Living on the edge

 An audio version of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed via this link.

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Before we begin, this is just a warning that the blog will shift to Sundays and Wednesdays, starting from 30 November, the first Sunday of Advent in the new liturgical year.  

Today’s gospel (Luke 21: 29-33) crowns the series of Jesus’ complex prophecies about the end times – complex, not because His language is difficult, but because these prophecies refer to different historical events, at least from a human perspective. We like our histories linear and neat, not interwoven and cast under an eternal light. And yet we find Jesus inviting us to another point of view which is ultimately the standpoint of eternity. Here, God lives among men.

There are at least three ends of the world evoked in the gospels during this season: the end of the world at the end of time, anticipating the return of the Son of Man and the last judgement; the end of the Jewish world of the Old Testament with the sacking of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jewish people; and lastly – since death is for every individual the end of their own world – the end of every individual’s moment under the sun, the point at which the pilgrim in this world reaches the end of their natural life or perhaps has it taken from them.

What does Jesus mean then that when the disciples see all these signs, they will know that the kingdom of God is near them? Is it just possible that while these signs will have their historic fulfilment, there is another layer of meaning to them? Strangely, few of the signs He has evoked in these passages are distinctive or unique. There have always been wars and famines, there have often been earthquakes and plagues. Jerusalem has frequently been surrounded by armies from empires and neighbouring countries, from the sands of Arabia or from the green fields of Europe, ordered to go there by Roman consuls, Ottoman sultans, French kings, and British imperial governments. How is it then that the kingdom of God can be identified if all the signs for it surround the disciples of Jesus in an undifferentiated cacophony? Where is our liberation when the dreadful signs of the end appear to be signs of the middle and the beginning as well?

But perhaps Jesus seeks here to wrongfoot the disciples’ taste for the spectacular. When will it be, they wonder? When, indeed? The answer is not then but now. Instead of making all these prophesies, Jesus might easily have said: when you see the sun rising, when the bird is on the air, when the sea laps the shore, when nature slumbers at night and wakes by day, then you will know that the kingdom of God is near. It is a divine tease. In other words, don’t await the drama, the crisis of the final cataclysm, although these things will come. Instead, O that today you would listen to His voice, harden not your hearts.

For the boundaries with eternity cross not only some future historical timeline but intersect the heart of every living, breathing human being. Time rises like the crest of a mountain line, giving way on the one side to the country of God and on the other to the lake of fire in St John’s vision in the Book of Revelation. God, who is omnipresent, upholds in being every thinking intelligence in the universe, angelic, human, and demonic. How can it not be that eternity thereby crosses our very thoughts and haunts our desires, even for those who have rejected Him?

But this eternity is not an endless time but an ever-present now, already unfolded and made vital through God’s very life in which we are merely sharers: all sharers in His being, some – those who accept Him – sharers in His friendship and love. Eternity thus is not at the end of our lives but stands in some overarching dome that encompasses us and, if we are open to it, fills our hearts with its promise and its riches.

And this is why, properly considered, there is no such thing as the humdrum. All the boredom and weariness of life is a deception; we have a window on eternity, but we fail to keep it clean. All flight towards the humdrum is in fact a flight from this ever-present eternity; all flight towards the humdrum is in a sense a refusal to bear with the eternal being who wants to be so close to us; we engage instead in false attempts to give meaning to our lives when they are severed from this eternal perspective. The kingdom is near to us when we see these signs, but the real question is: are we near to the kingdom? Are we prepared to look upon it and see it with the joyous eyes of Mary, with a heart full of festivity at His love made tangible, even in the simple tasks of a humble reality unadorned by the finer things?

Of course, we are wounded and need the Lord’s mercy. We are as yet convalescent; surprised and grateful beneficiaries of the kindness of the Divine Samaritan. But if we look to the windows that open constantly on eternity, how we should put to flight the burdens of our sickroom and the weariness of the everyday to rejoice and say ‘yes’ to the Lord in every moment of our lives!

