Come back to me Part 2

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.

Come back to me

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 11: 15-26) is a complex not to say confusing extract. Saint Luke does not identify those who were raising objections or criticisms about the exorcisms of Jesus. However, we can surmise that they were probably egged on by Jesus’ enemies. Yet, what comes next is hard to decipher. It seems to be, on the one hand, a kind of treatise in demonology that explains not only the inner logic of the kingdom of the devil, but also the power battles for souls that are waged by the fallen angels.

As always, we know that Jesus is teaching us here, leaving His lessons to be the food of slow reflection, rather than turning them into flash media campaigns that press everyone’s buttons without winning their hearts. One sign that there is more to it, is that Jesus verges in these exchanges almost on banter, reducing his critic’s arguments wittily to an absurdity. His argument about Satan's kingdom standing is a good debating point but, underneath it all, it is a poor argument, for we know that Satan's kingdom will not stand. Indeed, the fallen angels are in a very real sense fallen and divided; fallen from their friendship with God, fallen from their exalted status, fallen from the vocations. What can He mean, then, by arguing that kingdoms who are divided against themselves cannot stand?

One clue may lie in that apparently random remark that sits in the middle of this demonology: he who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters. Who is it who is not with Him or who does not gather with Him if not ourselves? Not that we are wholly in revolt, far from it, no more than the Sons of Thunder were in revolt; no more then brash Simon Peter was in revolt.

But, we are divided against ourselves. The further from God we are, the more scattered we are. We have our good intentions, but then we are all complicated. The pure light shines into us but refracts out of us in gaudy rainbow colours that fail to illuminate. We are the adopted children of God, and yet in our worse moments, as Shakespeare says,

Our natures do pursue,

Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,

A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.

This is not false abasement but a cause for humble joy for truth brings us insight. The demonology that Jesus sets out in this part of the gospel is of course about the fallen angels, but perhaps in another way, it is about ourselves. The devil in Latin is diabolus but this word comes from Greek and, according to some, it means to be thrown apart; in a sense, to be scattered. In truth, all our kingdoms are divided: the kingdom of Satan and the kingdoms of this world which are in fact ruled by the prince of this world, as we learn in the moment of the temptation of Christ. There is only one kingdom that is based on unity and it is the kingdom of God.

For God is one and sufficient unto Himself, yet He chose to share His goodness by creating the world and calling us into it. But, then the unity of God calls all things back to Himself, and by a special and extraordinary privilege, the call for the human race was to share in God's very happiness, in the inner life of love that belongs to the Holy Trinity. This is why we need forgiveness: for sin is brokenness, and a retreat from that original unity to which we were called. And this is also why, insofar as we do not gather with Christ, in all those parts of our inner life that do not strive towards unity with Him, we are scattering ourselves and our heritage to the four winds.

Mercy of mercies, however; over the din that is made by the forces that shatter our hearts, we hear those words related by the prophet Joel:

Even now, declares the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

    with fasting and weeping and mourning.

 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 25-37) relates the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. A lawyer questions Jesus, wanting to wrongfoot him, and Jesus, as always, side steps the trap, this time by shining the light of divine truth right into this lawyer’s eyes. And then comes the question: who is my neighbour? The fulfilment of the law that dictates that one must love one’s neighbour as oneself, depends entirely on a proper understanding of who one’s neighbour is. And so, the lawyer is anxious. He does not seek union with God but perfection. And in this way, his actions and attitudes already anticipate part of the parable to come.

The outline of the parable is, of course, well known. A man is waylaid by brigands on his way to Jericho, a priest and a levite pass him by and do not help him, and it is only because of the actions of a Samaritan - a member of a sect in schism from the main body of Judaism - that this poor man is helped. So many Saints and Doctors of the Church have commented on this passage. The man travelling to Jericho is often seen as a symbol of fallen humanity, attacked by the violence of the devil and left for dead. The priest and the levite symbolise the Law and the Prophets that cannot deliver the man from his misfortune. And the Samaritan is none other than Jesus, the one who was rejected, who becomes the source of the man's salvation, and pays the price of his care and rehabilitation.

