Important issues are involved.  We attain through this associated life of the Christian the power of mutual intercession.  We find that it is our privilege to share our prayers with others, and to be interested in one another’s lives.  We have common interests and we work them out in common.  Therefore when we try to put before us an ideal picture of the power of prayer, it will not be the solitary individual offering his personal supplications to the Father, but it will be the community of the faithful assembled for the offering of the divine Sacrifice.  It is the praying Body that best satisfies our ideal of prayer, where we are conscious of helping one another in the work of intercession.  We remember, too, when we think of prayer as prayer of the Body of Christ, that it is not just the visible congregation that is participating in it, but that all the Body share in the intercessions, wherever they may individually be.  Our thoughts go up from the little assembly in the humble church and lose themselves in the splendour of the heavenly intercession where we are associated with prophets and apostles and martyrs, and with Mary the Mother of God.

There was a third gift that the Magi brought to Him Whom they hailed King, a gift that is more perplexing as a gift to royalty than the other two.  That gold and incense should be offered a King is clearly His royal right; but what has he to do with the bitterness of myrrh?  But to this King myrrh is a peculiarly appropriate gift, for it is the symbol of complete self-abandonment.  He who came to do not His own will but the will of Him that sent Him; Who laid aside the robes of His glory, issuing from the uncreated light that He might clothe Himself with the humility of the flesh, is properly honoured with the gift of myrrh.

And as it was the symbol of His humility, so is it the symbol of our humanity in relation to Him.  It suggests to us that uttermost of Christian virtues, the virtue of entire abandonment to the will of God.  This is a most difficult virtue to acquire.  We cling to self.  We are devoted to our own wills.  We rely on our own judgment and wisdom.  We are impatient of all that gets in the way of our self-determination.  We have in these last days made a veritable religion out of devotion to self, a cult of the ego.

But he who will enter into the sanctuary of the divine life, he who will seek union with God, he who will be one with the Father in the Son, must abandon self.  He must lose his life in order to save it.  He must let go the world to cling to the Lord of life.  This will of the man which is so insistent, so persistent, so assertive, so tenacious, must be laid aside and the Will of Another adopted in its place.  Often this is bitter.  Very true of us it is that when we were young we girded ourselves and walked whither we would; but it must be in the end, if we make life a spiritual success, that when we are old another shall gird us and carry us whither we would not.