St. Thomas More (1478 – 1535) died a martyr’s death at the hands of the King Henry VIII.  In a vain effort to get him to bend to the king’s new marriage and new title as the Supreme Head of the Church in England, St. Thomas saw his little prison cell gradually be stripped of comforts.  Chief among those removed comforts were his books and paper for writing.  As a result, St. Thomas wrote down his “Godly Meditation” in the margins of his book of hours (breviary).  

St. Thomas’ Book of Hours wound up in Yale University’s rare book collection.  They have scans of every page on their website.  It’s pretty incredible that we can see Thomas More’s actual handwriting from nearly 500 years ago.  Check out the scans here; the Godly Meditation goes from pg. 17R to 26R.  Here is the text of the prayer, with some reflections to follow. 

Give me thy grace, good Lord,
To set the world at naught.

To set my mind fast upon thee
And not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths.

To be content to be solitary,
Not to long for worldly company.

Little and little utterly to cast off the world
And rid my mind of all the business thereof.

Not to long to hear of any worldly things,
But that the hearing of worldly fantasies may be to me displeasant.

Gladly to be thinking of God,
Piteously to call for his help.

To lean unto the comfort of God,
Busily to labour to love him.

To know my own vility and wretchedness,
To humble and meeken myself under the mighty hand of God.

To bewaile my sins passed
For the purging of them patiently to suffer adversity.

Gladly to bear my purgatory here;
To be joyful of tribulations.

To walk the narrow way that leadeth to life,
To bear the cross with Christ.

To have the last thing in remembrance,
To have ever afore mine eye my death that is ever at hand.

To make death no stranger to me,
To foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell.

To pray for pardon before the Judge come,
To have continually in mind the Passion that Christ suffered for me.

For his benefits incessantly to give him thanks,
To buy the time again that I before have lost.

To abstain from vain confabulations,
To eschew light foolish mirth and gladness.

Recreations not necessary to cut off;
Of worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all to set the loss at right naught for the winning of Christ.

To think my most enemies my best friends
For the brethren of Joseph could never have done him so much good with their love and favour as they did him with their malice and hatred.

These minds are more to be desired of every man than all the treasure of all the princes and kings,
Christian and heathen, were it gathered and layed together all upon one heap.

 The World

To start, I think it’s important to set the stage of this prayer.  First, Thomas’ martyrdom stared him in the face.  The screws were slowly being tightened that even More, the gifted lawyer and scholar, could not contend his way out of it.  Second, when Thomas speaks of “the world,” he held a different position than most of us ever will.  He held the post of Lord Chancellor from 1529 – 1532.  That is, professionally, he had the highest-ranking position second only to the king.  Thomas had a wide circle of friends, scholarly pursuits, friends and family, parties, and a pet monkey.  If I ran afoul of a king and lost my worldly position, I wouldn’t have very far to fall.  St. Thomas was just the opposite!

For all the glitz and glamor that the secular world fawns over, we cannot forget that the world is a fallen one.  St. Thomas asks to not ‘hang upon the blast of men’s mouths’, which is a prayer for him.  For us, it’s a lesson in how quickly the world can turn against us.  This is but one entry of evidence of the fallen nature of the world.  To pretend otherwise is simply ignorant.  There may be a softer word for that, but not a truer one.  The Good News brings salvation to the world; we cannot talk about salvation without considering original sin.  On top of that, we need the light of divine revelation to maintain a proper balance (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, #388-389). 

Longing

More doesn’t just focus on the world—something external—but also dives into his interior life.  He asks to not to long for worldly company or hear about worldly things.  This strikes me as a very spiritually mature prayer.  The biggest battlefield of the spiritual life is at that level of longing and its cousin, imagination.  Longing for things may seem harmless, but our opponent on this battlefield far outclasses us in intelligence, subtlety, and manipulation.  An idle longing here or there can quickly be turned into vanity, arrogance, anger, or any number of sins.  

If More’s prayer about casting off the world is an ask of deliverance, this prayer for his interior life is a prayer of surrender.  Could anyone fault him for longing to see his family?  Embrace his children?  Throughout this prayer, he asks for greater dependence on God.  And again, this is unlike when we pray the Surrender Novena from a comfortable chair.  St. Thomas was imprisoned for 15 months in the Tower of London in a tiny cell.  

Further down the prayer, St. Thomas offers all “worldly substance, friends, liberty, life and all to set the loss at right naught for the winning of Christ.”  This is reminiscent of St. Paul’s captivity epistles.  No matter what St. Paul went through (and it was substantial suffering), he saw opportunities to win Christ in every instance.  In the letter to the Philippians, he rejoices while in prison (1:19) and is grateful for the chance to spread the gospel to the praetorian guard (1:12-14).  St. James exhorts us to “count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet various trials” (1:2).  St. Thomas expresses something in the same vein: that he’s glad to bear his purgatory here, and he prays to be joyful in tribulation. 

Memento Mori

To have the last thing in remembrance,
To have ever afore mine eye my death that is ever at hand.

To make death no stranger to me,
To foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell.

To pray for pardon before the Judge come,
To have continually in mind the Passion that Christ suffered for me.

These stanzas ring a bell during Lent, when the Church liturgically turns our gaze toward death.  Granted, St. Thomas was staring death directly in the face.  The longer his imprisonment wore on, his comforts and privileges were gradually taken away.  Mentally and emotionally, the practical lawyer in him could not have had any doubt of his impending death.  

For those of us not imprisoned and facing execution, it still behooves us to think on our own death.  Why?  The answer is in the last two lines of this stanza.  We will all face the great judge: Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  We will have to account for our entire lives.  While we will come before a loving and merciful Judge, St. Paul gives a stark warning to not take advantage of that mercy:  

“Do you presume upon the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?  But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” –Romans 2:4-5

St. Thomas More’s “Godly Meditation” shows him above all else to be a holy man.  Pray with him if you need a companion in suffering.  Take his words to heart if the world is turning against you.  Seek his companionship if you have a mountain of a task staring you in the face. 

St. Thomas More, pray for us!