Sunday, January 11 : Blessed Columba Marmion

The heavenly Father has himself undertaken the task of establishing for us, (…) our ideal of sanctity. He predestined for us to become like, not to any creature, nor to an angel, but to his Son, (…). Saint Paul reveals this thought of the Father to us when he says: “He predestined them to be like the image of his Son” (Rm 8:29). God provides for us a divine model of perfection. He wishes to see reproduced in us the characteristics of his incarnate Son, and, thereby, to see our soul resplendent with the reflection of his own sanctity. (…) Though God, that ocean of perfection, is incomprehensible to all created intelligence, he himself in his infinity, grasps at once, the fullness of his grandeur; he expresses his knowledge in one thought, in one single expression, his Word. To this Word, he communicates all his divine life, all his light, all that he is. This generation within the very bosum of Father, being the very life of God, had no beginning and will have no end. At this moment as I write, the Father, in infinite exultation, says to his Son: “You are my Son; today – that is to say in an eternal present – ​​I have begotten you” (Ps 2:7). The Father has given us this Son as a model and as the source of all sanctity. “In him reside all the treasures of the wisdom and knowledge of God” (Col 2:3). An eternity of contemplation will not be enough to exhaust the knowledge of this mystery and to thank God for this benefit. If, as Saint Thomas Aquinas writes, “the natural and eternal filiation of the Word in the bosom of the Father is the sublime example of our adoptive filiation” (Sermo, XXXI, 3), the holiness specific to humanity of the true only Son of God must also serve as a model for the holiness of adopted sons.

Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team