FIRST ANNUAL ANGELIC DOCTOR LECTURE

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO • UNIVERSITY OF ST. MICHAEL’S COLLEGE

Newman Centre/St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church
Thursday, January 26, 2017

The Person of St. Thomas Aquinas and

His Contribution to the Intellectual Life of the Catholic University Students
FR. PETER JOHN CAMERON, O.P.

1. JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO, in November 2016, the legendary

Canadian poet and Canadian Hall of Fame inductee Leonard Cohen
died. Cohen was also a celebrity songwriter, and you probably know
him best from his famous 1984 song “Hallelujah,” which has been
covered by artists more than 300 times and was a featured song in
the movie Shrek. That’s how I came to love it.
Another popular Grammy Award-winning Canadian singer
considers the point of that song to be about, as she puts it, “the
struggle between having human desire and searching for spiritual
wisdom. It’s being caught between those two places.”

2. This is very interesting because Leonard Cohen was also famous

for being terribly melancholic. He has been called “The Poet
Laureate of Pessimism”; his first studio album was dubbed “The
Suicide Songbook.” His poignant lyrics are especially dark and
grim, even though he claimed that he was no more depressed than
anyone else.

3. All the same, there exists one beautiful song of Leonard Cohen’s
that, although probably much less known, is even more profound
and actually hopeful. It may even be fair to call it a hymn. The title
of the song is “Come Healing”, and it goes:

O gather up the brokenness

And bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow

The splinters that you carry

The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

And let the heavens hear it

The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

Behold the gates of mercy

In arbitrary space
And none of us deserving
The cruelty or the grace

O solitude of longing
Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

O see the darkness yielding

That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart

O troubled dust concealing

An undivided love
The heart beneath is teaching
To the broken heart above

Let the heavens falter

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 Let the earth proclaim
Come healing of the altar
Come healing of the name…

And let the heavens hear it

The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

4. There it is again: the struggle between having human desire and

the searching for spiritual wisdom. And who is the person doing the
speaking in that song? It doesn’t take deep analysis to realize that
the speaker is God: “O gather up the brokenness and bring it to me
now… Let the heavens hear it, the penitential hymn… Behold the
gates of mercy… O see the darkness yielding… Come healing of the
reason, come healing of the heart.”

5. In effect, what Leonard Cohen’s song is asking for is to meet

Saint Thomas Aquinas. Because probably nobody in the history of
the Christian Faith has understood and articulated better “the healing
of the reason, the healing of the heart.” For St. Thomas Aquinas, the
struggle between having human desire and searching for spiritual
wisdom are not at all two places where we are caught. They are,
rather, one Person who is caught up in love for us—Jesus Christ—
who blesses us with these longings precisely to set us free.

6. St. Thomas Aquinas was a wonder…a force of nature. Thomas’

first biographer, a man who knew Thomas personally—William of
Tocco—wrote:

In his lectures, Thomas raised new questions,

and discovered a new and clear way of solving
them, and he used new arguments in arriving at

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 these solutions. Those who heard Thomas
Aquinas resolving difficulties and problems in
a new way, with new principles, believed that
he had been endowed by God with a new light
of understanding.1

Thomas Aquinas was a genius in the sense held by the French

writer Maurice Barrès: “A genius is one who can give us what we
need, when nobody else can do it.”2
According to a modern biographer: Thomas “went below the
foundations of his own age and found the eternal principles of
things.”3
The 13th century poet Heinrich von Würzburg remarked about
Thomas Aquinas:

He could have discovered philosophy anew, if

it had been destroyed by fire. He could have
restored it in a better way.4

Can that new light of understanding somehow make a

significant contribution to the intellectual life of Catholic university
students today?

7. His whole life it seems St. Thomas was poised to do just that.
Thomas was born to a noble family in 1225 in the family castle of
Roccaseca near Naples, Italy. His father, Count Landulf, was a
relative of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. His
mother, Countess Theodora of Teano, was related to the Norman
barons.

1
Vita.
2
Cited in Sertillanges, p. 46.
3
A.G. Sertillanges, O.P., Thomas Aquinas: Scholar, Poet, Mystic, Saint, p. 119.
4
Cited in Sertillanges, Thomas Aquinas, p. 22.

