This body of death

 A recording of today's reading and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel again was the subject of a reflection last year, so for today’s blog I turn to the first reading, taken from St Paul’s letter to the Romans (7: 18-25a).

Alongside St Paul’s discourse on love in the first letter to the Corinthians, this passage from Romans is one of the most iconic extracts from his correspondence with the early Church. And in various ways, it is a good counterbalance to it. 1 Corinthians 13 offers us a canticle to the supremacy of divine love, and the fundamental necessity that all other virtues must be filled with its spirit and animated by its power: the greatest of these is charity. The theme is not St Paul’s alone but St John’s also in his letters: we too, he says, have believed in love: et nos credidimus caritati, in the beautiful Latin of St Jerome’s Vulgate translation. The point of today’s passage from the Romans, however, is no longer to draw the reader heavenwards in ecstasy, but rather to show how, despite the miracle of our redemption and the marvels of our growing union with God, certain consequences of sin endure in our very selves.

This is shocking for us; it confuses us. We thought we were better than that! We thought we had left our old ways behind with all the empty promises of Satan; indeed, this we say this every Easter Vigil at the renewal of our baptismal promises. But, as all the great spiritual masters observe, we need this knowledge, this reality check. It is, says St Teresa of Avila, the bread with which we should take all our spiritual nourishment.

Not all self-knowledge is painful. The first level of self-knowledge is the awareness of who we are as a creature before Almighty God. Raised to the status of His children by grace, we are, nevertheless, as nothing before His infinity, as grains of sterile sand before an ocean of fertile life.   He is He who is; we are they who are not, or at least not in any absolute sense. Our existence is contingent; we might never have been. We have survived this far, but the lives of most of us will have become a shadowy mystery almost before we are dead and gone, except in the mind of God. Some of us remain a mystery even in this life, ignored, unknown, unremarked, neglected by the surrounding world that is drunk of facetious self-absorption.

And yet God makes so much of us, dressing us in His gifts, blessings us with His gracious kindness, and caring for us in His mercy. Grace not only sanctifies but it elevates the human creature above anything it could have aspired to in nature. In other words, we must hold our littleness together with the knowledge of the dignity that He has given us. We owe it to the truth to acknowledge both the gulf between us and the loving bridges built by His hand.

But then comes the self-knowledge that Paul writes of today:

I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out … When I want to do good, evil lies close at hand.

Ovid, the pagan Roman poet, observed in himself a similar reality. Forgive just a little more Latin but it is so beautiful:

Video proboque meliora,

Deteriora sequor.                                                

I see and approve the better things but the worse things I follow.

It is St Teresa of Avila again who describes the snakes and venomous things that creep around the mansions of the heart, the distractions, attachments, and attraction towards sin that seems to lurk within us, despite our best efforts. St Thomas Aquinas speaks of these tendencies as wounds – and imagine what wounds were like in the pre-antibiotic medieval period – that afflict us even after the initial healing of grace: blindness in the intellect, malice in the will, weak resolution, and unregulated concupiscence in our emotional lives. As a result, we lack not only integrity but also integration; we are a frame filled with fragments that need to be brought to work together, but we are often so poorly coordinated.

There is, however, a divine pedagogy at work in our gradual restoration, an apprenticeship in healing. To become like Christ, we need to go on a journey, initially to the baptismal font. But beyond our passage through that spiritual Jordan, we are called to follow the Master in His peregrinations in life, His encounters with good and evil, His moments of joy, and perhaps also His hour of betrayal at the hands of those who claim to be friends; we must taste something of His sufferings in the spirit, but also of His growth in wisdom of which St Luke speaks tenderly, knowing all the while that the mystery of the Incarnation conceals from us the extraordinary illumination of Jesus’ soul by the beatific vision of the Blessed Trinity.

In other words, just as Jesus could have redeemed the world with a simple prayer, His prayers being of infinite value, it would have been possible for Him simply to transform every one of us by some instant miracle of grace at baptism. But since He chose another path to undo the work of sin-the rocky road to Calvary-so we too are called to undertake that journey with Him. Where the Master is, there must be the servant also. Where are you going, Lord? said St Peter who, during his flight from persecution in Rome, had a vision of His Saviour. I am going to Rome to be crucified again, was the reply. And, hearing these words, St Peter turned tail and ran once more – only this time towards the cross that awaited him. St Augustine sees the battle against our evil tendencies as a punishment and test, but we may go further. Our endurance of weakness reminds us of how low Christ brought Himself to redeem us and it confirms for us our utter dependence on Him.

What a challenge lies before us then, not only to fight the weaknesses we are aware of but, also, let us add, to discern little by little the weaknesses of our shadow selves, the people we are in our unconscious minds, the exiles in us who have fled to the margins, protected only by our noisier, angrier parts who hardly remember their own purpose. Our woundedness is not simple; we are compromised and made complex by experience, the things our heart hides away from our memories out of self-protection. We are a tangle of stories in search of a happy ending, wishing too often the final resolution without the bitter trial that lies between. It is time, my friends, to grow up. It is time to face ourselves.