The Jesus and Mary Co-op

A recording of today's gospel and blog is accessible via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 46-50) is of the briefest but its meaning runs deep. The Mother of God and some of Jesus’ wider family are seeking to speak to Jesus, and Jesus seems to respond with a rather detached, almost disrespectful remark: those who do the will of my Father in heaven are my brother, sister, and mother.

No doubt today’s gospel is meat and drink to those who prefer to see Mary as a kind of holy “girl next door”, a folksy mother earth figure with a swish of hippie non-judgmentalism about her. It is the kind of image of Mary that is calculated not to frighten. And yet, as maternal as she is, we do Mary wrong if we do not recall that the Roman liturgy once evoked her in the terms used in the Song of Songs:

Who is this that looks forth like the dawn,

    fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array?

And why should the Mother of God not be so evoked, she who is also Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs, Queen of Confessors?

So, why does Jesus respond as He does in today’s gospel, in a manner that might almost suggest He no more believes in family bonds than one of Mao’s Red Guards?

 

First, we probably should see this response in the context of its time in Israel. In a context where family ties and tribal identity are everything, Jesus is launching a gospel of spiritual kinship that transcends all earthly belongings. One can imagine the way in which perhaps well-meaning persons might have announced the coming of His mother, implying that Jesus had to drop everything and run outside. In this context, His words are not disrespect to His Mother but a reminder of the foundation of the kinship of grace that underpins all the work of the New Covenant in His blood.

But we can also take these words in another sense: that she became His mother precisely because she was the one who did the will of the Father. The destiny of Mary lies in the coming together of her predestination in grace from the heart of the Trinity and her free cooperation with that call when it came. Here we stand at the centre of that mystery which is her fiat, her free consent to God’s plans, the transformation of her life that makes her the beachhead of a divine and gentle invasion of the world to liberate us all from the chains of sin. This is why the liturgy in the Middle Ages looked on her as the figure in the Song of Songs:

fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array?

It is not that she is a power in and of herself. Rather, by her free cooperation with God, by her resolve to do the will of the Father in heaven, she initiates this return to God through the grace and redemption of her Son. She achieves in that moment a status that is the reverse of our unhappy mother Eve, becoming a second Eve to the redeeming second Adam. What enables her to fulfil this role is her availability and openness to God, sustained by her virtues of obedience and humility, and crowned by her thankfulness and joy, especially the joy of the Annunciation

First of my joys – their foundation and origin,

Root of mankind’s gracious redemption,

as the Pinsent Ballad says.

What is so reassuring about this is that Mary’s joy is not hers exclusively but becomes available to all those who do the will of the Father in heaven, as she did. Mary’s joy that led her to accompany Christ to Calvary was not hers exclusively but is also available to all those who do the will of the Father in heaven, bearing their cross after Jesus. She goes ahead, our Queen and our Mother, because gifted to us as such from the cross by our Redeemer.

Jesus is no lonely Greek hero, a figure of egoistic self-glorification. By making us fellow children and heirs with Him, He calls us – and Mary first of all – to make up in our selves that portion of redemption that is still unfulfilled. In other words, Mary could have said these words even before St Paul wrote them:

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. (Col 1: 24)

Can anything be lacking in Christ’s sufferings? Yes, our free cooperation with His battle campaign, our free shouldering of the burden of redemption, which makes up for what is lacking in His not because our effort is worthy purely in and of itself, but because His grace transforms our least act of good will into a weapon of His love, conquering not only our own hearts but the hearts of all those belonging to His mystical body.

The very heart of our restoration in grace, of our spiritual lives, and our path back to the Father, is traced out for us in the likeness that Christ establishes in our souls. We are Sons and Daughters of the Father with and through Him, and Mary first of all; we are priests, prophets and kings with and through Him, and Mary first of all; we collaborate in our redemption and the redemption of others with and through Him, and Mary first of all; Mary the faithful one, Mary who said the first yes of the new dawn of redemption.

