Our place among the ranks of the unknown

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 1: 1-16 and 18-23) recounts the genealogy of Jesus, going back to David and eventually to Abraham. A whole procession of names, most of them unknown to us, pass us by, as we await the coming of the Saviour. At last, the gospel relates some of the circumstances around Mary’s pregnancy, St Joseph’s prophetic dream reassuring him about the child, and the fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah that ‘the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.'

What spiritual sense can we make of this passage which seems so alien to us? What was its meaning to the first Christian readers? The final section about the situation of Mary and Joseph in a way speaks much more to us, with its mixture of trial and relief, and the assurance of prophecy fulfilled. Surely, we can afford to leave the first section alone or just skim over it? But then, what if we did not?

There are recognisable names of course in the genealogy: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Zadok among them.  But here we find some beginning of a deeper mystery. Each of these men were individuals in themselves with stories and experiences of their own, private thoughts and feelings locked away in their own hearts, not listed in a genealogy. Yet, in another sense, they serve to point the way forward to Christ, the Saviour to come, the hope of every human breast that longs and longs and does not know why. Abraham and Isaac between them played out the drama of the persons of the Father and the Son, Abraham willing to countenance the sacrifice of his child, Isaac bearing the weight of the wood on his shoulders. Jacob’s struggles anticipated those of Jesus, as does his vision of the bridge between heaven and earth which is realised in his Divine descendent. David and Zadok between them speak to us of Jesus’ kingship and His priesthood, his passionate love of God poured out in the song of His heart, and His utter devotion to the adoration of God. Jesus does not merely appear, therefore, at the end of this genealogy; rather, He is present throughout it, His actions foreshadowed in those of his ancestors.

Arguably, however, this is not the only way that Jesus’ genealogy may speak to us. Jesus is God and man; His destiny was to bestride the world as its conqueror and live among us as our brother. And so, we can regard every one of these other names, especially the unknown ones, as types not of Jesus but of us, the anawim the very ordinary ones, the ones that are seen and forgotten, the ones who go unnoticed by the busy and important world. They lived in hope and so must we; they lived often in ignorance of God’s purposes, and so do we. They did not know when their waiting would end, and neither do we. They were probably perturbed by the many troubles of the children of God, and so are we, scandalised in our leaders, disappointed in those we trust, wearied by others and wearied by ourselves. Yet all we can do at times is to cling on to Jesus, our alpha and omega. Like them, therefore, we are participants in that grand tradition described by St Paul in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews:

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings… By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away.” For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please God… By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. … By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going… And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.

What is this except the tradition of faith, the faith that goes before us and comes after us, that we have received and that by God’s grace we must be committed to passing on, for there are, as Chesterton put it, no private suns and moons, i.e. there is no account of the universe that is simply for little me. We belong to a larger world. The Sun of Justice is the Son of the Father, and He will rule forever over His Father’s domain.

This grand genealogy means something to us for two reasons: first, because it tells us about Jesus, and second, because it tells us about ourselves. It tells us about Jesus whose coming, ministry and destiny are foretold in the major figures whose names we have dwelt on already. It tells us about ourselves in the unknown names, the litany of the little ones forgotten or ignored by the world but who play a role in the passing on of that life which bears fruit in ways that are incalculable. Every hair on our heads is numbered, as we know, and the Father holds us in the palm of His hand and shapes us with the skill of a potter, if only we will allow it; if only we will suffer ourselves to be remade in the image of His Son.

And how they must have greeted their descendent when He opened for them the gates of their prison between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, when a new light dawned upon their ignorance, and mercy and justice together breathed the possibility of life back into the moribund figure of broken humanity. This is our family tree, the fruit of divine promises and many hidden and unknown human fidelities, handed on down the ages, from father to son and mother to daughter, until the last syllable of recorded time.

 The genealogy of Jesus, so strange upon our ear, is, then, no excursion into mere curiosity or arcane trivia. It is the unfolding and making known of the tale of God’s mercies down the centuries, told out in the lives of the many most of whose names are known to God alone.

Hard drinking and deep inner work

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 5: 33-39) relates to us a typical exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. It begins by the Pharisees thinking they are asking difficult questions about the shoddy religious operation run by Jesus. He brushes off their “concerns” about the apostles by saying that the latter will indeed fast one day … when the bridegroom is gone. While this mysterious reference left the Pharisees wondering why on earth He was claiming to be the bridegroom of the Song of Songs, Jesus bamboozled them further still by a well developed metaphor about new and old wine and new and old wineskins. And in their puzzlement, no doubt the tension of the moment was diffused. But what are we to make of it?

We might say that the bamboozling metaphor of the second part of this abstract is a direct rebuke to the error of the Pharisees in the first. What is their error, apart from having hearts that were largely closed to their Divine Saviour? Simply that they were all too often tricked by appearances. They could not see beyond them. Religiosity seemed to lie for them in the outward imitation of exterior habits and conforming these to the intricacies of religious observance. They never seemed to go deeper, except in trying to entrap Jesus in His words. Jesus refers to them in the end as hypocrites, which is as much as to say that they were conscious of the superficiality of their religion and were beyond caring about it.

