The Deifying Light

Selection of the Rule of St. Benedict for January 2, May 3, September 2

Let us arise, therefore, at long last, at this moment when Scripture bestirs us saying: It is already time to rise up from sleep (Rom. 13:11). And, our eyes opened to the deifying light, our ears attuned, let us hear a voice divine daily calling, forewarning us: If this day you shall have heard His voice, harden not your hearts  (Ps. 94[95]:8). And again: Who hath ears for hearing, let him hear what sayeth the Spirit to the churches (Matt. 11-15; Apoc. 2:7). And what says He? Come, sons, hear me: I shall teach you the fear of the Lord. (Ps. 33[34]:12) Run while you yet have the light of life, lest the darkness of death set upon you (John 12:35). 

When we speak of the Deifying Light of which our Holy Father Benedict here speaks, we are entering deeply into the mystery of Divine Adoption, for what else is this Deifying Light other than the Light of which the Church sings on Pentecost, in the Golden Sequence, when she says:

O lux beatissima,
reple cordis intima
tuorum fidelium.

O blessed Light of life Thou art;
fill with Thy light the inmost heart
of those who hope in Thee. 

The Deifying Light is that Spirit which “is not a spirit of bondage”, but the “Spirit of adoption of sons, whereby we cry: Abba (Father)” (Rom 8:15). Our eyes are opened to the Deifying Light, the Lux Beatissima, the Holy Spirit, Who is the Spirit of adoption. And since our adoption is in Christ Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Lord’s Mother, immediately enters our mind. Let us return to her a little later when we meditate upon the O Antiphon for 2 September.

“God Became Man so that Man Might Become God” – St. Anthanasius

Dom Hubert van Zeller says in his commentary on the Holy Rule:

The sentence about our eyes being open to the deifying light is an echo of what has been said above in connection with St. John and St. Thomas. The light of grace is “deifying”—it…transforms.

Deifying, literally Deum facere, to make into God. God, by His Uncreated Light, desires to transform humans, His little creatures, into His Very Self, for, as the Scriptures assert in 2 Peter 1:4, “[God] has granted to us His precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature.”

Commenting on this, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (CCC 460):

The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature“:”For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God” (St. Irenaeus). “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” (St. Athanasius). “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (St. Thomas Aquinas)

In today’s reading of the Holy Rule, St. Benedict wants us to set our eyes on the Uncreated Light that shines from the Face of Jesus. He wants us to respond to this light, as Van Zeller notes: “It is not so much that we awake from sleep and see the light as that the light wakes us up. Once awake to the reality of the light, we are stirred to action. It is now that we must keep our ears open to the admonishing voice or we shall go to sleep again.”

What a tremendous vocation is the Christian vocation! We who are nothing are called to share in the Divine Nature, to become God by participation!

We Need Emptiness in Order to Receive God

This vocation, which is what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and that which had never even entered into the human heart to conceive, is ours in Christ Jesus (see 1 Cor 2:9). But in order to attain to it, man must respond to the call, and the call is the same as that given to the Apostles, to leave one’s nets and all things, and even one’s self, and to follow Christ. There must be a conversion. As Van Zeller states: “To prevent the hardening of the heart which sometimes comes instinctively to the soul who hears God’s voice, there must be a readiness to silence the voices of the world which counsel every sort of alternative.” The foundress of the Benedictines of Perpetual Adoration, Ven. Mother Mectilde, used to frequently repeat: “Far too greedy is the one for whom God is not enough.”

When we look deeper into the need for a conversion that Jesus asks of us, something more becomes apparent. Jesus is only asking us to do what He has already done. The condition for experiencing this Deifying Light is nothing more than following the path that Christ has laid out for us, indeed the path that He has walked for us and wishes to carry us along.

[Christ Jesus,] being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: yet He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man.  He humbled Himself (Phil 2:5-8).

The Only-Begotten Son of God emptied Himself to become man so that we would have a pattern to follow. “Have this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5). As God emptied Himself to take on the form of a slave and be obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross, so we are called to empty ourselves so that “this corruption” can put on “incorruption”, “this mortality” can “put on immortality” (1 Cor 15:53).