And this is why in COLW she is our model: a model of availability, openness, and teachability; a model of collaborating in redemption for the sake of His body the Church; a model even of our sorrows on earth, and please God, of our eternal joys.

  

Melting pride

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

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In today’s gospel (Luke 22: 24-30) we leap forward to a scene from the Last Supper in which Jesus hears the apostles arguing over who will be the greatest among them. His rebuke to them is instant, and He explains to them this Christian paradox: that the one who would be first must be last. Nevertheless, He outlines also the dignity of their own calling as apostles through which they will become the judges of the twelve tribes of Israel.

The great wound or burden that the apostles here show is similar to the fault that brought about the fall of our first parents: the sin of pride. Pride comes before a fall, according to the old saying. We might correct this and say: pride came before the fall. Yet the reason the pride was so disastrous is precisely because it overturns the fundamental relationship between ourselves and our Creator who is the source and foundation of all reality. Pride is in the will, of course, as is all sin, but in humans it involves an error in the mind and deviations in our sense of self and our social need for respect or esteem. In its most demonic manifestation, it is about a refusal of our creatureliness, our dependence upon almighty God, who holds us in being, and from whom all our gifts come. Arguably in its most human manifestation, it is the fruit of an unregulated neediness, the appetite to see in others their need for what we are, a kind of lust for significance, as if without it we would not be who we are. I am who I think others think I am, is how one psychological theory sums up the twisted logic on which pride and vainglory seem to live.

In this light perhaps we can appreciate now the power of Jesus’ command to the apostles: Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. What is it that the youngest knows or desires, and what is it that the servant brings? How can we not find in such a precept an echo of Jesus’ other words: learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart? For, who is the ‘youngest’ in this case if not this little child, the Son of God? It is this child, the one who in time will be born to us, who knows the Father and in the same eternal moment knows the loving gaze of the Father upon Him. If then, like Him, we were to contemplate long enough the loving gaze that this Father casts upon those who have been made His children in baptism, would we not find it much more difficult to lust after the esteem of any other gaze? Why would we, like the apostles, desire the stoney picnic of society’s approval if we had feasted on the loving kindness of our God who desires the world so much that He sent His only Son to redeem it?

It is perhaps this love also which drives the true servant to serve. For the eyes of the servant should not be upon the other guests but upon the Master of the House who has first looked upon them with love. Again, like the youngest child, this servant is firstly the One who came to serve His Father by serving us, His unworthy guests, the One whose sandal we are not fit to untie? And if Jesus tells us to take the place of the servant, He is essentially telling us once more: follow me. For where the Master is, there must the servant follow.

The pride and vainglory of the apostles today melts in the face of the example of Jesus’ humility, the Jesus who both gives them the words of eternal life, and bows to wash the feet of His Father’s guests. Yet standing behind this great example of humility in Jesus is the unquenchable love that pours forth from the Blessed Trinity, the love that Mary confessed in hr Magnificat, for Jesus serves us to please only His Father in heaven whose love the Song of Songs tells us of in these terms:

 

The voice of my beloved!

    Look, he comes,

leaping upon the mountains,

    bounding over the hills.

 My beloved is like a gazelle

    or a young stag.

Look, there he stands

    behind our wall,

gazing in at the windows,

    looking through the lattice.

 My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one,

    and come away;

 for now the winter is past,

    the rain is over and gone.

 The flowers appear on the earth;

    the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove

    is heard in our land.

 The fig tree puts forth its figs,

    and the vines are in blossom;

    they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one,

    and come away.

 (Song of Song 2: 8-13)

These are the words addressed to every pride-filled heart that gorges on a poison of overpriced esteem and misplaced desire and who remains unresponsive to divine love received.

 

My love is love unknown, my Saviour’s love to me.

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.

 

And with such a gaze of love upon us, how can we hunger for anything less?

Who are you and who am I?