God forbid that any one of us should be guilty of such hypocrisy, and yet we too have to resist the temptation of an exterior rehearsal of religiosity which is only skin deep. As Dickens’s Dr Jobbling in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit observes, man is an imitative biped. We learn by imitation; we acquire most of our social skills through unconsciously observing and copying our elders. We fit into new social situations in the same manner, even as adults. We are instinctively chameleons; we have a herd instinct. Yet these autonomic responses to being social animals are both a boon and a curse, especially when it comes to religion. They leave us exposed to fads and fashions, as much as to good example. If we do not think carefully, we can easily internalise the superficiality of others, and multiply it by our own. Something more is asked of us if we are to do what Jesus commands us in the gospel: to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow Him.

And, we might observe, this last message is what lies beneath the metaphor of the wine and the wineskins in the second part of the gospel extract today. The new wine is that of the Holy Spirit, poured out afresh and in abundance in our baptism, in all the sacraments of the Church, and through the many inspirations of our day. The new wine is ours to be drunk on all we like, provided we do not forget the duty to weep in due season! Let’s become hard drinkers! Our fiat in joy is the spousal fiat to the bridegroom of our souls whose presence with the apostles set so different a tone from the pieties of all the Pharisees combined.

But what then are the new wineskins if not ourselves? The grace poured into our hearts is the new wine of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, but while grace heals as well as sanctifying us, it must be received truly, authentically, and interiorly; it must not simply be poured over us as if we were competitors spraying champagne on a winners’ podium. For us in COLW, this means there is deep inner work to do.

This is the work that challenges us on the inside to find the paths down, down, down to the very interior cell of our souls where we meet both our true self and the Divine Guest who dwells in us through grace. We are not who we project to the world; we are not the fine figure or the loathed creature in our imagination’s unreliable eye. We are what we are before God, and as St Catherine of Sienna discovered, that means we are those who are not, just as He is who is. Here is the renewal of our wineskins, their transformation from their old self-congratulatory or self-loathing leatheriness to a new responsive suppleness, attuned more to the aromas and inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

More particularly, it is only as we allow this transformation inside us to happen - only insofar as we walk the walk of self-knowledge, not talk the talk of pious conformism – that our wineskins can receive the sweet liquor of grace without tainting it with our own bitter acidity.

If we seek an answer to why pious people can be sometimes so off putting – why we fail to bear fruit or truly smack of Christ to others - we might find it here in this metaphor: our wineskins are old. We have failed to do the deep inner work, and are tainting the wine, almost until it is vinegar.

Jesus ends with the wry reflection that after drinking old wine, nobody wants the new. He does not approve this reaction. He is simply telling us how easy it is to be comfortable in our religion at a superficial level without ever descending to the core of who we are to meet Him.

Who will deliver me from the body of this death? Only Jesus Christ, the steward of the new wine and the master of the new wineskins.  

Sight to the blind, freedom to the captives, healing to the wounded heart

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 4: 16-30) relates the visit of Jesus to his own town of Nazareth. He reads in the synagogue and preaches on a text of Isaiah. Having at first amazed them, He then upsets the people with His commentary, and becoming enraged they turn into a lynch mob and set out to hurl Him off a local cliff, only to find that He has slipped their grasp and escaped. The level of detail in the synagogue scene is remarkable, evidently an eye-witness account. Was the Blessed Mother there or one of His disciples?

When the same gospel occurred last year, this blog reflected on the reaction of the people. They were prevented from hearing the vocation that Jesus offered them because a fantasy about their own destiny stood in their way and made them deaf. This time around, let us ask instead why they reacted so angrily that they were ready to commit murder.

Why do pious people become sometimes so angry in the name of their faith? There is indeed a form of just anger when it is in accord with right reason, but the people’s anger in this scene is not of that kind. If we had asked the Nazarenes why they were angry, they would no doubt have answered that Jesus’ implication about the privileges of the Gentiles was a calculated insult to the chosen people of God. What else could He have meant, they might ask, when all He emphasised were the unbelievers whom Adonai in His mercy had sent Elijah and Elisha to help? Those of a more theological bent might have added that this insult really sat atop a heresy that threatened the meaning of the very covenant of God with His people. Jesus in this light would be a preacher of error, a liar, and a threat to the faith of the town. The Law forbade such blasphemy; better to punish Jesus now and rid Israel of His lies before He did any further damage. Such might have been their justification, had they been called on to justify their attempted assault on Him.

All that of course would have been wrong headed for several reasons. Jesus was not delivering a calculated insult; they should have known Him much better than that, and indeed they did. Still, there are none so blind as those ready to take offence. Moreover, on a theological level the position of the Jewish people in the Old Covenant was not as exclusive as the Nazarenes’ reaction seemed to suggest; many moments in the Old Testament indicate God’s plan to broaden His reconciliation with the world beyond the confines of Israel, from the figures of Melchizedek and Ruth the Moabite to the faith of Naaman and Jethro. So, if Jesus was not being malicious, and if His views were hardly heretical, what was the cause of this anger in the people of His native town? How might we explain it?