There are always spiritual lights to be found in these parables, however. Can we imagine, for example, that the priest and the levite are so entirely indifferent to the fate of the man who has been attacked? Personally, I doubt it. So then, the question arises as to why they took no action to look after him? What afflicts them to prevent then caring for him in his grievous need? And what has this to do with us who have probably never crossed the path of a Jewish priest or levite?

We might see in these two figures two different kinds of spiritual disease that corrupt the exercise of love of neighbour. In the case of the priest, for example, we might see the kind of service or ministry which has become so official that all fervour has drained out of it. The priest is busy about his business. He has places to go and people to see. He has meetings to attend, forms to fill in, reports to write, and appointments that cannot be missed. And this is how ministry of any kind, not just the ministry of a priest, can turn from an exercise in the unction of the Holy Spirit into a fossilised object that serves nobody's benefit but its own. This is the kind of ministry which sees people as clients, rather then as suppliants whose chief need is mercy. It no longer seeks to battle with sin but only with disorganisation. It wishes to deal with symptoms and not with causes. It prefers to place cushions beneath the elbows of sinners, rather than perform the uncomfortable service of challenging their complacency. This is a ministry that seeks control of its beneficiaries, rather than looking for Christ in their eyes. It is a ministry of jargon, propped up by cliché, that probably feels like a burden but a burden that cannot be put down. What is missing in all this is the inner dynamic, the life at the roots, the energy that makes the Samaritan stop in his tracks and adjust himself to the needs of the person who lies by the side of the road, abandoning the schedules and appointments he has fixed in his diary, to tend the man’s wounds that suppurate with the poison of sin. When officiousness has replaced care, charity has already fled.

Those of us who have no particular ministry may feel such lessons do not apply to us. But not so fast: for here comes the levite. The priest suffered from one kind of disease, but at least his focus was still on things around him, even if his ministry was supposed to make him care for people rather than things. The levite, on the other hand, is another kettle of fish. The levite does not want to touch the man, not because he has other things to do, but probably because he perceives that in touching the man, he may become ritually unclean. His focus is not on organisation, planning, appointments, official meetings and all the paraphernalia of a busy priestly ministry. Rather, it is fixed on just how well he is doing himself. After all, he is trying to be as perfect as his Heavenly Father. He has fallen in love, not with God Himself but with the idea of loving God, or perhaps with the idea that proof of his loving God might be found in the approval that other people show for his patent devotion, his exactitude in the performance of his religious duties, for by their fruits you will know them. It is not so much that he does not love his neighbour; he will know he loves his neighbour when others observe him loving his neighbour, just not here on this lonely road where his neighbour appears so frightening and hideous. He remembers ultimately that the law commands him to love his neighbour as himself, and he loves himself so very much…

Between the minister who is lost in officialdom and the devotee who is lost to a project of self perfection, it is little surprise if wounds go unhealed, sins go unforgiven, broken hearts lie unmended, and wandering sheep remain lost. It is little wonder that the priest and levite both are dying from a poison they have little hope of understanding or seeking the remedy to.

And yet in the midst of it all, the answer to the riddle of the love of neighbour is lived out in the actions of a Samaritan who attends wholly to the victim in front of him, without ever shifting his attention away from the source of all love. The secret is compassion the origin of which word is to suffer with. We must bear each other's burdens; for that is how we fulfil this law of love.

Away, then, with officialdom and away with cold perfection. Let us allow the love of God to make us docile tools in the hands of the Potter himself.

