“The feast hath been too much for him;
His heart is full, his eye is dim,”

Those words of Fr Faber’s hymn The Death of Saint Philip are no doubt still ringing in the ears of many of St Philip’s sons and friends after the great feast of Our Holy Father, which we celebrated on Monday. This year we do not have much time to hold on to the memory of that day before the Church directs us, not elsewhere, still to Heaven, but seen through different lenses. On Tuesday we continued our May devotions to Our Lady, and then on Wednesday night we sing First Vespers of the Ascension and celebrate that feast all through Thursday. St Philip, Our Lady, and Our Lord — all in the space of a few days — what more could we ask for? St Philip himself reminds us: “He who wishes for anything but Christ, does not know what he wishes; he who asks for anything but Christ, does not know what he is asking; he who works, and not for Christ, does not know what he is doing.”

Our Holy Father himself preferred nothing to the love of God. His entire life was spent “going from Christ to Christ”, be it in prayer or in his apostolic labours. He was, as has been written, “naturally supernatural”. The account of St Philip’s death could really be an account of any day of his life. He rose early, welcomed those who came seeking confession, he prayed, he celebrated Mass, he received his spiritual children and conversed with them familiarly on the things of God. But he knew it would be his last day upon this earth and so every action of his that day was done in the knowledge that it would be his last.

Ascension Thursday then directs our gaze heavenwards too. It reminds us of the hope we have for those who have gone before us in death and urges us on in our prayers for them. Above all it reminds us that like Christ, like St Philip, we too shall pass through death, and please God, one day join them in Heaven. It is there that Our Redeemer awaits us, having prepared there a place for us. It is the reminder of Heaven that allows us to live and breath in that sure and certain hope which is so indispensable in our Christian life, and which is the source of our Christian joy. It was his loving familiarity with the things of Heaven that gave Saint Philip his natural supernaturality.

Please God each of us will allow St Philip to be that loving, gentle, and kind Father who will lead us to Heaven too.

For each of the last five evenings, after Mass we have prayed the novena prayers to St Philip in preparation for his feast day. They are simple and heartfelt, calling on our Holy Father’s aid for this little corner of the Lord’s vineyard which is never without need of help. The words of the hymns, written in his honour by old Fathers over the years, remind us of his life and his patronage of us in heaven. As part of those devotions we read from St Philip’s life, giving us a picture of the fruits as well as the cause of Our Holy Father’s sanctity throughout his long life. We pray to the Holy Spirit during the novena on account of the great closeness St Philip had to the third person of the Blessed Trinity. That proximity to the Holy Spirit changed the young Philip’s life, and remained for him as a Pentecostal fire for the rest of his life. From the moment in the catacombs in 1544 when the Holy Spirit appeared to him as a ball of fire and entered into his heart he was changed both spiritually and physically: his heart was enlarged so much that his ribs remained broken his entire life. Philip was taken over by the Spirit and his life was guided by the Holy Spirit’s promptings in an extraordinary way.

St Philip’s life is a good place to look for evidence of what that Holy Spirit can do in a soul that is well disposed to him. If, in St Philip’s life, we see compassion, courage and a hatred of sin, all tied to his profound devotion (particularly to the Mass) along with a radiant, beautiful joy, we see too the work the Holy Spirit wants to do in us. Although our Father enjoyed these spiritual gifts in an unusual and impressive way, we should certainly try to imitate much of what the Spirit did in him. We should imitate him in his prayerfulness, in his love of learning of the things of God, in his devotion to the Blessed Eucharist and in his zeal for winning souls for the Lord — this is what his Oratory, after all, is for — it is for making us into saints after the pattern Philip sets.

Feast days are given us as helps, useful steps on our journey to support and encourage us. Put Monday in your diary, come to the Mass for our Saint and ask him to help you in your own journey with God. Take him as your own special patron and entrust your cares to him. Perhaps we could all of us try a little bit more to allow that saint of “gentleness and kindness, cheerful in penance, and in precept winning” to steer the little ships of our lives. And if we do trust him as our friend and guide, we ca be confident that he, kindest and most cheerful of fathers, will help us along that journey to the place where he is now and forever.

There has been much in the media recently about the principal image of Our Lady in Rome, Our Lady Salus populi Romani, whose history of veneration by the popes goes back to St Gregory the Great, who brought the image into Rome. But this is only one of the titles given to the image of Our Lady, and for much of its history, it has been known as the image of Our Lady, Regina caeli, the Queen of Heaven, the title by which we invoke the Mother of God so often during the Easter season.

This season is marked by this Marian antiphon in a way that the other seasons are not, because it even replaces the Angelus three times a day. So it seems worth taking a look at the text of it. It is shorter and simpler than the others. We don’t have the poetry of the Salve regina, where Eve’s exiled children mourn and weep in a vale of tears. We don’t have the clever Hebrew-Latin pun of the Alma redemptoris mater (Alma is both Latin for “kind” and Hebrew for “virgin”). In fact, the text is extremely straightforward:

O Queen of heaven rejoice! alleluia:
For he whom thou didst merit to bear, alleluia,
Hath arisen as he said, alleluia.
Pray for us to God, alleluia.

It seems we spend three quarters of this antiphon telling the Mother of God things she already knows. But we do that in all these antiphons, and not for her benefit. When we say, “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy; hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope!”, we are reminding ourselves that Mary is merciful, and a consolation to us in this life. When we call her “clement, loving and sweet”, it’s not an empty compliment, but another reminder for us. In the same way, as we speak to Mary so many times a day throughout Eastertide, we are reminded that her Son is risen from the dead, as he foretold, and that we are joyful about it.

The last line is different. “Pray for us to God.” It’s not about Easter. We’re not telling her something that she already knows. We’re asking her to do something. Or…is it really that different? If we treat it in the same way as the first three lines, maybe we are telling the Queen of heaven to do something that she not only already knows but is already doing. This antiphon that we say and sing so many times throughout the season of Easter, then, is a joyful reminder of the Resurrection, and a joyful reminder that we have an advocate in heaven, looking out for us and pleading our cause, even as we go about our day and are busy with much more earthly things. Our Lady, Queen of heaven, pray for us.