There is a worse side to our fragile selves, and this is what St Paul confronts in today’s reading. But then there is the hidden side too which only the grace of God, wise counsel, deep work, and careful searching in prayer, can bring back to a state of health and life.

Who, St Paul asks, will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Roses from thorns

A recording of today's reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 12 : 13-21) was the subject of a reflection on the blog this time last year (follow this link). Today’s thought, therefore, concerns today’s first reading from the letter of St Paul to the Romans (4: 20-25).

 St Paul here reflects on the faith of Abraham, its strength, and particularly its anchorage in what God had promised. Yet, St Paul observes, Abraham’s case is a lesson for us, and an example of the transformation that can come about in our lives when we believe in the redemptive actions of Our Lord and Saviour, His death on the Cross that redeems us from sin, and His resurrection from the dead after which He pleads for us before the Father. St Paul leads us to grasp this parallel in which the promises made to Abraham are renewed in the new covenant sealed in the blood of Jesus. It is the unfolding of God’s original plan, not a new approach or a change of heart. In His mercy, God leads man deeper and deeper into the mystery of His friendship, but this cannot come about without a salvific solution to the sin which entwines itself around our very being. We are in chains; we have the possibility now of being liberated. Jesus has died for us, but it is only insofar as we embrace that mystery and live it in our own lives that we can taste His liberation and benefit from its fruits.

And so, there is a new logic that arises with Christ. Abraham was required to be faithful, and heaven knows he was put to the test by God’s command to sacrifice His only son Isaac through whom presumably he thought the divine promises would be fulfilled. But even in these actions we see a shadow of the new logic by which all those who desire to benefit from the new covenant must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Jesus through His transformation from death to life. We do this initially in baptism, but the passage from death to life is woven into every moment, every action, every opportunity we have to serve God. As St Paul again says, I live; now not I but Christ lives in me.

This transformation is the extension of the Incarnation on which we dwell so often in COLW, as we become new Christs in our turn, first through baptism, then by offering our yes and thank you to the Father in every moment, following the example of Mary who stood beside the tragedy of the cross, having once felt the abundance of His life within herself. And just as it was Abraham’s faith that held him to the promises of God, so we need to live our faith, to hold us true to the promises of our transformation in Christ. We need to beg God to perfect that faith through the divine gifts of knowledge, understanding, and especially wisdom.

From now on, in our lives and in the actions of every human being open to grace, there is the opportunity for this transformation to take hold, for the logic and pattern of death and resurrection to overtake and renew our intentions. We simply need to say yes: yes, and thank you, and by your power alone, Lord. The thorns of this life need not remain as thorns: barren, painful, a reminder of our losses and the dangers of our isolation from God. Now through grace, every moment of our life can know the transformation of grace, the passage from death to life, the metamorphosis by which something that can never happen in nature breaks in on the reality of this world: our thorns can become roses.

Now, looked on through the eyes of faith, our daily struggle, our duties, our inner weariness, and pain, can be melded into the mystery of Christ, our elder brother, and turned into a moment of eternal value. The eternity of God can break through on the mundaneness of our lives. The deadened lifelessness of daily disappointment and burden can become a springtime of vigour and joy, for in Christ and through His grace, our ugliness is made beauty, our sorrow is made festivity, and our little nothingness basks in the everlasting gaze of our loving Father and Lord. The eyes of faith bring the horror of the world around us into the eternal moment where God redeems us from the sufferings we endure in order to restore us to our home again.

Through faith and all the consequences that flow from it, life will follow death, triumph will come after disaster, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.    

 

Learning how to die

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 12: 24-26) gives us a teaching of Jesus that is utterly central not only to the means by which He offered us redemption but also to the processes by which we, His followers, are incorporated into Him. There can be few passages in the gospel which are more clearly an antidote to everything in us that continues to scream for the survival of the old man of sin within us.

We must understand that evil always copies good, and that the devil is ever the ape of God, as St Jerome says. On the one side stands the old man crucified with Christ that St Paul refers to in the letter to the Romans. On the other stands the ideal to which Jesus calls us, to follow Him as the disciples should follow the Master, for where the Master is there must the disciple be also.

Here is the drama for us. On the one hand, we must not smother the smouldering flax nor break the bruised reed. Weakness must be nurtured, not punished. At the same time, there is every temptation in the world, as Jeremiah says, to put cushions under the elbows of sinners … and, by the way, that means every single one of us. All humans have a taste for the holiday from good. If we are disciples, we struggle not to have a taste for the holiday from doing the better thing.

So, should we always do the better thing, and crucify our old man mercilessly? Not at all; the best and the better may be the enemy of the good. That way madness lies. Worse still, that way lack of integration between our better and our worse selves may take a hold at a deeper level, allowing us to believe in our performances of piety, while failing to back them up with actions that bespeak love truly.  

