Tuesday, November 18 : John Tauler

In the gospel, we read that Zacchaeus wanted to see Our Lord, but that he was too small of stature. So what did he do? He climbed a dried up fig tree. That is what people still do. Someone wants to see the one who works marvels and who causes a whole tumult in him. But he isn’t big enough, he is too small. So what to do? He has to climb a dried up fig tree. The dead fig tree symbolizes the death of the senses and of nature and the life of the inner person, which carries God. What does Our Lord say to Zacchaeus? “Hurry down.” You have to come down, you must not hold back a single drop of consolation from all your impressions in prayer, but come down in your pure nothingness, in your poverty, in your powerlessness… If, from the moment truth has given you some light, there is still some natural attachment in you, you don’t yet possess it, it has not yet become your own; nature and grace still work together and you have not attained perfect abandonment …; this is not yet full purity. That is why God invites such a person to come down, that is to say, he calls him to complete renunciation, to complete detachment from nature, in everything in which nature still possesses something of its own. “For I mean to stay at your house today; today salvation has come to this house.” May this today of eternity come to us!

Roman Extraordinary (Tridentine) Daily Readings – rosary,team