DAILY MEDITATION (MONDAY, AUGUST 3)

MEDITATION OF THE DAY

The One We Need Not Fear

Christ has healed the vices of my soul, and taken on himself the sicknesses of my body: man by his mother, God by his Father. He bore the weaknesses of the flesh that are appointed by nature, and evinced the feelings of the human body. He ate and drank, and closed his eyes in sleep, and grew weary with journeying in accord with his human sensibilities. He shed tears over the death of a friend like a man, but then as God raised him from the tomb. As a man he sailed on a ship, and as God he governed the winds; by his strength as God the man walked over the sea.

With his human mind he feared the hour of imminent death, but with his divine mind he knew that the moment of execution was at hand. As man he was nailed to the cross, and as God he terrified the world from the cross. The man endured death, but death itself endured the true God. The man hung on the cross, but as God he forgave sins from the cross, and by dying destroyed the life of sin. He who was counted among the guilty, and was assessed as worse than the thief…gave the Kingdom of heaven to the thief who believed, and while still confined to earth opened the gates of paradise.

Saint Paulinus of Nola

Saint Paulinus of Nola († 431) was a bishop and a friend of Saints Martin of Tours, Ambrose, and Augustine. [From The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, translated & annotated by P.G. Walsh. © 1975, Rev. Johannes Quasten and Rev. Walter J. Burghardt, s.j., and Thomas Comerford Lawler. Paulist Press, Inc., New York/Mahwah, NJ. www.paulistpress.com. Used with permission.]