Dedication to the Lord

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

Today’s gospels from the feria and the memorial were the subject of recent reflections on the blog. For today’s thought, therefore, I turn to the first reading from the memorial of St Willibrord, bishop and missionary, a first millennium Yorkshireman who helped evangelise continental Europe. The reading is from the Book of Deuteronomy (10: 8-9).

What is the meaning of this text and what are its implications? On the surface, it is a prescription about the Levite priesthood on which the Jewish religion depended under the terms of the Old Covenant. They were the ones designated from among the Jewish people to do service in the temple and ceremonialize in liturgical form the first three commandments of the Decalogue. Note the order of their duties: to carry the ark of the covenant, to stand before the Lord, to minster to Him, and to bless in His name. In other words, in the constitution of their priesthood, it was the theological and not the sociological or the pastoral which came first. Primordially, they were there for the service of God; then, and only then, they were set to serve the people by blessing them in God’s name and sharing with them God’s blessings. There is something profoundly important about this conception of priesthood which, so often in our day, is thought about in terms of functionality, of the job, perhaps, for some, of the equal or unequal opportunities. In the Book of Deuteronomy, the service of God comes first. But more than that, it is the service of God that then shapes the lives of those who are appointed to the ministry.

For what does the extract tell us next, other than that the Lord himself is the inheritance of the Levite? The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup; Thou maintainest my lot, says the Psalmist. Here we see in the Mosaic Law and in the Psalms a foreshadowing of the priesthood of Christ who is to come, for in fact the Levite priests could still marry, and still exercised the privileges and duties of fatherhood. Whereas Christ as the high priest of the New Covenant was, as St Paul alludes to in the letter to the Hebrews, ordained for men in the things that appertain to God. He was wholly for God, and indeed His availability to the people was not at odds with His being wholly for God but was a fruit of it. From His consecration to the Father came his divine readiness to being the great bridge builder. For in His dealings with the lost sheep, He had no other mission than to bring them back to the Father and make them too share in His goodness, His God-centeredness.

This is why even if the ministerial priesthood is reserved to a particular slice of humanity, the priesthood of the faithful belongs to all those who have been baptised in the death and resurrection of Christ, and who, therefore, have taken a share in His God-centeredness. We are all marked with His character, even if we are not all empowered to distribute His gifts as the ministerial priests are. We are all part of that Body then which, in union with its Head, approaches the throne of the Blessed Trinity in the mysterious worship accomplished in His sacrifice.

In COLW, this has everything to do with how we understand our vocation, for that vocation is not firstly about what we are asked to do, but rather about how we as individuals are meant to reflect something of the utter beauty and holiness of God through His particular call to us, to reflect something of how His inexhaustible holiness was realised in the person of Jesus. Thus, whether we are simply baptised Christians or whether we are privileged enough to have been called to the sacred ministry, we are all meant in some way to bear the ark of the covenant, to stand in the presence of the Lord, to bless His name, and to bless others in His name insofar as we can, mystically priests, prophets and kings, as St Peter says. It is this sense of union with this overwhelming fountain of divine life that St Therese of Lisieux expressed in declaring her vocation to be love. To echo St Catherine of Sienna, how we would set the world on fire if only we had plumbed the depths of this mystery and begged the Lord to bring it to realisation in our own lives.

We probably all often wish we could have His mercy and His largesse. But perhaps we should also pray for His total dedication to the Father, for then we might know better how to live our consecration to the Lord, and how to share together this calling to reflect His glory in our lives. To do so, however, we only have to say with Mary our yes and thank you, regardless of what our vocation is.

The passage of sorrow

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 7: 11-17) sees Jesus arriving in the town of Nain where He encounters a funeral procession for a young man. The deceased’s widowed mother and a large crowd are accompanying the bier when Jesus, without any bidding, approaches them and simply commands the dead man to rise. The townspeople are stunned at what happens next, as stunned no doubt as the grieving mother whose broken heart must hardly have been able to comprehend the turn of events. Jesus says nothing further in this extract, but the news spreads throughout the region that God has visited His people.

What an example the widow of Nain is to us. There is none of the weeping and wailing here that would normally accompany grief in the Palestine of Jesus’ day. We know little of her, except that she had lost her husband, and nothing of her son whose attempts to speak after his resurrection were no doubt hindered by the ritual clothes that were tied around his face.

And, yet, what more do we need to know other than that, with the greatest dignity and soberest poise, she bore her son away from the town to bury him, perhaps beside his late father? There is no protest; she is silent throughout the episode. She was well known to her neighbours since her son’s funeral attracted a considerable crowd. And there she stood for all to see, this grieving widow, now a grieving mother, voiceless save for the inner voice that must have spoken to the heart of Jesus and attracted His compassion.

What can we conclude but that the widow of Nain had already said in her broken heart the fiat in sorrow, the so be it of loss, that the Lord God Almighty called from her? What must every step behind her son’s bier have cost her? What weight must the sight of his shrouded corpse have placed upon her heart and mind? As the great J.R.R. Tolkien says through one of his characters, Nobody should have to bury their child.  

Many spiritual writers have seen in the widow a figure of the Church grieving over her children dead in sin, awaiting the healing word of the Lord to call them back to life. Yet, we might reverse this metaphor, and wonder whether she does not in fact stand for the grief of heaven, weeping with the tears of Good Friday over the loss of the Son of God, who will be suddenly and miraculously restored through resurrection.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together,

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine

wrote Francis Thompson in The Hound of Heaven. But Thompson’s sinner, fleeing the Hound, was looking for consolation; not this widow. What we know of her inner state comes from the command of Jesus: do not weep.

