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Office Of Readings | Week 19, Sunday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Dialogue Of Saint Catherine Of Siena On Divine Providence | Bonds Of Love
‘The bonds of love.’
This passage from Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue on Divine Providence is cast as a prayer, but it also unfolds as a theological reflection. Catherine speaks to God in direct, personal language, yet her words move from personal confession to intercession for the whole Church. She frames her petition in terms of the ‘mystical body’ — a phrase drawn from Paul’s letters, meaning the Church as a living organism bound together in Christ.
Her argument is layered. She first appeals to God’s greater glory: to forgive the many is a greater manifestation of divine mercy than to forgive one sinner alone. She then shifts from self-interest to solidarity — her own salvation, she says, would be incomplete if the Church remained in ‘death’, a metaphor for sin.
Catherine roots her plea in the narrative of creation and redemption. Humanity’s dignity, she recalls, comes from being made in the image and likeness of God, a status forfeited by sin. Yet she insists that God’s response to this loss was driven not by compulsion but by love. The sending of the ‘only-begotten Son’ is described in strikingly concrete terms: Christ ‘went down’ from divine heights into the ‘clay’ of human life, taking on both the nature and the injustice of humanity.
One of the passage’s most distinctive images is the ‘veiling’ of God’s divinity in the humanity of Christ — the ‘cloud’ of flesh drawn from Adam. This is Catherine’s way of holding together two aspects of Christian teaching: that Christ is truly God and truly man, and that this union was motivated by love.
Her final plea is a bold universalism of prayer. She does not restrict mercy to the righteous or the penitent, but asks that God ‘freely extend’ it to ‘all your lowly creatures’. For Catherine, this request is not separate from the Incarnation; it is its natural consequence. If God has already stooped so low in love, then mercy for all is not merely possible but fitting to God’s character.
A Reading From The Dialogue Of Saint Catherine Of Siena On Divine Providence | Bonds Of Love
My sweet Lord, look with mercy upon your people and especially upon the mystical body of your Church. Greater glory is given to your name for pardoning a multitude of your creatures than if I alone were pardoned for my great sins against your majesty. It would be no consolation for me to enjoy your life if your holy people stood in death. For I see that sin darkens the life of your bride the Church – my sin and the sins of others.
It is a special grace I ask for, this pardon for the creatures you have made in your image and likeness. When you created man, you were moved by love to make him in your own image. Surely only love could so dignify your creatures. But I know very well that man lost the dignity you gave him; he deserved to lose it, since he had committed sin.
Moved by love and wishing to reconcile the human race to yourself, you gave us your only-begotten Son. He became our mediator and our justice by taking on all our injustice and sin out of obedience to your will, eternal Father, just as you willed that he take on our human nature. What an immeasurably profound love! Your Son went down from the heights of his divinity to the depths of our humanity. Can anyone’s heart remain closed and hardened after this?
We image your divinity, but you image our humanity in that union of the two which you have worked in a man. You have veiled the Godhead in a cloud, in the clay of our humanity. Only your love could so dignify the flesh of Adam. And so by reason of this immeasurable love I beg, with all the strength of my soul, that you freely extend your mercy to all your lowly creatures.
Christian Prayer With Jesus Christ
Eternal Father,
You formed us in your image and likeness,
and when we turned from you,
you gave us your Son to share our nature and bear our sin.
Draw your Church into the unity of his body,
that none may remain in the shadow of death.
Clothe us again in the dignity you willed for us at creation,
and soften our hearts to recognise your love
veiled in the humanity of Christ.
Through him who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen.
Glossary Of Christian Terms
Mystical body – A term used for the Church, understood as a living body whose members are united to Christ as the head.
Majesty – A title or description for God’s supreme dignity and sovereignty.
Mediator – One who stands between two parties to reconcile them; in Christian theology, Christ reconciles humanity to God.
Justice – In this context, the righteous standing before God that Christ makes possible for humanity.
Only-begotten Son – A biblical phrase referring to the unique and eternal relationship of Jesus to the Father.
Divinity – The divine nature or Godhead.
Clay of our humanity – A reference to the biblical account of Adam being formed from the dust of the ground, symbolising human mortality and weakness.
Incarnation – The Christian belief that the eternal Son of God took human nature in the person of Jesus Christ.
Saint Augustine’s sermon addresses a recurring human tendency: the belief that former times were better than the present. His reflection places suffering within the broader theological framework of punishment for sin and correction for salvation. Affliction is not simply random misfortune but part of the divine pedagogy by which believers are purified and trained in perseverance [ … ]
The crowds press in around Jesus. Perhaps there is a sense of enough having been done for now in this place, in terms of teaching and the healing miracles of Jesus. Perhaps there is a sense of too much ferment, and a need to leave these thousands upon thousands of people in quiet to reflect upon what they have experienced of Jesus so far. It is time to move, and now there does arise a question of who will follow Jesus and who will stay behind. This may be a figurative moment, in that sometimes there are people who follow Jesus in a great rush of feeling and momentarily; others are concerned to follow Jesus permanently, all their lives [ … ]
We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