 

 

With great power comes great responsibility

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 10:13-16) shows Jesus in a mood we are less than comfortable with. There are no imaginative parables to soften the sharp edge of His analysis. Instead, we hear a dressing down for the towns and villages where He has preached: Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum. The towns He compares them to, Tyre and Sidon, were no doubt dens of vice and iniquity. So, what was their problem? And, were they really quite as bad as Jesus implied?

The problem is very simply stated. Their streets had been filled with crowds desperately following after the Lord, straining to hear His voice which echoed off the stones and tiles. Their main squares had heard the preaching of the Son of God, delivering His message of good news, of mercy and forgiveness, of healing and peace. Their denizens had witnessed Him exercising extraordinary and miraculous powers, curing diseases and healing disfigurements that some had endured since they were born. And through it all, these towns did not truly know the hour of their visitation or grasp who it was that walked among them.

They saw the power of God, but they did not do penance. Their ambitions had been set alight by the seeming dignity that came from the visitation of this local superstar. Perhaps most tellingly, the cash registers of their shops and the money boxes of their merchants were probably filled to overflowing by the wave of humanity that lapped at Jesus’ feet. And all these things were their undoing.

For they sinned both by omission and by commission: by omission, first, because they did not realise that they could not bear fruit unless they were prepared to undergo the penitential pruning and dunging that every good garden must endure. They had not understood that in the logic of the Lord, death is the condition of life, and that every good tree that brings forth fruit must be cut back to deliver another yield. And they sinned by commission: for they missed the real import of Jesus’ message and they only thought about what it brought to them. Instead of the gold of the love of God, their hearts were won over by the fool's gold of the love of self. The gospel does not say explicitly that these towns revelled in the money that flowed into them thanks to the crowds who came to listen to Jesus. But since we know that humans either serve God or mammon, we can be sure that there was money involved.

Who are they then, these obscure towns, who treated the Lord in such a vile way? Who are they to have neglected penance after all that they had heard? Who are they to think of self-glory - to be puffed up as the destinations favoured by the miracle worker - when they had seen with their own eyes the glorious intervention of divine power upon the earth? Who are they to have such base interests when Jesus had pointed them towards the eternal horizon, and shown them the path to an everlasting Kingdom? Who are they if not ourselves?

For how often have we understood that we needed to do penance, and found some excuse to leave it undone? How often have we, perhaps secretly and surreptitiously, considered ourselves better than those whose reddest sins are painted in huge letters on the front pages of the tabloids? How often have we gone after the illusions that deceive us, putting first our own glory and our own earthly gain in whatever currency we happen to value: human respect, material possessions, vainglory, illicit pleasures? And as for you [here say your own name to yourself], did you want to be exalted high as heaven? You shall be thrown down to hell. Jesus’ words. O Lord, prayed St Philip Neri, don’t trust Philip!

So, what ought we to do, apart from daily penance and from seeking true self-knowledge? The answer comes in the final sentence of this gospel: anyone who listens to you listens to me. We must listen, keeping our ear close to the Apostolic tradition, the tradition that teaches total self-gift to God who has given Himself in total self-gift to us. The Apostolic tradition is a tradition of listening, for in hearing the voice of Jesus, we hear the voice of the Father, and in hearing the voice of the Apostolic tradition, we hear the voice of Jesus. I have passed on what I have received, wrote St Paul, for goodness shares itself.

In the revelation of Jesus, received through a grace-given faith, perfected by the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, we find all we need to know to convince our hearts of this simple truth: that the power to love God is a greater gift than any other, and that with great power comes great responsibility.

The vocation of Jesus Part 2

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 46-50) sees another pair of admonitions from Jesus to his disciples. The second of these – anyone who is not against you is for you – is a warning not to give too tribal a tone to their discipleship. When the seed of God is observed, let it be encouraged, rather than repressed; curation and stewardship are not simply about control. It is perhaps a warning for the disciples not to stifle the gifts of the Spirit, wherever they happen to be found. It is something of a paradox, nevertheless, for Jesus will say what appears to be the opposite in Matthew 12: 30: He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. The latter is as much to say that nobody can claim the gifts of the Spirit in opposition to Jesus. While the Spirit roves widely, He is ultimately the breath of the Father and the Son, not the purveyor of a different brand of Jesus-less holiness. The Holy Spirit bestows His gifts where He wills, but Jesus is the way, for Jesus is the path to God.