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 At the age of five Thomas was brought to the nearby
monastery of Monte Cassino, where his Uncle Sinibald was the
abbot. In the words of one of Thomas’ best-respected modern
biographers:

The sacred solitude of the holy mountain of

Cassino may have permanently influenced the
susceptible heart of the ideally-minded boy,
and may have developed in him his bent for
reflection, contemplation, and the inner life.5

8. But it was a life not without trials. His ambitious father had set
his sights on Thomas taking over as abbot of Monte Cassino. He
even engineered a way for him to do it without Thomas having to
become a Benedictine. Moreover, when his worldly mother
discovered that her son had opted to join the Dominican Order
instead of the Benedictines—a huge step down on the social scale—
she arranged for Thomas’ brothers to kidnap him and hold him
prisoner in one of the family castles. Even locked in a tower,
Thomas wouldn’t budge. So the brothers hired a prostitute and
threw the woman into the room with Thomas, hoping that she would
persuade him. It didn’t work.
At long last, the family relented and allowed Thomas to
proceed to his studies with St. Albert the Great. But, if all this
wasn’t stigma enough, in the classroom he fell prey to the bullies of
his day. As G.K. Chesterton explains in his biography of Thomas
Aquinas:

It is clear, before long, even his imposing

stature began to have only the ignominious
immensity of the big boy left behind in the
lowest form. He was called the Dumb Ox. He
5
Martin Grabmann, Thomas Aquinas: His Personality and Thought, pp. 1-2.

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 was the object, not merely of mockery, but of
pity.6

On occasion Thomas was made to feel like a bit of a freak,

owing to his great girth. “The mother of Thomas’ [secretary and
right-hand man] Brother Reginald of Piperno, recounts that when
[Thomas] was passing, the peasants in the fields left their labors and
came near to look at him, full of admiration for a man of such
corpulence and beauty.”7
Perhaps it was out of a mild sense of defensiveness that St.
Thomas went on to write: “Pulcritudo proprie consistit in corpore
magno”—beauty is found in a large body.8

9. What we are sure of is this: the many troubles that Thomas was
forced to face did not weaken his resolve to follow Jesus Christ as a
Dominican friar, but only deepened his desire. And for St. Thomas
Aquinas, desire is everything.

I. Desire

10. The sadness that Thomas Aquinas may have experienced over
being misunderstood and rejected by his own family, mistreated by
his schoolmates, and feeling self-conscious about his personality
and bearing would have affected him a lot. In his teachings, St.
Thomas notes that, of all the passions—the four basic ones being
sadness, joy, hope, and fear—it is sadness that “causes the most
injury to the soul.”9

6
G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, ch. 3.
7
Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work, p. 26.
8
Sententia IV, 8, 1123 b 5.
9
ST I-II, q. 37, a. 4.

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 Maybe he personally felt the threat of that. But, because he was
a thoughtful and reflective person, Thomas turned his hurt into
something constructive that led him to wonder: What is sadness?

11. And the ingenious conclusion Thomas came up with is this:

Sadness is the “desire for an absent good.”10
He made it his life’s goal to go after this absent good because
“the human desire for joy is stronger than the fear of sadness.”11

12. Thomas learned this the hard way. One night when Thomas
Aquinas was a little boy, he was sleeping alongside his nurse, and
his baby sister was sleeping in the nursery with them. A
thunderstorm erupted in the middle of the night. The infant was
struck by lightning and died. But Thomas was spared.
A contemporary biographer of Thomas Aquinas writes:

Remembering, no doubt, the episode when his

young sister had been killed by lightning as he
slept by her side, [Thomas] had the [pious]
habit of making the Sign of the Cross during
[thunder] storms, and repeating, “God came in
the flesh, God suffered for us.”12

13. A calamitous happening like that might cause some to despair

and give up. For Thomas Aquinas, it produced enlightenment that
moved him to keep going. As he would later write:

10
In Dionysii de divinis nominibus 4, 9.
11
ST I-II, q. 35, a. 6.
12
Torrell, The Person, p. 284.

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 Despair, like hope, presupposes desire. Neither
hope nor despair is directed towards anything
that does not move our desire.13

