The risks of pied beauty
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today's gospel (John 10:31-42) sees another tense standoff between Jesus and those who accuse Him of blasphemy. As in the gospel of Monday, Jesus moves between argumentation and transcendent revelation. At first, He exchanges arguments with them, questioning why it is a problem for Him to claim to be God when it is written in the Law that they are all gods:
I say, “You are gods,
children of the Most High, all of you (Psalm 82: 6).
But then, once again, Jesus begins to unpack for His listeners the relationship that He enjoys with the Father, teaching them that He is in the Father and the Father is in him. Lastly, He evades their attempts to arrest Him and crosses the Jordan where many people come to Him and believe in His message.
Our focus on Monday was very much Jesus and His relationship with the Father and the links between the warmth of the Father and the light of the Son. Today, we might dwell instead on the deafness of Jesus’ listeners. For like all human beings, they live in contradiction.
On the one hand, they had seen the works that He had done, and since they had been done in such abundance, it was hard for them to be denied. This was the reality of the situation. People well known to have been crippled for life walked again; men who were born blind were given their sight; those suffering from leprosy - that most devastating of diseases -had been cured and had shown themselves to the priests, as the Law required. Jesus’ argument here was beyond refutation: If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. And who could deny that these actions were a blessing on blighted lives?
On the other hand, some of His listeners could not bear to hear the teachings that these actions were meant to illustrate: that Jesus claimed to be the Son of God; that He claimed to live in the Father as the Father lived in Him; that He knew the Father and the Father knew Him. All this was, as I say, unbearable blasphemy, as far as these people were concerned. They even took up stones to inflict on Him the punishment reserved for blasphemers and would gladly have seen Him arrested. There is no end to the hostility against Him, even though the works He was doing were undeniable.
In essence, the problem that these people have is a lack of docibilitas – teachability. They have eyes but do not see, they have ears but do not listen. Even though the entire Law has taught them to anticipate the fulfilment of a promise from God to send a Messiah, what shocks them are not the extraordinary works of their Messiah but the gap between their own understanding and this new revelation that He brings them. This new situation requires them to let go of something; And yet the way they cling to God's previous gifts prevents them from doing what they should. And this clinging on is a blockage that only grace can remove.
Jesus brings the fullness of revelation, and the Holy Spirit was sent to the Church to unfold that revelation. This is why it is impossible to urge Christians to accept novel doctrines on the basis that they should not cling on to their own views. We do not cling to an old covenant; we cling to Christ. As Pope Benedict put it, handing on the faith is a matter of continuity and not rupture. This doctrinal understanding is in fact a deeply spiritual insight, for God is both truth and love right through, and we cannot separate them, even though these things are a mystery to us. It is for this reason that Saint Paul told the Galatians that even though an angel from heaven should preach to them a new gospel, they must not believe it: not because they needed to cling to their own views but because Christ had already come.
Nevertheless, it is possible for us back-sliding humans to hold the fullness of revelation with less than the gentle and grateful hands that we should have. It is possible for us to fail to discern; it is possible for us to close our eyes to the marvellous workings of grace because we are hostile to those on whom those graces are being showered. How else can we explain the sometimes vile and vicious behaviour and attitudes shown by people who should know better towards their fellow Catholics? How many minds are closed by jealousy? How many ears are stopped up because others are blessed when we seem not to be? How many stones are picked up and hurled at our brothers and sisters because we do not believe in the good works that they are doing?
Here is another way then in which docibilitas must be developed. There are many paths of holiness in the Church. This is a fact that does not point to a limitation in ourselves but to the marvellous, fruitful, and abundant diversity of the richness of Christ.
The lesson of Gerard Manley Hopkins is evergreen:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
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A loving ‘yes’
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 12: 28b-34) sees another of those dialogues between Jesus and a private individual – in this case, one of the scribes. Which is the greatest commandment? he asks Jesus, and Jesus replies by citing part of the Shema Yisrael, a key text in the morning and evening prayer of the Jews that declares God’s oneness, our duties to Him, and notably the duty to love God and love one’s neighbour. Yet it is the scribe’s response to this reply that strikes us: before Jesus, he declares this law to be much more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices of the Temple. Jesus offers him an answer, but the scribe – as if he knew full well the answer – then gives us perspective on that answer. Not only is this the best commandment but it is better than all the liturgical grandeur of Temple sacrifice. Jesus in turn blesses his reply, declaring: You are not far from the kingdom of God. What are we to make of this exchange, for many of us no doubt offer up our prayers, works, sufferings and joys every day to God? Have we mistaken the wood for the trees? Should we simply be trying to love God and do what we will?
But that would be too simplistic a way of understanding what is being said here. This dialogue is not a reason to neglect sacrifice but rather to understand it in its true context. This dialogue is not a reason to pretend we are not material beings for whom the physical representation of religion is nothing but a mirage. Our God became incarnate, and our religion is incarnate in order for us creatures of flesh and blood to reconnect with the transcendent and divine. This dialogue then is an invitation to understand the true heart of our liturgy and prayer and to assimilate all our actions into it. In a way, it is another reason why the Colwelian yes must run deep in all our actions.
Is love of God greater than burnt offerings? We must distinguish. Love of God transcends the sacrifices of the old covenant. In the new covenant, however, there is only one sacrifice, and it is the sacrifice of the Son who offers Himself to the Father: behold, I come to do your will. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays that this ‘cup’ of the Father’s will, this path He requires Jesus to walk, should pass from Him, and yet in the end, your will be done.
In us, sacrifice and will seem separate and potentially at odds. Sometimes by God’s grace we offer sacrifice for the right reason; sometimes, we may be trying to prove something to ourselves; and sometimes, God help us, we may be engaging in an exterior performance, doing the right thing while never really truly surrendering to God in our hearts, in danger of becoming hypocrites. Genuine hypocrites – if we can get our head around that idea - pretend to make sacrifice only for self-interested reasons. But in Jesus, despite the struggle in the garden – a struggle He allows His human nature to feel to the point of sweating blood – there is no true distinction of self and sacrifice at least from one perspective: Jesus as the God-Man offers His sacrifice, but in some mysterious way He is His sacrifice too: it is in a sense one with His being, for He is the Paschal Victim. His sacrifice is His total yes to the Father in heaven. All His efforts are subsumed in this action of love and submission to the Father and bring the gates of hell crashing down, opening the floodgates of grace to the world again if only the closed hearts of men could receive it.
And this is why the scribe is not far from the kingdom of God: he senses in the order of liturgical sacrifice a greater order that proceeds from love and submission to the will of the Eternal Father. For us living under the conditions of the new and eternal covenant, the lesson is clear: every one of our sacrifices only makes sense when it is plunged in the reality of Jesus’ sacrifice, Jesus’ yes to God, a yes He was only able to make because Mary first offered her yes at the moment of her annunciation.
Thus, our prayers, works, sufferings and joys are not independent sacrifices looking for their own justification before the throne of God. What brings them to life is the sacrifice of Jesus, represented for us in the Eucharistic sacrifice, where through the actions of the ministerial priesthood acting in the person of Christ, the Church as it were tunes again into that eternal yes of Jesus. Every liturgical action and every daily action is animated by this life force of the will of Jesus which is a will to love God and love neighbour. Nothing now is alien to us, other than sin. And, we need not be afraid of our failures, for our sufficiency comes from Jesus. His life becomes ours; His action informs ours; His yes can become ours as a gift of His grace.
O Mary, teach us to say yes to the Lord every moment of our lives.
Saving the best until last
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Matthew 25:31-46) dramatizes for us the scene of the Last Judgement. The Son of Man separates the just from the unjust, sifting them according to their works in the world before dismissing the latter into eternal fire and welcoming the former into His eternal bliss. This was a scene often emblazoned on the walls and the tympana of medieval cathedrals, reminding human beings, whether they were at worship or passing in and out of the door, that judgement was coming and that right soon. The damnation of the latter is a subject for meditation in the first week of the Exercises of St Ignatius, one of the tools of spirituality that transformed the troops of the Counter Reformation into a vast company of holy men like St John Ogilvie whose feast falls today. This is not the invention of some hellfire preacher, bent on stoking the fears of his listeners, but a revelation of the merciful Son of Man, the Good Shepherd, the one who is meek and humble of heart, whose task as the voice of the Father is to initiate us into the mysteries of His Divinity: the mystery of how He is both pure mercy and pure justice, just as He is three and one and yet entirely simple in Himself.
