us are no evils; when some small prospective loss looks like ruin, some really trifling possible trouble keeps us awake all night with fear, and some little difficulty, which lifting a hand might remove, seems insuperable. All evils are phantoms, even physical pain, which a perfectly courageous heart converts, by simply confronting it, into present and sensible joy of purgation and victory. 'Savages' will laugh and sing under excruciating tortures, and many a Saint has been forbidden by his director to inflict on himself corporeal pain, because it had become a luxury.

When reflecting on our life and our day, the phantoms of evil in the day should be faced head and and acknowledged for what they are. Much less are the annoyances and bruises to the ego. Fortitude is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and when we have ceased to fear these phantoms it is a sure sign of his presence and the acceptance of this gift.

XXVI - The true Temple has veil within veil, and one is rent for the ingress of God every time the Soul dies upon the Cross, that is, resists interior temptations even to despair. 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His Saints'; and every Soul which is destined for Sanctity dies many times in this terrible initiative caress of God.

"we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." —1 John 3:2. This rending of successful veils points to both God's ingress—his Spirit and grace, that divinizes us when we take up the cross of Christ—but also our capacity to see God, as he is, which comes from being divinized. Our theosis through our participation in the death of Jesus by our own deaths of ego, temptations, etc increases our capacity to "taste AND see the goodness of the Lord" in this life.

XXXVII - The Visible Church is like the larva of the caddis-fly, from which the winged truth shall finally emerge, perfect and beautiful, but which at present inhabits a house of singular grotesqueness. Sticks, straws, stones, and shells in amorphous agglutination, giving much occasion for wonder and scandal to the Gentiles, and often causing anxiety to its inhabitant, who is apt to confuse these strange externals with its own life, and to think that attacked when these are criticised. 

Have you ever, when riding, near sunset, or soon after sunrise, noticed the shadow of yourself and your horse on the road before you? Such a ridiculous shadow is the visible Church of the invisible.

Being incarnate beings, it can be very easy to get caught up in the passing shadows of this world. I think this cuts right to the heart of C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters, Letter 2 when the demon's ally is the Church; not the Church "spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners." but "the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics" not to mention the Church of sinners and scandal. But the visible Church is just a kernel, and "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."