In fact, Saint Thomas is never more eloquent, never more

lyrical and romantic, than when he is speaking about hope:

Hope, like smoke from the fire of love, mounts

up from life and vanishes in glory.14

14. St. Thomas Aquinas instructs us, “There is no desire which is

not directed towards a good.”15 “A natural desire cannot possibly be
vain and senseless.”16
No—our desires are given to us with the intention of leading us
to the One who gave them to us in the first place. Our desires are
given to us so that we can understand the purpose for which we are
living. Desires are given precisely so that we can know who Jesus
is, and just how much he can fill our lives with total satisfaction.
Desires are given to us so that we can share in the happiness of the
One who created us.
Desires are not to be feared or repressed. They are to be
embraced.

15. St. Thomas says in his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica,

“Every person’s life consists in the affection that principally sustains
them and in which they find their greatest satisfaction.”17

16. The moment we dare to go to the root of our desires and find
that affection that principally sustains us, we want what St. Thomas
13
ST I-II, q. 40, a. 4, ad 3.
14
Epist. ad Ephes., Prologue.
15
ST I-II, q. 8, a. 1.
16
SCG, Bk 2, 79.
17
ST II-II, q. 179, a. 1.

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Aquinas wants. A story is told about a time when Jesus,
miraculously from a crucifix, spoke to St. Thomas. The Lord was
pleased with what Thomas had written about him—regarding his
Passion and Death—and the Lord wanted to reward him. When
Jesus asked Thomas Aquinas what he wanted for his reward,
Thomas replied, “Non nisi te, Domine.” Nothing but you, Lord.

II. Truth

17. To speak about “that in which we find our greatest satisfaction”

is to speak about the Truth. This is a topic Pope Saint John Paul II
addresses so powerfully in his encyclical letter Fides et Ratio, Faith
and Reason. He says:

One may define the human being as the one

who seeks the truth…. The thirst for truth is so
rooted in the human heart that to be obliged to
ignore it would cast our existence into
jeopardy…. The desire for truth spurs reason
always to go further…. At the summit of its
searching reason acknowledges that it cannot
do without what faith presents.18

18. And what do you think John Paul goes on to talk about next? St.
Thomas Aquinas. The pope continues:

Thomas recognized that…faith…has no fear of

reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just
as grace builds on nature and brings it to
fulfillment, so faith builds upon and perfects
reason. Illumined by faith, reason is set free….
18
Fides et Ratio #28, 29, 42.

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 This is why the Church has been justified in
consistently proposing St. Thomas as a master
of thought.19

19. Here’s the humility with which Thomas Aquinas looked at

reality. He says in the Summa Contra Gentiles:

Human beings are ordained by divine

Providence towards a higher good than human
fragility can experience in the present life. That
is why it was necessary for the human mind to
be called to something higher than human
reason here and now can reach, so that it would
thus learn to desire something and with zeal
tend towards something that surpasses the
whole state of the present life.20

Again, this is emphasized in Fides et Ratio:

The human heart…yearns for the infinite riches

which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be
found the satisfying answer to every question
as yet unanswered.

Faith liberates reason in so far as it allows

reason to attain correctly what it seeks to know
and to place it within the ultimate order of
things, in which everything acquires true
meaning.21

19
ibid. #43.
20
SCG, Bk 1, 5, 2.
21
Fides et Ratio #17, 20.

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20. What all of this means is that, in our common insatiable search
for meaning, purpose, truth, faith is not optional.
We just have to look at history to see how much, when left to
reason alone, we’re stuck with a terrible impasse. One leading
Thomistic scholar, Dominican Fr. James Brent, comments on this
predicament:

Human reason has many questions, but the

history of thought proves that human reason
faces great difficulties in finding shared
answers to its own most profound questions.
Philosophical questions about whether life has
a meaning and what it is, whether there is a
God, why God would permit evil, whether
human beings have a purpose and happiness
beyond life in this world and what it is,
whether it is possible for universal justice ever
to be secured in human society, and other such
fundamental questions have been raised in all
or most human societies. But answers to those
questions seem also to elude human reasoning
both with philosophers and with common
people…. Faith in divine revelation, however,
speaks to all of these questions and more.
When one believes by faith the testimony
offered by God, one receives answers to the
questions of life. And those answers are
susceptible to support, defense, and
illumination by reason.22

22
http://www.thomisticevolution.org/disputed-questions/faith-and-reason-the-two-wings-of-the-
human-spirit-part-ii/ — Accessed January 21, 2017.

