ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN FEBRUARY
Saints celebrated on the 4th of February
Prayer to the Angels and the Saints
Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.
In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.
Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.
Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.
HIS PRAYER LIFE
Being persuaded that Christian perfection is to be attained by holy prayer and contemplation, and by a close union of our souls with God, he gave six or seven hours every day to prayer, and moreover seasoned with it all his other actions and employments.
HIS HUMILITY
A spirit of prayer is founded in the purity of the affections, the fruit of self-denial, humility, and obedience. Hence proceeded the ardour with which our saint studied to crucify his flesh and senses by the practice of the greatest austerities, to place himself beneath all creatures by the most profound and sincere humility, and in all things to subject his will to that of his superiors with such an astonishing readiness and cheerfulness, that they unanimously declared they never saw any one so perfectly divested of all self-will, and dead to himself as Modan.
HIS FIRMNESS IN MAINTAINING EVERY POINT OF MONASTIC DISCIPLINE
The abbacy falling vacant, he was raised against his will to that dignity. In this charge his conduct was a clear proof of the well-known maxim, that no man possesses the art of governing others well unless he is perfectly master of that of obeying.
His inflexible firmness, in maintaining every point of monastic discipline, was tempered by the most winning sweetness and charity, and an unalterable calmness and meekness. Such moreover was his prudence, and such the unction of his words in instructing or reproving others, that his precepts and very reprimands gave pleasure, gained all hearts, and inspired the love, and communicated the spirit of every duty.
HE PREACHED THE FAITH AT STIRLING AND FALKIRK
He preached the faith at Stirling and in other places near this Forth, especially at Falkirk; but frequently interrupted his apostolic employments to retire among the craggy mountains of Dunbarton, where he usually spent thirty or forty days at once in the heavenly exercises of devout contemplation, in which he enjoyed a kind of anticipation or foretaste of the delights in which consists the happiness of the blessed.
HIS HOLY DEATH
He died in his retirement near Alcluid, (a fortress on the river Cluid,) since called Dunbritton, now Dunbarton. His death is usually placed in the seventh century, though some think he flourished later. His relics were kept with singular veneration in a famous church of his name at Rosneith. He is also titular saint of the great church at Stirling, and honoured particularly at Dunbarton and Falkirk.
(From Fr Butler's Lives of the Saints - 📷 An old photograph of Dryburgh)
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