But the temptation for those who are committed disciples, willing perhaps to die for Him, is to mistake worldliness for moderation, to confuse the inner disgust which can coat our spiritual senses with the inevitable fatigue and weariness of our many duties. We claim to be tired, and maybe we are, but sometimes we are actually looking for Jeremiah’s cushions; we are turning inward; we are seeking not rest but anaesthesia. 

Jesus’ answer: unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. St Therese of Lisieux showed us how littleness can embrace this utterly stark doctrine with fruitful abundance. We do not need grandiose gestures here, announcing our sacrifices to the world; we just need a little path through the thorns of our complaining nature, reaching for the flowers of His grace and the fruits of His redemption.  

If anyone serves me, He must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be. Any big mouth can clamour for Christ when they feel pumped up; the challenge is to know how to die when nothing within us can find a reason for it, or when everything in us calls for us to be taken down from the Cross before the sacrifice is accomplished.

From the archives

I have a little trouble with the car this morning so this is blog post from the archives on today's gospel extract. A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 11: 29-32) sees Jesus surrounded by a crowd who have assembled to hear His preaching. They certainly get an ear full, not to say a tongue lashing. It is not clear what unleashes it. Immediately before this extract, a woman had cried out from the crowd that His mother was blessed. Jesus responded that those who do the will of God (like his mother in fact) are blessed, not to dishonour His mother but to dishonour the assumption that a person’s connections are what really count.

And, then, comes the tongue lashing: This is a wicked generation. Oh, how the PR agents, the diplomats, and justice and peace advocates must have shaken their heads in dismay. How on earth could Jesus build bridges with such cutting language? The thing is: Jesus is the bridge and the bridge builder – the ponti-fex, as the Latin has it – who connects us back to God, saving us from the abyss of perdition. The problem with this generation is not that they have not really had the chance to understand; the problem is that they are, like most of humanity, in revolt against God in various ways. But how?

There are perhaps two problems that emerge from the judgement Jesus delivers. The first of these is that, like most of us, the people in their generation believe they are an exception, and as an exception, they merit special treatment. The odd thing is that by this time in Jesus' ministry, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had heard about the abundant signs of Jesus, but, oh no, they still claim they need another one. Yet this exceptionalism is a sin of pride, masquerading perhaps as fervent religiosity, the pretence that their need for a sign is required for a sensible discernment of Jesus’ authenticity. There are few if any among them with the faith of the centurion who even dispenses Jesus from the need to attend his beloved servant in person if only He will cure him; the centurion knows Jesus can cure him, and this is enough.

The second problem of this generation – the problem that their feeling of being an exception actually covers up – is that they are sensationalists, seeking the thrill of the special and miraculous, demanding the dopamine hit of God’s spectacular intervention on their behalf. They are collectors who invest in collectable religious experiences. Many among them will have turned up their noses at the preaching of those dishevelled seventy-two disciples who only had one coat each, because, you know, this lot don’t like peer-led preaching; instead, they want the real deal, a zingy homily like Jesus preached during the Sermon on the Mount. They want the showstopping number from the big guy in the sandals; not a cover version from the apostles’ tribute band. But no sign will be given them except the sign of Jonas.

Now, these two problems of exceptionalism and sensationalism lead to a third: the problem of complacency. They have been given all these chances to hear and embrace the truth from Jesus (and indeed from the seventy-two disciples with one coat each), but for many their search for the sensational probably rests on a hardcore foundation of self-belief – belief in their piety and their being deserving. This crowd believed they knew the divine score, and the divine score was in their favour. We will see that only a few verses later when Jesus visits the house of a Pharisee. But they are here now, in this crowd, the unwittingly complacent religious enthusiasts who believe in their own competence. They have learned nothing from the example of the men of Ninevah, even though they will know the story well. They have learned nothing from the wisdom of Solomon, even though they have heard it read countless times in their synagogues. All the wisdom of the Old Testament has bounced off the surface of their souls that have been rendered impenetrable to God’s inspirations by a panoply of religious observances that wrap them in a safety-blanket of selfish reassurance. Thus, they struggle to expose themselves to, or even conceive of, the dangerous liberation of intimacy with God. They have all the latest colours of phylactery; they treasure the memory of meeting the High Priest as he sailed by them into the Temple during last Passover in a wave of incense. They have confidently purchased the latest Pharisee guide on 365 ways to wash your hands up to the elbows to maintain ritual purity. And yet they have not repented. They are too complacent.

They have not heard the voice of God, echoing in the words of the prophet Joel:

Even now, declares the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

    with fasting and weeping and mourning.

There comes a time when preaching must cease and dialogue must begin, or maybe when dialogue must cease, and preaching begin. But it seems there also comes a time when neither preaching nor dialogue can continue; when preaching and perhaps especially dialogue, can be manipulated and rendered sterile by the listener; when all attempts at reaching out are simply drawn into the spectacular web of hypocrisy that the human heart builds to protect itself from its deepest responsibilities to hear and answer God’s call.