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 Or, in the words of the author considered to be the definitive
biographer of Thomas Aquinas, Dominican Father Jean-Pierre
Torrell, “Only faith allows us to encounter the Reality beyond the
formulas that attempt to express it.” 23 For as St. Thomas himself
tells us:

In the progress of knowledge the human mind

is usually most helped if its natural intelligence
is strengthened by a new light: the light of
faith. By that light, the mind recognizes that
God lies above and beyond everything that it
can know by nature.24

21. Thomas Aquinas didn’t devote his life to research, writing,

teaching, and scholarship because he was an erudite and studious
sort of guy. He did it as his way of getting as close as he possibly
could to God.

22. “Yes, but,” you might reply, “he was a mega-intelligent

braniac.” And if you were to say that to St. Thomas, he would take
that word “intelligent”—as he often did—and turn to the etymology
of the Latin intelligere. Calling upon his theory of interpretation, he
would tell you that that word is made up of two words—“intus” and
“legere”—which put together mean “to read within”, “to penetrate
beneath the sensible surface and discern the rational meaning.”
“This is a penetration into ‘the very essence or substance of a
thing.’”25

23
J.-P. Torrell, Christ and Spirituality in St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 24.
24
In Boeth. de Trin. I, 2.
25
Christopher T. Baglow, “Sacred Scripture and Sacred Doctrine,” in Aquinas on Doctrine: A
Critical Introduction (Ed. Thomas G. Weinandy, et al.), p. 5.

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 That’s the true value of “intelligence” for St. Thomas Aquinas.
An intelligent person is one who wants to read within things…to
penetrate to the deepest meaning…to get to what is real.

23. Ironically, one thing that human reason, all on its own, is very
good at is bringing us to the certainty of the reality of God.
In the Summa, St. Thomas observes:

In all of us there has been implanted by nature

something that leads to a knowledge of the
existence of God.26

24. Very likely it was this conviction that attracted the American
author Flannery O’Connor to the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In
her letters she admits:

I read the Summa for about twenty minutes

every night before I go to bed. If my mother
were to come in during this process and say,
“Turn off that light. It’s late,” I with lifted
finger and broad bland beatific expression
would reply [in the form of a Summa article],
“On the contrary, I answer that the light, being
eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut
your eyes,” or some such thing.27

And Flannery O’Connor probably ascribed to the counsel

Thomas Aquinas borrowed from St. Jerome: “Never let a book be
absent from your eyes and hand.”28

26
ST I, q. 2, a. 1.
27
The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Ed. Sally Fitzgerald), pp. 93-94.
28
Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, XI, 2.

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25. No wonder, then, that Thomas Aquinas was always absorbed
and preoccupied in adapting his thought to the matters and concerns
of the world, which he considered to be the philosopher’s chief
purpose in life.
In the assessment of Dominican Fr. A.G. Sertillanges:

Thomas tackled these problems, not out of

curiosity or ambition, but because they were of
importance to mankind. He thought in order to
live himself and to help others to live. He
sought to find his way about the world, that he
might walk in it and help us to walk.29

St. Thomas agreed with Plato—error about things that it is our

duty to study is as bad as murder.