One thing that strikes us now about this judgement scene is how both the just and the unjust had not understood the drama in which they took part in their lives. Yet, surely, this similarity in them arises from different sources.
The just ask the Judge when they saw Him sick, or hungry or thirsty, and gave Him to drink. In other words, they did not know what they were doing. It is as if the Son was saying: reward them Father for they do not know what they have done. Yet this is no praise of ignorance. The lack of knowledge in the case of the just comes from decisions they made not to deny those who asked for their help. If this means they have lacked discernment, they have lacked it in the right direction. They have erred on the side of generosity. It is not that they did not allow their right hand to know what their left hand was doing; it was that both hands of the just were too busy about the needs they saw before them to count the cost. In this sense, they reflected the nature of God who is all good, for it is in the nature of goodness to share itself. Elsewhere in today’s liturgy, we are reminded of this cascade of goodness that is God and the call that is upon us all to imitate it; to make ourselves the children of our Father in heaven. The secret is not to be minded about who we are as we do such an act of generosity, but rather to mind the goodness we mean to achieve. This is not an invitation to be mindless in our giving, as if there were good in putting ready change in the pocket of a someone likely to use it to harm themselves; it is one thing to help the undeserving and it is quite another to facilitate a person’s self-destruction. Nevertheless, Jesus’ words are an invitation not to calculate, not to trade on a person’s distress to benefit ourselves; not to cross on the other side of the road because crossing the road to help has nothing in it for us.
The unjust are like the just only in this point of similarity: that they do not exactly know what they have done. Jesus condemns them for actions that they do not recognise as their own. This is not because the judge is unjust and that they are innocent; rather, it is because they ignored their call as human beings to imitate their Father who is in heaven, pouring forth His goodness on all. They saw the distress of others and either ignored it, or possibly calculated that there was a quick dollar to be made in squeezing the needy into a relationship of dependence.
But why in their case is ignorance no defence? Again, did not Jesus ask the Father to forgive his executioners precisely because they did not know what they were doing? So He did, but in the case of the unjust, their ignorance does not proceed from the thoughtless brutality of men tasked with society’s dirtiest jobs. Rather, it comes from one indubitable source: a lack of love. Love does not calculate; love is a poor merchant but a good donor; love does not serve the self but the other; love turns the barren mountain of faith alone into an open ocean of benevolence and the tinkling cymbals of self-pursuit into a magnificent symphony of goodness: first towards God and then towards others.
Some people drive this principle to an extreme, even to the point of making faith irrelevant. This, however, is as much as mistake as those who push the importance of faith so far that they excuse their own cruelty in the name of truth. The balance, as so often, lies in holding both sides of the equation together, the doing of truth in love. This is how the just pass the test and, alas, how the unjust fail it. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Who will save us, we ask again, from the body of this death? With man it is impossible, replies the Lord, but with God, all things are possible.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ, who came to call sinners and rescue us from the night of death.
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The “yes” of conversion
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) rehearses a passage we read in May last year when the Pharisees come questioning Jesus once more to test him. They want to scrutinise His orthodoxy on the question of marriage and divorce in Jewish law, but Jesus turns the tables, showing that Moses’s concession on divorce was to be blamed only on the waywardness of the people. Then, Jesus puts forward the teaching on marriage that belongs to the original purposes of creation and to the new law of grace in which those original purposes are in this case reaffirmed. Marriage is for life, not only as a legal convenience but because the marriage transforms the connection between the spouses into an enduring bond: So, they are no longer two but one flesh.
We might wonder here about Jesus’ failure to take account of the complexity of marital situations and the awful burdens this inflexible law would place on human beings. Isn’t He a little too rigid for the twenty-first century? If only the author of life could come up to our own sophisticated and caring levels! But, the author of life is not merely a rule maker, like some petty tyrant. In a sense, He is the Eternal Law and that law we know must be infinitely good, as He is in Himself. It is the foundation of the law in God that explains why Jesus concludes His remarks commenting that those who divorce their spouse and marry another are guilty of adultery. This was a corollary that must have made the Pharisees rather uncomfortable since they were normally the ones to put the measuring rule against the conduct of the Jews. Normally, it was Jesus who pronounced the words of forgiveness. In this case, He indicates that the moral effects of breaking a marriage bond do not recede into history simply because the former spouses have – to use that awful cliché – moved on. Yet if these are the ends of marriage, how on earth is it to be lived according to the unrelenting standards of the merciful Jesus?
Here is where we must pair this renewal of the teaching on marriage with an understanding of Jesus as the author and fount of all grace. For He who wills the end wills the means. And God who wishes all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, as St Paul says, offers humanity that chance by making available to them the living waters of His redemptive grace, the reservoirs and canals of the Sacred Heart, that flood down to us through the sacraments and the sacramentals: through every Mass we attend, every prayer we utter, every inclination of the heart towards His love. If any one thirst, let him come to Me and drink (Jesus 7:37) Jesus will declare in the temple. The renewed teaching on marriage sits alongside the combative path that Jesus traces out for His disciples. He will do the work for it is only by His grace that the work can be done; but it falls to us to decide whether we are in or out; whether we want this or not; whether we will try to follow Him or follow our own instincts; whether we will accept the awful responsibility of being His follower by allowing ourselves to be made like to Him – honoured, if such be God’s will, or unfairly reviled and rejected instead. If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too. The point is not the cross but what the cross points to: reconciliation with Him at any cost.
This is a hard saying; who can bear it? (John 6: 60) was the reaction of some people to Jesus’ teaching on His Eucharistic presence. But this is where Jesus is no longer merely a teacher of sound ethics, nor is He the kind of goodie-two-shoes minister of kindly indulgence, handing out get-out-marriage-free- cards to willing punters. Instead, in marriage as in all the Christian life, He asks of us something utterly extraordinary: that to find our lives, we must lose them. Tweaking Shakespeare’s words only a little, we might say:
Let us once lose our attachments to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our attachments.
When we compare the situation of the people in Moses’ day with our own, there is something the same and something different. The something different we have just described: we live now in the reign of the New Testament of divine grace, the age of His mercy and forgiveness properly understood. If any man loves me, my Father and I will come to him and make our home in him. To understand the enormity of this promise, especially to Jesus’ listeners, we must consider that the Jews believed God was really present in the temple behind the curtains of the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, into which the High Priest alone was admitted but once a year. And here He is now, dwelling in the humblest of His servants who love Him. Here is where all our strength must come from; not from our determination to carry on but from the divine winds of grace that carry our ships home to the eternal shores. There is life again beyond our defeats and humiliations, if only our hope holds fast to His promises and to the conviction of His all-encompassing love. Practice resurrection, as the American poet Wendell Berry tells us.
So, if this is what is different from the time of Moses, what is the same? Just our hardness of heart. While the dispensation of mercy is new, the waywardness of human wanderings is as irregular as ever it was. Humanity is not on some progressively improving path towards greater civilisation and more humane behaviour. This was a nineteenth-century myth that became a twentieth-century delusion, and heaven knows how it has infected the Christian imagination with its superficial parody of the gentler virtues while allowing the inner life to become overgrown with thorns.
Recognising our need for conversion, the danger we run through our hardness of heart, is the keystone of our docibilitas – our teachability, as we say in COLW. And let us be in no doubt that it is a grace. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus cites the prophesy of Isaiah on this very point:
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise, they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.
This is not a once-in-a-lifetime task to turn for healing, but rather a daily one, an hourly one: the task of the current minute. Mary is our model who never needed to turn to say “yes” to the Lord but said it freely of her own accord. Our path is more onerous in that regard but similarly imperative.
Jesus will not bend the law like Moses did, but what He offers us is of a magnitude far greater: an invitation into the inner life of the Blessed Trinity where we become His spouse in a bond even more unbreakable than the marriage bond, for it extends beyond our death. Our task is not to become decent people; it is to be radically changed into the image of Jesus, so faithful to Him that others, whether they love or revile us, will find His reflection in our every word and gesture. To be new incarnations of His love to the world: this is our calling. But first and last, we must pronounce the “yes” of conversion of heart. For what God has joined together in grace, let no man put asunder.
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Turning to the Lord
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
Today’s gospel (Mark 9: 14-29) contains on the surface one story: the tale of a boy taken by an evil spirit whose father successfully approaches Jesus to deliver his son. Jesus interrogates the man about the case, hearing its history, questioning the man’s attitudes, and soliciting from him one of the tenderest, most self-aware prayers in all the gospel: I believe; help my unbelief. Finally, Jesus cures the boy who at first appears dead, but then rises up cured of his affliction.