Then, if nothing more can be humanly done, the sign of Jonah is all that remains. The sign of Jonah is, we know, the resurrection, but in a spiritual sense, it is resurrection from sin after redemptive suffering. Talk and listening are good but not even Jesus proposed to talk people all the way to heaven. There is work to be done. This generation of complacent sensationalists, who believe in their own exceptionalism, suffer a kind of locked-in syndrome, unable to take another spiritual step forward, incapable of seeing the urgency of shedding their own wisdom and replacing it with the wisdom of God. For this wisdom would remind them that they suffer from the poison of sin, but that they are also immeasurably blessed by a Saviour who will endure the night of Jonah to lead them into the day of salvation.

Love flowing like a river

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s ferial gospel has been the subject of our reflection elsewhere on the blog. Today’s reflection, therefore, is on the gospel of the memorial for the feast of St Paulinus of York (Matthew 28: 16-20), another monk missionary sent to England by St Gregory the Great, who baptised King Edwin of Northumbria in York in 627.

Appropriately, the liturgy offers us the sending of the apostles from the last chapter of the gospel of St Matthew when the eleven stood in a wavering state of mind, some adoring Jesus, some doubting Him, and all of them surely wondering what was coming next.

And what did come next if not, as we reflected on last week with our reflection on Peter, other than the Lord handing on His mission to His chosen ones, sending them out as He too had been sent, bearing His task, labouring in His name and for the glory of His Father? The dynamic of the mission does not come from the Church except insofar as her members participate ever more faithfully in the outpouring of grace and holiness that Jesus wins for us in His death and resurrection and which the Holy Spirit communicates to us through the ministry of the Church, through His personal gifts, and through His own presence.   

Notice the two sides of this mission: Go… baptising them … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. These orders – the last ones Jesus gives the Apostles - place the tasks of sanctification and teaching at the heart of the mission. Note the nuance also: all that I have commanded; not half of it, not a best-bits version, not a bowdlerised copy with the tough bits omitted, not tailored for the shifting fashions of the age which will be something else by the end of next week. The woundedness and needs of the human heart are much the same from age to age, no matter the prevailing winds, no matter how many castles in the air are built by our pride. Below the changing currents at our surface lie the same rip tides that always bedevil us, quite literally at times: we are always damaged goods. Fashion chasing is for fools, not for followers of the Lord.

We see also in these two tasks an order and a logic: sanctification and then teaching. In time, the Church will come to say: Lex orandi lex credendi - the law of prayer is the law of belief. Because in point of fact, while truth perfects our minds, we can never truly understand the mysteries that Jesus has revealed to us. We do not need to fabricate mystery: God’s revelation is all a mystery of love and transcendence that surpasses our human capacities; of love, because God is good and total love is the response to total goodness, and of transcendence, because God is holy and we are the creatures who, along with the angels, were given the capacity to be conscious of what it is to honour freely their creator. At the same time, because it is possible for us to be misled by our own lights, the Church also reverses the law stated above and says: Lex credendi lex orandi – the law of belief is the law of prayer. Even the greatest mystics submitted their insights in prayer to the Church for she is the custodian of Revelation and faith.

If all this seems a tall order, Jesus gives the apostles one last consolation in this gospel: that even though He leaves them bodily, He is with them always until the end of the age. With them and with us in His sacred words of course; but because our total sanctification is His goal, sanctification meaning radical union with Him, He is with them and us pre-eminently in His Eucharistic presence the mystery of which will unfold over the centuries. He is with them and with us lastly in the Spirit which He sends into the world from the Father to remind us of all things and grant a deeper appreciation of them.

The procession of goodness, therefore, goes on, beginning with the persons of the Blessed Trinity, in essence one, through the hands of the ministers of Christ commissioned to share His gospel, through the action of the Spirit, and through all those who make themselves docile instruments of the purposes of Providence in this world.

To be apostolic in the end is to become a willing channel of the great fount of gifts that pours out of the communion of the Blessed Trinity and breaks forth in this world from the rock which is Christ, who is admitted to this world by Mary’s great yes. The apostolate that we in COLW aspire to is nothing other than to do our part to facilitate this flow of His goodness into the world, through the Church, through the hands of Mary, channelled through our poor minds and hearts and – please God – into the ears and hearts of our neighbours, families and friends, if we will just let ourselves be the voices, hands and feet that the Master sends forth into the world.

What a mission, what a hope! How little we have done and how much remains to be undertaken. But listen again to His last word to us: behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Shedding a little light

 A recording of today's reflection can be accessed here.