God alone knows the secrets of the heart. We will perhaps learn on the day of judgement what passions and thoughts drove this extraordinarily brutal display. But if we seek some hypothesis, beyond the obvious one of offended pride, perhaps we might find it in the weakness of otherwise faithful souls when human wounds are covered up by, or intertwined with, theological or spiritual excuses. What did Jesus’ answer about Elijah and Elisha require of them? It required them to cling a little less tightly, a little less possessively, to their sense of being the Chosen People of God. But then why were they clinging so tightly to it? It is not as if this was a mistaken notion: God had indeed chosen them. But why had its importance loomed so large in their consciousness? Instantly, they would perhaps defend their feelings on theological or spiritual grounds. This is what faithful souls do, they might argue, the implication being: We do this action or that action because we are so full of faith. Charity urges us. But is this the case? To be full of faith is to be full of God, and where is the spirit of God in the angry mood of a lynch mob? Where is the justice? Where is the fair hearing?

The anger of imbeciles fills the world, as the French writer Georges Bernanos was fond of saying, but perhaps that is a little harsh. Yet Bernanos was aware, as some faithful souls are not, that while love drives our fear, fear often impedes love. What were the Nazarenes afraid of then? That again is their secret but might they have been afraid not so much of Jesus’ blasphemy, as of their own crumbling faith? Here they were, living under Roman occupation, one more offence against the self-belief of Israel to be God’s Chosen ones in a pagan world, and now here comes a miracle-working preacher, indeed one of their own kind, challenging them to think about God’s plans for that iniquitous world that was afflicting them. Jesus did not offend their faith; He triggered their fear. He did not disrespect the Covenant of God; He questioned their distortion of it, for their faith brought comfort without bringing light.

The problem here was not really the behaviour of the Nazarenes so much as what their behaviour concealed from the world, deep down in their hearts. They were shaken day in and day out in their faith; now Jesus was here to shake them some more. But why were they shaken? We have said twice - but let us say it a third time - that God keeps the secrets of the heart. But perhaps they were shaken because they had not known how to shine the light of their faith into their deepest sense of insecurity. It is not enough to hold the truths of the faith; we must hold them with the spirit of God.

Perhaps we must not blame them too much if this was the case. How brutalizing and damaging must it be to live under occupation, to be always in danger of falling foul of an invader’s injustice, and to see all this happen seemingly against the promises of the God to whom one is dedicated. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? But is this not our question also, we Christians of the twenty-first century?

The challenge for us, of course, is always to recognise that not only is the environment around us a strange land; that we can hardly miss, and Jesus explicitly did not promise to make us happy in this world. But more than that, this strange land is also found within us. It is strange because it is made up not only of light but of darkness; not only of the truths of God but also of our own false deductions, and our tortured logic; not only of the truths of faith but of the hall of mirrors created by our vanity; not only of His merciful action, but also of our own wayward attempts to save ourselves, trying to cauterise our wounded hearts when we should be offering them in humility to God’s healing touch. We cannot save ourselves after all, we who are the lowest of the low, the anawim, the widows of Sidon or the lepers of Syria.

But Jesus can lead us out of captivity, restore our sight and set us at liberty, not only from the world’s oppression but from our own.  

 

Making straight the path within us

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

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Today’s gospel is both beguiling and brutal. John preached against Herod’s marriage to Herodias for she had previously been married to his brother Philip. To placate Herodias, Herod locked John away but punished him no further, knowing him to be a good and holy man. Herodias was not so tolerant, however, and when Herod offered Salome, her daughter, as much as half the kingdom to reward her dancing before him and his guests, Herodias told Salome ask for the head of John the Baptist from whose mouth came forth the condemnation of Herodias’s preferred lifestyle choices. Checkmate, one might say, against John and Herod. A guard wandered down the many dark steps to John’s dungeon, removed the offending item, and they served it on a dish.

The drama of this gospel is played out between four people, three of whom hardly know themselves. But let us focus here on Herod and his self-styled wife, and leave Salome for another time. Herod was a pleasure seeker, an epicure. But his tastes were complex and refined. This explains why he was happy to have a religious preacher in his house where Herod could savour his elevated thoughts and dabble – no more than dabble - with the drama of his own salvation. It was said in a previous blog post that Herod was a religious poser, a man who enjoyed the distinction of religiosity, even if he neglected its demands. How very modern of him! Perhaps he thought of himself as a normal Jew, not one of these rabid radicals who tortured themselves with thoughts of self-reform. But for all his palaces and pleasures, there was a gulf that loomed beneath Herod, and if we wish proof of that, we only need consider Jesus’ appearance before Herod during His passion when, St Luke tells us, He answered Herod nothing. There is little that can be said to help even a well-meaning narcissist whose readiness to embrace self-knowledge – if they are so ready – would be limited to the necessities of managing their self-promotion. And yet, is there not a little of Herod in each of us, wishing to have our cake and eat it, lusting for the excitement of religious engagement while leaving our unpleasant and unacknowledged wounds gently to suppurate in the background? How much baggage are we bringing with us on our journey of following Christ? That is the question. There is no room for our favourite indulgence or our preferred hostilities, or for our half-hearted accommodations. Gently, we must let God break in and steal our hearts. 