Let’s deal with one obvious issue that comes at the end of the extract: different variants of the gospel offer slightly different solutions to this kind of demon. While the variant used today in our liturgy says This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer, many variants – including the King James Version and the Douai Rheims - say This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. The Latin of St Jerome reads: nisi in oratione et ieiunio – by anything except prayer and fasting - which seems not only logically better – after all, what had the apostles first done to exorcise the boy except pray to God to deliver him? – but also spiritually better: to hijack a saying of St Augustine about hymn singing, those who fast pray twice. They pray with their lips no doubt, but they also pray by offering in their bodies a sacrifice to the Lord through which they confess their total reliance on His power. Thereby, their own conversion to the Lord grows ever deeper, or as C. S. Lewis puts it in Shadowlands: It doesn’t change God; it changes me.
Another issue that arises from the gospel – still not perhaps the most important – is the spectacular nature of this boy’s problems. Naturalistic readings of the passage will simply declare he is an epileptic suffering seizures. There may of course be some truth in that; it is not impossible that he was both possessed and an epileptic. Yet, we must not dismiss the supernatural dimension of his problems, first because without ascribing personal sin as the particular cause for some concrete suffering, natural disorders are part of the disrupted universe, the theatre of our fallen human race; second, because prayer alone was not a sufficient antidote to the problem.
And here is where the story of the boy intertwines with the story of the Church at large. The Apostles had been appointed by the Lord and sent out to work all kinds of miracles. Why did their charisms fail them here? We may find helpful the commentary of Fulton Sheen on this point if we put this scene back in its context just after the Transfiguration of the Lord. The Lord’s three close companions had gone up the mountain with Him and, left to their own devices, they would gladly have stayed on the mountain, wrapped in the joys of contemplation; they are like those members of the Church who love their prayers but perhaps fail to grasp the urgency of the love of neighbour. The apostles who waited for them at the foot of the mountain and who failed to cast out the demon from the boy are like those in the Church who are immersed in activity, so much so that they have no time for the prayer and ascetical disciplines – the inner conversion – that must underpin any active ministry. The juxtaposing of these two incidents – the Transfiguration and the exorcism of the boy by Jesus alone – is an object lesson for every tendency in the Church, the contemplative and the active, to be humble, to turn towards the Lord and yet, in doing so, to turn towards our neighbour. In the cure of the boy, however, it must be said, all of us are transported back to the mountain and glimpse something of the power of the Lord who has visited His people in tenderness.
Still, one last question arises from this near chaotic scene in today’s gospel: how is it that heart speaks to heart? For on the one hand, we hear and we empathise with the distress of the father of the possessed boy, a sorry witness of his lad’s lifelong condition, a man probably traumatised by the harm to which the boy’s condition has led him. The man knows his son’s condition all too well, but he also knows his own. When Jesus lays down the principle that all things are possible for one who believes, the man’s humility shines out of him. The sinful publican of the parable bemoaned his unworthiness in quiet prayer, but this man in the hearing of a crowd of pious Jews prays explicitly: help my unbelief, i.e. help my uncertainties, help the quiet whispers of doubt that arise from my years of distress and disappointment, help me overcome my experience of receiving apparently no answer to my prayers when I cried and cried and cried in the night and God seemed not to hear. What a man and what a heart – not because of his faith which, by his own confession was weak, but by his self-knowledge and humility. If his heart had hitherto grown distant from heaven, still, this father had his feet on the ground, had not revolted in pride. I believe; help my unbelief.
This prayer, moreover, falls on the ears of the incarnate Lord who knew the man already better than himself. We may find it shocking to listen to Jesus’ first reaction to the failure of the disciples to cast out this boy’s demon: O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? How are we to understand such words? What happened to the Lord who declares Himself meek and humble of heart? Must we approach Him already fearing that we are a burden and a bother to Him? Must we feel the humiliation of realising the extent to which Jesus feels He has acted in vain in our regard?
Yet, it is not the anger of God that we perceive in these words so much as the drama of our own waywardness. Time and again, the disciples do fail in their faith; Peter in particular does so spectacularly several times. Even before He has met the boy’s father, Jesus already knows the pitiable state of his faith. But in all these incidents, Jesus emerges precisely as the only one who can save faithless humanity from the disease of its own infidelity. All He needs is a spark! How long am I to bear with you? is the cry of the Saviour whose incarnate mission is to bear the cross of fallen humanity to the summit of Calvary? How long am I to bear with you? is not said so much to express His own sentiments as to show us the gravity of our own failure in His regard? How long am I to bear with you? does not give us a window into His heart so much as a mirror in which to see our own disfigurement reflected. The beautiful heart of Christ speaks out to our own ugliness, not to chide and abandon us so much as to draw out of us in the person of the possessed boy’s father, that wonderful profession of humility and faith: Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.
This prayer the “yes” of a man wounded by doubt, but already turning through humility. Let our “yes” only echo his and we will have every reason to raise a resounding “thank you” to the Lord.
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The carrying of the cross
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 8: 23 – 9:1) contains some of Jesus’ most severe admonitions: to deny ourselves and take up our cross. He describes some of the factors in this process, warning also that unless His followers confess His name before others, He will not confess their names before the Father. The passage ends with one of His more mysterious prophecies, according to which some of His listeners would not die before they saw the coming of the Kingdom.
This is not the kind of Jesus that people like to hear about these days. People prefer the cuddly type of Jesus, the one who is all smiles and sweetness, the one who gazes benignly on all comers, stands them a drink perhaps, or behaves himself decently at parties. I'm reminded of an anecdote from the life of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor who as a newly published author was invited to a fancy dinner party where one of the other guests was lapsed Catholic Mary McCarthy. McCarthy, at one point, waxed lyrical about her Catholic past, saying to her smiling listeners:
I like the Eucharist; it's such a lovely symbol.
O'Connor, looking up from her soup, replied acidly in her Georgian drawl:
Well, I say if it's just a symbol, the hell with it.
Perhaps one has to be a prophet to speak like that.
But this challenge of denying oneself and picking up one’s cross to follow Jesus is a choice that lies between two apparent extremes which, like all extremes, are adjacent to each other. On the one side, the fallen human being can be counted on to be devoted to themselves, almost unconditionally. No self-denial here, unless it be for self-interested reasons. The whole movement towards self-realisation or self-authentification in our own day – you be you - is a perfect example of this. To me to live is Christ and to die is gain, says St Paul. He would not have said you-be-you but you-be-Christ.
Famously, Saint Augustine wrote:
Two loves have built two cities: the love of self unto the contempt of God has built the city of man, and the love of God unto the contempt of self has built the city of God.
The civilization of love that St John Paul II acclaimed was, whether we like it or not, pitched against a civilization devoted to self-interest and self-love.
The other extreme that I mentioned above is not the love of God, so much as a counterfeit of the love of God. As a person becomes more devout, they take on the garments of one of the wedding guests of the Lamb, and yet there remains in them – indeed, in all of us – a streak of self-orientation that is not ready to die. At one level, the Christian life involves ridding ourselves of the obvious misalignment of our lives with the path of Jesus. If we say the fifteen-decade Rosary, the Divine Mercy chaplet, but still get roaring drunk and beat out spouse on a Saturday night, we have not really gone beyond that first level. Go and sin no more, Jesus says to us.
Beyond this point, however, the story of the death of self is not over. The self can live on, dressed now in the garments of devotion and piety. The mind may focus on higher callings to perfection, and yet that perfection can be not a pursuit of our final goal but a pursuit again of self-realisation, just in a religious mode. The love of self is like a moral radiation, the very half-life of which may last a lifetime and need the purification of Purgatory to put an end to it. It is not eliminated overnight in this life, without some mighty miraculous intervention of God. In this sense, we may, like St John of the Cross, prefer to think not about the goal of perfection which opens the door to this kind of self-focused project, but rather to think about union. For union does not belong only to the higher mystics but, in some sense, to every soul in a state of grace where charity reigns in the heart, even imperfectly. St Therese of Lisieux towards the end of her life is far from perfect in her own eyes and surely not in God’s, but she lives in deepest union with Him, overwhelmed by His grace and exultant in His joy.
