Meditation 19
The Greater Tools and the Sacraments
The Greater Tools and the Sacraments
The state of a soul who has lost the fullness of the baptismal grace is indeed pitiable as our Lord and Redeemer proclaimed while He dwelt with us in this earthly tabernacle of the flesh. Thus we must beseech the Holy Spirit to kill and uproot the hidden serpent nestling in the depths of our hearts. It is the human heart itself which must be purified in the fire of the prayer, the stone heart of a soul who has lost the purity of her baptismal grace. In its ignorance, forgetfulness and laziness the heart becomes again a source of evils as our Redeemer emphasized
For from the heart
come evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury,
slander. These are the things that make a person unclean (Mt 15. 19,
20).
The holy fathers in the Egyptian desert, the first Carmelite brothers who lived at the well of Elijah on Mount Carmel and the holy fathers in Syria and Mesopotamia realized this truth clearly in ancient times,
Restrain the
unrestrained mind, scattered and dispersed as it is by the power of the
enemy, who, through our negligence, has come again since Baptism,
returned to our slothful soul, along with others more evil spirits; as
the Lord said: “the last state of this man is worse than the first” (Mt
12. 45). [1]
These are the seven capital vices: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust which must be replaced by the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance and the divine virtues of faith, hope and charity. Only thus the soul is able to attain to the Vision of the Celestial City, a truth which urged David to cry, “God, create in me a clean heart, renew within me a resolute spirit” (Ps 51. 12). It is this truth which marks the beginning of our own Tabernacle prayer (see Appendix A) below. We implore thus our heavenly Father to remove the veil of darkness from our hearts, a prayer based on an ancient prayer by Simeon the New Theologian,
God, Lords of Hosts,
You who stretches out the universe like a cloth (Is 40. 22), You who
has power over every breath and every soul, You who only can cure us.
Hear our prayer and send us in yours lovable mercy your Holy Spirit to
kill the serpent nestling in the hearts of these poor wretches that we
are. Infusing into us a Christ like humility in order to make us
able to fall at the feet of your Son Jesus Christ and move His Sacred
Heart to compassion. We beg You not to abandon wrecked souls as us who
have once been united to You in the baptismal grace. You know, Almighty
God, how we desire salvation, although our impediments are a hindrance
for us, but to you, our God, everything is possible. Abba, Father, You
are all powerful! May your Holy Spirit infuse into our sinful hearts
the glory of the Uncreated Light in our Christification and cloth us by
your Son's Royal Image so we will be able to praise the glory of your
grace (Ep 1. 6) and your Holy Name forever. Amen.
In His boundless mercy God provides us by His divine materialism with all the means In order to break down the walls of the Jericho of the vices, the prefiguration of the black tabernacle in our heart which He reveals by the arrangement of the greater tools of the Sanctuary forming the sign of the cross. As prefiguration of the seven sacraments the tools reveals how God intends to lead the faithful to salvation by means of the sacraments.
The first great tool or the altar of burnt offerings (A) represents simultaneously two of the sacraments: the sacrament of Baptism and the sacrament of Confirmation. This is the reason why God emphasized so much that Moses made “a Sanctuary so that I can reside with them. You will make it all according to the design for the Dwelling and the design for its furnishing which I shall now show you” (Ex 25. 8, 9).
This Sanctuary is thus an precise organizing chart and a prefiguration of the coming Church were God reveals how the human soul attains the Life in Christ. This is the place of the soul's Christification as God has intended His Church to be as a Recycling Plant of the Holy Spirit in accordance with His predestination by His divine materialism in the sacraments, or by the words of the Prince of the theologians, Thomas Aquinas,
. . . for they are
applied to men by divine ordinance to cause grace in
them. [2]
The first written records of the rite of confirmation involving the imposition of hands and anointing with oil are found in the writings of Tertullian and Hyppolytus of Rome in the third century. The official use of this text in support of confirmation restricted to bishops goes at least as far as to Pope Innocent I and thus the rite is performed in the Western Church, but in the Eastern Church a priest is allowed to execute it. As the number of catechumens increased drastically when Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire the bishops were not able any longer to visit all local churches at the same time, or on the Saturday eve before Easter when the neophytes were baptized as a rule. How often do we not hear – especially in our contemporary times in the greatest apostasy ever witnessed in the Church – that all depends on becoming “spiritual,” or by the words of the American religious philosopher Peter Kreeft,
There is nothing
necessarily good about being more “spiritual” and less material. The
devil is a pure spirit. God, on the other hand, has a body (ever since
the Incarnation and Ascension). How often have you heard the sentiment
that “religion” shouldn't worry about external forms, only the inner
spirit?” That may be a “religion”, but it is not Christianity. If that
sentiment were true, God never would have sent his Son into a pain
filled material world to suffer a bloody death, and we would have been
left with only our own “inner spirits” and good intentions. Not enough!
Not enough to save us from a fate far worse than death. [3]
The furnishing or the great tools of the Sanctuary reveal the sacraments as a secure path to salvation. Thus we can never thank God enough for His divine materialism as revealed in this Sanctuary as a prefiguration of the coming Church of His Son.
Souls who in their presumptuousness have fallen a pray to the enemy of our salvation reject such a divine ordinance as they “know everything better” than even God Himself. Such souls appreciate far more membership in secret societies as freemasonry akin to the mysteries of ancient gnosticism or the fantasies of a New age spirituality, theosophy or pure spiritism, magic and seances! They reject a visible Church which Christ look upon as His own Body (Ac 9. 5) and make a mock of material sacraments, speaking of a spiritual church of the heart inviting its “members” to a freedom more or less akin to anarchism, the distinct mark of the fallen cherub, or by the words of Peter Kreeft,
God does not think in
this manner. He created matter, incarnated himself in matter, redeemed
matter, and continues to work through matter . . . To say that the
material act of having water poured upon your head or the act of
opening your mouth and eating what looks like a piece of bread could
not possibly be God instituted ways to eternal life is to be more
“angelistic” than God. [4]
We see the sacraments thus revealed in following order in the Sanctuary: (A) sacrament of Baptism and Confirmation; (B) sacrament of Confession; (C) Eucharist; (D) sacrament of the Anointing; (E) sacrament of Sacred Orders and (F) sacrament of Matrimony referring to the union of Christ and his bride: the Church.
This God proclaimed already as His intentional plan to the prophets of the Old Covenant: to become the heavenly Bridegroom of the soul and thus He says to His becoming bride, Come then my beloved, my lovely one, come(Sg 2. 10). Dear soul! Pay thus heed to the words of Saint Paul against counterfeit apostles denying the role of the sacraments as a secure way of salvation to God,
These people are
counterfeit apostles, dishonest workers, disguising themselves as
apostles of Christ. There is nothing astonishing in this; even Satan
disguises himself as an angel of light. It is nothing extraordinary,
then, when his servants disguise themselves as the servants of
uprightness. They will come to the end appropriate to what they have
done. (2 Cor 11. 13-15).
[1]. Summa theologiae, III. 62, 1.
[2]. Abba Isaiah the Hermit, Philokalia, On the Prayer of the Heart, pp. 86.
[3]. Angels and Demons, pp. 131-132.
[4]. Ibid.
[1]. Summa theologiae, III. 62, 1.
[2]. Abba Isaiah the Hermit, Philokalia, On the Prayer of the Heart, pp. 86.
[3]. Angels and Demons, pp. 131-132.
[4]. Ibid.