Ultimately, Herod appears not to have known what he really wanted, other than to have his cake and eat it; to sprinkle a soupcon of religiosity on his debauchee’s divan. Herodias, on the other hand, knew exactly what she wanted, or at least she thought she did. She wanted the silence of the wretched Baptist. She had paid a high price to be with her lover Herod; and here was this thunderous voice coming from the desert, denouncing her choices, and spoiling the party. Herodias’s actions were driven by hate, but what was it she hated exactly? The Baptist? Possibly. The damage to her reputation? Conceivably. Or was it the thorn in her conscience, driven in by John’s incessant admonitions? What did Herodias want if not peace in her sins? And here she was, surrounded by the opulent possessions of one of the richest men in the region, unable to savour the peace that pursuing her desires was meant to bring her. We can be sure that adding murder to her ledger only brought further burdens to her feverish mind.

And then, there is John. Today, experts in the most fashionable kinds of pastoral theology might fail John the Baptist in his final examination, citing his inability to accompany Herod and Herodias along their primrose path... It is important to remember, however, that John's actions were not simply shaped by the culture and the time. They were driven by the gravity of the sins that Herod and Herodias were guilty of. John preached repentance, not accommodation; John called for self-reform, not self-fulfilment; John ignored the superficial scratches of dissatisfied desire and went right to the gaping wound caused by rejection of God. We must not break the bruised reed, nor stifle the smouldering flax, but neither must we coddle chaos. We need the prudence of love, but we must not confuse its requirements with avoiding the consequences of what we are: the friends of a God who asks us to take up our cross and follow Him to the end. John followed Him. John lost his head and, in doing so found his life.

Today’s gospel is a parable of the chaos of the human soul when it flees from the one thing necessary, the one thing that will bring it peace. Human indifference to this one thing is not an indication of its irrelevance, but proof of our insensibility to the wound of man’s divorce from God. And the return to God, the return to our Father’s house? John made the road straight for us in that regard. We have only to remember that we are not fit to untie the sandal of the one who brings us healing, and to decrease as He increases His kingdom within us.

Healing after crisis

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

Today’s gospel (Matthew 23:13-22) sees Jesus deliver one of his tongue lashings to the Pharisees. Woe to them for avoiding heaven and blocking other people entering therein. Woe to them for turning hearts of flesh into monstrosities. Woe to them for their minute wrangling over minor laws which disgraces the sources of holiness. Although we do not hear them all in this passage, Jesus delivers seven woes or curses upon the Pharisees; not a counterbalance to the seven beatitudes, so much as seven warnings for those who will not bear His yoke.

What are we to make of such behaviour on the part of Jesus? The psychologists are already lining up with their clip board to pathologize this apparently wild conduct, determined that nothing is more all-seeing than the scientific eye. But God searches the hearts and minds of humanity to their very depths in ways no psychologist will ever understand. He knows our wounds, and He knows also how we have wounded others. The next time Jesus spoke with severity of this kind in the gospel of Matthew was precisely in the scene where He foretold the Last Judgement:

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

What strict accounts must be given and what shaking there will be when the judge is to come, says the hymn the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass. Nobody set it to music better than Mozart.

We wish to displace these accusations of Jesus. Perhaps we are sure they are not aimed at us but only and specifically and exclusively at the Pharisees. Yet in another way, their target is not only the Pharisees but all abusers of religion. It has lately been fashionable to assume the Pharisaism condemned by Jesus is embodied by those who prefer formality in liturgy, but that critique is just a spiritual version of reverse snobbery. Pharisaism in its essence is the use of religion to assert power over others; it is the instrumentalization of religion for purposes other than the glory of God; it is the parody of zeal and devotion. And this sort of power can be asserted not only with the hard-edged sharpness of the Pharisees, but also with the soft-shoe shuffle of the religious poser. Herod Antipas was a poser of this kind, with his fondness for John the Baptist’s preaching, combined with his resolute neglect of the unpalatable moral reform that John called him too. The religious poser thinks John is a Pharisee for being so harsh.

But in the heart of the Pharisees, as in the heart of us all, there are wounded exiles in need of redemption. Perhaps the difference between the Pharisees and us (if we are not ourselves Pharisees) is how we manage those wounded exiles. Do the Pharisees load up burdens on the backs of others precisely so they can avoid facing those burdens in themselves? Do they obsess about the intricacies of spiritual minutiae only so they can distract themselves from the bigger, plainer but more demanding impositions of the gospel? Jesus denounced in them especially their tortured reasoning that acted as a curtain to veil their eyes from the great simplicity of the laws of God. Granted, laws are sometimes not simple, and that is why we need experts in the law. But minutiae that acknowledge higher laws only by rendering them null represent burdens that have gone beyond the pale. It is important here to see that Jesus was not hostile to the keeping of the law which He came to fulfil. He was zealous for its proper understanding; for lower laws to cede to higher laws, as God orders them to do.

