Sunday, March 8 : Saint Gregory of Nyssa

“Come and pass through from the beginning of faith, from the peak of Sanir and Hermon.” (Song 4:8, translation of Gregory of Nyssa)What meaning, then, did we detect in these words? The wellspring of good things always draws the thirsty to itself just as in the Gospel the wellspring says: “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). For in using these words, he sets no limit, whether to thirst, or to the urge to come to him, or to the enjoyment of the drinking. Rather, by the openendedness of his injunction, he issues a continuing invitation to thirst and to drink and to be impelled toward him. To those who have already “tasted” and have learned from experience “that the Lord is good” (cf. Ps 33:9; 1 Peter 2:3), the tasting becomes, as it were, an invitation to partake of yet more. On this account the invitation to come to him that has been off ered, and that ever and again draws us to better things, is never lacking to the person who is journeying upwards. Let us not be forgetful of the urging that the Word addressed to the Bride in earlier passages: “Come, my close one, he says, and again, Come, my dove, and Come for yourself … to the shelter of the rock.” Th e text runs as follows: Come and pass through from the beginning of faith, from the peak of Sanir and Hermon. With these words, however, he
intim ates the mystery of the birth from above,8 for it is from there, they say, that the springs of the Jordan fl ow, over which there looms this mountain
that divides into two peaks with the names Sanir and Hermon. Since, then, the stream that fl ows out of these springs is for us the beginning of our being
remodeled for existence at the level of the divine.

Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team