#theolog

From The Three Conversions in the Spiritual Life by Fr.Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange O.P.

I believe that home is Christ's kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through the world in search of it.

1 And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. 2 She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. 3 And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. 4 His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. 5 She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, 6 and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.

A leading man in the Confessing Church recently said to me: "We have no time for meditation now, the ordinands should learn how to preach and to catechize." That seems to me either a complete misunderstanding of what young theologians are like today or a culpable ignorance of how preaching and catechism come to life. The questions that are seriously put to us today by young theologians are : How do I learn to pray? How do I learn to read the Bible? If we cannot help them there we cannot help them at all. And there is really nothing obvious about it. To say, "If someone does not know that, then he should not be a minister" would be to exclude most of us from our profession. It is quite clear to me that all these things are only justified when alongside them and with them - at just the same time!-there is really serious and sober theological, exegetical and dogmatic work going on. Otherwise all these questions are given the wrong emphasis.