Not all the Pharisees were such vipers of hypocrisy of course. In those not moved by the levels of hypocrisy Jesus denounced, perhaps what drove them onto the rocks of legal wrangling was the fear that arises when the highest sources of the law have failed to penetrate to the depths of the human heart. We need laws; we need guidelines. But when they are not understood with the right spirit of charity and equity, then we lose the clarity, compassion and calm that result from the love of God and spirit of justice living in our very bones. Jesus came to recover humanity and to save it from sin, not to deform it in the process. Indeed, to use those oft quoted words of St Irenaeus of Lyon, the glory of God is man fully alive. What is usually not quoted is the origin of those words that are found in his masterpiece Adversus Haereses – Against the Heresies­. And the Pharisees were, in a sense, heretics, not theologically but because their obsessiveness practically deformed the image of God in man, skewering the potential of the simple souls who trusted them. How many faithful Jews were broken by the hypocrisy of these men who lashed their neighbours’ consciences into a crisis of moral and psychological inflammation, like an OCD sufferer who develops a bleach addiction and teaches it to others?

Such wounds on skin or on consciences can only be healed by the most powerful balms and, in the case of consciences, by the gentleness coming from the heart of our Saviour. We sometimes all give way to inner Pharisees who torture others. Maybe there is an inner Pharisee who tortures parts of our own soul. We should not return blow for blow, if this is the case; we can only throw ourselves again and again upon the great healer who came to save us. For those He condemns on the Last Day as Judge are only those who failed in life to seek His loving hand and the healing that He offers, His light eternal, and His eternal rest.

The impossible dream

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 1:26-38) recounts the mystery of the Annunciation which is, as it were, the mystery central to our charism in COLW. The Angel Gabriel came to Mary, greeting her with those words that are ever fresh: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Mary is startled and troubled and inquires what this might mean. Gabriel explains to her that she will conceive a son and that He will be the saviour long-awaited by the people of Israel. Mary, hearing in these words the vocation God was calling her to from all eternity, offered her consent: let it be done to me according to your word.

In this gospel scene, Mary models for us three qualities that are intrinsic to our following of Christ. Perhaps surprisingly, the first of these is not a virtue but a state of mind: it is her objectivity. Our attachments are so deep, our wounds are so serious, that objectivity escapes us very often, but not so Mary. Mary, says St Luke, was greatly troubled and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. Her mind was not warped by gentle delusions about herself; her perceptions did not pass through a cloud of neediness. Her response, therefore, was not to say: well, where have you been, I’ve been waiting? Rather, it was to test the spirits, as St Paul says. Mary models for us the anti-enthusiast’s response to religious phenomena. It is not disbelief; rather, it is prudence. This response reflects equally her humility – for who would speak to a peasant girl in Nazareth in this way, she could fairly wonder – but we shall return to that further on.

Upon hearing Gabriel’s explanation, Mary models for us a second quality in this gospel scene with the following words: How will this be, since I am a virgin? What we hear in this response is no longer merely her objectivity but now her teachability. What she has heard is extraordinary. She, the lowliest of Nazareth’s denizens, is called to be involved in the realisation of the great hope of Israel. There is no doubt she understood both sides of this mystery: the fulfilment of the promise of God, and its startlingly humble and ordinary path. Teach me, Lord, is what her words mean here. Show me, Lord, your ways, for they are not ours. God’s plan for the saving of the human race would pass none of the stress tests the cynical human mind can put it under. But then, God could make the very stones sing if He so desires. He does not need high performance; just our consent. He does not need our achievements; He asks us only to return to our origins and become once more the clay in His hands. Here is Mary, then, mothering not only His Son to life, but in her example, showing His Son’s brothers and sisters how to follow Him. Be teachable. Ask God not why me? but how will this be?

And, finally, having heard how this will be, Mary promptly answers the call with humility. Gabriel’s final words – nothing will be impossible with God­, spoken in reference to Elizabeth’s conceiving John the Baptist - are in fact the response to every query about the vocations we are all offered. Nothing is impossible with God. God, who makes manna in the desert and turns shepherds into kings, will now walk the earth to turn the stones of our hearts into the voices of his children. Let is be done to me according to your word, says Mary; fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, in the Latin of St Jerome. Fiat mihi: be it done to me.

When we say yes to the Lord, we often seem to be saying yes to the Him only in the moment. But what we miss is that every moment on earth gathers around the eternal moment of God who wills us to join Him in due course in that eternal moment of His joy. To say yes then calls forth also our thank you, calls forth our joy; and joy itself, St Thomas Aquinas teaches us, is only one of the qualities of love, along with peace and mercy. At the same time, these human yeses that join His yes to us, echo also down the centuries, through all the hearts who ever, if only for a moment, turned to God, from the lowest sinner to the highest saint.

