Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side.  They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.

Of course the literal meaning is the foretelling of Jerusalem’s destruction which does indeed take place.  But harkening back to the reflection on Luke 19.42 [apparently from the calendar readings] and considering all the many places in Scripture where “the enemy” is allegorically considered as the demons we can see in this passage what happens to the one who abandons their interior life with the Word.  The soul has nowhere to lay its head and goes searching for comfort in the world.  This is the beginning of disaster, for not only can the world not bring the joy which the Word brings but the soul is guilty of leaving its true love for another.  This activity we have spoke of elsewhere as adultery.

How hard it seems to be, especially in our day, for the soul to continue in constancy!  How difficult it is for the soul to come to the knowledge that its true source of joy lies in the Word!  All earthly joys pale in comparison, though creation itself brings its own special joy, albeit a shadowy one, for it sprung from the Word.  But the Incarnate Word is our sole desire, for we were made for, from and through the Word and back to the Word we must go.  It is the effusive Word which inspires in us a desire to have the Word become incarnate in our lives, through example, silence, fidelity and the full flowering of all the virtues.