Extreme Measures, Fr. John Dominic Corbett, O.P.

It is a curious fact that the earliest Christian moralists were hesitant to embrace growth in "virtue" as the goal or description of the Christian moral life. This is because the term "virtue" suggested to them an inner mastery which bordered on self-sufficiency. This attitude of the pagans was always on the lookout for balance and emotional distance, and any unseemly display of joy or grief would have been despised by them as evidence of moral failure. But the mind of the Church has always been that the proper measure of love of God is to love God without measure. We Christians do not or should not silently reprove ourselves for "indiscretions." We mourn, or ought to mourn, our sins as though they were attending our own funeral. Likewise we Christians do not, or should not, give measured and discrete approval to God. Instead, we dance like fools because, against all the odds, we have been invited to God's own wedding feast. A measured response to a social indiscretion or to a job promotion is virtuous because these things are of only relative importance. But if we would see the life and death implications of our yes or our no to God, we would see that nothing less than a dirge or a dance will do.

Psalm 95

Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord;
   let us acclaim the rock of our salvation.
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
   let us joyfully sing psalms to him.

Come, let us bow down in worship;
   let us kneel before the Lord who made us.
For he is our God,
   and we are the people he shepherds, the flock he guides.

Oh, that today you would hear his voice:
   "Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,
   as in the day of Massah in the desert,
Where your fathers tempted me;
   they tested me though they had seen my works."

Psalm 144

Blessed by the Lord, my rock,
   who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.
My refuge and my fortress,
   my stronghold, my deliverer,
My shield, in whom I trust,
   who subdues my people under me.
O God, I will sing a new song to you;
   with a ten-stringed lyre I will chant your praise,
You who give victory to kings,
   and deliver David, your servant from the evil sword.

John 15:16

It was not you who chose me, says the Lord, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.

Rose Round: The signs of the Four Evangelists

"Is that your eagle, Theo?"
Theo laughed. "No, it's St. John's," he said.
"St. John's?"
"You know the four Evangelists have signs?" Theo said. "St. John has the eagle, which was said to fly unblinded towards the sun, because he is the one who looked longest and deepest at Christ on earth and into the mystery of his being when he went back into his glory."
....
"And what's St. Luke, Theo?"
"St. Luke is a Bull."
"How queer! Why?" Matt asked.
"I'm not sure," said Theo. "Perhaps because the Bull is a sign of life: the zodiac bull comes in the spring, you know. He's the sign of generation and Christ is the regenerator of Man, and his sacrifice of his own life was made in the spring. He said himself that the seed must die to bring up the new corn. The signs are symbols of mystery: they let you look through the doors but they don't tell you everything at once. You can never know everything there is to know, that's why we shall be happy for ever in heaven if we get there."

Rose Round: The fourfold living signs of the soul

Signs of mystery, Theo had said, when he had seen the eagle in the north, before the hard winter and the time he had fallen off the roof. Theo wore an eagle in his ring, on his hand; it was his sign as well as St. John's, the great bird king of the air who flew unblinded towards the sun. But this bull-head was not less his, nor the lion and the man looking west, and Matt felt that they were his own too, and any man's, and in every man they lived.
But bulls are dangerous and wild, Matt thought, and lions too: they were beasts of the forest and the great plains and of desert and mountain, and were they hiding inside people, inside himself? Suppose the bull charged? The lion roared upon its prey? The eagle swooped on its victim? Suppose the man should change his face and become any or all of these, and no longer human? He was suddenly afraid; it was not only dangerous, it was terrifying to be alive, to be someone with all these unknown powers in his heart.
Then he saw Theo come through the western arch on the other side of the fountain, looking at the sun rising, and at him too.
"Theo," he said, holding on to the stone basin with his hands and looking through the falling water. "I was thinking about the bull, and the others, how dangerous they are. Suppose they got loose? I know they're not real animals, but they are sort of real inside, aren't they? Suppose they did?"
"Well, they do sometimes," said Theo, smiling. He came up to the fountain. "They get very wild. Why do you think our world is in such confusion, with nations all quarreling and fighting, and people grabbing everything they can from each other, and making silly excuses to justify themselves? The beasts inside have got loose."
"I don't like them then," said Matt. Yet he had, in fact, felt only wonder and delight when he had seen them, and a kind of awe.
"Yes, you do like them," said Theo. "They are splendid. They are all kings. They are what makes you a king too. You are a man in your mind, an eagle in your spirit, a lion in the courage of your will."
"But the bull?"
"He's in the power of love," said Theo.
Matt said, "But they do go wild, you said so."
"Yes, they go wild," said Theo. "But look at the garden: it's a square, but a square in a circle. It has a center. Don't you remember talking about it on the tower?"
"The sun," said Matt. "The sun is the center."
"The sun is the center outside," said Theo. "It is the image of the one who is inside: Lux umbra Dei."
Matt looked at the golden sun rising. "If he's in the center, all's well with the sacred beasts," said Theo. "The Phoenix is their Lord."
The sun was shining in his nest of clouds, brighter and brighter, like the Phoenix in the rose of fire. Matt looked back at the fountain, the water that sprang up and fell back for ever.
"Then why is it our Lady who is here in the middle of the garden, Theo? Why not him?"
"Because this is our world," said Theo. "He chose to come into it through her. He is too great to fit into the ring of the world, this little pattern of our sun and our hearts, except by becoming her child, and so one of us. And yet if you look at it inside out you will see that all this, the solar circle, the seasons of time, the fountain of life, the fourfold living signs of the soul, and the Lady herself who said yes to the will of love, are all in him, only in him, and we see them clearer when we look at them in him. There are some people who will only see everything in themselves, but don't be one of them. Our selves are only moons to his sun: in his light all things are revealed as they are."

Circles around the Sun

"Look, the children are playing ball on the lawn, with Sam," said Alix.
Their figures, in a wide circle, were tiny far away, like another sundial, Matt thought, only these figures moved. Then Alix said it.
"They're like a sundial too."
"Games played in circles are games of the sun," said Theo.
"Ring of roses," said Matt. "The Rose Round."
He could see the Rose Round from here, away in its corner by the woods, and suddenly remembered looking through the telescope at it.
"We all go round the sun," said Alix.
"And the sun is the shadow of God," said Theo. "Lux Umbra Dei."

Rose Round, pg. 195.