Charles Williams : The New Christian Year

Quinquagesima Tuesday (February 28th, 2017)

What is Quinquagesima?

No creature can be a child of God but because the goodness of God is in it; nor can it have any union or communion with the goodness of the Diety till its life is a Spirit of Love.  This is the one only band of union betwixt God and the creature . . . Here the necessity is absolute: nothing will do instead of this will; all contrivances of holiness, all forms of religious piety signify nothing without this will to all goodness.  For as the will to all goodnes is the whole nature of God, so it must be the whole nature of every service or religion that can be acceptable to Him.

William Law: The Spirit of Love.

Quinquagesima Monday (February 27th, 2017)

What is Quinquagesima?

Do not lie about the past.

Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks.

And as I walked towards the jail, the word of the Lord came to me, saying, "My love was always to thee, and thou art in my love."

George Fox: Journal.

Jesus said: "Would thou love one who never died
For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?
And if God dieth not for man, and giveth not himself
Eternally for man, man could not exist; for man is love,
As God is love: every kindness to another is a little death
In the divine image; nor can man exist but by brotherhood."

William Blake: Jerusalem.

Quinquagesima Sunday (February 26th, 2017)

What is Quinquagesima?

The life of Jesus is perfected obedience to the will of the faithful God.  Jesus stands among sinners as a sinner; He sets Himself wholly under the judgment under which the world is set; He takes His place where God can be present only in questioning about Him; He takes the form of a slave; He moves to the cross and to death; His greatest achievement is a negative achievement.  He is not a genius endowed with manifest or even occult powers; He is not a hero or leader of men; He is neither poet nor thinker:—My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  Nevertheless, precisely in this negation, He is the fulfillment of every possibility of human progress, as the Prophets and the Law conceive of progress and evolution, because he sacrifices to the incomparably Greater cause there is no conceivable human possibility of which he did not rid Himself.  Herein he is recognized as the Christ; for this reason God hath exalted Him; and consequently He is the light of the Last Things by which all men and things are illuminated.

Karl Barth: The Epistle to the Romans.

Sexagesima Saturday (February 25th, 2017)

What is Sexagesima?

If this is a world in which I, and the majority of my fellow-beings, live in that perpetual distraction from God which exposes us to the one great peril, that of final and complete alienation from God after death, there is some wrong that I must try to help to put right.

T. S. Eliot: The Idea of a Christian Society.

The seven works of bodily mercy be these: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked and needy, harbour the houseless, comfort the sick, visit prisoners, bury the dead.  The seven works of spiritual mercy be these: teach men the truth, counsel men to hold with Christ's law, chastise sinners by moderate reproving in charity, comfort sorrowful men by Christ's passion, forgive wrongs, suffer meekly reproofs for the right of God's law, pray heartily for friend and for foe.

Middle English Sermons (abridged).

The Feast of Saint Matthias (February 24th, 2017)

The kingdom of heaven suffers violence from warm love and living hope, which conquer the 
Divine Will, not as when man overcomes man, but conquer it because it chooses to be conquered, and, so conquered, again conquers by its own benignity.

Dante: Paradise.

Jesus does not regard in Judas his enmity, but the order of God, which He loves and admits, since He calls him friend.

Pascal: Pensées.

Sexagesima Friday (February 24th, 2017)

What is Sexagesima?

Our heart must we give wholly unto him; that hath opened his heart so wide.  His heart is ours must be all one.  Nothing requireth he of us but the heart.  "Son," saith he, "give me thy heart."

Miles Coverdale: Fruitful Lessons on the Passion.