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Both the gospel of today’s feria and today’s memorial have been the subject of commentaries already on this blog. If you are reading this entry, you can follow these links to reflections on the ferial and to the memorial gospels. Instead, today’s reflection concerns the first reading of the memorial of St Bruno, Philippians 3: 8-14. All Scripture is good for our meditation, but today’s memorial concerns a saint whose vocation to contemplation is echoed in COLW’s own charism and its commitment to the interior life, the soul of all the apostolate, as Dom Chautard so famously said.

In these words, Saint Paul shows us the two polarities or dimensions of contemplation. The first and primary dimension of contemplation is to know and behold the truth about God. This contemplation begins with the theological virtue of faith which enables us to believe everything that God has revealed about Himself. It is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not, as again St Paul tells the Hebrews. This contemplation deepens as the Holy Spirit activates his gifts in us, most especially the gift of understanding and wisdom. It is this purpose that St Paul evokes as the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. Then we will know even as we are known, he tells the Corinthians, referring to the beatific vision of the saints in heaven. But the light of glory then is anticipated by the light of faith now, and it is as well to remember but while the gifts of the Holy Spirit perfect the theological virtue of faith, they do not replace it. We must walk by faith in this life. We are travellers on His path but not yet beholders of His beauty, so touchingly evoked by the devotion to the Holy Face. Everything in our prayer which reaches out for light can be associated with this surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. We see it too in many instances in the Gospel, for example, when Philip asks Jesus at the Last Supper: show us the Father and it is enough for us. Our souls must seek the Lord, like the hind that seeks the water, for if we ask Him, He will give us the living water, as he did to the woman at the well.

The other dimension of contemplation, however, belongs to the gift of knowledge which enables us to understand created things in relation to God. For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish… But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal. So speaks St Paul, not because all things are rubbish - this is the kind of rabbinical hyperbole that Jesus was given to also - but rather because the value of all created things is relative when seen in the light of the eternal and glorious Trinity in whom all things have their being. Wealth, health, reputation, comfort, loss, pain, confusion, upset: these too will pass before the infinite and eternal majesty of the One who created this world and not only suffers its waywardness but redeems it in His blood. It is this divine appreciation of the relativity of this world that paves the way for accepting the sufferings that come to us and for which we also need the gift of fortitude: that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like him in His death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Our minds are often a tangle of meanings, acquired through our learning and through our experiences, compounded by our duties and our busyness. In contemplation, we seek God's help in untangling the mess, in letting in His light, in coming to maturity, and in seeing all things that belong to this world - our possessions, our relations, our many responsibilities - in the eternal light of the divine face. It is His light alone that can illumine the darkness within; and it is His light alone, given by grace and by nature, by which we must try to see through the darkness around us.

I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own, says St Paul. In St Paul, St Bruno, indeed in our Carmelite saints, we have examples enough for the journey.

Hearing the call to be Jesus

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 21: 15-17), taken from the optional memorial of St Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, in the diocese where your blogger lives, shows us the scene where Jesus gives to the head of the apostolic college what we would come to call the Petrine mission. Three times Jesus asks Peter if he loves Him. Three times Peter replies that he does, showing on the third occasion just a scintilla of frustration or annoyance. What did the Lord mean by asking him three times? Peter surely understood what the repetition implied and what it was a mirror of. Then came the final command: Feed my sheep. Things could not have been made simpler for Peter, really.

Yet what underlies the Lord’s treatment of Peter in this scene, and what does it suggest about His way of dealing with each of us?

In the first place, the thrice-asked question evoked for Peter, as it does for us, another scene in the gospel when, on the night of Jesus’ arrest, his disciple denied three times that he knew his Master. Jesus had foretold it at the Last Supper. And Peter, denying the possibility all the while, walked right into a situation for which he was still not prepared, not for lack of foresight but for lack of insight. Peter, so often the victim of his own impulsiveness, became in that moment a traitor to the cause. He was the first pope to do so, and of course he was not the last. Put not your trust in princes, says the Psalm. Caiphas was High Priest. Solomon fell from grace. God writes straight with crooked lines, but it is in God we trust, not man.

Still, this is not the only mystery bound up in this scene. There is in the repeated questioning of Peter by Jesus some sign and signal of how God approaches all of us to instruct and guide us along the way. We are not machines; we learn and we sometimes forget. Repetition is the mother of education, but education is what is left over when we have forgotten all the information we have acquired. In asking Peter three times this simple question, the Lord was not merely reminding Peter of his moment of betrayal – warning him and reminding him of his fragility, even while he professed his love; he was also helping Peter purify his memory of that awful night. The reminder was not a further chastisement; rather, it was like the intervention of a doctor, taking a scalpel to the poisoned wound. We all suffer from such wounds. Our sins are forgiven, and yet we have not quite squared everything away. Our passions remain attached to the sin, or our hearts remain invested in our waywardness, even as we resolve not to sin again (how often, o Lord, how often must we do so?). But Jesus, who heals the mind of error and the heart of malice, also gradually seeks to evangelise us even in the depths of our past which is ever before Him in the eternal moment. Our poor choices have left a mess within and here comes the Lord to restore order in Peter’s aching heart, his gut still twisted as he recalls his cowardice; not only to forgive but to heal the twisted complexities of his wandering heart. The Lord does the same for us also. The mystery of iniquity which we carry within us is thus exposed to the sunlight of the divine presence, a restorative surge of mercy that exposes us to the call of love, where our broken selves might choose complacent or purblind self-protection.

