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  "The divinity is jointly a sole perfection, and many perfections diverse, one in simplicity, and many in valor and eminence."--Fray Luis de León, The Perfect Wife §I "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!"  So declares the Shema of Deuteronomy, and so declares the Church: and yet we also declare that God is Three.  Not only does the Divinity have three Persons, but God manifests Himself to us in a multitude of ways.  These three Persons show themselves to us in many, many ways.  (They are not themselves merely manifestations of the Divinity, for this was the ancient heresy of Modalism.)  One tradition speaks of the different "books" by which one encounters God: first is the book of Scripture, of course, but there is also the book of nature, and the book of experience, among others.  We learn of God through prayer, through the liturgy, through contemplation, through study.  Yet it is always the one God we learn of, the On...

The Ascension from the Rabula Gospels (6th century) "And you leave, holy Pastor, your flock in this valley deep, dark, with solitude and crying..." We are in that time of the first novena, between the glories of the Ascension and the great breath of Pentecost.  During these days, we remember how the Apostles spent them, reconstituting their number after the fall of Judas, praying and praising God, both in the synagogue and in the Upper Room, together with the All-Holy Theotokos.  They had that hopeful message from the angels: "The one taken up from you into heaven, the same will come in the way you saw him going into heaven."  Jesus would return in glory, riding on the clouds, seated on the throne of judgment and righteousness, and we pray that, on that day, we will be among those taken up into the clouds to be with Him. Yet were the Apostles always that hopeful and joyful during this time?  Did they not experience a solitude, a feeling of loss?...

A lithograph of the Eishet Chayil in Hebrew by Shuki Freiman " A woman of valor who can find?  More honorable than costly stones is such a one."--Prv 31:10 As we complete our reading of the Proverbs of Solomon for this Lent, we come across that great praise of the Godly woman that ends this book.  It is a well-loved passage among the Jews, who call it by the Hebrew name Eishes Chayil (or Eishet Chayil ), which means "Woman of Valor."  It is the Jewish tradition to recite the passage before the Friday meal every Sabbath to praise the women of the house or all the women of Israel; thus the man recites it to his wife or to any woman there, and if there are only women in the household, they recite to praise all the women of Israel.  The passage describes the characteristics of a wonderful wife or "the perfect wife," as Fray Luis de León calls it in his commentary of the same title ( La perfecta casada ).  Such a woman works to beautify her home and...

Fray Luis de León was an Augustinian friar in Spain during the 1500s. He wrote much, both prose and poetry. Aside from his lyric poetry, his best-known work (and only one easily available in English translation) is The Names of Christ , recently printed as part of Paulist Press' "Classics of Western Spirituality" series. Among his other prose works are La perfecta casada , a marriage handbook based on Proverbs 31, and Traducción literal y declaración del libro de los cantares de Salomón , often abbreviated as Cantar de Cantares . As the name says, Cantar de Cantares is a literal translation and explanation of the book of the Song of Songs. I cannot find an English translation of the Cantar de Cantares online, so I decided to try my hand at my own translation. I must admit, I am not a professional translator, and I cannot vouch for any high technical value in this translation. I am only working on a Spanish minor, and this is also medieval Spanish, so it's mor...