The Lay Dominicans of the Queen of the Holy Rosary Group will be posting meditations for the fifteen Tuesdays leading up to the feast of our Father Dominic on August 8th.   See here for more information on the 15 Tuesdays devotion.

When we refer to Our Holy Father Dominic as “Preacher of Grace”, we should see immediately that the object of preaching ought to be the Divine Word, Christ Himself, for the salvation of souls.  In the Dominican mystical tradition, this preaching can be thought of as participating in the Divine Birth. This is a theme prevalent in the writing of the German Dominican Meister Eckhart and his disciples, John Tauler and Henry Suso.  Just as the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Christ, we too bring the Divine Word to birth in the world through our preaching. Even more fundamental to this, though, is that the Divine Birth must first happen interiorly, otherwise our preaching risks becoming self-centered and oriented away from Christ.

In exploring this theme, Meister Eckhart points to the story of the Finding of Jesus.  After searching for the Lord for three days, Mary and Joseph discover Him in the Temple where they had started their journey.  They had to leave the crowd behind in order to find Him in His Father’s House. Eckhart suggests that to seek the Divine Birth interiorly, we must also return to the source. We must set aside “the crowd”, all distractions, imagination, even our preconceived knowledge and learning, and humbly return to the pursuit of holiness, which is how God roots Himself in the soul by grace.  This is where God the Father speaks his Word to us, communicating His very own life, making us partakers of the divine nature. Everything that we do henceforth is an effect of this: God abiding, preaching, and working in us and through us.

We also see that the Lord was found in the Temple “sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions”, and as they went away, Mary “kept all these things in her heart” in deep reflection. The Divine Birth of the Word in the soul continually unfolds through the careful elucidation of divine truths through study, unselfish disputation, and prayerful contemplation.  Only after this can we emulate Our Holy Father Dominic by doing as the Blessed Virgin Mary did: humbly bring the Divine Word to birth in the world through holy preaching.