Beside the two mysteries we have already considered, we come now at last to the most profound: that Jesus commits to a frail human the mission to be his hands and voice and presence in the world. Feed my lambs, feed my sheep, He tells Peter. In other words, be my vicar in the pastoral mission confided to me by my Father. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, Jesus says elsewhere. This is precisely what He had done at Easter. And now, His language to Peter places the responsibility of incarnating Jesus’ mission on earth on the shoulders of the former fisherman.

Feed my sheep. Here is the Lord at His most bewildering, confiding His mission into the hands of a man who barely two months before swore he never knew Him, a man who was intemperate enough to slice an enemy’s ear off, a man who sank into Lake Galilee because of his weak faith. Discounting his beloved disciple, ignoring the future apostle He would make of Paul, Jesus called Peter in this moment. And yet, while it is a moment personal to Peter, it is applicable to us all. Jesus might easily have said in simple terms to us all: be me. Be my hands and feet; be my voice and my touch; be to others a sign of the One who has sent you.

In COLW, we evoke often the path of incarnation, i.e. to realise in our own lives the vocation to which the Good Lord has called us and thus grow to resemble more and more our adopted brother Christ. Indeed, we regularly ask after Holy Communion for the grace that others might recognise in us the Word made flesh in Mary. This is a reality that is contained in seed in every call and command Jesus issues in the gospel: be me. But it reaches its ecclesial significance when we see it happen to Peter. He, even he, has a path he must follow: a call to leave behind his sin, a call to follow a path which will lead him three decades after this moment to the centre of the Empire and the site of his execution and from where he must feed the Lord’s sheep still through the hands of his successors who receive the same call.

But in the end, this call was special to Peter, and yet it reflected the call the Lord gives to us all: simply to be where our Master is, for wherever the Master finds himself, there must the disciple follow.

 

From lowly insights to high visions

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 1: 47-51) sees Jesus encountering the apostle Nathanael for the first time. The briefest of exchanges occurs, following which Nathanael professes his belief in Jesus’s divine sonship. It is an extraordinary moment of faith, and Jesus promises that Nathanael will see greater things, the very concourse of angelic traffic between this world and the next in the service of the Messiah.

The nub of this passage, however, lies in the first exchange which passes between them. Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit! says the Lord. How do you know me, Lord? replies the future apostle.  When you were under the fig tree, I saw you, Jesus responds. It is these words which trigger in Nathanael a profession of fervent faith.

What is it that the Lord perceived in Nathanael? What was it in those words an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit which told Nathanael that the Lord knew him through and through. Perhaps this little exchange dramatizes for us the tensions with which we live daily. For who among us can say that there is no deceit in their soul?

The best spiritual authors commend to us knowledge of God and knowledge of the self. But, as we observed on this blog last week, we are often strangers to ourselves. Our capacity for self-reflection is often undermined by the hall of mirrors within us which distends our self-knowledge, sometimes flatteringly and sometimes to our detriment. As one might say these days, objects in these mental mirrors may appear better or worse than they really are. On the one hand, we suffer the wounds of original sin, and pride stalks our good works to such an extent that the Lord tells us not to let our right hand know what our left hand is doing; pride takes fire like dry leaves. On the other, we hardly understand our own inner psychological wounds, the fruit of our unpurified experiences, which leave us clinging to bitter shards of misunderstanding and disappointment, the things that make us embrace deceit not usually out of perversity but for the comfort they appear to bring. It is hard sometimes to know which lies the world is telling us, and our neighbour is often full of subterfuge, perhaps even without knowing it. But, knowing ourselves and seeing our own capacity for deceit – which we choose sometimes as a tactic and sometimes as a false refuge - that is a life-long challenge. The Psalmist himself asks God to cleanse him from his hidden sins.

And, yet here is Nathanael, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Here is a man who, to quote one hymn, has already been reclothed in his rightful mind. We might almost say that poor self-knowledge – self-knowledge of the distorted kind that we have just considered a few moments ago - is in fact a form of being out of one’s rightful mind, for the mind is made to know truth - the truth about God and the truth about the world and ourselves. In contrast, we have the Lord’s word for it that Nathanael’s mind was not clouded with error; not for him the deluded ambitions of James and John, nor the empty braggadocio of Peter. He was, as the Lord observed, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.