Today's reflection comes from the archives and can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 17: 26-37) contains several alarming descriptions of the end of the world, and yet in another way, these descriptions are as enigmatic as all prophet texts. First, Jesus looks back and evokes the experience of the people who lived at the time of the flood, and then reflects on the events that preceded the destruction of Sodom. So, it will also be in the days of the Son of Man, He observes. Next, Jesus evokes the drama of those who will face that end-of-the-world moment, and how they will know the sudden sundering of the human race in two: then, there will be one taken, and another one left. Finally, He ends with yet another enigmatic reference: where the body is, there too will the vultures gather. Other translations render this differently and refer to eagles. How are we to know how to read the implications of such a text?

Yet, like all texts of Sacred Scripture, this mysterious passage begins to yield when we approach it with two fundamental questions in mind: who are you, O Lord my God, and who am I? For knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves are the two lights which make sense of the reality of the universe and help us prepare to hear His call and receive His friendship.

Who are you, O Lord my God? You are a God of just desserts and rewards, punishing as well as rewarding. It is unfashionable to speak of this, but we should reflect on the fact that the word for hell is mentioned more often in the gospel than the word for heaven. Would it be so, if this were not a possibility? Unless we do penance, we shall all likewise perish, Jesus tells us in Luke 13: 3.

But this God of justice is also a God of revelation and redemption who has sent His Son, and the Son will come again in due course to complete the great cycle in which mankind is led back to God, or at least that portion of mankind that has not definitively rejected Him. Still, what are we to make of the suddenness of His action? God seems to deal with things not in our time but in His own. Whole centuries seem to pass with chaos ensuing, only for a crisis to provoke precipitous collapse and judgement. Jesus evokes the sudden interventions of God in this passage, as well as the precision of His judgements that differentiate the fate of one human from that of another. Everything is in His hands. If we fear and tremble, we do no less than obey the command of St Paul in working out our salvation. And, yet, at the same time, we hear the voice of Jesus: be not afraid. Like all paradoxes of the faith, it is not one that we should try to resolve in one sense or the other; God is three and one, Jesus is God and man, Mary is Virgin and Mother, we should be afraid and not afraid: let us hold the paradox in prayer and our ignorance in humility. Only by the gifts of the Holy Spirit is human fear properly driven out, while a divinely-inspired fear of the Lord continues to move us.

From there, we come to our second question: who am I? Am I one of those who wants to look back with Lot’s wife, or to flee with Lot? Am I one of those whose taste for eating, drinking, buying and selling prevails over my taste for coming to the Lord in prayer and humble love? Am I the kind of soul who returns to their house for their possessions, rather than turning their hearts towards the Lord’s temple? Who am I before these choices?

In a sense, the answer to the first question about God provides the answer to the second question about us, without being able to solve it for this or that individual who is still a wayfarer in this vale of tears. If God is our maker, our redeemer and the spouse of our souls, there should only remain in us the fear of offending Him, just as we fear to hurt anyone we love. But this dilemma casts light upon what we are truly attached to, and upon who we are in this moment: for by its light are our secret attachments – and, thereby, all our secret fears – driven out into the open, revealed in their abjectness, exposed in our lifelong capacity for betrayal of God and of ourselves. By refusing to let go of our false selves – our deluded self-image – we are like those who try to preserve what we think life is, rather than accepting to die like the grain of wheat…

And here we discover whether our abjectness is true humility or unhealthy abasement: for humility liberates us to cast ourselves into the arms of the Lord who comes to our aid and hastens to help us, while abasement enslaves us to self-hatred, serving for the soul a dish of disappointed vanity that tries to find some self-respect in sterile self-inflicted pain.

Let us fear only that the vultures attend upon those who depart this life dead in sin. And let us also take heart for we are His body, His mystical body, and our lives are hidden with Christ in God whose grace can overcome our mistaken pride to bring us back to Himself by helping us become who we are meant to be.