There is a model of what is now called accompaniment in Jesus’ attitudes in this gospel. On the one hand, He had compassion on her, says the extract, but on the other hand, He commands her not to weep. Only the victimhood of Jesus provides an ultimate rule of conduct. All other victimhood is, as it were, relative to His. He grieves with us, but there is a bigger picture, a picture that can only be fathomed through looking deeply into the well of His own sufferings.

Perhaps this then is the lesson of the widow of Nain. Not every mother who loses a son finds herself overtaken by his resurrection; indeed, there are only a tiny number of cases we could cite. Nevertheless, the scene in Nain is a sign that every fiat pronounced in sorrow will only ever be temporary; that every broken heart, as shattered as it is, can be mended in the time of grace; that every tear upon red-raw cheek will be wiped away; and that the momentous evils – the physical ones but especially the spiritual ones - that threaten to overwhelm our very being, will ultimately be crushed by the victory of the Lamb who intercedes for us.

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, says the Virgin of Nazareth, who will soon be the widow of Nazareth; let it be done to me likewise, says the widow of Nain. What right have we not to have to travel by the same passage?

Attention and silence

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 1-6) recounts another episode in which Jesus once more breaches the rules of the Pharisees and heals on the Sabbath. Once more, one poor suffering soul is the object of Jesus’ mercy and the object of the Pharisees’ cold calculations. Once more, Jesus asks a question of the Pharisees that they cannot answer; a question that only shows up the fact that it is not their legalism that causes the problem but their sheer hypocrisy in wanting to apply one rule to Jesus and a different rule to others. And they could not reply to these things, the gospel concludes.

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who came to the doors of the Church but remained on the threshold, argued that prayer was nothing other than a kind of attention. But one thing that is so striking about this very short passage is that nobody could deny the attention of the Pharisees was focused on Jesus. One Sabbath, when Jesus went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. They continue gazing as Jesus responds to their complaints about Him, but they remained silent, says the gospel.  

So, what is the difference between what the Pharisees are doing and the action of prayer? Quite simply the difference is that prayer is attention in humility. He must increase and I must decrease. The seventeenth-century religious sisters of Port Royal-des-Champs in Paris, who believed in the errors of Jansenism, were said to be as pure as angels but as proud as demons. Nobody would have questioned their attention or their silence; it was the uprightness of their hearts that was at stake.

The amazing thing is that despite it all – despite the pride of the Pharisees and their hypocrisy – Jesus still goes among them, reaching out even as His hand is slapped away. He had driven them to silence, but it is they who must surrender themselves. There is no other way. His power to cure the burdens of His people was proven a thousand times over; nobody who had already seen him perform a miracle could have doubted what would be the outcome of that scene in the Pharisee’s house.

And, so here now is Jesus attending to our prayer, and we attending to Him, but our attention is not enough. If the Pharisees’ case is anything to go by, we must strive to ensure that our approach to the Lord is paved not with self-acclamation, not with thoughts of what we might achieve or deserve in the process, nor with movements of the heart that anticipate our own self-gratification, that subtle stuff that creeps through our religion like rising damp. Rather, it must be paved with faith – faith in the One we are speaking to; in His majesty and in His tenderness – and humble and contrite recognition of who we are, the health-giving bread of self-knowledge that reminds us we are rebels, merchants of imperfection, at best publicans who kneel in the shadows of the Temple to pour out our hearts to God, not Pharisees notching up another supposed spiritual conquest on the end of the bench.

In the end, evil doers from the devil down ape the actions of God and ape God’s servants. If like them we watch Jesus carefully and remain silent before Him, let our watching be full of love and our silence be full of reverence and humility. For we are meant to be the anawim of the Lord, the little ones who gather like Mary around the throne of His heart where dwells the majesty and mystery of His abiding love.

A town called malice

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 13:10-17) shows Jesus affirming a certain way of interpreting the moral law. He heals a woman on the Sabbath. To some, the fact that this action was a miracle appears to be irrelevant; for them, He was wrong to heal on the day of rest. Should we see this as a peculiar blindness in those committed to a strict legal framework? Not necessarily.

It would be a mistake to imagine that Jesus’ action is an overturning of the law. The healing of the woman is not a lawless action. In fact, in some ways it is as strictly legal as the interpretation of the sabbatarians. After all, the law that Jesus observes as He cures the woman is the law of mercy by which a lower law gives way to a higher law. He, after all, is the law giver. Moreover, Jesus himself points out that even His critics would have watered their animals on the Sabbath day.

We might say, therefore, that the real problem in this gospel is not the legalism of Jesus' critics but their hypocritical malice; they condemn in Him an action that they would have permitted for themselves. In other words, theirs is a fake accusation, an insincere indictment.

Jesus’ command not to judge others seems to urge us to blame all wrongdoing on ignorance or error in the mind. In an endeavour to be charitable, we prefer to think that it is an exaggerated legalism that leads Jesus’ critics down the wrong path. Yet, it seems rather that their criticism arises from simple bad will. They were not being high minded. They were actually being perverse.

We have to consider this carefully. Human malice and hypocrisy are real factors in the shaping of our lives and the shaping of the lives of others. They are real and present dangers for the human heart, tethered to this earth by jealousy, pride, self-regard, anger, or the unregulated neediness that turns neighbour into an idol and makes a fetish of the fashionable.

What we need in this case is the healing touch of the merciful Lord, coming to our aid even after many years of our slavery. Our salvation lies neither in legalism, nor in some form of deluded largesse about observing the law, but in embracing the eternal law of divine love which alone can cure us of our malice, heal us of our sins, cast the mighty from their thrones, and raise the lowly. And thus will all the people rejoice at all the glorious things that are done by Christ.

 

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 lastyear, 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, 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 on facetious self-absorption.

And yet God makes so much of us, dressing us in His gifts, blessing 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, by 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. 

Yes, Lord, and thank you.

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.