The Lord's Prayer by Romano Guardini

At a time when we feel so many things shaken to their foundations, we have every reason to grope our way back to the very core of the Christian realities wherein the undisturbed omnipotence of the Redemption reigns.

Guardini wrote that in 1932. Here we are almost 100 years later when we too feel foundations are being shaken. This book is timeless and good thing.

This is one of Guardini's glorious short books of meditations where he looks carefully, bit by bit, for the riches of Christ in things we think we already understand. Like the Our Father. In the process, he gives us new ways to look at familiar things while turning our gaze inward to draw us closer to God and outward to look at our fellow man.

Pick up this or his books The Art of Praying, Meditations Before Mass, or The Rosary of Our Lady. Whichever book I'm reading I always think is the best of the bunch. But this might really be the best.

Hindrance: Sentimentality

How would such doing look had it been left to the religious sentiments if not downright sentimentalities of the pious? To have an idea, we really should examine some of the devotional leaflets. Everything would be extremely wordy and moving, the fearful and gruesome aspects of suffering would be stressed wherever possible, Jesus’ love would be the constantly reiterated theme. A pious importunity would accost Him, praise and pity Him, place all sorts of touching phrases in His mouth. The texts of the missal speak quite differently. They are clear and concise. Their tone is that of profound emotion, dignified and controlled.

Romano Guardini, Meditations Before Mass

Guardini was writing before Vatican II so the idea of focusing on extreme suffering is not accurate anymore. Instead what we have is extreme sentimentality swung in the other direction, on the loving Jesus with songs that spend a lot of time patting ourselves on the back for being followers and participants in his ministry. Regardless of the example, his point about sentimentality is right. It is not sentiment but is a semi-manufactured and indulged desire for emotion that can cloud our vision.

I'm really enjoying my slow journey through this book. You can read it here online.

Gifted Versus Believing

A man may be profoundly gifted, have a strong consciousness of self, undergo deep natural-religious experiences — until he has more than these, compared to the inwardness under discussion, he remains superficial. On the other hand, the man of strictly commpnplace natural gifts has that "dimension" in him when he believes in the God of revelation and loves Him. The point is such that interiority is not psychologically deeper, or spiritually nobler, but essentially different from any natural interiority; it is a gift of grace from the Spirit.

Romano Guardini, The Conversion of Augustine

So true.

Memory and the Physical World

Is not remembering precisely the retaiing of corporeal things in an incorporeal manner?

Romano Guardini, The Conversion of Augustine

Um — hey, it is! So simple but so deep also!

Placing ourselves voluntarity in God's truth

God's knowing is judicial. It is the act by which He measures His creature by the norm of the essential truth which He has established for it. His gaze judges, discards, and confirms. If this is so, confession is the act by which the creature places himself voluntarily in God's truth. Now not only is it known by Hm whose view is boundless, but it also deserves to be known by Him. It allies itself with the all-perceiving power of God's truth against its own shame and self-assertion.

Romano Guardini, The Conversion of Augustine

This is a really great book with many deep insights that seem to spring right into my heart. What an elegant way to say what I've often been told — God already knows everything you have done. Confession is for your benefit, not His.

The Lord by Romano Guardini — "But love does such things!"

Speaking of the Incarnation, Guardini says:

However, this journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory, this stride across the border into history, is something no human intellect can altogether grasp. The mind might even oppose the apparently fortuitous, human aspect of this interpretation with its own "purer" idea of godliness, yet precisely here lies hidden the kernel of Christianity. Before such an unheard of thought the intellect bogs down. Once at this point a friend gave me a clue that helped my understanding more than any measure of bare reason. He said: "But love does such things!" Again and again these words have come to the rescue when the mind has stopped short at some intellectual impasse. Not that they explain anything to the intelligence; they arouse the heart, enabling it to feel its way into the secrecy of God. The mystery is not understood, but it does move nearer, and the danger of "scandal: disappears.

None of the great things in human life springs from the intellect; every one of them issues from the heart and its love. If even human love has its own reasoning, comprehensible only to the heart that is open to it, how much truer must this be of God's love! When it is the depth and power of God that stirs, is there anything of which love is incapable? The glory of it is so overwhelming that to all who do not accept love as an absolute point of departure, its manifestations must seem the most senseless folly.

This book is my Lenten reading this year. However, it is rich enough, requiring slow absorption, and big enough that it will likely last past that time. I'm reading a library book but realize that it is a book for owning as I would benefit from many rereadings.

Interestingly, it is somewhat like reading G.K. Chesterton's nonfiction. Chesterton always does you the compliment of assuming you know all the basic facts about a subject. It is like entering a conversation between friends who have left mere facts behind long ago and are now delving deeper into underlying themes.

In that way The Lord is a great relief. I don't have to hear yet again, line by line, what Jesus "really meant" by each line of the beatitudes. Instead Guardini brings Jesus' words to life by diving straight into the heart of what lay behind the bigger picture. This may sound odd but consider the above passage, excerpted from his discussion of Christ's incarnation. It dives right to the heart of why believers and nonbelievers alike may struggle with the concept of God becoming man.

The italics are my emphasis of the lines that struck straight to my own heart. It is the basis for so much of Christianity, of learning to answer Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" Certainly it is a wonderful expansion upon that maddening word "mystery" which often is my only fallback when trying to answer questioning non-Christians about something which just "doesn't make sense."