Here, I am reminded of the old saying that the first thing we want is the last thing we get. If we want to follow Christ, we must go by the path He forges for us. Jesus Himself says it: pick up your cross and follow me. Not because we want the pain; rather, we want the pleasure of His company, the eternal joy of His heart. This is the pearl of great price for which we may need to sell everything we have. For the following of Christ alone makes sense of the apparent losses we must suffer. We do not want the pain; we want the goal that lies beyond the pain where we are freed from the misery of self-love or indeed from love of this world and transformed by the happiness God wants to share with us.
But what if the pain is the pain of others? In A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More must face the prospect of going to his death, knowing that his wife does not understand why he put love of God ahead of love of the family. But in the end, even if Alice gives him something precious in this life, it is but a shadow of the love of God that unites us to the God of love.
Finally, the last paradox of this gospel, part of the death of self that we must undergo, is the realisation that picking up our cross is impossible to us. We cannot deny ourselves by our own power, no more than we can perfect ourselves by our own agency. All we can do is raise our eyes to heaven in supplication. And the One who gave us life in the beginning will bring us to the fulness of the life He wishes to give His children whom He rescues from the shipwreck of this world. All He wants is our “yes”.
And, if, like Mary, we can say “yes” to this cross and “yes” to this path, He will be pleased to say “yes” to our resurrection in His life where all our longings will be fulfilled in the bosom of the Father.
The peace of the lamb
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 1-9), a passage chosen to mark the feast of Saint Cyril and St Methodius, is one of those parts of the gospel where one could dwell on every line for quite some time. Every expression, every metaphor, and every allusion is pregnant with meaning and significance for the disciples of the Lord. Perhaps, the selection of the seventy-two disciples and their commissioning as missionaries of the good news might make us feel that these are words addressed to those in consecrated life rather than to every Christian. Indeed, in a very concrete sense, the commissioning of the seventy-two is like the creation of the presbyterate, just as the commissioning of the Twelve is the foundation of the episcopate. Yet, in a broader sense, these seventy-two disciples stand for every one of us, and while we may not all live out every single counsel that Jesus places on their shoulders, we are at least called to emulate who they were. And who were they but lambs in the midst of wolves?
To be a lamb in the Christian sense is to be many things. First, it is to be an image of Christ who is the Lamb of God, the Saviour sent for the redemption of the world. St Augustine says that while he is a Christian for himself, he is a priest for others. But on another level, we may observe that to be Christian is to be for others, and primordially for God. Greater love than this hath no one, that a man should lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). Saint Peter tells us that we are all priests, prophets, and kings, meaning that we all share something of these characteristics which exist substantially in the person of Jesus Christ. We are not all appointed to minister sacramentally to his Mystical Body for that is a role accorded only by the Sacrament of Orders, and, nevertheless, there must be something Christlike in each and every one of us. To be a Christian, therefore, is to be a lamb.
With this slightly uncomfortable reflection, we may consider an even more uncomfortable reflection: that we are sent out as lambs among wolves. Here, Jesus’ metaphor evokes everything about the world that we may fear. I take the world in the sense that Saint John gives to that word: the way in which its forces seem ranged against us, the pressure that they exert on us, the exploitation and manipulation they impose. The intent of the wolf is to consume the lamb while the prospect of the unwary lamb is literally to become a lamb’s supper. Who then is the wolf? We may well ask the question, as the scribe who asked Jesus: who then is my neighbour? And the answer to the first question is disturbingly close to the answer to the second. The wolf is my neighbour, my brother, and my sister. Indeed, as the decadent French poet Baudelaire wrote:
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère
Hypocritical reader, you who resemble me, my brother.
In other words, you, reader, are the wolf and so too am I. Not that I am all bad (and neither may I say are you). It’s just that we are shapeshifters or, if you prefer, backsliders. Like eggs that can stand on neither of their ends, in the absence of God’s help, we humans are prone first to disobedience and then to every other disgrace that follows on our liberation from God. When we are good, we are very, very good, and when we are bad, we can be rotten. We are lambs by our baptism, we are wolves by birth. We cannot but be sent out as lambs among wolves, for the wolves are among us; indeed, except when we are faithful, they are ourselves.
Every society or indeed social group is prone to want to identify the guilty ones among them – the source of the trouble they all suffer from – and as often as not they scapegoat the wrong person. The key insight of Christianity was to show us that the scapegoat, Christ, is innocent, and that it is we – the rest of us – who are the guilty ones, the source of the problem. In short, the wolves.
But if we are then sent out as lambs among the wolves, we are called to recognise a reality that is, as Chesterton was wont to say, stereoscopic. Saints are not so very different from sinners. Jesus himself said the just man falls seven times a day. We are clay vessels, and even the best of us lack conviction at times and may be full of passionate intensity at just the wrong moments and in just the wrong ways.
These realities are not a reason to despair but rather to become realistic about who we are and about our utter dependence on God. When we say “Peace be to this house” to our neighbour, we must remember that we are unreliable diplomats of peace unless we keep our hearts for the Lord. For that, we must recall that only in the reign of Christ can His peace flourish; only if we say our “yes” continually; only when He remains master of the house, can we we sure that the house is inhabited by lambs, rather than being overrun by wolves.
The editors of today’s gospel extract did not include verses 10-12 from the tenth chapter of Luke, and yet their conclusion is part of the admonition we must daily administer to ourselves:
But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for all that town. Such are the words of the Lamb, Christ.
For ourselves, the meaning is clear: to be born a wolf is no excuse for remaining a wolf. If the miracles of grace performed in us had been performed in our neighbours, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.
Peace then be upon all our houses, the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ.
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The cure that awaits us
A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 6:53-56) presents one simple scene of the gospel that might be easily overlooked, but which is full of meaning for ourselves and the power of Jesus. Jesus and His disciples were moored at Gennesaret, and the people were following them in their droves. As soon as word got around that Jesus was near at hand, people started flocking towards Him in search of healing for themselves and their friends and relatives. Laying out the sick in the public places, they made it possible for them to touch Jesus as He walked by, and many were thus cured, merely by being within reach of the Saviour.
It would be easy to read this gospel as a story of the fickleness of the people. The healing and the cures come so easily to them, one might be permitted to wonder if the enthusiasm of the crowd was like the enthusiasm of followers after a travelling circus. Were there souls here present who would one day call for the crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem? How could they appreciate such immense gifts when they were as abundant or as common as flowers in spring? And as many as touched the fringe of His garment were made well. Easy come, easy go, isn’t it?
And, nevertheless, the miracles worked are not automatic, but rather the work of God’s superabundance. Blessed was the land of Gennesaret, for in that moment, there had rarely been such a fountain of grace or divine gifts known to men. He will have mercy on whom He has mercy. As the presence of evil makes men question whether there is a God, so His gift-giving fills the mind with the conviction that all will be well– as every human heart not utterly lost to demonic cynicism senses that it should be.
Yet, for all that, if we only read this gospel from the perspective of the enthusiastic crowds, we have in a way read it backwards. The action of this gospel does not begin with their enthusiasm, but rather with the coming of Jesus. The crowds were not seeking Him before He had begun to seek them. It is not their enthusiasm which gives this scene its deepest colour. Rather, it is the dogged determination of the Divine Shepherd who comes now in search of the lost sheep.
Note also how these sheep approach Him. On recognising Him, they ran about to seize the moment. They implored His gifts. They practically barricaded the roads with the bodies of the sick. The heart of the Shepherd that went in search of His people was met with fervent welcome, a sense of obligation, and a readiness to importune Him until He had mercy on them, like the woman in the parable who troubles the judge until she gets judgement from him (Luke 18: 1-8). Heart speaks unto heart, as the motto of St John Henry Newman says. Here the heart of the people spoke, because among them they sensed the presence of the Divine Heart. No one ever spoke as this man does, say the temple guards to the Pharisees who wanted Jesus arrested.
Where are we in this gospel scene? Where do we stand in relation to this Divine Visitor in whose hands an abundance of grace is held for our benefit? Do we run after Him? Do we importune Him? Do we mobilise our neighbours as much as we can to make them aware of the blessings that He has for them? Most of all, are we prepared to join the sick and lame in the streets in the hope of receiving from His abundance? Next to the mystery of our own waywardness – our weakness before the three enemies outlined in the gospel last Friday – comes the mystery of our failure to recognise and confess our neediness daily, not to say hourly, not to say in every minute of every day.
