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Office Of Readings | Advent Friday Week 1 | A Reading From The Proslogion Of Saint Anselm | A Rousing Of The Mind To The Contemplation Of God
‘A rousing of the mind to the contemplation of God.’
Saint Anselm expresses a very personal kind of prayer — not analysing God from a distance, but putting into words the restless desire of a believer who knows that God is real, yet not yet fully seen. For Anselm, faith naturally awakens longing, and longing draws the soul deeper into God.
Anselm begins by calling the reader to silence and interior stillness. He knows how easily the mind is occupied by responsibilities, anxieties, and distractions. For him, the search for God requires a deliberate turning inward, a quietness of heart in which everything unnecessary is set aside. This is not escapism but a way of recovering the most important truth: that God cannot be found amid noise unless the heart is first at rest.
Anselm then prays honestly. He acknowledges the paradox that God is everywhere, yet not perceived; that God is light, yet unapproachable; that God made him, yet remains unseen. For Anselm, this tension is not a failure of faith but part of the believer’s journey. The human heart was created to behold God, and that vision is the fulfilment of our nature. Until that moment, the soul feels like an exile — loving the One it has not yet fully met.
Much of his prayer expresses a kind of holy impatience. He asks ‘How long?’ echoing the Psalms. He names the ache of loving God while feeling God’s hiddenness. Yet this longing itself becomes a form of worship. The desire to see God is already the work of grace, already the beginning of union.
Finally, Anselm prays for the help he knows he cannot supply. We cannot even begin to seek God unless God first draws us; we cannot find him unless he reveals himself. Seeking, longing, finding, loving — all of it depends on grace, but grace that engages the whole heart. Anselm wants to seek God with desire, to desire God in the seeking, to find God through love, and then to love God more fully in the finding.
Anselm’s prayer becomes a simple expression of the Christian life, especially in Advent: waiting, longing, asking for light, and trusting that God will reveal himself fully in his own time.
A Reading From The Proslogion Of Saint Anselm | A Rousing Of The Mind To The Contemplation Of God
Little man, rise up! Flee your preoccupations for a little while. Hide yourself for a time from your turbulent thoughts. Cast aside, now, your heavy responsibilities and put off your burdensome business. Make a little space free for God; and rest for a little time in him.
Enter the inner chamber of your mind; shut out all thoughts. Keep only thought of God, and thoughts that can aid you in seeking him. Close your door and seek him. Speak now, my whole heart! Speak now to God, saying, I seek your face; your face, Lord, will I seek.
And come you now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and how it may seek you, where and how it may find you.
Lord, if you are not here, where shall I seek you when you are absent? But if you are everywhere, why do I not see you present? Truly you dwell in unapproachable light. But where is unapproachable light, or how shall I come to it? Or who shall lead me to that light and into it, that I may see you in it? Again, by what signs, under what form, shall I seek you? I have never seen you, O Lord, my God; I do not know your face.
What, O most high Lord, shall this man do, an exile far from you? What shall your servant do, anxious in his love of you, and cast out far from your presence? He is breathless with desire to see you, and your face is too far from him. He longs to come to you, and your dwelling-place is inaccessible. He is eager to find you, but does not know where. He desires to seek you, and does not know your face.
Lord, you are my God, and you are my Lord, and never have I seen you. You have made me and renewed me, you have given me all the good things that I have, and I have not yet met you. I was created to see you, and I have not yet done the thing for which I was made.
And as for you, Lord, how long? How long, O Lord, do you forget us; how long do you turn your face from us? When will you look upon us, and hear us? When will you enlighten our eyes, and show us your face? When will you restore yourself to us?
Look upon us, Lord; hear us, enlighten us, reveal yourself to us. Restore yourself to us, that it may be well with us, yourself, without whom it is so ill with us. Pity our toilings and strivings towards you since we can do nothing without you.
Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me when I seek you, for I cannot seek you unless you teach me, nor find you unless you reveal yourself. Let me seek you in longing, let me long for you in seeking; let me find you by loving you and love you in the act of finding you.
Christian Prayer With Jesus
Lord God,
you have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
Grant us moments of quiet in which we can turn aside
from our burdens and distractions.