Beyond flesh and blood

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 16: 13-19) describes the scene in which the leader of the disciples makes his declaration of faith in the divinity of Jesus before the other apostles, and in which Jesus names him Peter, the rock, to whom He gives the keys of the kingdom. The text is foundational to the Church’s self-understanding and crucial to grasping Peter’s ministry. Let us, however, leave aside the dogmatic structures to which this scene is connected, and instead reflect on a line that passes by usually unnoticed: Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

In one sentence, Jesus offers us a commentary on Peter’s journey to this point. It is a significant journey for us to. In one regard, Peter is all flesh and blood. His hot-headed behaviour will get him into trouble in the gospel on more than one occasion, pushing him at times into awkward corners from which he has not the grace to come out unscathed. He walked on the water like a proper charismatic, only to find the H2O gently yielding to receive his body like so many drowning fishermen before him. He wielded the sword in the face of what was practically a lynch mob in the Garden of Gethsemane, only to find his courage blunted by the pertness of a serving girl. Later he will boldly proclaim the faith to the people of Israel, only to lose his grip in an act of papal prevarication, acting ambiguously as if Christians had not been liberated from the strictures of the Mosaic Law (Galatians 2:11-14).  What were all these incidents if not Peter giving in to the waywardness of mere flesh and blood?

There is one further, notorious incident to mention in this regard, and it follows today’s scene in the gospel when flesh and blood led Peter to step boldly forward and make an ass of himself. Jesus had begun to prophesy His future sufferings when Peter rebuked Him and told Him He must never follow such a path. Jesus in that moment gave Peter yet another name which somehow never caught on:

Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.

Thus speaks Jesus, humble and meek of heart, in the face of his friend’s worldliness. Jesus could not have made His feelings any clearer if He had said: my Father in heaven has not revealed this to you, Peter; it comes only from your all too human, flesh and blood perspective. It will be an important lesson for Peter’s successors to remember; papal primacy is a ministry of service to the truth in season and out of season, not a privileged, arbitrary princedom, to be run according to the logic of human expediency. When, after all, was the thorny Paschal logic of death and resurrection ever in season for human calculations?

Finally, now, we can come back to the second part of Jesus’ observation to Peter which attributes Peter’s enlightenment to the work of the Father in heaven. Even if we take the expression flesh and blood in its most positive sense, meaning, for example, our minds and wills, the human being using human powers alone can never discover the divinity of the Son. The greatest philosophers on earth have told us many things, but their writings fail to rise to the insights granted by faith and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These all come instead from the hand of the Father in heaven, building on the faculties of mind and will, as grace builds on nature, to give them access to the fierce and fiery mysteries of God at least as much access as we are capable of here below. This is no strange and exotic possibility, reserved as a rare privilege to the greatest mystics. One of the most startling insights of mystical theology in the twentieth century was that progress in the Christian life should normally lead to this state known as infused contemplation when God feeds the soul directly using the gifts granted at baptism. Why else were those gifts given in the first place? In Peter’s case the action of the Father acclaimed by Jesus suggests that this moment of illumination and of Peter’s confession is the fruit of the gift of understanding, granting him an ever-deeper access to the mysteries of divine revelation. The theological gift of faith may be exercised voluntarily under grace, whereas the gifts of the Holy Spirit move us by His divine initiative, taking us to places that human powers, flesh and blood, cannot imagine.

And so, what is the conclusion but that all who have the faith and the gifts are thereby blessed by the Father, blessed to be lifted above the limited scope of flesh and blood, and blessed to be given a glimpse of the divine wonders that pour forth constantly from God, the wellspring of all goodness, truth, and beauty? Come further up and further in, says C S Lewis’s Aslan to the human children in The Last Battle, the final novel in his Narnia chronicles. But come further up and further in is what the Lord says to us all.

Such is His command: to be ready to step beyond our limited flesh and blood calculations, and to await the blessing of the Father humbly, the blessing that enables us to go further into the mystery of faith that by His cross and resurrection the Son of God has set us free; free - like Peter - to love Him to the end.

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.