Late have I loved You, beauty so ancient yet so new.

Points for meditation from Fr Thomas Dubay: “And You are Christ’s”

This is a marvellous book. If anyone is at all considering a celibate vocation they should buy it. Entirely marvellous. Reading it and praying about the concept of gospel virginity, particularly as it applies to me. A side note, in Fr Leo’s homily, he mentioned a candidate for the Friars who had said, “I was living in a way that was breaking God’s heart.” How can we take any glory in past sins, when we look at them like that…? Anyway, Fr Dubay:

For the ancient Hebrew, to be “holy” referred not to excellence in humility and temperance, but rather signified that they had been called from the ordinary mass of mankind to a special relationship with the one God…

Lev 20:29. To me you shall be sacred, for I, the Lord, am sacred, I who have set you apart from the other nations to be my own.

God is so infinitely beyond all that is created, so utterly other, so completely transcendent and sacred…that persons partake in His holiness simply by being called into a special closeness with Him… selected by the Lord Himself from the generality of all other human beings to enter into the transcendental sphere of the utterly Sacred One in a new and exclusive manner – a manner that becomes a state of life…

Would love to quote the whole book… but these paragraphs stood out to meditate on in holy hour today…