ACC ~ 1 Timothy 5 v5

SHE IS UNENCUMBERED. CHRYSOSTOM: To whom is this said? To those who have no children, because they are more highly approved and have a greater opportunity of pleasing God, because all their chains are loosened to them. There is no one to hold them fast, no one to compel them to drag their chains after them. You are separated from your husband but are united to God. You have not a fellow servant for your associate, but you have your Lord. HOMILIES ON 1 THESSALONIANS 6.

SHE STILL HAS GOD. CHRYSOSTOM: But if any one has no children, he means, she is desolate. Her he especially consoles, saying that she is most truly a widow who has lost not only the consolation of a husband but that arising from children, yet she has God in the place of all. HOMILIES ON 1 TIMOTHY 13.

PERSIST IN PRAYER. AMBROSE: And you, O widow, find those who will pray for you. If as a true widow and desolate you hope in God, continue constant in supplications. Persist in prayers. Treat your body as dying daily, that by dying you may live again. Avoid pleasures, that you, too, being sick, may be healed. CONCERNING WIDOWS 9.56.

MAINTAIN PERSEVERANCE. JEROME: A widow who has ceased to have a husband to please, and who in the apostle’s language is a widow indeed, needs nothing more earnestly than perseverance. Remembering past enjoyments, she knows what gave her pleasure and what she has now lost. By rigid fasting and vigils she must quench the fiery darts of the devil. LETTERS 54.7.

WE ARE ALL WIDOWS. AUGUSTINE: When the Lord exhorted us to pray always and not to faint, he told of the widow whose continuous appeal brought a wicked and impious judge, who scorned both God and man, to hear her cause. From this it can be easily understood how widows, beyond all others, have the duty of applying themselves to prayer, since an example was taken from widows to encourage us all to develop a love of prayer. But, in a practice of such importance, what characteristic of widows is singled out but their poverty and desolation? Therefore, insofar as every soul understands that it is poor and desolate in this world, as long as it is absent from the Lord,it surely commends its widowhood, so to speak, to God its defender, with continual and most earnest prayer. LETTERS 130.15.29-30.

THE CHURCH IS THE WIDOW. CASSIODORUS: The church is called Christ’s widow, because she is stripped of all worldly help and places her hope solely in the Lord. Like a widow, she suffers the shameful actions of evil men, the most cruel plunderings of the wicked. Like a woman deprived of a husband’s aid, she always grieves and is always worn out, yet she enjoys the unchanging steadfastness of a most chaste mind. … She is called a widow because she is bereft of worldly protection and has placed her hope in her heavenly Bridegroom, who has transformed her swarthiness into beauty, her error into uprightness, her cruelty into devotion and her frailty into total constancy. EXPLANATION OF THE PSALMS 131.15.

1 Tim