26. St. Thomas Aquinas referred to the whole of his work as sacra
doctrina—but that expression means more than what the English
suggests, “sacred doctrine”. Sacra doctrina is a significantly broader
reality than theology alone. It incorporates all forms of Christian
teaching at all levels.30
As the famous editor of the sixty-volume English Summa,
Dominican Fr. Thomas Gilby, points out:

Sacra doctrina [is] an imparting of God’s

mystery to human beings which is a
communicating of his life, not merely the
conveying of information…. The effect of
sacra doctrina is…an invigoration of the
mind’s own proper vitality, contemplative and

29
Sertillanges, p. 46.
30
Torrell, Christ, pp. xv, 3, 4.

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 active…shaping human activity in the bustle of
temporal affairs.31

27. According to the testimony of those who lived with him,

Thomas Aquinas would on occasion place his head tenderly against
the tabernacle in the hopes of discovering its secrets, like a trusting
little child.32

28. St. Thomas was thoroughly convinced that a person

“enlightened by the gift of wisdom possesses an intimate familiarity
with divine things that the theologian cannot procure merely by his
pure science.”33
So, in a sermon that he preached at the University of Naples,
the great Common Doctor of the Church was heard to say to his
devout hearers: “Any elderly woman today knows more about
divine things than did all the philosophers of antiquity put
together.”34 And, as a witness at St. Thomas’ canonization
proceedings attested, when Friar Thomas preached at Naples, he
was interrupted by the tears of the congregation.35 They were crying
because St. Thomas made them happy—for happiness, as he taught,
“is the joy produced by truth.”36

III: Friendship

31
Thomas Gilby, Summa Theologiae: Volume I, “Appendix 5—Sacra Doctrina”, pp. 58, 60.
32
Sertillanges, p. 54.
33
Torrell, Christ, p. 15.
34
Sertillanges, p. 42.
35
ibid., p. 56.
36
ST II-II, q. 3, a. 4.

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29. What all this is showing us is that we don’t engage in the pursuit
of wisdom just to become “cerebral” or “smart.” The Angelic
Doctor assures us:

The learned person not only attains to

knowledge of divine things, he also
experiences them [literally ‘suffers them’], i.e.,
not only does he receive them as knowledge
into his mind, he also becomes one thing with
them by love and by affection.37

There is something momentous held out to us through the

eminent and ardent pursuit of wisdom. St. Thomas tells us what that
is:

The pursuit of wisdom is more noble than other

human pursuits because through this pursuit
the human being approaches to a likeness to
God who made all things in wisdom. And since
likeness is the cause of love, the pursuit of
wisdom especially joins the human being to
God in friendship.38

30. A hint of this is to be discovered in the very word we have

designated to refer to an institution of higher learning. We call this
place where we earn academic degrees a “university.” And the word
“university” is a shortened version of the Latin universitas
magistrorum et scholarium, which can be translated as “community
of teachers and scholars.” Before all else, a university is a
community!

37
Expositio in librum b. Dionysii de divinis nominibus, no. 191.
38
SCG I, 2, 1.

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31. It is not a coincidence that Dante referred to St. Thomas Aquinas
as “an intellectual light full of love.”39 The Doctor of Humanity
wants to model for us in every way how to live in a lasting union
with God…to live the charity that is friendship. He goes so far as to
claim that

the human being approaches nearer to God

through love than through reason, because in
love the human being does not act himself, but
is in a manner of speaking drawn nearer by
God himself.40

32. According to St. Thomas, what is the primary purpose of human

law? His answer? To cause friendship between people. And what is
the purpose of the divine law? To establish friendship between
human beings and God.41
So too, a singular purpose of the Catholic university is to
provide a sacred locus where that communion of divine charity can
flourish—a place where we can draw near to God through love.

33. Friendship is critical if we are ever to be victorious in the

struggle between the goading of human desire and our search for
spiritual wisdom. For, as the Angelic Aquinas teaches us, the happy
person needs friends in this life.42
Friends enable us to be our truest self. Without friends, one
would be likely to lose enthusiasm for and interest in the activity of
virtuous living. Friends act virtuously towards each other, mutually
feeding the motivation of the other to act in a virtuous way. By

39
Dante, Divine Comedy, “Paradise,” canto 30, line 40.
40
ST I-II, q. 26, a. 3, ad 4.
41
ST I-II, q. 99, a. 2.
42
ST I-II, q.4, a. 8c.

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looking at our friends, we can look at ourselves in a less biased
fashion.43

34. For example, when St. Thomas considers something like

disordered sexual lust, what he finds so evil in it is how it is utterly
opposed to the very possibility of friendship.
Look at what Thomas lists as the eight effects of sinful lust:
 blindness of mind
 thoughtlessness
 inconstancy
 rashness or impertinence—temerity
 self-love
 hatred of God
 love of the present world
 and despair of a future world.44

The lustful person is not unhappy just because of the bad sex
they engage in. The lustful person is unhappy because they are
incapable of having—or being—a true friend.