What is even more striking about Nathanael’s self-knowledge is that it matches the Lord’s knowledge of him. How could it be otherwise? To see the truth of things, to see the truth about ourselves, is to see things and ourselves as they are seen by the author of truth. This Nathanael intuits simply by dint of the Lord’s having claimed to have seen him under the fig tree. We cannot know what was on Nathanael’s mind at that very moment, but what we see in the moments that follow is a grand convergence of hearts: a human heart that is ready for divine love because it dwells in the truth about itself and God, in freedom from all deceit, and a divine heart that pours itself out passionately to share the goodness of the eternal truth. It is perhaps the happiest of all the encounters that Jesus has with any of his future apostles, and Nathanael might have said, anticipating St Paul: Now I know even as also I am known.

And what does the Lord promise Nathanael? He promises a glimpse into the true relations between heaven and earth. Heart spoke to heart, faith affirmed belief, and the Lord of gifts promised Nathanael than he would be able to see the celestial mysteries surrounding his incarnate presence on earth.  We can trace now a path in Nathanael’s journey that goes from honesty and self-knowledge to divine encounter, and then from a profession of faith to mystical illumination. Nathanael’s path is firm, and the way before him was paved with clarity of vision leading to the truth of God and the truth about himself.

And the promise was extraordinary that he would see the ministry of angels to the Christ, the coming and going of divine messengers about the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, now incarnate in flesh and walking the earth. We never think about this beautiful angelic gift promised to Nathanael, although it is one that is echoed in the lives of many saints who lived and interacted with the angels around them. We do not know when it began, nor how he lived its reality later on. And yet we know it must have given birth in him to an awareness of, and reverence for, the messengers of the Most High, those spirits who see constantly the face of the Father in heaven.

Such blessings were not the choicest gift of Nathanael’s life: that was the intimate friendship of Christ. But those high privileges began where that same friendship began also: under a fig tree where Nathanael was sitting, humbly letting go the vestiges of self-deceit, like a fall of autumn leaves.

Finding the measure of all things

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 10: 28-33) sees Jesus setting a series of teachings before his Apostles. He speaks to their fears, telling them not to be concerned for the destruction of their earthly goods – material possessions or social status – but rather to be ready to pursue God and eternity over and above everything else. On this will our judgement finally depend.

What is the fundamental issue at stake underpinning this gospel extract? Quite simply, it is a matter of what we derive our values from, the values which guide our actions and our relations with God and with others. Depending on what we value, our decisions and our conduct will be as distinct as east and west. The values that have ruled our conduct in this life will be the stuff of our judgement before the Father in eternity, Jesus tells us.

We see here instantly the sense of Jesus’ first warning: Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. By the body, Jesus does not only mean our physical selves but rather everything that we have and are in this material world. We are indeed material creatures, and we are heavily conditioned by the things that form our culture and our environment. We are gentrified or rendered savage by the civilizations into which we are born. And because of our sinful wounds, we internalise lessons that surround us - the doctrines of consumerism or the indulgences of sexual licence -instead of doing what our baptism calls us to: sitting at the feet of Christ every new dawn in order to learn His gospel afresh. Perhaps we pat ourselves on the back for not being so overtly greedy as some Wall Street banker, but there are many material realities that we probably cling to unconsciously, separation from which would put us to a trial that only grace could save us from. And so again the Lord warns us: do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. It is not that Jesus expects us to make a bonfire of the material things or advantages that we have, but rather that the follower of Christ should bring these things also into the obedience of His Kingdom where the soul is safe and where, please God, the body will join it after resurrection.

And since these things must come into the obedience of His Kingdom, it stands to reason that Jesus requires us to bring our social relations and standing into the same obedience. We cannot love God and Mammon, but by the same token, as St Teresa of Avila warns us, perhaps we cannot really begin to serve the Lord until we have lost our reputation. The sin of our first parents had both a material and a social dimension. They were meant not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but when they sinned, it was not firstly because of a physical or material need. Eve, we know, listened to the serpent, and chose thereby to make herself a child of the Father of Lies rather than a child of our Heavenly Father. She entered into relation with the agent of deceit, separating herself from the author of truth. Man is the social animal, said the pagan philosopher Aristotle, but in Eve’s case we see that these social relations also exist with the world of the spirit. In this sense, perhaps Adam’s case is closer to our own for when he sinned, he said it was because of another human being: The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ We now call that kind of thing “throwing somebody under the bus.” Adam is undone in this moment through taking the law of his heart no longer from his Creator but from this creature of flesh and blood before him. Just at the moment he was called to acknowledge the law of his Father in heaven, his actions bespoke a denial of that law in the society of his spouse You shall have no other gods before me, says the first commandment, yet when we commit any sin, there is always some element of our action that places something or someone – the strangest of gods – before the Lord.  

How then are we not to be dragged to destruction either by the things we possess and enjoy or by the social whirl in which we move? The answer to this dilemma lies in the middle of this gospel extract:

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father knowing. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; You are of more value than many sparrows.

