Ronald A. Knox - Lightening Meditations

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Preface

For more than twelve years Mgr. Knox contributed every month a short sermon to The Sunday Times. In 1951 he gathered seventy-one of these sermons into a book which he entitled Stimuli. Introducing the collection Mgr. Knox warned readers to beware the sting these sermons contained: like the Scriptures, they have barbs here and there hidden beneath the surface,''ready to pierce the skin of your conscience, though it be as tough to kick the goad as the university of Tarsus can make it." At the same time Mgr. Knox pointed out that the book did not consist merely of scoldings, but contained comfort as well as admonition.

This second collection contains sermons of a later date than those published in Stimuli.

Through practice Mgr. Knox's skill in condensing his lesson was made perfect. This volume, I think, is both more disturbing and more comforting than the first. Each little sermon illuminates the dark corners of our conscience like a flash of lightning. The title Lightning Meditations is most apposite.

- v

PREFACE

Mgr. Knox carefully kept cuttings of these later sermons, and no doubt intended to republish them as a book. I have arranged them here on roughly the same pattern that Mgr. Knox followed in the first volume. No word has been altered. Occasionally I have added a footnote where there was need for a date or reference to a text.

Philip Caraman, S.J.

- vi

CONTENTS

XVIII. SWEPT AND GARNISHED, PART ONE

XIX. SWEPT AND GARNISHED, PART TWO

XX. DESTINY ACHIEVED

XXI. THE SOLICITED BLESSING

XXII. MYSTERY OF PALM SUNDAY

XXIII. LIFE HERE AND HEREAFTER

XXIV. SPRING-TIDE AND EASTER-TIDE XXV. OUR lord's DISAPPEARANCES

XXVI. SEEING AND BELIEVING

XXVII. GIVING LIFE

XXVIII. THE SHADOW ON THE PICTURE

XXIX. THE LEAVE-TAKING

XXX. THE WEANING

XXXI. THE BREATH OF GOD

XXXII. THE CHURCH CONTEMPLATIVE

XXXIII. PRAYER AND THE TRINITY

XXXIV. TRINITY SUNDAY XXXV. FOR ALL ALIKE

XXXVI. HEART AND HEAD

XXXVII. THE LOST SHEEP

XXXVIII. THE LOST UNIT

XXXIX. "BE opened"

XL. DEAF AND DUMB

XLI. THOUGHT FOR TOMORROW, PART ONE

XLII. THOUGHT FOR TOMORROW, PART TWO

XLIII. THE VIRGIN HEART

XLIV. AT CROSS PURPOSES

XLV. THE DELAYED COMING

XLVI. ABSENT AND PRESENT

- via

CONTENTS

Part Two SAINTS AND OTHERS

I. HOARDING IN HEAVEN 97

II. THE HOPE OF THE MAGDALEN 99 III. A PORTENT IN HEAVEN 101 VI. D.P.S' PATRON 103

V. PATRIOTISM 105

VI. AN AUTUMN SAINT 107

VII. THE WIVES' SAINT 109 VIII. A NEAR-SAINT 111

Part Three THIS AND THAT

I. THE HOPEFUL TRAVELLERS 115

II. THE BIAS IN OUR NATURES 117

III. CHRISTIAN SADNESS 119

IV. THE CARRIAGE WHEELS 121 V. AT PEACE 123

VI. WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY? 125

VII. A people's ATONEMENT 127

VIII. REST AND LIGHT 129 IX. THE OPEN EYE 131

X. IDLENESS 133

XI. TIDYING UP 135

XII. THE CHRISTIANS LOYALTY 137

XIII. FAMILIAR PRAYERS 139

XIV. ORIGIN UNKNOWN 141 XV. ON CALLINGS 143

XVI. RELIGION AND TASTE 145

CONTENTS

Part Four SOME VIRTUES

- X

PART ONE

Round the Year

CHAPTER I

The Royal Route

Now and again, the oldest imagery becomes topical; Coronation year makes it easy for us to catch the spirit of the Baptist's message, "Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten out his paths." The prophet was thinking, maybe, of Israel's return from exile, but to us it is the programme of the King's Coming. All that busy levelling and clearance typify a preparation of the heart which is to be expected in us as we look forward to this year's Christmas, and beyond that, to the eternal Christmas which will straighten out our world for good.

"Every valley is to be bridged, and every mountain and hill levelled"; the ancients built their roads, as we our railways, with an eye to avoiding steep gradients the cutting and the embankment must eliminate rises and dips. That Christmas ought to drive a cutting through our self-conceit goes without saying; for love of us men and for our salvation, God took on himself

the nature of a slave. But equally, it must bridge our gulf of self-despair; "Christian/' says St. Leo, " be conscious of thy own nobility; sharing as thou dost in the divine nature, wilt thou return to thy old grovelling?" Each of us must sink to child-level before the Crib; each of us, at the same time, must rise to Incarnation-level.

"The windings are to be cut straight"; that is more typical of our modern road-building. Christmas has the disconcerting directness of childhood; challenges our doubts with "Yes, but did it really happen?"; embarrasses our ingenious evasions of conscience by demanding whether we really mean it. For once in the year we have to see things with the lucidity of a child's eyes. "And the rough paths made into smooth roads"alas for our modern outcry in favour of the amenities! We all have our little reserves with God, like our first parents hiding themselves among the trees of the garden; sentimental prejudices, cherished self-indulgences surely we cannot be expected to sacrifice these? Advent is the bulldozer which is meant to flatten out such excrescences; the King's business must go forward.

- 4

CHAPTER II

The Forerunner

The calendar is for ever cheating us with false perspectives. In the Sunday Gospels of Advent, so much stress is laid on the position of John the Baptist that we imagine him, in the back of our minds, as preaching already beyond Jordan when the shepherds found their way to Bethlehem. Actually, he was only a child six months old. So short an interval was there between the world's repentance and the world's redemption.

What we are meant to see, dramatically, is the world at its best, not at its worst, when Christ came. The Baptist's mission crowned, apparently, with success; all the social inequalities of the age being ironed out; food and clothing shared equally between rich and poor; taxes no longer exorbitant; public justice no longer tyrannous; the soldiers no longer agitating (Tacitus gives you the record of it) for higher pay. All that is the picture that emerges from St. Luke, a Utopia in the mak

ing. And the man who has so gripped the public conscience is not satisfied for a moment. All this is only a beginning, only a preparation for something higher yet, the kingdom of grace. To be content with this is to mistake shadow for reality.

Christ did not come into a self-satisfied world. The public conscience which responded, in Judaea, to the Baptist's appeal is reflected at Rome, at the very heart of things, by the campaign of the Emperor Augustus for a reform of morals. It is reflected in the State-inspired literature of the day, a passionate sighing for the primitive virtues, which reaches its highest point in the Messianic Eclogue of Virgil. In a world torn by civil wars for more than a century, people were longing for a clean slate.