And yet, if only we could seize the moment, we might just find that it is in that passing second, that passing moment of grace, that the fringe of His garment is closest to us. Jesus may be hard to recognise from such a supine angle. But we should not doubt that He is there for us, just beyond our inner chaos, just beyond the buffeting tumult of worldly passions, or the seductive traps that the devil lays beneath our feet. There He is for us, passing in the crowd, close to us in our woundedness, driven on by His goodness, busy among the throng, but ever ready to come to our aid, if we will but reach out our feeble hand and seek to touch the fringe of His garment. All He wants is for us to say a determined, decided, and persistent “yes” to the solution He brings to the diseases that hold us back from embracing Him as we are called to do.
The only question that remains now is whether we really want to be cured.
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Standing when all about you falls apart
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be found here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 3:22-30) revisits a passage we heard almost exactly twelve months ago (22 January 2024). The scribes from Jerusalem – perhaps supposedly a better class of scribe – deliver their judgement on Jesus with what might have been the kind of scoff we should expect from high-placed talking heads in Roman Palestine:
He is possessed by the devil, they say.
Jesus’ refutation of their precipitately formed opinion is swift and decisive: How can Satan cast out Satan? He replies. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. The final lines of this passage, however, are a warning of the ominous confusion that had descended on these high authorities from the capital of Israel: Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, never has forgiveness. Let us consider these three movements of the gospel, like three movements in a piece of music.
The first movement
He is possessed by the devil, say the scribes. Thus, they become the malign patron saints of all those who, henceforth, in the history of the Mystical Body will take scandal at her action and find a devil in her. Their descendants might be traced today to those who accuse the Church of wickedly barring women’s ordination or oppressing certain minorities. There is a mystery here and it is a mystery of iniquity. It is a common enough assumption these days that we take the Lord’s inunction not to judge as a command to think everyone is inspired by the best of intentions. Judge not, lest you be judged, is the Lord’s command, and yet He also tells us to be wise as serpents; we cannot take this rule about not judging as an indication that we will not face malice and opposition, for these are the lot of fallen humanity. Christ asks us not to judge where people stand ultimately before God; not to stick our heads in the ground and pretend there is nothing wrong. There have been many devils in the Church, as the long lines of abuse victims can testify, but let us not forget that the actions of abusers are a betrayal what the Church is. Moreover, if they are devils who scoff at the Church from the outside, is the same not true of those who scoff at their brothers and sisters within the Church, who unthinkingly adopt spite rather than true discernment as their mode of relating to others?
The second movement
And thus begins Jesus’ refutation of their scoffing nonsense: a house divided against itself cannot stand. Actually, Satan’s house cannot but be divided against itself. It was called to stand for God; it tried instead to stand for itself, its own vainglory and security, and thus it forged a bargain with the malice of dissent, leaving behind the logic of God’s charity. Yet, the temporary unity of those in revolt against God – this is what Jesus here alludes to - is ultimately founded on the shifting sands of radical selfishness and, therefore, of division. According to the poet Yeats in the The Second Coming,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Satan’s house cannot stand against itself, and such as it is, it will fall, as everything founded on sand will fall. The only question for us is whether anything in our own lives risks involving us in that calamitous conclusion. No earthly power will hold us at the centre; no privilege or perfection of our own can prevent the anarchy which sin looses upon our souls if we, in our pitiable turn, choose to scoff like Satan rather than to bless. How can we avoid such an outcome unless we ask ourselves with honesty: where do I make myself weak? For none can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus here refers to Satan, but we can apply the principle to ourselves. Weakened by the flesh, compromising ourselves through the world, we are at every risk of the deceits of the Enemy whenever we try to source our strength in ourselves, rather than in the Almighty.
The third movement
And thus comes the conclusion: all sins can be forgiven except the sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, i.e. the sin of abandoning hope in the goodness of God, of finding nothing but evil in the works He has wrought to the point that one concludes God has an unclean spirit. This, after all, is the fault that these scribes commit.
And before we find such a conclusion too obscure – for who ascribes such uncleanness to God? - we should observe that this anti-God nihilism surrounds us. It shapes the high, moralistic barracking of contemporary liberalism for which the ten commandments are a kind of genocide against human freedom. To say that God’s law is opposed to human freedom is indeed to say, He has an unclean spirit, for who but an evil God would impose such burdens on His children?
The only response to such accusations is to remember who it is they really accuse, the one who stands accused in this very gospel. My yolk is sweet, and my burden is light, He replies. Heaven forefend that we should hold His law to be too high or too heavy to be kept by His grace, and yet, is this not the meaning of the widespread abandonment of the Christian law around us, where it is assumed that there is such an unbridgeable gulf between our condition and the path He calls us to? That certain human actions are so much part of human nature that God cannot really have intended to forbid them? Here we should remember that encouraging humans to defy God’s command not to eat of a particular fruit was in fact the devil’s original temptation.
All that remains for us to do, therefore, is to offer up our “yes” and “thank you” to the one who can deliver us from the devils around us.
Jesus, the diamond geezer
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Mark 2:1-12) sees Jesus perform one of His iconic miracles, healing a paralysed man who has been lowered through the roof of the house where He is sitting. Among the crowd are found scribes that question whether it is blasphemy for Him to forgive this man's sins. The miraculous healing that Jesus performs is a direct answer to their scrutiny. Some passages of the gospel are like nuggets of precious metal that appear single and unitary in nature. Other passages are more like precious jewels for when we cast the eyes of faith upon them, many details seem to give forth their light. Today's gospel is of the latter kind.
First, we can note the marvellous detail that the house Jesus performs this miracle in is His home in Capernaum. Perhaps this was only for a time since, as we hear later on, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay down His head. We think of COLW’s devotion to the Holy House of Nazareth, but this makes one wonder whether there might ever have been a devotion to a Holy House of Capernaum. We are now so used to the spectacular notion that Jesus makes His home in us that the idea He ever made His home other than in Nazareth takes us by surprise.
This scene is likely the first time in His ministry when we see Jesus also reading the hearts of His listeners. Again, we are so used to the notion that, as God, He knows our every innermost thought that is hard to get a sense of how awestruck they must have been to realise He knew exactly what they were thinking. We find ourselves struggling at times to understand our own hearts, their motives and the swirling undercurrents that drive us on blundering through our day, but we should probably appeal more regularly to the One who knows our hearts best. To feel that we are known so thoroughly is a happy preparation for our necessary abandonment to His divine will.
Yet another beautiful face of this gem of a gospel passage can be seen when we consider which is the greater miracle here, for there are in fact two: the miracle of the healing from paralysis and the miracle that the man’s sins are forgiven. For the third time in this gospel, we note something spectacular that we are far too accustomed to: the idea that our rebellion need not end in our separation from God but that He Himself has engaged to rebuild the bridges we have broken. As Shakespeare says.
Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy.
And note something else here also: this double miracle underscores a most important truth about grace, namely, that charismatic gifts - in this case, the gift of healing - are not for ourselves, but for others. What makes the paralysed man holy is not his miraculous cure but the forgiveness of his sins which comes not from Jesus’ charismatic gift as healer but from Jesus as His redeemer. The inner reality of holiness is not found in show-stopping supernatural phenomena, or in those spectacular natural gifts that the saints sometimes display, but rather in the quiet cleansing and inner reform that comes from sanctifying grace.
Let us dwell finally on yet another dimension of this diamond of a gospel passage; speaking personally, it was the one that most attracted my eye when I first became aware of it as a child. To enter this crowded house, the men who brought the paralysed man to Jesus did no less than climb on the roof, take it apart, and lower the poor fellow into the crowd below. The gospel tells us that Jesus saw their faith, but we can also wonder at what it is that this faith enticed them to do. For what strikes me about their action is that they went in the opposite direction to the mass of human beings pressing around the house like a swarm of wasps eager to gain access. We who are carried along by the busyness of our lives, by the frenetic rhythms of our self-importance, and who swallow too often our own excuses for distraction and inattention, could perhaps take a leaf out of the book of these men who neglect the rush, leave the crowd behind, dispense with the conventional necessity of entering a house through its front door, or even the unconventional necessity of hopping through a window, and who find instead the almost unique solution of arriving in the centre of attention by first passing via the heights of heaven. Is there any better example in the gospel of suppliants of Jesus who abandon all human resorts only to alight on a path that they would not have normally taken, the path that leads them straight to the feet of the Holy One?