And yet this centrality of Jesus as Saviour (as we noted on Friday, His active vocation) is married to what we could consider His personal vocation of being the little Child before the Father. Again, this is only a vocation in a broad sense that pertains to Jesus in His human nature. For the disciples to welcome the little child in the name of Jesus was to recognise the mystery of Jesus’ personal relationship to the Father. This is why the disciples’ competitive jostling was so wrong. They imagined that coming close to God meant assuming some powerful position. They failed thus to see that divine election was not promotion, quite the contrary!

No wonder then that Jesus could pray alone in the midst of His disciples, as we noted on Friday. They were physically present to Him, but they had far from understood the path He was on: a path of surrender to the Father upon whom He gazed continually in the depths of His soul where the Beatific Vision accompanied Him. Who then is the least among them? It is Jesus of course – least in the sense that the deepest meaning of His incarnation, perhaps Jesus’ personal vocation, was His sonship through which He was, as it were, a little child before the Eternal Father, providing the model by which all adopted sons and daughters of the Lord might live. The human instinct for power assumes that kinship with the king signifies firstly princedom. The Divine Wisdom tells us here that kinship with the King of the Universe signifies firstly filiation, dependence, intimacy, surrender, tender love. The deeper the dependence, the intimacy, the surrender, the more tender the love, the more the disciple approaches to the model of all divine childhood: Jesus, our Saviour.

Common usage suggests that all humans are children of God, but this is not quite true. All humans are creatures of God and all are called to become His children, but it is only through Jesus the Way, that this filiation of tender, intimate surrender to our Eternal Father becomes a reality. He alone can make us pleasing to the Eternal Father. He alone can make us akin to the child who stood in the midst of the disciples and was chosen by the Son of God Himself to symbolise the blessed and exalted destiny of those who are ready to cast themselves by His grace into the arms of the One who awaits their homecoming.

The vocation of Jesus

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9:18-22) shows Our Lord Jesus Christ in two different lights. In the longer part of the gospel, He enters into a dialogue with the disciples, first, asking who others say that He is, and then asking who they say He is; finally, He tells them that He will be rejected by the leaders of the Jewish people, put to death, and raised up again on the third day.

This longer part of the gospel, the dialogue with the disciples, is as it were a model of discernment. Of course, Jesus Himself does not need to discern in the same way that we do. His knowledge as God (knowing everything through His divine nature) and his knowledge as Saviour (knowing everything through His role as the voice of God's revelation to the world), puts Him thus in a unique position in human history. At the same time, there is human knowledge in Jesus, for He is an actor in the historical reality of His time, and He grew in grace and wisdom, according to Saint Luke, but He also transcends His own time because He is God Incarnate. There is an immense mystery to be contemplated here, and one which dispels the attempts that some make to reduce the complete strangeness of the Son of Man to nothing. He’s a man, he’s just a man, sings Lloyd Webber and Rice's Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, but those who think so quite mistake the case. They imagine that by dragging Jesus down to their level, they are making him more approachable or bringing people closer to Him, although, in reality, by refusing to countenance such a mystery, they are unwittingly attempting to short circuit the surrender that God – the Utterly Other – invites us to make, and which is necessary for us to enter His intimacy. God is God, so close to us and yet entirely unlike us. Living with this strangeness is not the end of the question but part of the journey towards Him.

