 Welcome to The Commentaries, a podcast series from Tan in which you'll learn how to read and understand history's greatest Catholic works from today's greatest Catholic scholars. In every series of The Commentaries, your expert host will be your personal guide to not just read the book, but to live the book, shining the light of its eternal truths into our modern darkness. Visit tancommentaries.com to get your copy of the book and to subscribe for access to all the great reading plans, new episodes, bonus content and exclusive deals for listeners of The Commentaries. Hello and welcome once again. I'm Father Robert Nixon, a monk of the Order of St. Benedict and director of the Institute for Benedictine Studies at the Abbey of the Most Holy Trinity in New Norseo, Western Australia. This is the Commentaries series on The Imitation of Christ, The Great Masterpiece by Thomas A. Kemples. Today is Day 9 of our series of podcasts, and we're going to be covering today Book 3, chapters 13 to 12. Well, before we embark upon this journey, let's begin as we always do with a prayer to God, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Enlighten, Lord, our souls and hearts, and to our minds thy grace impart, lead us by thy gentle hand, teaching us to understand the wisdom of thine only Son, the humble, patient, holy One. Help us imitate Christ's ways and live His gospel all our days. Now today, as I mentioned, we're going to be dealing with Book 3, chapters 13 through to 22. This is actually a big number of chapters that we're going to be talking about today, and some of them we're going to skim over fairly briefly. As I noted before, one of the features of this book is that there is a degree of repetition that the same themes come back again, always expressed differently, with slightly different nuances and emphases. But nevertheless, we're going to focus on just a few of the chapters out of this multitude of chapters, which we're due to cover in today's brief session. Chapter 13 is entitled, The Abedience of a Humble Subject, after the example of Jesus Christ. And obedience is something which He's talked about before. Abedience is linked to humility because it means being prepared to step back from one's own will and preferences and to give way to someone else. And giving way to someone else is indirectly giving way to the will of God. If we believe that God has ordered things as they are, and of course God is omnipotent. So ultimately everything is ordained by the will of God. Chapter 14 is on the consideration of God's secret judgments, lest we be puffed up with our own good works. And this begins with the disciple speaking. And he says, You thunder forth over my head, Your judgments, O Lord, and You shake all my bones with fear and trembling, and my soul is terrified exceedingly. I stand astonished and consider that the heavens are not pure in Thy sight. If in the angels You have found sin, and have not spared even them, what will become of them, what will become of me? Stars have fallen from heaven, and I that embot dust, how can I presume? They whose works seemed praiseworthy have fallen to the very lowest, and such as before, fed upon the bread of the angels, I have seen delighted with the husks of swine. So in this case is reflecting upon the inscrutable judgments of God. God sees into the interior, into the reality. We see only the exterior. So for this reason we can never presume our innocence, our favorable judgment in the sight of God. Just as I said, as we read in the book of Job and so forth, even the angels had faults in his sight, and who are we compared to the angels? So we defer fully to the judgments of God to this ineffable judgment which wholly transcends all human comprehension. Chapter 15 is an important one. How we are to be disposed and what we are to say when we desire anything. When it begins with Christ speaking to the disciple, my son said thus on every occasion, Lord if it be pleasing to you, let this be done in this manner. Lord if it be to your honour, let it be done in your name. Lord if you see this is expedient and approve it as profitable unto me, then grant that I may use it to thine honour. But if you know that it will be hurtful to me and not expedient for the salvation of my soul, take away from me such a desire. For every desire is not from the Holy Ghost, though it seems to a man to be right and good. So we're given here instruction from Christ himself as to how we should pray, and it's following very closely what we hear in the Lord's prayer, Thy will be done. Everything we ask for from God, we should say, God if this is in accordance with your will, and your will is my salvation and my ultimate good. So if it's what you want, let it be done. There's a certain amount of humility in this, in giving up our own preferences, realising that sometimes we can be mistaken about what's good for us and what's actually bad for us. A lot of the time the things which our hearts seem to want might actually be for our own final destruction, and of course we have no way of knowing it at the time. So to preface all of our prayers with Thy will be done. And Jesus tells us at some point in the Gospel, whatever we ask in His name will be granted. But asking in His name means that we ask for the glory of His name. So we ask that it be done according to what He wants. And this is an important precondition of good petitionery prayer. Good prayer where we're actually asking for something. And if we've got nothing to ask for in prayer, in a way we should be thankful for that. But we should also always pray with the sentiment of the Lord's prayer. Lord, let Your will be done this day. Chapter 16 tells us that true comfort is to be sought in God alone. And this is so important. A recurrent thing. One of the things Thomas the Kempers frequently talks about is that the comfort which we find in this world, in the things of this world is temporary at best and often illusory and deceptive. And this chapter is in the form of the disciple speaking to Christ. He says, Whatever I can desire or imagine for my comfort, I look not for it in this life but for hereafter, for if I alone should have all the comforts of this world and might enjoy all its delights. It is certain that they would not last long. Wherefore you cannot, O my soul, be fully comforted, nor perfectly delighted but in God, the comforter of the poor and the support of the humble. Wait for a little while, my soul, wait for the divine promise, and you will have plenty of all that is good in heaven. If you desire too, inordinately, these present things, you will lose the things which are heavenly and everlasting. Let temporal things serve your use, but the eternal be the object of thy desire. For thou cannot be fully satisfied with any temporal thing, because you were not created for the enjoyment of such thing. And this is very profound. Even if we had every joy and blessing and good fortune in this world, it wouldn't lead us to true or lasting happiness or contentment. I mean, it might lead us to kind of passing contentment, passing joy, but ultimately it wouldn't last forever. And you think about, you know, human life is such a transitory thing. It seems to go for a long time when we're quite young, but once you reach adulthood, the years and the decades seem then just to fly by. And looking back, we think it's all been over so quickly. While human life