Vigils Reading

A reading from

BLESSED GUERRIC OF IGNY

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Search the Scriptures then. For you are not mistaken in thinking that you

find life in them, you who seek nothing else in them but Christ, to whom the

Scriptures bear witness. Blessed indeed are they who search his testimonies,

seek them out with all their heart.” Your testimonies are wonderful, Lord,

therefore my soul has searched them. There is need for searching not only in

order to draw out the mystical sense but also to taste the moral sense. Therefore

you who walk about in the gardens of the Scriptures do not pass by heedlessly

and idly but searching each and every word like busy bees gathering honey from

flowers, reap the Spirit from the words. “For my Spirit,” says Jesus, “is sweeter

than honey and my inheritance surpasses the honeycomb.” So, proving by

experience that hidden manna is savory, you will break forth into those words of

David: “How sweet to my mouth are your words, sweeter than honey and the

honeycomb to my palate.

From these gardens the Bridegroom will lead you, if I be not mistaken,

into others where rest is more hidden and enjoyment more blessed and beauty

more wonderful. When you are absorbed in his praises with accents of

exultation and thanksgiving, he will take you into his wonderful tenting place,

into the very house of God, into the unapproachable light in which he dwells,

where he feeds, where he lies down at midday. For if the devotion of those who

sing psalms or pray has something of that loving curiosity of the disciples who

asked: “Rabbi, where do you dwell?” they deserve, I think, to hear: “Come and

see.”…

As long as we are with the Father of lights, with whom there can be no

change, no swerving from his course, we know nothing of night, we enjoy a

blessed daylight. When we fall thence, we relapse into our own darkness. Woe is

me: how quickly my days have passed away, how quickly I have dried up like

grass. As long as I was in the garden with him, I was vigorous and flourishing

like God’s Paradise. With him I am a garden of delight; without him, a place of

horror and utter wilderness.

For I think that the man who enters his garden becomes a garden himself,

his soul is like a watered garden, so that the Bridegroom says in praise of him: “A

closed garden is my sister, my bride.” Are they not a garden in which there

comes about what the Gardener himself says to the plantation which his Father

planted? “Give heed to me,” he says, “scions of the divine stock. Burgeon like a

rose-bush that is planted by running water. Yield the fragrance of incense.

Blossom like the lily, and smell sweet, and put forth leaves for your adornment.”