The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 47 of 124

Sermon for the Rogation Days

Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go to him at midnight, and shall say to him: Friend, lend me three loaves; because a friend of mine is come off his journey to me. and I have not what to set before him. And he from within should answer, and say: Trouble me not, the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give to thee. Yet if he shall continue knocking, I say to you, although he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend; yet, because of his importunity, he will rise and give him as many as he needeth. — Luke xi, 5-9.

This is part of our Lord’s teaching about how we should pray. And he immediately adds: “And I say to you: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.” Now let us consider the difference between asking, seeking and knocking. Asking means the turning of a really interior man to God, begging some favor with deep sincerity. Seeking is praying for something because we have a particularly earnest longing to posses it more than other things. Knocking means constancy in one’s petition, never giving up till one has obtained what he asks for.

Venerable Bede explains this teaching thus: “The friend spoken of by our Lord is the soul of man, which, having strayed away into distant and foreign lands of unspiritual thoughts, returns again and again to itself hungry and thirsty after all good, and finds nothing granted to it. Then that soul turns to its friend, namely, God, and, standing before

His door, prays and knocks, begging three loaves of Him, meaning the knowledge of the Holy Trinity. He that is within excuses Himself, and says that He has gone to bed and so have His servants; and these servants mean God’s appointed teachers, who are absorbed with Him in a state of holy contemplation. But the soul, standing without at the door, perseveres, and it continues to knock, until He that is within at last arises and gives him what he desires.” He gives him His answer by means of teachers, or by directly teaching him without any intermediary. And this is why Christ said: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.”

Here we may remark God’s unspeakable goodness; for He grants us gladly just for the asking, and He earnestly bids us ask, exhorts us to do so, and teaches us how. But His gifts are not granted to the slothful, but to earnest askers and to those who persevere in their petitions.

And what shall we ask? Love. When one sets himself to pray, when he calls home his wandering thoughts and banishes all distractions, then let him with genuine humility cast himself at God’s feet and crave love as an alms from the Divine charity; let him knock at the door of his Father’s heart, and beg as a gift the bread of love. If one had all the food in the world except bread, his meals would be tasteless and unprofitable. So is it with regard to all things without Divine love.

Again, let a man beg God’s guidance as to how he shall pray. Ask of God that prayer that pleases Him best, that kind of interior exercise that will serve thy soul’s best interests. After having done that, accept whatsoever devout thoughts come before thee, whether they be of the Godhead simply, of the blessed Trinity, or of the sufferings and the wounds of our Lord.

Remember that all are not able to pray wholly with spiritual acts of the mind, for many must pray with words. Dear child, pray to our Lord as thou canst, with all possible pious and Divine words, and thou shalt find thy heart and mind enraptured with joy. And pray to thy heavenly Father, that through the merits of His only begotten Son He will present His own blessed self to thy soul as the object of thy worship, in whatever manner is most pleasing to Him. Then when thou findest any manner or method of praying very productive of devotion and most pleasing to thee, stick to that — whether it be the sorrowful thought of thy sins, or anything else whatsoever. Our Lord’s way for us to seek and to find, is seeking and finding the grace to do His will and to best serve our neighbor. Knock at that door with all persistence: he that perseveres shall be granted the crown.

Our Saviour says: “And which of you, if he ask his father bread, will he give him a stone? Or a fish — will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will be reach him a scropion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give the good spirit to them that ask Him?” (Luke xi, 11-13.) Now, the gift of a fish may be taken to mean confidence in Qod, and the gift of an egg may signify living faith.

But if truth itself says, “Ask and you shall receive,” how does it happen that so many men are asking their lives long and the living bread is never given them? And yet we know that Qod is unspeakably kind and a thousand times more ready to grant than man is to receive His favors. They utter the same devout prayers every day — Pater Nosters, the psalter, and other prayers taught us by the Holy Spirit, and yet they are not heard. There must be some great cause for this, and it is a wonderful thing. Children, I will reveal it to you: Your inmost hearts, your love and your intention are all in the possession of some alien affection. Whatever it may be that you expend your love upon, the living or the dead, yourself or your kindred, that holds possession of your heart, it occupies the place that true Divine love should occupy, that love which is God’s bread of life. Pray and ask as you like, and as much as you like, and it is all in vain. Hence Hugo of St. Victor teaches: “That a man can live without some love or other is as impossible as that he can live without a soul.”

Let each one study carefully his own case. Remember that before one love can come in, the other love must go out. See to it at once, says St. Augustine, that thou art filled with the right love. Men come with their worldly hearts to Qod, hearts preoccupied in their inmost depths, and when they pray and ask, the heavenly bread is not given them. Is this God’s fault? If they get a stone instead of bread, is it not their own stony heart, dry and cold, from which all devotion and grace are absent? They read many good books, and they enjoy them, but what they read does not open the springs of grace in their souls. As a man does his daily task of work and sleeps and wakes and works again and over again, so does he pray, and all in the same routine spirit; and he thinks that that is enough. Meanwhile his heart is as hard as a millstone, and is not any more capable of being softened or broken. If you happen to propose anything to him that he does not like, whether to do or not to do, you soon find that you are beating upon a heart of stone. Dear child, beware of this hardness of spirit. And have little to say to such a man; deliver thy message in one word and fiy from him; let it

Let me assure you that when I find these men harboring hidden hate and resentment and refusing to give it up, I will not allow them to receive the Lord’s body. There are many who go to confession for twenty or thirty years, and never do it rightly, nor are every rightly absorbed, and yet always afterwards receive the blessed Sacrament — a most distressing, a most terrible thing. The Pope himself, who has the highest power in Christendom, could not validly absolve such men. The oftener they receive holy communion, and the more they pray and do good works, the harder and stonier grow their hearts, and the blinder and duller do they become; they fancy that all is well with them, for they are trusting to the outward good deeds they do. Better do no good thing, than to approach our Lord in communion without quitting their sinful state and curing the cause of it. Be sure of this: God will never allow such conduct to go unpunished; He will visit it with penalties, not only for the soul’s pain, but also for the body’s — they will receive a serpent instead of a fish.