Mary Most of All Emptied Herself

In the Magnificat, Our Lady calls herself God’s lowly handmaiden or God’s humble slave. Our Venerable Mother Mectilde referred to Mary as the creature most annihilated, that is, most emptied and made nothing. That is to say, Mary had within herself nothing that could be an impediment to the identity that came from grace or to the workings of grace. She was empty of all that would prevent her from being filled with God. She made herself nothing of herself so as to receive everything in God. She sought not her own, was not puffed up, envied not, was not ambitious, thought no evil, rejoiced not in iniquity (1 Cor 13). She knew that, of herself, she was nothing, and she felt no pain in her nothingness, but she rejoiced that her nothingness could be filled up with God. The nothing of creatures. The everything of God.

For this reason, she sang:

For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me: and holy is His name (Lk 1:48-49).

She recognized that God had done great things in her and through her, and that she too would be called Blessed. All of this was because she, in her lowliness, was able to correspond to God’s election by His Grace. She was so ennothinged that there was nothing in her that stood in the way of God’s operation. And because of this, God clothed her in Himself. Of all those who are purely creatures that have ever existed or will ever exist, Mary has been most deified. She “emptied herself” by His grace, and therefore “God has highly exalted her,” and she has become the source of grace for all creatures.

In Mary, the cycle of Christ’s self-emptying is completed. “God became man so that man might become God.” We see in Christ God the Word emptying Himself to become man. We see in Mary man being emptied to become God.

This is the backdrop of today’s Marian O Antiphon.

September 2, O Maria, Mons Dei

The Mountain of God

Let us meditate upon three aspects of mountains.

First, mountains in the Holy Scriptures are associated with temples. A close reading of Genesis shows that Eden itself was a mountain. The ark rested on Mount Ararat, and there “Noah built an altar unto the Lord: and taking of all cattle and fowls that were clean, offered holocausts upon the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and said: I will no more curse the earth for the sake of man” (Gen 8:20-21). Abraham took the son of promise, his only-begotten whom he loved, and gave him back to God upon Mount Moriah, trusting the God who could even raise the dead, but the Lord Himself provided the sacrifice in the place of Isaac (Gen 22). On Mount Sinai, God Himself came and gave the law to Moses, and with Moses He ate and drank (Ex. 19ff). On Mount Sinai, God willed the Tabernacle of the Covenant to rest, and of the Temple Mount, He willed His House to be built. Pagan worship took place “upon every high mountain” (Jer 3:6). We can conclude from this that mountains, in the Holy Scriptures, are temples.

Second, waters flow from down from mountains. “In that day the mountains will drip new wine, and the hills will flow with milk” (Joel 3:18).

Third, mountains are visible from a distance. They are places of journey, and ends of pilgrimage. “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the temple of the God of Jacob” (Is 2:3).

Mary is all of these things. She is a temple, for the body of Jesus is called a temple, and we are the body of Christ. Hence St. Paul meditates in 1 Corinthians upon us as God’s temple. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). It is in Mary above all that this identifying with Jesus as the true temple takes form.

Mary is also the height from which grace flows. She is the temple mount:

[And the Angel] brought me back to the door of [Mary] the temple, and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east). The water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by way of the north gate and led me around on the outside to the outer gate that faces toward the east; and behold, the water was trickling out on the south side…As I went back, I saw on the bank of the river very many trees on the one side and on the other. And he said to me, “This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah, and enters the sea; when the water flows into the sea, the water will become fresh. And wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. For this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes. Fishermen will stand beside the sea. From Engedi to Eneglaim it will be a place for the spreading of nets. Its fish will be of very many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea. But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. 12 And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.”

Finally, Mary is the beacon seen from afar, the “city set on the hill,” the lamp set out for all to see (Mt. 5:14).

Scriptural Sources

The antiphon draws from three scripture passages. First, in Isaiah 2:2 (which is almost identical to Micah 4:1), we learn that Mary is the temple of the Lord, higher than all the other creatures that are called to become temples of the Lord, the one to whom all go to meet Jesus. She who was lowly has been lifted up, and all the nations flow to Jesus through her:

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.

In Psalm 67(68):16-17, we learn that Mary is a verdant (“fat”) mountain in which God the Word shall dwell forever:

The mountain of the Lord! A fat mountain, a congealed mountain! Why do you look with mistrust, O congealed mountains, at the mount that God in which God is well-pleased to dwell in it? For the Lord shall make it His abode forever!

Finally, in Daniel 2:45, we learn that the Rock that is Jesus, the cornerstone of the Eternal Temple, was cut from her, as from this mountain, but not by any human hands, but by the Holy Spirit:

“…you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.”