Away then with our pious pretence of finding God among the pots and pans in a desperate blur of activism, like an addict shooting religious enthusiasm into his veins. We cannot find God among the pots and pans unless our hearts ascend quietly and serenely above the rush of the crowd and become attentive to the one thing necessary; unless we are ready to buck the trend of frenzy, not to abandon duty but to approach it from a different angle. Love’s labours are indeed lost unless our hearts, divided by every claim on our attention, have ceased to put themselves in God’s place and surrendered gently to the Divine Labourer within.
Healing and new life
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) offers us once more the scene of the annunciation which we reflected on a week last Monday. Really, COLW is spoiled on the approach to Christmas as the liturgy revels in the central mystery which happens to define our charism. But, in truth the mystery of the annunciation never runs out, just as Mary’s yes to the Lord is never exhausted. Its inner depths go deeper than we can possibly fathom. But why this repetition of the same gospel again and again? Mary, now assumed and living in the eternal now of God, lived once in this world in its constant chain of passing moments when no doubt she said yes to Him in every instant, just as we ask her to help us to do. The recitation of this gospel again and again, therefore, is like an echo to Mary’s song, a theme and its variations, which are the same and yet different.
But for herself it is also possible that Mary said yes in every moment of her life without any need for variation whatsoever. While lesser and more complicated souls, like us, may find repetition harassing, children like Mary – for Mary is the little child of God Jesus asks us to be, more completely than any other human can be – children like Mary, I say, find repetition exhilarating. The case is much as G. K. Chesterton described it in his essay Orthodoxy:
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
So, what if Mary says yes to the Lord in every moment of her life, not because she needs to cling on grimly for dear life like us, but because she cannot stop her joy from pouring out of her, a yes, a thank you, again, and again for the sheer happiness of the thing!
There is one variation, one difference, in this gospel scene which we can point to which is both wonderful and illustrative, and it is found in the difference between Mary’s lot and that of Elizabeth. Mary on the one hand is full of grace already, and the Holy Spirit will overshadow her to make her Mother of the Son of God; indeed Mother of God, for a mother gives birth to a person, not a nature, and the person she will bring forth and feed, clean, cuddle and educate, is – marvel of marvels - the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. In contrast, we know little of Elizabeth other than that her conception of John overturned the living shame of being infertile in an age when fertility was not understood. Yet in the contrast between the work of God in Mary’s life and in Elizabeth’s, we see a glimpse of the wonderful work of grace in its dynamic diversity.
First, grace heals and restores. It heals Elizabeth’s soul no doubt at the same time as her body, just as Jesus’ later physical cures came with an invitation to spiritual transformation; the angel ascribes her conception of John to God’s power for nothing is impossible with God, although this blessing is nothing like that of Mary’s. John was no doubt conceived naturally but the process was aided by divine intervention. At the same time, Elizabeth’s spiritual transformation is like our own, coming also from His merciful intervention now to heal our souls with a grace which makes us, like Elizabeth, able to recognise and welcome the Mother of our Saviour. We live constantly in the shame of our spiritual infertility; we long to bear the fruit of grace in our lives but find ourselves too often sterile, our souls neglected and choked with weeds from other fields, or else overworked and exploited by our own cleverly-disguised self-interest, like land exhausted and made sour by industrial farming; no matter the causes, they render us barren until we surrender to the health-restoring downpour of God’s grace. This is why we say then:
O Mary, teach us always to say yes to the Lord every moment of our life.
O Mary, teach us always to give thanks to the Lord every moment of our life.
These are the paths to our restoration.
But grace also elevates us too, as it did with Mary the health of whose soul was never in doubt since she was born immaculate and remained so. Grace restores nature, as we noted with Elizabeth, but it also elevates it as we see most tangibly in Mary in the scene of the annunciation, promising to draw us into the intimacy of life in the Blessed Trinity in whose embrace we are made a child, a sibling, and a spouse of our Creator. The Holy Spirit comes upon us and the power of the Most High overshadows us, now in the interests of bringing forth into the world siblings of the Word who was made flesh in Mary, new incarnations made alive in the likeness of Jesus.
If yes and thank you mark our gradual restoration to health, joy and love are the qualities of a life recreated and raised up into the bosom of God. On this journey, we follow a Saviour whose path leads us from the valley of our death to the mountain of His welcoming embrace, the eternal dwelling of the house of Jacob and its unending festivities over the prodigal children who are home at last with their Father. And this is why we cannot help ourselves saying also:
O Mary, teach us always to rejoice in the Lord every moment of our life.
O Mary, teach us always to love the Lord every moment of our life.
Amen.
Sorrow and joy in counterpoint
A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11:16-19) evokes the song of the Lord that we heard sung in the liturgy of the feast of the Immaculate Conception on Monday. Jesus addressed the crowd with what seemed an obscure parallel. This generation, He said:
is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”
He goes on to bewail the contradictory criticisms levelled first at John the Baptist and then Himself, and concludes quite enigmatically:
Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.
What are we to make of such a collision of conundrums, collecting so decidedly in the space of a few verses? What does the Lord mean?
It all depends on what He refers to as this generation. It would be easy – and it is indeed common – to assume that He means His listeners, the people who would go on to criticise both John the Baptist and Himself. But what if He does not? What if, instead, this generation means precisely John the Baptist and Himself, the generation born in the reign of King Herod, the generation whose births were announced by angelic visitors, and who speak now in the reign of Herod’s son?
For John the Baptist sang a dirge of repentance to the Israelites of his time. John offered the Chosen People the possibility of pronouncing, as it were, a fiat in sorrow, a recognition that they had sinned, and that they needed God’s forgiveness, an admission that there was much that they had to let go of in order to have open hands to welcome the coming Kingdom of God. Of course, some heard and embraced John’s message; but so many more did not, including the leaders of the Jewish people, and notably Herod Antipas himself who, though attracted to the tone of John’s music, could not agree to the sorrow it sought to induce in his heart.
But John’s music was only a preparation for Jesus’ melody which found its key, as we reflected a few days ago, in the original harmony of His mother with the Eternal Father and the grace notes of the Holy Spirit. Jesus echoed John’s theme of fiat in sorrow, but He added another richer strain of a fiat in joy, telling His followers from the Sermon on the Mount to rejoice in suffering and persecution. While John came in sackcloth and ashes, Jesus proceeded in festivity after His extraordinary fast in the desert at the beginning of His ministry, returning to John’s sorrowful dirge only from time to time, and most especially in His Passion.
Like all the greatest truths of our faith, then, the flute of Jesus and the dirge of John hold together in a paradox, bringing to light the false joys of those who resist John’s lament and the dourness of those who neglect Jesus’ joy. The harmonious blending of the two is the fruit of wisdom who is justified in her deeds, says Jesus.
What deeds, we ask? The deeds of salvation which require, first, conversion in a repentant mode, and then, a living out of our adoption as children of God, in which we are exposed to the great festivity of a Father - who rejoices at the return of His wayward little ones - and commanded to share in it.
How can we join that new song of the Lord, initiated in the Immaculate Conception, continued in the harmony of Mary and the Father, and that takes flight in the glorious melody of the Son of God? We join it now by listening deeply to the sorrowful dirge of John and the joyous flute of Jesus, and then little by little, by raising our voices, to turn their duet of wisdom into a mighty choral outburst of eternal love.
Broken vessels
A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today's gospel (Matthew 9: 27-31) sees another healing at the hands of Jesus, son of David. Two blind men follow Him along the path and approach Him when he reaches His destination. They profess their belief that He can cure them and cure them He then does. Finally, He warns them sternly not to tell anyone about this, but they go and of course spread the news throughout the local area.
On one level Jesus’ behaviour in this scene seems hard to understand. These are blind men, and He fully knew they were there. Why did He leave them stumbling after Him in search of their cure, instead of stopping to assist them? Why did He ask them if they believed He could cure them when, surely, only determined believers would have followed Him in the circumstances just described? And finally, why did He warn them sternly to conceal what must have been a life-transforming joy, a warning He knew full well they would ignore anyway? Truly, Jesus, as St Teresa of Avila said to Him, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you don’t have many!
Nevertheless, there are layers within the layers of this story, and undoubtedly unknown factors that Jesus knew full well but about which we could only speculate. More concretely, we have to start from the principle that Jesus’ healing ministry is not to the body alone but to the soul of man. Jesus is not a genie to be summoned by the magic words “Son of David”. These blind men ended in faith, but where did they begin their journey if not perhaps with the equally blind enthusiasm of the crowd with its taste for the spectacular rather than the transcendent? Jesus made them follow Him not to take them on a journey away from Capernaum, but on a journey away from their worse selves to discover something better than they had anticipated. Wherever I am, my servant must be there too. They could not arrive at this destination on the wings of religious fervour; only by following the perhaps stony lakeside path along which Jesus wound His own way to a house that was not identified in this scene but which we may well assume was in various ways the house of the Father.
