 |
| St. Hilary, Bishop and Doctor of the Church |
Saint Hilary, Bishop and Doctor
From
a sermon On the Trinity by Saint Hilary, bishop
May I serve you by making you known
I am aware, almighty God and
Father, that in my life I owe you a most particular duty. It is to make my every thought and word speak
of you.
In fact, you have conferred on
me this gift of speech, and it can yield no greater retrun than to be at your
service. It is for making you known as
Father, the Father of the only-begotten God, and preaching this to the world
that knows you not and to the heretics who refuse to believe in you.
In this matter of declaration of
my intention is only of limited value.
For the rest, I need to pray for the gift of your help and your
mercy. As we spread our sails of trusing
faith and public avowal before you, fill them with the breath of your Spirit,
to drive us on as we begin this course of proclaiming your truth. We have been promised, and he who made the
promise is trustworthy: Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and
you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.
Yes, in our poverty we will pray for our needs. We will study the sayings of your prophets
and apostles with unflagging attention, and knock for admittance wherever the
gift of understanding is safely kept.
But yours it is, Lord, to grant our petitions, to be present when we
seek you and to open when we knock.
There is an inertia in our
nature that makes us dull; and in our attempt to penetrate your truth we are
held within the bounds of ignorance by the weakness of our minds. Yet we do comprehend divine ideas by earnest
attention to your teaching and by obedience to the faith which carries us
beyond mere human apprehension.
So we trust in you to inspire
the beginnings of this ambitious venture, to strengthen its progress, and to
call us into a partnership in the spirit with the prophets and the
apostles. To that end, may we grasp
precisely what they meant to say, taking each word in its real and
authentic sense. For we are about to say what they already
have declared as part of the mystery of revelation: that you are the eternal
God, the Father of the eternal, only-begotten God; that you are one and not
born from another; and that the Lord Jesus is also one, born of you from all
eternity. We must not proclaim a change
in truth regarding the number of gods.
We must not deny that he is begotten of you who are the one God; nor
must we assert that he is other than the true God, born of you who are truly
God the Father.
Impart to us, then, the meaning
of the words of Scripture and the light to understand it, with reverence for
the doctrine and confidence in its truth.
Grant that we may express what we believe. Through the prophets and apostles we know
about you, the one God the Father, and the one Lord Jesus Christ. May we have the grace, in the face of
heretics who deny you, to honor you as God, who is not alone, and to proclaim
this as truth.
Taken from
the Liturgy of the Hours, According to the Roman Rite, Ordinary Time, Catholic
Book Publishing Corp. New York, 1975
No comments:
Post a Comment