Teach us to seek you with honesty and longing.
Show us your light, strengthen our desire,
and guide us into the fullness of your presence.
Let us seek you because you draw us;
let us find you because you reveal yourself;
and let us love you more deeply
as you bring us nearer to your face.
Amen.
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Proslogion – A short work of prayerful theology by Saint Anselm, written as a meditation addressed directly to God.
Contemplation – A quiet, attentive form of prayer in which the soul seeks to rest in God’s presence.
The divine vision (or beatific vision) – The final and perfect seeing of God ‘face to face’ in heaven.
Grace – God’s free gift of his life and help, enabling us to seek, know, and love him.
Exile – A spiritual image for the human condition before seeing God: created for him, yet not yet fully united.
Longing for God – A desire planted by grace, expressing the soul’s natural orientation toward its Creator.
Divine hiddenness – The experience of God being real yet not fully seen or felt; a common theme in Scripture and prayer.
The Church teaches that marriage is a sacrament, which means that it is an outward sign of an inward grace. In marriage, a man and a woman are united in a way that reflects the union between Christ and the Church [ … ]
On Tuesday, His Grace turns to the theme of Jesus’ hidden years. His Grace asks the students to consider questions concerning what really happened: ‘Who, for instance, was Joseph? Was he indeed a carpenter, or has Joseph’s true role in the society in which he lived been misconstrued and forgotten to us? Though it be a beautiful, simplifying image to grasp, which offers to us much that is of value in Catholic faith… ‘A wise elder, which carpenter could mean, or a great engineer, an architekton, which in the Greek does not mean carpenter. But carpenter in the Hebrew could mean a wise man…’ His Grace turns the pages of his Bible back and forth, as if to itemize the paucity of information. Then he says: ‘What I think I can say to you with confidence is that it is of profound significance that we simply don’t know what Jesus was doing for most of his earthly life. There are some very different possibilities. One idea cherished by the Church is that Jesus worked with his father Joseph as a carpenter. Another possibility is that Jesus lived and prayed and studied closely with John the Baptist. They were cousins, and very close, almost the same, in age. Luke’s Gospel tells us clearly that Jesus and John knew each other from within the womb before they were born. So there may have been something quite important happening there. You see, we don’t know – it is an impossible mystery to us – just how much Jesus had to learn. This is because, if Jesus knew everything, humanly speaking, even as a tiny baby, then how can we say he is fully human? We simply can’t probe too far into this mystery, but we can draw extraordinary truth and healing from this thought, which becomes of immense relevance in our own lives. Jesus came to know and to understand himself not merely as a son of God, but as God the Son, and so as self-identical with his Father. It is not an adoptive relationship. Jesus is God. Now so much is hidden here. But this is a great gift. If you think about it, how do we come to know that we are loved by God, that we have our relationship with God? What are we born with in here’ – his chest – ‘and what do we have to learn? This is to say, what is gifted to us by other Christians at our baptism? ‘Jesus must have studied, and experienced profound revelation about who and what he truly was, and, so it seems to be, these studies cannot have been confined to the Semitic world. But this is the important point: there is a hiddenness about all of this. No matter which schools and which sects our Lord might have encountered all these years, this to us is as a desert space. What this means is that we can enter into the hidden life of Jesus, and there we can discover our own being with God, our own sonship. Our own particular being loved by God can come to us, if we can enter within this great unknown – into this desert space, where we are loved by Jesus. I firmly believe that there may be a great Lenten mystery in this period of our Lord’s life.’ A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 1 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 2 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 3 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 4 | King James Audio Bible | KJV A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 5 A Bishop’s Lenten Homily | Holy Week | Extracted From The Gospel According To Tomàs | Faith And Hope And Love And Sexuality | Part 6
In Luke’s account of the eschatological discourse, the apocalypse – from the Greek for revelation – is clearly envisaged as beginning in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. The natural world is portrayed as being in a state of turmoil, and this reinforces for the listener the impact of what will be – has been by the time of Luke’s writing – a political event. The Jewish rebellion and the sacking of Jerusalem will be brutal and bloody [ … ]
