Vigils Reading – 6th day in Christmas Octave

A MORE GRACIOUS VISITATION

OF THE LORD AT CHRISTMAS

From the writing of St Gertrud the Great

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O unattainable height of marvellous power! O depth of the abyss of

inscrutable wisdom! O immense breadth of desirable love!… Even in my

wandering exile I was allowed…to experience again the foretaste of the most

pleasing delights and sweetest pleasures, by which anyone who clings to God

becomes one spirit with him. The boundless nature of his blessedness, spread

abroad so abundantly, permitted me, just a speck of dust, to have the audacity

to lap up some of its droplets, in the way I shall describe.

On that most holy of nights, when by the sweetening dew of divinity the

heavens rained down honey on the whole world, my soul, drenched like

Gideon’s fleece with dew on the threshing-floor of the convent, was intent by

meditation, and through the practice of certain devotions, on being present and

offering help at the heavenly birth, at which the Virgin brought forth her son,

true God and true man, like a ray of light. As in a moment of revelation my soul

realized that it had been offered, and had received, in place of its heart so to

speak, a tender little boy. In him there lay hidden the gift of complete

perfection, which is truly the best endowment…

Then my soul perceived a meaning that defies explication in the sweet

words, ‘God shall be all in all’. It felt that it held within itself the Beloved,

installed in the heart, and it rejoiced that it was not without the welcome

presence of its Spouse, with his most enjoyable caresses. Offered the honeyed

draughts of the following, divinely inspired words, it drank them in with a thirst

that could not be satisfied: ‘Just as I bear the stamp of the substance of God the

Father in regard to my divine nature, so you bear the stamp of my substance in

regard to my human nature, for you receive in you deified soul the outpourings

of my divine nature, just as the air receives the sun’s rays. Penetrated to the

very marrow by this unifying force, you will become fit for a more intimate

union with me’

.

O noble balm of the divine, sending out streams of love on every side,

flourishing and flowering for ever, but to be spread everywhere when time shall

come to an end! O true power of the invincible hand of the Most High, when a

vessel so fragile and disgraced by its own imperfection contained so precious a

liquid to be poured out! O proof most clear of the abundance of God’s loving-

kindness! It did not shrink from me, who wandered so far into the pathless

wastes of my sins, but rather made known to me, as far as I was capable of it,

the sweetness of that most blessed union.

7 Gertrud the Great of Helfta. The Herald of God’s Loving-Kindness – Books 1 & 2. CF 35. Trans. Alexandra Barratt.

Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991. 116-118.15