Children, another bad trait in these men is their tendency to rash judgment. The serpent instills his poison into them, and they spit it out upon their neighbor by making little of his good deeds and by destroying his reputation, their evil work extending in all directions. They never consider their own state of sin, but watch and count their neighbor’s sins, often playing their snake-like part by injecting their poison secretly. Be on your guard against this; judge yourselves, and judge nobody else.

And, again, such men have received a scorpion instead of an egg; that is to say, they are deluded about themselves and cultivate a false confidence in their supposed virtue; and they despise others. Why, they ask, shall not I get on as well as such and such others? Do not I pray, and read pious books, and sing pious hymns, and live as well as they do? Just as the scorpion shows no venom with his mouth, and yet stings with his tail. Such is the case with those whose confidence is misplaced and falsely grounded. And what happens when they begin to realize that

Children, this comes from the dreadful failure to take true account of what is going on in the interior of the soul, and what offenses against God we have committed. Children, it is for this reason that some sins are reserved for absolution to the Pope, some to specially appointed confessors and to bishops. This is by no means done foolishly, but that men may learn the difference between various kinds of sins, think of them more intelligently, and thereby have greater sorrow for them and guard more carefully against committing them. Children, did you but know how horrible a sin it is to drink the precious blood of Christ our God — blood poured out for love of us — while the soul is in this wicked state, you would be ready to expire with grief. It is for this reason that in some monasteries it is the rule to receive communion only once in three weeks, so that each one may have full time rightly to prepare for this great banquet, and that it may have full opportunity to complete its good results within him. But as to you, you should stimulate your hearts to ardent longings to receive holy communion, and establish a custom of often doing so. Pray to our Lord that He take this preparation of thy soul into His own hands. Live kindly disposed toward all, be inclined to the interior life, be humble to all men, and be detached from created things.

A certain master was once asked, how it pleased him that certain persons wished to receive our Lord oftener than was the custom in their community. He answered: “May our Lord God be praised, and may we rejoice in our hearts that there are any who long and yearn after God in this manner; the inmates of whatever monastery that has them, should most earnestly help them to enjoy this privilege.” But such as these should carefully abstain from thinking that those who act differently are worse than they are. For others there are who often abstain from motives of humility, deeming themselves unworthy of so high a favor. And if it should happen that anyone sits in judgment on thee, and, as it were, throws stones of condemnation at thee in the shape of hard words, let this be to thee as if it came direct upon thee from God Himself.

And there are other stones: As when a man is sincerely detached from this world and longs for God with all his heart, and yet his soul remains hard and dry, cold and dull.If thou art thus afflicted, then I bid thee stand carefully on thy guard, suffer this spiritual dryness patiently, and willingly continue in it. Take heed lest thou seek a solace for it in

Stay at home in thy desolate heart. Attack thy faults, condemn thyself severely for them with resolute courage, chastise thyself hard. And if this judgment of Ood rests on thee a whole year long, all the better. Keep on stoning thy guilty self in God’s presence.

And just the same shouldst thou do immediately that thou art conscious of having committed some fault. Confess it to God without any delay. And if this defect escapes thy mind when thou dost make thy confession to the priest, be sure that thy sincere repentance more than compensates for this lapse of memory, for the sacrament of confession is given to Holy Church primarily for the remission of mortal sins; and one should not be distressed with doubts in any venial matters. It may be that thou shalt imagine that the devout exercises of thy vocation hinder thy spiritual progress; such exercises, I mean, as assisting in choir, and the usual works done by obedience to rule. But this is a delusion. Be by no means diverted from keeping thy rule, for disorder in this respect would be the real hindrance to thy progress. If thou shouldst yield to this error, it would show that the actual cause of thy trouble is that thy love of God is not disinterested, that thy resolutions have not been made with purity of intention, and that thou art in reality preoccupied with alien things, and art become thy own real hindrance.

Jesus once said: “I am the door. By Me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved.” (John x, 9.) Now it is on three parts of this door that a man must knock if he would be surely let in. First, he must knock at our Lord Jesus Christ’s heart, which is invitingly offered him, and which was cut in two after His death. And when he enters in, let him do so with profound reverence, avowing his utter poverty, his absolute nothingness; let him take pattern by poor Lazarus who lay at the rich man’s door; let him crave the crumbs that fall from the table of God’s grace. The grace that will be granted thee will change thee into a divinely supernatural being.

The second knock must be on the holy wounds in our Redeemer’s blessed hands, wounds ever open to thee. This knock is to obtain real Godlike knowledge, which will be like His wounded hands guiding thee and lifting thee upwards. Then knock on the door of His holy feet, begging the gift of true Divine love, whereby thou shalt be united to Him, sunk into Him, enclosed within Him. That we may all pray thus, asking and seeking and knocking, and that we may all be called within, may God grant us. Amen.

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This arises from ill-ordered affection for created things — Another fault is preferring the outer to the inner ways of serving Cod — Disdain of weaker brethren is also offensive to Him — Richard of St. Victor’s four degrees of love.