35. Friendship, our spiritual master insists, begins only with

reciprocity—redamatio: “to love in return.” Which means that the
key to the pursuit of wisdom—whose goal is to be joined in
friendship with God—is prayer. Prayer, in the judgment of St.
Thomas, is the indispensable interpreter of our desire. It’s what
we’re meant to do with our desire so that it doesn’t torment us.
This is why the wisest Catholic university student does not
distinguish too much between “oratory and laboratory.” 45 St.
Thomas promises you: “If a person submits their learning and their

43
Eth. IX. 10.
44
ST II-II, q. 153. a. 5.
45
Sertillanges, p. 5.

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other powers to God, his devotion, as a direct result, will be
deepened.”46

36. This is done, St. Thomas advises us in his commentaries on the

Psalms, simply by raising, elevating the soul to God:
 the elevation of faith through the admiration of God’s grandeur
 the elevation of hope by straining toward beatitude
 the elevation of charity through intimate union with God and
his holiness
 the elevation of justice by imitating God’s justice in our own
actions towards him and towards others.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reflects on the priority of praise in the

spirituality of Thomas Aquinas. He writes:

Saint Thomas says that through the praise of

God the human being ascends to God. Praise
itself is a movement, a path; it is more than
understanding, knowing, and doing—it is an
“ascent”, a way of reaching him who dwells
amid the praises of the angels. Thomas
mentioned another factor: this ascent draws the
human being away from what is opposed to
God. It awakens the inner man.47

37. Reason gets us close to God; love expressed through prayer gets
us nearer. And “the nearer a being stands to God, the further away it
is from nothingness.”48 And who doesn’t want to be far away from
nothingness!
46
ST II-II, 82, a. 3, ad. 3.
47
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, p. 116—citing ST II-II, q. 91, a. 1 resp.; ST II-II, q.
91, a. 1, ad 2.
48
SCG, Bk. 2. 30.

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 So we study and we pray, because we want to live life boldly.
And “the boldest people,” the Dumb Ox bellows, “are those who are
rightly related to divine things.”49 “All those who think rightly
recognize that the end of human life is found in the contemplation of
God.”50

38. As he lay dying in the Cistercian abbey of Fossanuova, Thomas

Aquinas, contemplating God, dictated to the monks there a
commentary on the Song of Songs. His dying words were a love
letter to his divine Friend.
Thomas Aquinas was about forty-nine years old when he died.
Remarking on the tragedy of Thomas dying so young, one
biographer says that “thought, like a raging fire, had used up his
strength.”51
St. Thomas may be who the 14th century Rhineland Dominican
mystic Johannes Tauler had in mind when he wrote, “A man may
die of a broken heart because God works in him so vehemently that
it is more than he can bear.”52
The published acts of the canonization process of Thomas
Aquinas relate that, after Thomas’ death, his beloved teacher and
master, St. Albert the Great, could not bear to hear the name of
Thomas’ spoken without bursting into tears.53

Conclusion

39. Leonard Cohen, in that song “Come Healing”, makes this plea:

O solitude of longing
49
ST I-II, q. 45, ad 3.
50
Sent. I, Prologue, a. 1.
51
Sertillanges, p. 27.
52
Sermons, Sermon 11.
53
Grabmann, p. 33.

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 Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

O see the darkness yielding

That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart

Let the heavens falter

Let the earth proclaim
Come healing of the altar
Come healing of the name…

And another hymn writer—a glorious inductee of the angelic Hall of

Fame—replies:

Being born, He became our friend.

At supper, He became our food.
Dying, He was our ransom’s price
And, reigning, is our eternal good.

O Sacrifice for our salvation,

Heavenly Gates You open wide.
Our enemies press hard around us.
Give us strength; our help provide.

To the One and Triune God,

Be glory and eternal praise.
May He grant us life forever
And to our home our souls upraise.
Amen.54
54
Verbum Supernum Prodiens.

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Thank you.

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