Mary’s yes began this chorus of restoration in objectivity, teachability, and in humility. We only need follow her example to see the impossible.    

 

In search of healing

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 16-22) relates the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus to ask what he must do for eternal life. Keep the commandments, is Jesus’ fundamental message. In hearing this, the young man is on comfortable ground for he is a faithful Jew. Well, says Jesus, in that case: sell everything you have, give money to the poor, and follow me. Now, the man finds himself on uncomfortable ground. He goes away sorrowful, says the gospel, for he had great possessions.  

It would be easy to read this gospel today only from a moralist or a spiritual point of view. This young man is not a bad person; his case is very different from the woman taken in adultery or the repentant thief on the cross. He is a faithful Jew, a man of decency, and honour. What is his problem, therefore, if not that he refuses to take that leap towards the next level that Jesus calls him too: detaching himself from the things of this world? Beyond the commandments lie the evangelical counsels – poverty, chastity, and obedience –the following of which leaves the soul freer in its return to God, less encumbered by this material world. The counsels are perfected in the vows our sisters make, through which every action becomes not only an act of morality but an act of religion, offered as an instance of worship to honour the Blessed Trinity.

But the rich young man’s world is not open to this adventure. He is too attached to the things of this world. What he needs is more detachment, we could conclude. And, we may be right, in a purely material if real sense. Detachment is certainly in play in this case. Today’s gospel extract at Mass pulls the punch that the following verses of the gospel of Matthew deliver with no apology:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”

But let us look at this young man again and ask a different question. If we would like to bring him nearer to detachment – if we would ourselves wish to be more detached – what question should we ask next? What about: where does this lack of detachment come from?

After all, the man is not an evident debauchee. We cannot know his circumstances; his status as a ‘rich young man’ is all the gospel records. But people cling to the things of this world for different reasons. For some, it is about the pleasure, the sheer enjoyment that things can bring. For others, it may be something more negative: the unstated awareness of what the loss of things would mean for them. We may or may not be happy to deny ourselves the need for food for a time; as a pious young Jew, no doubt our rich young man was accustomed to that practice. But how happy are we to forego or to fast from security, from our secret clinging to the sense of safety that our many possessions provide for us? Now, perhaps this man’s lack of detachment begins to look a little different. We do not know specifically why he is sorrowful, but we may wonder whether the real problem was not giving up material possessions so much as giving up the safety and security that these things deliver without our even realising it.

Yet, we may go a little further: can this young man be helped? Is he always doomed to be in this condition? Does he just need to take himself in hand and try harder, or is there something that needs the gentle cure of divine love, driving out the toxins that our lack of love induces, and healing the wounds and sores that he could hardly allow himself to acknowledge? To help him, we would need to understand what lies beyond his general, widely shared need for security that all human beings feel to some extent. Had he known great poverty as a child? Had he lost his parents but inherited a fortune? When he saw the poverty of those who lived in the streets near his house, did his stomach turn like a man on a cliff who has no head for heights? What was the wound that lay beneath the finery and security of his rich and comfortable life? Here then is the truth. We may add coin upon coin, day by day, to our pile of accumulated gold, but none of it can bring a cure for wounds that lie so deep they need to be protected by building mental castles in the air, imaginary dwellings where we can proclaim ourselves faithful observers of the commandments, and from where we can follow after the Rabbi, asking Him questions to show how pious we are.

So, why was this rich young man sorrowful? Beneath his spiritual limitations, what wounds stood in need of healing? If only he had stayed around, he might have found not only the healing he needed, but also some consolation in the last words Jesus speaks in this chapter of Matthew:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.

It is not enough to follow the commandments. Our whole being stands in need of healing. And we must  not turn away but knock at the door and wait for the answer of the Divine Doctor. 

Mary, bringer of joy

One from the Blog Archives. An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link. Happy feast day to all!

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 39-56) tells us more about the Blessed Mother than almost any other part of Sacred Scripture. Bethlehem means in Hebrew ‘House of Bread’, but before Bethlehem, Mary was the House of that Bread who had come down from heaven following the Annunciation, Mary’s original joy. He is present in this gospel in mysterious and perfectly Eucharistic silence. Mary’s journey to the hill country of Judah in today’s gospel is, as it were, the first Eucharistic procession in history, and like the coming of the Eucharist, Mary’s arrival brings joy to Elizabeth and to John.