Why then did Jesus ask them if they believed He could cure them? Once again, this is not so much about seeking reassurance for Himself, as about helping them grow out of their jejune mindset to arrive at something more mature. They had begun by craving the admittedly jackpot-winning prize of the restoration of their sight. While they wanted something miraculous, they crowded about Jesus like a couple of game-show contestants, looking to get their hands on the lucre. Jesus was a wonderworker, was He not?
Indeed, no, He wasn’t, and He isn’t. Jesus is not after an admiring crowd and a grateful audience; He is not a P. T. Barnum in sandals. He walks the earth to call its inhabitants to something better than riches, more real than power, and more far-reaching than self-satisfaction. Do you believe that I am able to do this? He asks the blind men. What is this? We assume He means restore their sight but let us not be dupes of the spectacular also. Jesus is looking beyond the appearances, to a transformation that lies deeper than this mere return to vision. After all, if they eye offend thee, pluck it out. Jesus spent little time demonstrating His power over nature; to demonstrate His conquest over sin, however, He went to the cross. Merely to believe in the spectacular is an exercise in naivety; to believe in redemption, on the other hand, takes something more truthful, humbler, and more mature, a readiness to recognise and accept the fallen condition of man, the need for a redeemer, the incapacity of human beings to work their own passage to heaven, and our utter dependence on Him in every moment of our lives. To say, yes, I believe, to Jesus should not be a profession of belief in His magical powers to deliver whatever our hearts desire, no matter how good that is in itself; it is to admit and confess who He is, and to recognise everything about us that estranges us from Him and from the Father, wrecking His work in us. To say I believe is thus to accept the truth about Him and, by corollary, about us.
For these men – and this is not always the case in those who are healed - the first condition of preserving the fruits of this confession and of persevering in the following of Jesus was to keep it to themselves. Jesus wanted no return to the sensationalism than drove them to follow Him in the first place. He wanted them to spend time reflecting on what He had done for them; to realise its implications; to figure out where to go and what to do next. Instead of which, as the gospel wearily tells us, they went away and spread His fame through all that district.
What was this mistake? It was of course a very human one, but a mistake none the less. They wanted, invoked, and seemed to have obtained a display of the spectacular. What had actually happened was that Jesus had cured them, while calling them to something deeper and more real; and instead of pausing to draw breath, to realise what had just happened, they resorted to their taste for the old razzle dazzle. They were in touching distance of the gold of His love, and they chose the fools’ gold of being legends in their own lunch time.
There will be a moment to spread the word, but it does not come before something more genuine, something deeper, something more radically transformative than a hurriedly muttered profession in Jesus’ power has taken place within us. We must recognise Him but also ourselves for what we truly are: loved but very chipped and broken earthen vessels.
Seeking the face of God
An audio version of today's gospel can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 12-14) offers us once more a lesson in many layers. On the surface, it is a simply matter of whom one extends charity to: Jesus tells one of the leading Pharisees not to invite desirable guests to his dinners but the humanly undesirable ones, so that his reward will be given him in terms of eternal merit, not some earthly currency. This teaching follows the lesson in Matthew chapter 6 when Jesus warns His listeners not to practise their virtues ostentatiously in front of others:
When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then, your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Yet this is not so much about whom one invites to dinner or whom one extends one’s charity to, as about the motives behind such actions.
Jesus does not, for example, mean that people should not invite friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbours at all, as if the standard of the gospel were not so much to love the poor as to deliberately offend the wealthy. There are the physically poor and lame, and then there are the spiritually poor and lame; the former benefit from our corporal works of mercy, while the latter from our spiritual works of mercy. They may sometimes be the same person!
Of course, Jesus Himself deliberately offends against the niceties of the Pharisees but His aim is not to give offence, so much as to offer two further lessons.
The first of these is for the Pharisees whom we should understand as those devout in their religion, and the lesson is not to do the done thing, so much as the thing that is pleasing to God. The Pharisees seem to have operated like a select club; appearances were important; conformism was expected; a judging eye for failures in observance was simply de rigueur; unity mattered more than justice; and as for cover-ups, they were probably considered a duty. All of these tendencies reflect what happens to religion when it seems to become skin deep, enmeshed in shallow priorities, attached to a kind of performative, self-congratulatory perfectionism. This kind of religion is up with the latest trends or else it is all ears for the voices of the right-minded people. Pharisaism invented virtue signalling long before the twenty-first century adherents of what some call moralistic, therapeutic deism, the touchy-feely and intolerant version of Christianity that loves the Way but neglects the Truth and the Life of the gospel. Jesus’ reproaches to the Pharisees offer a standing rebuke to every devout soul who becomes absorbed not in God but in their own service of God.
But if we should not do the done thing, what then is pleasing to God? This is the second lesson to take on board here. Ultimately, as we noted in last Friday’s gospel, and in Sunday’s gospel, what is pleasing to God is that we should love Him above all things, seeking His face and yearning for it. St Augustine of Hippo summed it up nearly four hundred years after Christ walked the earth:
Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.
This then was the challenge for the Pharisees, as it is for ourselves. Our souls are a battleground for two competing loves. No matter our levels of piety or regular devotion, the battle is not done. It wages on, even as we seek the face of the Lord. The terrible thing about total self-surrender to God is that it may not be half so pretty as all the regular practices, the pious statuary, and the romantic imaginings our minds prefer to conjure. It may involve something as cruel and painful as wrongful condemnation, a tortured final mile, and an agonising death on a rain-soaked hill of humiliation. But perhaps it is much harder to find the face of God in the darkness if we have not become accustomed to finding the face of God in the ordinary world that surrounds us, or even in those aspects of the human world that repel us. There is the peace of God that keeps us – united in love with a common purpose and a common mind: the mind of Christ.
For the Pharisee, it was never wrong to invite the rich and famous to supper. It was only wrong not to seek the face of God and to yearn for it in the dinner guests, yearning instead for the earthly gain that such company seemed to offer. For the Pharisees, Jesus’ counsel to invite the humanly undesirable guests was only ever a way of removing that temptation from the table so that their souls could journey towards God, rather than sinking more deeply into the mire of their own self love.
It is mostly easy to spot the temptations of the world and the devil around us. What is more difficult to spot is the more insidious temptations that our own self-love draws into the very fabric of our religion, making a parody of the kingdom of God within us.
The alternative is to seek the face of God and yearn for it, in every moment of our lives like Mary. For there is the peace of God.
Prayer up hill and down dale
An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 6: 12-19) sees the appointment of the ‘apostles’ who become a select group among Jesus’ many disciples. We also see how the people from Judea, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Sidon flocked to hear Him preach and to beg His aid. It must have been quite a sight, not least because, as this gospel extract attests, power came out of Him that cured them all. It was not that Jesus was a mere miracle worker; His very presence generated miracles. Jesus was not just a person but an event!
Yet perhaps the most spectacular part of today’s gospel is its opening line:
Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and He spent the whole night in prayer to God.
In the light of these words, for example, we can place the events of the following day in their true perspective. Jesus appointed apostles, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. Jesus went among the crowd that had gathered to see, hear, and be cured by Him, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. The prospect of the heroic prayer of Jesus should put to flight the many excuses we find not to pray; our shortage of time, our many pressing duties; the priorities of immediacy over the enduring value of the eternal which, in our human calculations, can be covered by prayer tomorrow just as well as by prayer today. If we somehow, in some weird place in our heads, think our need for prayer is not that great today (because, you know, we are pretty devout anyway), by the same cheap measure we should wonder why Jesus needed to pray all night long. I mean: who needed to pray less than Jesus?
But this is, as I say, a cheap measure. If we only pray like customers at the jumble sale of divine favours, we are like those religious believers whose prayers seek to forge currency rather than communion; something to trade with rather than to live in. Our conscious minds need prayer like our bodies need food, in regular rhythms of activity and rest. But our unconscious minds need prayer like we need oxygen. Changing Charlotte Mason’s dictum about education, we might say prayer is an atmosphere, a disciple, and a life. Prayer’s atmosphere surrounds us and holds us in being; prayer’s discipline encourages the harmonising of our inner life with the pulse of the Eternal Father – if that metaphor can be allowed; and prayer’s life fills us up, for to pray as we ought is to pray like Christ. Jesus prays all night; would that we could too; would that we could find the path that leads to those heights where He plays before the Father of us all. At the very least we can try to be open to His gifts of prayer, whether they lead us to the desert or to the hills.
