Late with the blog this morning as we have dedicated an extra half-hour to prayer for the people of Haiti. There is nothing useful we can say on the subject, except to urge everyone to pray and contribute to the relief funds being set up to help. Our prayerline is always open, and we are glad that many find it a way of expressing their deepest hopes and fears. Just now it is full of petitions for families in Haiti.

Here the snow has been falling all night and is falling still: everywhere looks so beautiful that it has proved a great distraction. We were half-way through Vigils before I remembered that today is the Memoria of St Hilary of Poitiers (died c. 368). The "Hammer of the Arians" is such a contrast to St Aelred, whom we commemorated yesterday: a pugnacious, slightly irritable man, who could write like an angel when he wasn't skirmishing with rival authorities, the Emperor in particular. A convert from paganism, he was married with a daughter, Apra, when he was chosen as bishop of Poitiers. His zeal for orthodoxy was intensified by his experience of Arianism, which he distrusted and feared because it imperilled the eternal salvation of souls committed to his care. His comment on the Arians is revealing, "They didn't know who they were." Hilary knew perfectly well who he was, a child of God, a God who was a Trinity of Persons:

For one to attempt to speak of God in terms more precise than he himself has used: to undertake such a thing is to embark upon the boundless, to dare the incomprehensible. He fixed the names of His nature: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever is sought over and above this is beyond the meaning of words, beyond the limits of perception, beyond the embrace of understanding."

(Hilary, De Trinitate)

Not knowing who one is seems as much a problem today as it ever was. Perhaps that is something that will come up in our next web conference on 21 January: vocation is about what one is, not just what one does; and it applies to everyone, married or single, monastic, clerical or lay.