To Elizabeth first – for like her child, she too was filled in this moment with the Holy Spirit. Some Christians appear to think of Mary as a baby machine for the incarnation, but not Elizabeth who recognises Mary’s blessing for what it is: the greatest dignity ever accorded any human being. Mary’s holiness is crowned by her union and cooperation with God (Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it), but her dignity and holiness are rooted in her divine motherhood, for her preservation from sin was a gift that made possible her vocation. Hence, Elizabeth’s question: why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? When the Litany of Loretto calls Mary cause of our joy, it is evoking this very moment of encounter between Mary and Elizabeth, and proposing it as the sign for our encounter with Mary, our mother and our model. If Mary is not the cause of our joy, we have to question whether we have really understood what she brings, for she brings this joy not just to Elizabeth but to succeeding generations also…

Beginning with John of course, Jesus’ cousin - who would be known as John the Baptist, and who would lay down his life in defence of the sanctity of marriage, the social symbol of the union of Jesus with His Church. Any woman who has carried a child could tells us what it is like to be booted in the guts by an unborn infant, but the commentators of the gospel have long seen this as the moment in which John was himself filled with the Holy Spirit, like his mother Elizabeth. Elizabeth, the wife of a priest, speaks from the depths of the Old Testament, like Esther, Ruth, or perhaps more like Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel. Samuel's joy, like Mary’s, was to say: Here I am Lord: your servant is listening – for obedience comes from the Latin obedire which is to listen or pay attention. But the obedient John speaks here also, in the only way an unborn child can speak, and in speaking thus, articulates the then silent cry of all those future generations who would call Mary blessed later on.   

 And then in the hearing of both Elizabeth and John, Mary’s hymn of joy unfolds, singing the greatness of God, His condescension to her, her future glory, God’s mastery of human affairs and history, and His faithfulness to those He promised mercy and forgiveness. For Mary knew a kind of forgiveness or at least salvation, not for personal or original sin but in a preventative sense, for she too needed a redeemer whose merits would reach back to her own conception and exclude her from the effects of the fall of Man.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth thereafter. May she stay with every one of us, bring us joy today, and travel with us, no longer towards the hills of the earthly Judah, but on our journey in this life towards the eternal hills.

O Mary, teach us always to say ‘yes’ to the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to give thanks to the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to rejoice in the Lord every moment of our lives.

O Mary, teach us always to love the Lord every moment of our lives.

Amen.   

The family business

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19:27-29) recounts a brief exchange between Jesus, Peter, and the other apostles. We who have left everything: what do we get? is St Peter’s rather desperate question, which has the tone of a man who has let his enthusiasm get ahead of his mastery of the terms and conditions of a contract. Jesus’ reply, however, is generous beyond expectations. The apostles, He says, will judge the tribes of Israel, receive a hundredfold in this life, and inherit eternal life.

We must not think any the less of Peter for this question. In this chapter of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus had just stood the disciples’ sensibilities on their heads by saying how hard it would be for the wealthy to be saved. We must place the exchange in today’s gospel in this specific context: how can we make sense of things when Jesus has challenged the very way in which we understand things? In the Old Testament, material blessings were often associated with God’s blessings. There is a hangover of this notion in the prosperity gospel and certain versions of the doctrine of predestination. If material benefits are the sign of God’s blessings, what does it mean to be poor and homeless, like the Son of Man, especially for us who are such earth-bound creatures of flesh, blood, and bone?

In this sense, today’s gospel thrills with the implications of incarnation, of the taking of flesh by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity who enters history and, in so doing, begins to carve out from the rocks of the passing ages a pathway back to the Father for His lost children. There is a paradox behind the incarnation. Our hearts are made for thee, O God, and are restless until they rest in thee, says St Augustine. Nevertheless, the way in which we must ascend to such a place of rest is proportioned to our weakness by our loving God who made us such as we are, material creatures. We are not meant to be angels. Indeed, those who would aspire to be angels often end up as beasts, as the old saying goes.

Had we not fallen, there would be no dilemma here, but since we are fallen, we encounter the dilemma throughout our lives: on the one hand, we must deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Jesus, and, on the other, this path of denial is not an abandonment of what we are as material creatures. God made matter; it is not the work of the devil. There is in other words a theology not only of the body but of the material world, and of our fleshly hearts that need evangelisation like our weary souls, and here we can speak of incarnation in a broader sense: the way in which the grace of the incarnation of the Son of God takes flesh in our human reality of spirit and matter. This incarnation in a secondary sense involves a certain physicality, made concrete in the matter of the seven sacraments, but it also evokes the following of Christ, the being like Him who is the icon of the children of God, and in whose image we are remade. May everyone we meet encounter in us the Word made flesh in Mary, as we so often pray, not as a mere historical accident but as a condition of our discipleship.

Of course, in COLW the words of the gospel today – in which Jesus alludes to those who have left brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children or lands for His sake - are met in their truest and fullest sense in the lives of our sisters. Nevertheless, there is another sense in which they may be true for the rest of us, and in which we again encounter the dilemma I spoke of above.

For on the one hand, we need brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, and lands to live in. These features of our existence are not mere social arrangements or physical conditions of our lives, nor indeed do they only impose on us a series of duties that we ought to perform; more than all these things, their roots plunge down into our very identities, they shape where we have come from and how we receive the world around us. Our relationship with our fathers and mothers in the natural order will shape our ability to encompass fatherhood and motherhood in a spiritual sense.