The law of God that should rule our relations with the material world and indeed with all our fellow human creatures finds a foundation in us through the virtue of faith and the gift of understanding. On the one hand, the virtue of faith assures us of everything that God has revealed about Himself, His promises, and our path back to our home, because He has said it and His word is true, as the act of Faith tells us. This faith, as Saint Paul tells the Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And then there is the gift of knowledge which only the Holy Spirit can move in us. This is the gift which enables us to penetrate the surface reality of things in order to perceive reality in the light of God. This is the gift which enables us to see behind the ephemeral and passing life of the birds of the air – or indeed the ephemeral and passing life of the mighty human forces that surround us – to catch a glimpse instead of the loving, guiding hand of divine Providence. How those of us who who must live in the world at large – the world of material possessions and ambitions with all its paper-thin guarantees of bliss and social status - should beg the Holy Spirit every day to illumine us in this way; to let us see the mighty parade of human folly for what it is: the result of wayward zeal and misguided love.

‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’ So speaks our Saviour to calm our fears that we will not survive the losses that discipleship calls us to.

The light shines in the darkness

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 16-18) is all about light: what light we stand in, and what we do with the light. The light is clearly the light of God, the light of eternity. Yet we can be tempted into hiding the light of God in our hearts, our betrayal of which we may not even notice until the little of it we retain is taken away. So says Jesus in this compact passage. How can we avoid such a calamity?

In its origins, the light that Jesus here commands us to let shine is not our light but His light in us. Normally, for light to shine out we need to open up the shutters or draw wide the curtains. Paradoxically, like a flame that needs protection as it takes hold, the only way God’s light can shine out of us is for it first to shine inwardly in the cell of our soul. We dilute the light every time we leave this cell and seek the artificial light down the corridors of our gaudy imaginations. In contrast, the light that comes from other kinds of knowledge is good – the light of philosophy or science or a healthy imagination -  but only God’s light can flood our hearts like a summer daybreak to reveal His supernatural mysteries through faith and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Why then do we hide the light, covering it with a bowl or putting it beneath a bed, to use Jesus’ images? We are right to be prudent of course: Jesus said let your light shine, but He did not say we ought to shine it into others’ eyes like an interrogator!

Perhaps we sometimes refuse to share the light for two reasons: first, we consider ‘letting our light shine’ as a technical problem of communication, of saying the right thing at the right time and in just the right way, as if we were the builders of God’s kingdom, not Him. And nevertheless, this is in various ways a miscalculation, not because discretion is wrong – far from it – but because being the light to others cannot be reduced to a technique. We are not called to communication but to communion, as the great French writer Fabrice Hadjadj says. God’s call, which should echo in our lives for the sake of others, is not merely a lesson to be learned but a romantic adventure to be engaged upon. Blessed be God if we become skilled in reaching out, but the fruitfulness of our actions depends on their remaining rooted in the vine that is Christ. The harvest comes from His hand, not ours. As to whether we are speaking in the right moment, for that we must depend explicitly and confidently on the Holy Spirit.

The second reason we might refuse to let our light shine comes from a much worse place in which our hesitancy arises now from a kind of surrender to the light of others, their views and attitudes, their mistaken opinions, as if a rightful humility before their experience should lead us into hesitancy about our own. If we miscalculate here, the problem runs deep, for hesitancy is not the fruit of humility but a sign that our grip on the light of God is weak, possibly that His flame burns only feebly in our souls, or perhaps that we have not taken the time to put fuel on the blaze He intends to kindle in our hearts. For fire to take hold, it needs oxygen, heat, and fuel. For God’s fire to take hold, it needs the breath of the Holy Spirit, the heat of God’s love, and the fuel of our surrender to God’s light, in the rays of which the light of others is like a 40 watt light bulb before the blazing sun.

The fact we do have not His boldness suggests we have not yet gone deeply enough into His mystery. Or worse, that instead of turning to Him in the cell of our souls, we wander down the labyrinth of our own minds, vainly seeking out our reflection in the mirror of the minds of others, rather than in the mind of God. To God’s light, we can strangely, not to say perversely, prefer the chiaroscuro – the blend of dark and light - that we see in pictures like Caravaggio’s study of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist. Behold Salome who dreamed of triumph, now disgusted by the realisation of her mother's fantasy.

This is why to anyone who has not, even the little he thinks he has will be taken away. This is not a punishment on poverty. Rather, it is the fate of those who, through a kind of greed, have become excessively attached to the things humans can cling to beyond reason – esteem, respect, status, good standing, reputation, the good opinion of our fellows. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it.

If, instead, we were rich in the contemplation of that light that shines within us, if we let it fill our minds and hearts in daily prayer, then we would not even think or care to dissimulate about what is within, least of all to hide it under bowl or bed. We would no more think of doing so than we would think of turning on the light in a room that is already flooded with the rays of the sun. The journey towards allowing the light to shine out of us begins with the step that takes us towards the light coming from the mystery of His presence in our hearts, for the kingdom of God is within.