Blessed Marmion: A Life in the Trinity

Father Mark on the venerable Irish Abbot who wrote of the liturgical life of the Church so beautifully. To quote:

 Although Joseph Aloysius Marmion was baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; although he was plunged into the life of the Three Divine Persons, becoming by grace what Jesus is by nature, that is, a well–beloved Son; although he was raised in a pious, God–fearing, Catholic family, and even dressed in black from the time he was a small boy to get him used to the soutane for which, in his parents’ eyes, he was pre–destined; although he studied philosophy, and then theology, at Clonliffe and in Rome; although he read his breviary faithfully, offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass each morning, never failed to make his daily Way of the Cross, and never omitted his daily rosary; it was not until he experienced total immersion in the liturgy of the Church as a Benedictine monk that the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity came alive for him. In the sacred liturgy — and principally in the Divine Office with its daily round of psalmody punctuated by the ever–recurring Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto — Columba Marmion passed from a speculative, notional knowledge of the Most Holy Trinity to an experiential, sapiential, cordial knowledge of what it means to be « a son in the Son ».(Read more.)