But on the other hand, Jesus’ invitation to leave fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, etc asks us not so much to abandon these relationships as to transform their reality through His love. It asks us more particularly not to break our bonds harshly but to put our loves – love of God and love of family - into a right order. What is important here is that even those of us who do not physically leave our families behind, as do our sisters, are still called to bring our closest relationships into harmony with the following of Christ. Our families too have the same call, though they may not recognise it.

We find in this perhaps some clue as to the generosity of Jesus’ reward to his disciples. Loving God and loving our families in God may cost us things that run right to the roots of who we are. There is a fear in Peter’s original question, a fear that might lurk in all our minds when we face the radical nature of this call to love that we all are given. In this sense, we might listen again to today’s gospel and hear in it an echo of those tender words found in the gospel of Luke: Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.

Vocation and beauty

 An audio version of today's gospel and blog (memorial of St Dominic) can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 57-62) relates Jesus’ answers to those who say they will follow Him, and to one whom He asks to follow Him. Answering the former, He speaks directly to their hesitation, for each says, I will follow you… and yet there is a “but”, spoken or unspoken, within their offers. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head, Jesus tells the first. No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God, He says to another. And to the one who hesitates when Jesus Himself calls him, Jesus speaks in the starkest terms: Let the dead bury their dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God – quite a thing to say to a man who seemingly had just lost a parent.

As ever, we can easily imagine that the stories of these three would-be disciples were more complex than the gospel allows us to see. Each had walked his own path until that point; each was known intimately to Jesus, the Saviour. As for the first, we can easily imagine this lad loved his comforts, and perhaps imagined he could have his cake (whatever that was) and eat it. But neither he nor we can do so, not at least if we are intent on the following of Christ. If anyone would follow me, let him deny himself… Deny himself, not because Christianity is masochistic, but because the conundrum of our fallen race is that we always carry the seeds of our own destruction in our back pocket. We are our own worst enemies. When Chesterton asked the question: “What’s wrong with the world?” he answered it himself wryly: “I am.” So, whence come our satisfactions? Where do we wish to lay our heads? If we wish to lay them anywhere but on the breast of the Sacred Heart, then we might hear these words for ourselves also: the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

Then, Jesus turned from the first volunteer to another potential disciple, issuing to him a joyous command: Follow me. Would that every one of us might hear such words from the Lord in the sense in which He intends them for us in our own lives. Follow me, be like me, model yourself on me, Jesus says. In response, would that we might make our own those words of Jesus’ other apostle Paul: to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. When the man asked first to go and bury his father, the bystanders might have raised an eyebrow at Jesus’ savage observation: Let the dead bury their dead. Was the man not observing the Fourth Commandment? How could the Rabbi urge him not to do so? As we have already said, there is something else going on here in for this individual, and the gospel does not reveal it to us. We can only speculate. Perhaps it was not true, and Jesus knew it. After all, what Jewish son in mourning was likely to be found wandering the highways, following a crowd, and listening to a popular preacher. Let us be realistic here and observe that Let the dead bury their dead might in fact have been a kinder response to the man’s excuse than Liar, liar pants on fire. Not everyone who expresses an apparently pious wish is as intent on piety as they would like to appear. The desire expressed before the world – the desire we express before ourselves - is not necessarily the reality.

We find the same holds true for the third person also. He only wanted to go home and say goodbye before heading off to the hills with Jesus, didn’t he? Don’t go off with strangers and tell someone where you are going are fairly sound principles of prudent conduct. And yet, here again, Jesus saw through the superficial piety, and wiped its gaudy makeup off the man’s face for him. No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Why did this man speak up and offer to follow Jesus? Why did the first man do likewise? We can only speculate on their attempts at heroism. Maybe they thought it was the right thing to do. Maybe they thought it was the impressive thing to do. Maybe they were taken by enthusiasm. Maybe they were jealous of the closeness of the apostles to the Lord. Maybe they imagined there was some other advantage to be had. But, in reality, Jesus was not content with their surface-level offers. Jesus knows the human heart and reads it like a book.

While none of us is intrinsically bad, we are all intrinsically complex, whereas the calling that the Lord gives all of us is, for the most part, radically simple: follow me. It is not too hard or too challenging for us: it is simply too simple for us. The closer we are to God, the simpler we become, the less we are a laminated mess of conflicting desires, complicated by strands of acquired behaviour, heavy gloss coats of bad habit, and suppurating scabs on wounds unhealed, sometimes by our own neglect.

 Jesus’ apparently brutal responses to these generous offers of would-be followers were not hyperbolic; they were medicinal. They were mirrors into which the would-be followers could gaze … if they dared. For sometimes the Lord teaches us by inviting us to gaze upon His own beautiful face, and sometimes He teaches us by making us confront the ugliness of our own, made uglier still by every lie we tell ourselves. For it is only on this journey that our own beautify – the beauty to which He calls us and not the kind that we grab for – can be rediscovered and restored.