So, where is the model of discernment here? The model of discernment lies in what happens before and during this dialogue. So, before the dialogue, Jesus prays. Not only does He pray; He prays alone in the presence of his disciples. In the midst of the hurly burly of a busy ministry, having come from one place and no doubt preparing to go to another, and surrounded by the back and forth of chit chat and laughter, a figure of calm in a storm-tossed crowd, Jesus prays. And then, and only then, He begins His dialogue with the disciples. He next gathers information from different sources: what other people say and what the disciples say. In this process, He solicits from Peter his confession of faith by which Peter himself enters his own vocation. And then, Jesus contrasts these matters with what He knows most intimately: His role, we might almost say His vocation, as the suffering saviour of mankind. And thus emerges His model of discernment: first praying, then asking and listening, then reflecting and comparing, and then concluding. He does not do this for Himself; He does it for the sake of His disciples who must become both men of prayer and men of discernment.

And it is right to speak of the vocation of Jesus here in a broad sense. It is not a vocation perhaps in the same way as our own. But to have a vocation is to hear the voice of God and we know that Jesus is above all obedient to the will of the Father, i.e. He listens and He does the will of the Father, and in doing so carries He out what His Father calls Him to do. Furthermore, as with all vocations, Jesus’ vocation shows forth a dimension of the holiness of God. In His case, this dimension is a reaching out for, and a rescuing of, that which was lost. Jesus means Saviour. His vocation in in His name.

But then, if we reflect on the nature of vocation as we understand it in COLW, what Jesus does – His saving action - is only in a sense His active vocation. What about His personal vocation? Again, we must speak in a broad sense here since the Man-God is divine, the second person of the Divine Trinity; we can only speak of His receiving a call in regard to His human nature. As God He calls, while in His human nature He is called. Nevertheless, perhaps something like His personal vocation is captured in the very first clause of this gospel: one day when Jesus was praying alone in the presence of His disciples. His calling to save humanity from sin will be executed in due course, even though His least action and indeed His least word or prayer would have been enough to save us all. But just consider this praying alone in the presence of his disciples. What is going on here?

 Saint Thomas teaches along with many that Jesus possessed the beatific vision in His soul. His travels through the villages and towns of Israel remind us that He is a wayfarer in life like we are, with a day behind us that marked our birth and a day ahead of us that will mark our death. Yet He is also already a contemplator of the divine mystery of God in the beatific vision. In the cell of His soul, He is rapt in the mystery of the beauty and goodness of the living God. And just as any human soul so rapt in that mystery, He is filled to the fullness of His extraordinary being, a fullness whose light breaks forth only at the Transfiguration.

The wonder of all this is twofold: first, that Jesus is who is, the Way, the Truth, the Life, and has become Incarnate and walked among us in our human reality, knowing its very heights and its very depths; and second, that He intends with every fibre of His being and every drop of His blood to bring us a share in His divine life, to make us pleasing to the Eternal Father, adopted sons and daughters, rendered now alike to our brother. The beauty and the wonder of it all, the divine action and human response, the echo of His grace in his chosen ones, are all summed up in those lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

 

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Let there be light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Along the path

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 1-3) is a text of great simplicity. At a first read, there seems almost nothing for our edification. Unlike certain parts of scripture, we can feel that we might even bounce off its surface, uncertain of why the Church asks us to read this passage. And yet, in spite of appearances, every sentence is pregnant with mysteries that light our way and draw us towards the One who has called our name.

Jesus made his way through towns and villages preaching, and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God. For Jesus is the teacher, and He comes to reveal to us who God really is, how much He loves us, and how we can find our way home to Him. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life; by grace He becomes our way, our truth, and our life. Jesus is the path. No name is given to us under heaven or on earth by which we can be saved. And our obedience to God begins, as the roots of the word obedience suggests, in listening: listening to Jesus’ voice, listening to His preaching, listening to His tales of the Kingdom. When we consider this Jesus who walks the paths through the towns and villages of Israel, we have a glimpse of what Saint Patrick saw when he wrote those beautiful words: Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me.

