The Office of Readings today
From the dialogue On Divine Providence by Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and doctor
How good and how delightful is your spirit, Lord, in all people!
The eternal Father, indescribably kind and tender, turned his eye to this soul and spoke to her thus:
‘O dearest daughter, I have determined to show my mercy and loving kindness to the world, and I choose to provide for mankind all that is good. But man, ignorant, turns into a death-giving thing what I gave in order to give him life. Not only ignorant, but cruel: cruel to himself. But still I go on providing. For this reason I want you to know: whatever I give to you I do it out of my great providence.
‘So it was that when, by my providence, I created you, I looked into myself and fell in love with the beauty of the creature I had made – for it had pleased me, in my providence, to create you in my own image and likeness.
‘Moreover, I gave you memory, to be able to remember the good things I had done for you and to be able to share in my own power, the power of the eternal Father.
‘Moreover, I gave you intellect, so that, seeing the wisdom of my Son, you could recognise and understand my own will; for I am the giver of all graces and I give them with a burning fatherly love.
‘Moreover, I gave you the desire to love, sharing in the tenderness of the Holy Spirit, so that you might love the things that your intellect had understood and seen.
‘But my kind providence did all this solely that you might be able to understand me and enjoy me, rejoicing in my vision for all eternity. And as I have told you elsewhere, the disobedience of your first parent Adam closed heaven to you – and from that disobedience came all evil through the whole world.
‘To relieve you of the death that his own disobedience had brought, I tenderly and providently gave you my only-begotten Son to heal you and bring satisfaction for your needs. I gave you the task of being supremely obedient, to free the human race of the poison that your first parent’s disobedience had spread throughout the world. Falling in love, as it were, with his task, and truly obedient, he hurried to a shameful death on the most holy Cross. By his most holy death he gave you life: not human life this time, but with the strength of his divinity.’
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