Margaret Yo · @MargaretYo_
4th Dec 2010 from Twitlonger
Grace for Our Blindness: A precious time has begun for us... The season of Advent has a holiness and sweetness all its own. It is the time toward which the prophets and saints of the ancient covenant during four thousand years sighed with incomparable ardor, crying out to God: "O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down!" (Is 64:1) to deliver those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. All the happenings, all the symbols of the Old Testament, had the one end of setting forth the grandeur of him who was to come, and who now has come. Let us, then, thank God and always praise him, that he has created us at this time and under this law of grace, that he has willed to give us his gift and his riches in such abundance, if we will only take them... We must, therefore, consider carefully how we have fallen and how we can rise again out of our sins and vices to our first innocence.
God created us to fill the places from which Lucifer and his angels were driven out. Through hate and envy of us Lucifer treacherously led the first man into disobedience and caused him to lose all the graces and virtues which made him like God and the angels. In this way was man poisoned and his noble nature stained. By his sin he wounded it mortally. And by this transgression has come upon us blindness of reason, perversity of will, disorder of the appetite of concupiscence, and weakness in resisting evil...
In two ways we should become like God -- in the practice of obedience after our Savior's example, who obeyed his heavenly Father even unto death, and by growth and perseverance in that virtue and in all others. Thus do we become heavenly [people]; thus are we made one spirit with God through deep humility, by entire yielding up of self, by patience full of sweetness, by poverty of spirit and by warmth of charity. All who do this... shall triumph over their foes. God will free them from the heavy burdens which weigh them down and help them in bearing the trials, many and painful, which he sends: for he sends trials in order that men entering within themselves may consider the reasons of these trials, so that being, as it were, thrown back on themselves by suffering, they may be kept in a state of recollection.
Father John Tauler, O.P.
1361, German Dominican priest, a popular preacher, and a mystical theologian.