With Him went the Twelve, as well as certain women who had been cured of evil spirits and ailments. In this line also, we find truths that run deep and that console us. The Church is not one of cheap, doe-eyed anime saints, no matter the horrors committed against their memory by vacuous contemporary Church art. Down the ages, we have seen many kinds of Saints; some, like Saint Joseph or St Therese of Lisieux, seem logical and obvious invitees to the glories of heaven; others, like Saint Augustine of Hippo and of course St Didimus, whose cross stood beside Jesus’, are less likely candidates, humanly speaking. But this is only to see things in a very worldly way, like St Peter, the first pope, trying to block Jesus’ path to the cross. Jesus, who, as we have said, walks through the towns and villages, comes in search of His lost sheep, to fix that which was broken, to restore that which has failed, to redeem that which is captive. We know from the gospel of the woman with the alabaster jar earlier this week that such women were regarded with suspicion, not to say loathing in the time of Jesus. It is not so long ago in our own culture that certain moral failures brought down shame and social exclusion, while, it should be recognised, other moral failures, perhaps even worse ones, went overlooked. In truth, all sin is shameful, for all sin disfigures in us the image of our Creator, and mortal sin robs us of the life of grace. These damaged women with their unsavoury histories, not to mention the Twelve disciples too, are the first fruits of the harvest that Jesus wishes to offer to the Father. Like our Blessed Mother, they are masterpieces of His grace, although they are restorations of another kind. The loving John who stands by the cross at the end begins his apostolic career with vile ladder climbing. And Mary Magdalene who meets Jesus in the blessed Easter garden reverses in that instant the many wayward and unholy trysts of her wretched past. As the saying goes, every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.  

The last clause of this very short gospel reads: Mary surnamed the Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna, and several others who provided for them out of their own resources. On the surface, such details reveal something of the sources that Saint Luke was able to draw on as he wrote his gospel. Saint Luke had names, places, and timings. Whoever reported these things to him was an eyewitness of what had happened.

Yet, on another level, this line is a reminder to us that the Jesus who seeks us along the paths of the towns and villages of the world, calls us by name, knows us already intimately, and bids us listen carefully to that call. For COLW, this line is a reminder that we must read the gospel through a vocational lens and allow the Holy Spirit to show us little by little the next steps along the path.

For the path goes on, through those towns and villages, and for us the path continues along the secret ways of our heart where, as Francis Thompson says sadly,

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind.

But where, please God, little by little and by His grace, our flight will at last cease, so that we may sit at the feet of Jesus in the cell of our heart to learn His gospel afresh.

Faith from fury

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link. 

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Today’s gospel (Luke 7:1-10) is full of movement. There is the movement of the Jewish elders who bring to Jesus the message from a Roman centurion that his servant is in need of healing. There is Jesus’ movement, walking in the direction of the centurion’s residence. There is the movement of the belated messengers, who intercept Jesus on the way with a message whose sentiments so inspired the early Church that they became an integral part of the Eucharistic liturgy: I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof . And indeed, the movement of Jesus’ heart, elated by the faith of this gentile. All these movements are in a way redolent of the movement that the centurion himself goes through as he passes from his Roman religion to faith in the living Christ.

When he begins that journey, his religion is one of exchange and trade, like so many religions in which people entered into a kind of commercial arrangement with the gods. Before we get too snooty about such a pragmatic form of religion, we should of course recall that we are all too prone, consciously or unconsciously, to indulge in our own kind of trade with God – for what we will or will not do for Him if He does this or that for us. Accordingly, it is entirely possible that the centurion’s building of the local synagogue was done in this frame of mind, a barter with the local deity, although of course it is also possible that paying for the synagogue to be built was a hearts-and-minds operation – a Roman way of trading for the goodwill of the local people. One cannot always rule over others simply by force.

