Ordinary TimeThursday of the Seventeenth Week

“Blessed the man who finds refuge in you, in their hearts are pilgrim roads.” (Psalm 84, 6.)

Saint Gregory of Nazianzus reflects on this verse from today’s Responsorial Psalm:

“The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly and the Son more obscurely. The New [Testament] manifested the Son and suggested the deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit dwells among us and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself. For it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son; nor when that of the Son was not yet received to burden us further (if I may use so bold an expression) with the Holy Spirit; lest perhaps people might, like persons loaded with food beyond their strength and presenting eyes as yet too weak to look at the sun’s light, risk the loss even of that which was within the reach of their powers; but that by gradual additions, and, as David says, “Goings up, and advances and progress from glory to glory,” the light of the Trinity might shine on the more illuminated. It was for this reason, I think, that [the Holy Spirit] gradually came to dwell in the disciples, measuring himself out to them according to their capacity to receive him, at the beginning of the Gospel, after the passion, after the ascension, making perfect their powers, being breathed on them and appearing in fiery tongues.” (Theological Oration 5 (On the Holy Spirit))

Collect

O God, protector of those who hope in You
without Whom nothing has firm foundation,
nothing is holy,
bestow in abundance Your mercy upon us
and grant that,
with You as our ruler and guide,
we may use the good things that pass
in such a way as to hold fast even now
to those that ever endure.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen