Dominic's Simplicity and Common Sense - Novena to St Dominic Day 5
On this fifth day of our novena to St Dominic, we began our Mass with the prayer: Draw near to your servants, O Lord,
and answer their prayers with unceasing kindness,
that, for those who glory in you as their Creator and guide,
you may restore what you have created
and keep safe what you have restored.
What is impressive about St Dominic? His simplicity, I think. He simply loved God, and lived with the longing that all people might share his faith and love. Does his simplicity make him irrelevant for this time of ours, which is becoming increasingly complicated and inhuman?
Was Dominic’s vocation irrelevant in his own day, or was it revolutionary or unique or innovative? Or simply common sense? … A refreshing spring of truth and wisdom; of freedom and hope; of mercy and love for a world that had grown, as it were, to be a ‘dry, weary land without water’?
Yes, common sense.
Re-calling those he encountered - one soul at a time - to encountering God who is love: this was his mission, as it is ours.
His time - as is ours in many ways - was one of unrest; war; distrust and suspicion; of indifference to God and of disillusionment with the Church and her authority. Hope was a virtue that could be said to have been weak among men, particularly hope in humanity and its goodness - it was a bleak world in tremendous need of light.
And along came Dominic, just in time, with his unshakeable faith and confidence in God; with his simplicity of faith; with his love and hope for men and his desire that they - and we - should live in the light of truth: truth about God and about themselves.
God is love and mercy.
We belong to Him and are infinitely loved by Him. … Infinitely.
Therefore, we are good, although separated by the darkness of our sin.
But we are not our sin, nor are we without hope, and it is our capacity to love that makes us human. God, in His mercy, frees us and restores our ability to love, to be human and to live in Him.
St Dominic was utterly free, joyfully so. He laboured wisely, skilfully and successfully, but by no means in vain. In his prayer and toil, he offered everything and everyone to God, our Creator and guide, in whom he trusted; for whom he lived; and who alone, as Dominic knew, unfailingly restores what He has created and keeps safe what He has restored.
May St Dominic obtain for us in our time that same grace of confident faith and hope in God: that simplicity of faith, that we may know - even if it is all we know - that God is love.
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