So, how, we wonder, did his journey in faith begin? Did he find in his trade with Jupiter and Mars some kind of preparation for the gospel? Did the bartering of slaughtered animals and grains of incense with the gods of the Roman imagination bring him, as it were, some sense of the God who really did exist? Some say that all religions are a path to God but in the case of this Roman centurion, it is his military experience that provided a pattern through which he could understand the empire of the God of all gods. For he understood authority like an officer who says ‘go’ to one and he goes: the docility of lower powers to higher powers. This was the message that was brought to Jesus by the second group of emissaries the centurion sent, probably after pacing the floor of his house wondering how his first message would be received. If, at the beginning of this faith journey, he was still remotely interested in the free trade of favours between the heavens and the earth, as its conclusion approached, he was persuaded by a faith that had given birth to humility, to a very un-Roman sense of indignity: Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, nor indeed even to loosen the strap of His sandal.

The importance of the centurion in a theological sense is that he was a gentile. The centurion foreshadows the fact that the terms of the new covenant that Jesus was about to write in His blood would also encompass the Roman world and beyond. But such theology holds the deepest spiritual significance for us because this Jesus, who brings peace and justice but not as the world dreams of them – indeed, not really as any other religion dreams of them – this Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. It was not by becoming more deeply pious within the frame of his Roman religion that the centurion approached God, although his Roman sense of order and indeed virtue perhaps placed him and others a step ahead of some cultures. The seeds of the Word fall where they will, even among the violent structures of a humanly almighty military power. Jesus rejected the advances of Herod Antipas and tongue lashed the Pharisees, but he welcomed two sets of messengers from a bloody Roman occupier. In this gospel, we see more faith in Jesus emerging paradoxically from a culture of furious force and cruelty than from all the pompous pieties and deceptive doctrines of a thousand panjandrums. Our centurion glimpsed the kingship of Christ through the machinery of an Empire that the centurion had thought was above all others.

O Mary, teach us to say ‘yes’ with the centurion to the empire of Jesus, the reign of the Father and the Spirit with Him, over our hearts, our community, and our country.

 

 

Lord, that I may see

For an audio recording of today's gospel and blog, follow this link.

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Lord, that I may see

In today’s gospel (Luke 6: 39-42), Jesus simply offers His disciples teaching, and it is a teaching all about vision: moral vision by which we guide others and inner vision by which we know ourselves.

The former depends to a great extent on the latter. Who is the person who sees a splinter in the eye of another but has not noticed the plank in his own? It is every one of us! We do not automatically see ourselves truthfully; our wills, our appetites, and our attachments will not permit it. Solzhenitsyn said pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, but he could easily have called it self-love: the need to take satisfaction in our own self image, a need that is sometimes countered only by the opposite vice of self-hatred or abasement, as if we were not lovable at all. The truthful mind breathes the oxygen of reality in for all breath is somehow redolent of the Spirit of truth, the giver of life; the untruthful mind – the self-serving mind – breathes in the carbon monoxide of self-deceit and its senses slowly dim to uselessness. The truth of who we are and how we stand before God underpins our path back to Him, and as we come to know Him better, we know ourselves also better. Lack of self-knowledge is no virtue in His children.

Indeed, lack of that inner vision is potentially a catastrophe for others – for those we go out to and those we are responsible for. In Jesus’ parable, the blind cannot lead the blind. The lack of self-knowledge – the plank in one’s own eye – is a barrier to seeing the splinter in our brother’s eye. Those who learn from us are dependent on us to illuminate the path before them, for, as Jesus says, the pupil will be like his master.

Ultimately, charity begins at home, and mission begins with contemplation of God, for what truthful inner vision of ourselves can there really be if we do not see ourselves with God’s eyes or in His light? Through faith we know God, but its ambient light tells us who we are, as a species and as individuals. Knowledge without self-knowledge looks too much like a grab for power over what is around us, and perhaps even over others. If, as in Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, we too are

Here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

we must turn again towards to the source of all light and vision who illumines every person who comes into the world.