For that too is important. He surely prayed often enough for His daily bread, as He taught us to do. But His delight was to pray in the hills, closer to the eternal mysteries, as it were; from Tabor to Calvary, from the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon from the Cross, Jesus often reveals the sublime to us on elevated ground. In these events, Jesus is always an example, even though He is always an exception. His possession of the Beatific Vision meant He had no need to go to the hills; and yet He goes to the hills to pray, perhaps suggesting to us how we should fly the lowlands of our distractions, the busyness of our overworked brains with their dizzying engagements, in search of the rest and recollection we desperately need before God; an unmet need we are insensible to, like the unfelt hunger of a starving man. From these heights, we have a chance to see things for what they really are; from these heights we can beg the grace to see them as God sees them in their eternal light; not in the garishly blinding dimness of workaday desperation.
And then He spent the whole night in prayer. It would be wrong to see this only as a quantitative statement: the whole night as opposed to a half or quarter of it. Unless we are the parents of babies or small children, the point is that, so often, while our day belongs to others, our nights belong to ourselves, nature’s reward for the labours behind us. And here is Jesus, giving His whole night – the one thing that does not belong to His followers - to the Father instead. For to spend the whole night in prayer for Jesus is to do no more than to rest secure in His belonging entirely to the Father. The Father and I are one. Of course, many of us experience unwelcome wakefulness in the night; it is as if our day is robbing our night in the interests of worry and fretfulness. Yet, as we know, wherever the Master is, there His disciples are bound to follow. A broken night feels tangibly like an invitation to follow Him in suffering; but perhaps it would be more fruitful – perhaps more encouraging – to see the fragments of a broken night as an invitation to hear the call to give ourselves wholly and entirely to Him who gave Himself wholly and entirely to us and to the Father in His nights of prayer.
Then, lastly, comes the unspoken part of the gospel: when day came, before He summoned His disciples, He must have descended those hills. Once we are up there, we do not want to come down, like the three apostles who wanted to build tabernacles for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It is good for us to be there. It seems good to us to stay there.
And yet, as we followed Jesus into the hills, we should follow Him down from the hills, for this too is His command: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant will be there too.
In that, at least, we have Mary’s example to follow, for she went into the hill country of Judea to sing her Magnificat but descended to Nazareth to undertake her work – her work and our work - of bringing forth God’s son.
If I were a rich man (yabba, dabba, etc.)...
An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today's gospel (Luke 12: 13-21) is one of those extracts in which the circumstances of daily life give rise to one of Jesus’ parables. Two brothers are in dispute over their family inheritance; two siblings set in rivalry against one another – and thus it has been since the time of Cain and Abel. But Jesus’ first response is not to underline their inherent hostility to one another but rather to warn against avarice of any kind:
for a man's life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs.
And, in this line, we learn why we should all pay attention to the parable that follows: not because this is a meditation on what we normally think of as avaricious behaviour, but rather because it reaches beyond it, to the kind of avarice that effects even those with modest incomes. On the surface, this is a parable about a rich man, but underneath this is a parable about us all.
Because we are all in search of what will make our lives secure. For the rich man in the parable, the pursuit of security consists in building bigger barns and storing up his goods. In his case, not only does he sin by seeking his security in the wrong place, but also by what he proposes to do next: take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time. Freely, he has received, for the harvest was good; but these goods do not flow freely through his hands to the benefit of others. Goodness wishes to share itself; evil is a cul de sac, and this man's priorities seem like a judgement on his soul, even though eating, drinking and having a good time are all necessary things in their place.
Yet, as I said, this is not just a parable about a rich man who is fixed on enjoying his bounty. It is a parable about the pursuit of security in all the wrong places. It is possible for us all to mistake our vocations and to forget that being rich in the sight of God is our true security. What is it that we are most afraid of? What is it that we perceive as a threat to ourselves? It may be physical suffering, poverty or illness. It could equally be mental suffering of some kind. In our own time and in our western cultures where we enjoy generally speaking an abundance of the things of this world, our mental suffering seems particularly acute. We live in a plague of anxiety, the world of work is wracked by stress, our family relations are poisoned by division; instead of hearing and pursuing our vocations, we hear and pursue unattainable prospects held up to us by the countless adverts we unwittingly drink in every day, or for some the professional demands of performance management. Even our children, exhausted by digitally induced dopamine insensitivity, grow bored and dissatisfied with the narrowness of it all. We have wanted to be rich in our own sight and the sight of others and have made ourselves paupers in the sight of God.
And even the most devout among us can be guilty of this avarice. We seek security when God calls us to intimacy. We seek safety even though salvation is a risky business. We want to treat grace like a currency that can be quantified and counted out, providing us with the warm reassurance of a rising bank balance. Perhaps we think that because Jesus paid the ransom for sin, our own part in the accounts must be traceable to some line in the ledger; it is but we will never know it until the day of judgement. For now, it is enough to know that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. God has not called us to calculate his mercies but to narrate them; to tell their story where we can. His love for us is a gift to be passed on; not a grab bag of merchandise to serve as our comfort blanket.
For security cannot be reached directly. Like a landing place on the far side of a fast-flowing river, security will only come if we face the adventure of the currents, and cast ourselves upon the mercy of God. And then, to return to Jesus’ metaphor, we can be rich in the sight of God and by His own gifts: rich in love, rich in gratitude, rich in our joy and rich in readiness to say ‘yes’ to Him in every moment of our life.
Come back to me
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 11: 15-26) is a complex not to say confusing extract. Saint Luke does not identify those who were raising objections or criticisms about the exorcisms of Jesus. However, we can surmise that they were probably egged on by Jesus’ enemies. Yet, what comes next is hard to decipher. It seems to be, on the one hand, a kind of treatise in demonology that explains not only the inner logic of the kingdom of the devil, but also the power battles for souls that are waged by the fallen angels.
As always, we know that Jesus is teaching us here, leaving His lessons to be the food of slow reflection, rather than turning them into flash media campaigns that press everyone’s buttons without winning their hearts. One sign that there is more to it, is that Jesus verges in these exchanges almost on banter, reducing his critic’s arguments wittily to an absurdity. His argument about Satan's kingdom standing is a good debating point but, underneath it all, it is a poor argument, for we know that Satan's kingdom will not stand. Indeed, the fallen angels are in a very real sense fallen and divided; fallen from their friendship with God, fallen from their exalted status, fallen from the vocations. What can He mean, then, by arguing that kingdoms who are divided against themselves cannot stand?
One clue may lie in that apparently random remark that sits in the middle of this demonology: he who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters. Who is it who is not with Him or who does not gather with Him if not ourselves? Not that we are wholly in revolt, far from it, no more than the Sons of Thunder were in revolt; no more then brash Simon Peter was in revolt.
But, we are divided against ourselves. The further from God we are, the more scattered we are. We have our good intentions, but then we are all complicated. The pure light shines into us but refracts out of us in gaudy rainbow colours that fail to illuminate. We are the adopted children of God, and yet in our worse moments, as Shakespeare says,
Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.
This is not false abasement but a cause for humble joy for truth brings us insight. The demonology that Jesus sets out in this part of the gospel is of course about the fallen angels, but perhaps in another way, it is about ourselves. The devil in Latin is diabolus but this word comes from Greek and, according to some, it means to be thrown apart; in a sense, to be scattered. In truth, all our kingdoms are divided: the kingdom of Satan and the kingdoms of this world which are in fact ruled by the prince of this world, as we learn in the moment of the temptation of Christ. There is only one kingdom that is based on unity and it is the kingdom of God.
For God is one and sufficient unto Himself, yet He chose to share His goodness by creating the world and calling us into it. But, then the unity of God calls all things back to Himself, and by a special and extraordinary privilege, the call for the human race was to share in God's very happiness, in the inner life of love that belongs to the Holy Trinity. This is why we need forgiveness: for sin is brokenness, and a retreat from that original unity to which we were called. And this is also why, insofar as we do not gather with Christ, in all those parts of our inner life that do not strive towards unity with Him, we are scattering ourselves and our heritage to the four winds.
Mercy of mercies, however; over the din that is made by the forces that shatter our hearts, we hear those words related by the prophet Joel:
Even now, declares the Lord,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting and weeping and mourning.