also is limited by factors such as disease and old age, which means that our capacity to enjoy things in this world, even if we did have them, is itself strictly circumscribed and limited. So our true joy is to be sought in the things of heaven, in the things which lie beyond this world. As Saint Augustine says, we cannot find rest until we rest in God. So as long as we attach ourselves to things which are other than God, we're not going to find that rest for which our souls always long. Chapter 17 tells us that we ought to cast all our cares upon God. And it begins with Christ speaking, Son, permit me to do with you whatever I wish, for I know what is best for you. You think as a human being. You judge in many things as human affection suggests. So Christ is here telling us that we should follow His will. We should let Him do whatever seems best to Him. Our thoughts, our perceptions and so forth, always very limited. We judge as limited mortal human beings. God judges in the context of real truth. Yet often we protest against the judgments of God and we prefer that we get our own way. In this respect, we can think about the example of Christ. You know, when Christ was in the garden and He says, Lord, Father, take this chalice from me, but let it not be done according to my will, but according to your will. Of course, ultimately the will of Christ and the will of the Father were one, because they're both in substance the one true God. Yet there's this kind of conflict between the fleshly part of Christ and His divine Father, and He submits one to the other. We're also called to do the same. Whenever we face adversity or trial or difficulty, we should consciously resign ourselves to the will of God and say, God, let this work out according to your will and your judgment, not mine. We need to come to Him, as it says in the Gospel, as little children, which means giving this blind and unconditional trust and deference to His wisdom. In chapter 18, we're told that temporal miseries are to be born with patience, after the example of Jesus Christ. This word temporal, by the way, which has popped up quite a lot, is related to the word tempest, meaning time. It's normally used, though, to mean earthly things, passing things. So we need to bear with our passing miseries with patience, following the example of Christ who, of course, accepted the tremendous suffering of Calvary, knowing the glory of the resurrection which lay ahead of him. And in this chapter, Christ says, I came down from heaven for your salvation. I took upon me your miseries, not out of necessity, but moved there to by charity, that you might learn patience and might bear without repining the miseries of this life. For from the hour of my incarnation, whom I expiring on the cross, I was never without suffering. A very remarkable statement there, and perhaps some of us might wonder, you know, is that really true? Well, a traditional thinking is that Christ was always suffering during His incarnate life because of the fact that He knew full well all along what lay ahead of Him, and also because of the fact that as the divinity, the infinite God, just to be within a human body was a source of suffering, that He was somehow acutely more sensitive to all the pains of our mortal existence than a regular person was. And if we think about that, the capacity for suffering is linked to intelligence. I mean, things which have no intelligence at all, plants and jellyfish and so forth don't suffer that much. But as we rise in the scale of intelligence and wisdom, our capacity to suffer increases. Now Jesus Christ Himself was infinitely high in this scale of wisdom and intelligence, and therefore His suffering was infinitely beyond that which any human being can experience. We need to follow His example as best as we can. In chapter 19 we're told on supporting injuries and who is proved to be truly patient. Now this term injuries in this case is used as a synonym for injustices, so on supporting, on putting up with injustices and who is proved to be truly patient. So being truly patient consists not only in being ready to wait, but also being ready to put up with things, and not just put up with things which are incidental or unavoidable, but putting up with things which are actually unjust, and all of us have to do that from time to time. I mean, it's part of life, and when we think about Christ, He put up with the ultimate injustice of His condemnation, although He was truly the one innocent human being. Chapter 20 is on the confession of our own infirmity and the miseries of this life. You might recall that we've encountered another chapter on the miseries of human life. An important theme which people were quite open about in the late Middle Ages, which perhaps these days we tend not to want to talk about or look directly in the face. In chapter 21 we are to rest in God above all goods and gifts. In other words, to find our peace, our hope, our joy in God alone. This is a wonderful lesson which we've encountered before. We have in the prayer, my God, my sovereign good, the only consolation, how dare I raise myself towards you, draw you to myself, and firmly unite myself to you. I who am filled, penetrated, and loaded with so many miseries, and irregular inclinations towards evil, and continual repugnance to the good. I who am every moment falling away from you to myself, and from myself into sin. I, in a word, who meet with so many obstacles within myself, which like a wall of separation would hinder me from being united with Him. But what, O Lord, is impossible to me, is easy for you. From Thy power and goodness I place all my hosts. A very wonderful sentiment there. A recognition of our inability to unite ourselves to God, because God is incomparably beyond who we are, but we rely entirely upon His goodness and mercy and grace towards us. Finally, chapter 22 of the remembrance of the manifold benefits of God, and this again is a summoning to gratitude, for God has given us everything. Everything which we possess and are, is a gift from God. And not only this, but all of our potentials. Our potentials include union with the eternal glory of God. Now this is the greatest gift which could possibly be given. Are we really grateful for that as we should be? So let's open our hearts to gratitude. I think we can be tempted to overlook the good things which we have and instead focus on what we don't have or focus on our adversities. We're told that no, the attitude which God wants of us is gratitude. So in a spirit of gratitude, we draw to the end of session 9 of this series of podcasts. It's been wonderful being with you today and exploring these great chapters of the imitation of Christ. Next time we'll be continuing with book 3, dealing with book 3 chapters 23 to 31. Until then, may Almighty God bless you, may Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, always be with you and may the Holy Spirit guide and protect you in all that you do. This has been an episode of The Commentaries, a podcast brought to you by Tan. To follow the show, study more of the greatest Catholic classics, and to support The Commentaries and other great free content from Tan, visit tancommentaries.com to subscribe and use coupon code COM25 to get 25% off your next order, including the imitation of Christ and countless more spiritual works to deepen your interior life and guide you to Heaven.