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Call Upon the Lord

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Grant me, O Lord to know and understand which comes first: to call upon you or to praise you: and whether first to know you or call upon you.

How are they to call upon him in whom they have not believed? How are they to believe in him whom they have not heard? And they who seek the Lord shall praise him."
--St. Augustine--Confessions 1, 1

Prayer: May I seek you, Lord, by praying to you, and let me pray to you by believing in you.
--St. Augustine--Confessions 1, 1


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February 5th - St. Avitus
(Alcimus Ecdicius). 

A distinguished bishop of Vienne, in Gaul, from 490 to about 518, though his death is place by some as late as 525 or 526. He was born of a prominent Gallo-Roman family closely related to the Emperor Avitus and other illustrious persons, and in which episcopal honors were hereditary. In difficult times for the Catholic faith and Roman culture in Southern Gaul, Avitus exercised a favourable influence. He pursued with earnestness and success the extinction of the Arian heresy in the barbarian Kingdom of Burgundy (443-532), won the confidence of King Gundobad, and converted his son, King Sigismund (516-523). He was also a zealous opponent of Semipelagianism, and of the Acacian Schism at Constantinople. Like his contemporary, Ennodius of Pavia, he was strenuous in his assertion of the authority of the Apostolic See as the chief bulwark of religious unity and the incipient Christian civilization. "If the pope," he says, "is rejected, it follows that not one bishop, the whole episcopate threatens to fall" (Si papa urbis vocatur in dubium, episcopatus videbitur, non episcopus, vaccilare. — Ep. xxxiv; ed. Peiper). 

The literary fame of Avitus rests on a poem of 2,552 hexameters, in five books, dealing with the Scriptural narrative of Original Sin, Expulsion from Paradise, the Deluge, the Crossing of the Red Sea. The first three books offer a certain dramatic unity; in them are told the preliminaries of the great disaster, the catastrophe itself, and the consequences. The fourth and fifth books deal with the Deluge and the Crossing of the Red Sea as symbols of baptism. Avitus deals freely and familiarly with the Scriptural events, and exhibits well their beauty, sequence, and significance. He is one of the last masters of the art of rhetoric as taught in the schools of Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries. Ebert says that none of the ancient Christian poets treated more successfully the poetic elements of the Bible. His poetic diction, though abounding in archaisms and rhythmic redundancy, is pure and select, and the laws of metre are well observed. It is said that Milton made use of his paraphase [sic] of Scripture in the preparation of "Paradise Lost". He wrote also 666 hexameters "De virginitate" or "De consolatoriâ castitatis laude" for the comfort of his sister Fuscina, a nun. His prose works include "Contra Eutychianam Hæresim libri II", written in 512 or 513, and also about eighty-seven letters that are of considerable importance for the ecclesiastical and political history of the years 499-518. Among them is the famous letter to Clovis on the occasion of his baptism. There was once extant a collection of his homilies, but they have perished with the exception of two and some fragments and excerpts.

 In recent times Julien Havet has demonstrated (Questions mérovingiennes, Paris, 1885), that Avitus is not the author of the "Dialogi cum Gundobado Rege", a defence of the Catholic Faith against the Arians, purporting to represent the famous Colloquy of Lyons in 449, and first published by d'Achéry (1661) in his "Spicilegium" (V, 110-116). It is a forgery of the Oratorian, Jérome Viguier, who also forged the letter of Pope Symmachus (13 Oct., 501) to Avitus. The works of Avitus are found in Migne, P.L., LIX, 191-398. There are two recent editions: one by R. Peiper (in Mon. Germ. Hist.: Auct. Antiq., VI, Berlin, 1883), the other by U. Chevalier (Lyons, 1890). 

This Version Taken From:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02161c.htm


Saint Quote:
It is important that you choose your career with care, so that you may
really follow the vocation that God has destined for you. No day
should pass without some prayer to this end. Often repeat with St.
Paul: "Lord, what will you have me do?  
--St. John Bosco

Bible Quote:
He that speaketh of himself, seeketh his own glory: but he that
seeketh the glory of him that sent him, he is true, and there is no
injustice in him.  (John 7:18)


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Irish Night Time Prayer

Four corners to my bed 
Four apostles at my head.
Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.
God bless the bed I lie upon.
Before I lay me down to sleep,
I give my soul to Christ to keep.
Four corners to my bed,

Four angels there a spread,
Two to foot, and two to head,
And two to carry me, when I'm dead.
If any danger come to me,
Sweet Jesus Christ, deliver me!
And if I die before I wake,
I pray that Christ my soul will take.
Amen.