Personal vocation in and through the Son

Today's gospel and reflection are provided in the context of the Lay Branch members online formation weekend. An audio version can be accessed here.

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The gospel for today’s reflection (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 because of His role as the voice of God's revelation to the world), put 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.

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 never get any further 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 face 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 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. This vocation 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? By personal vocation we mean that call in us to reflect in our own being and very selves some aspect of the Eternal Divine Beauty. The personal vocation is the making specific of the universal call to holiness that exists for all the baptised, turning what is collective and public into something individual and specific. So, I ask again: what about His personal vocation? Once more, 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. Yet, perhaps something like Jesus’ 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. 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, and which pours itself forth in a continual act of prayer and thanksgiving.

Here, in beholding this inner vision, Jesus in His human nature most reflects the Word, the second person of the Trinity, in His divine nature. In other words, we might say that in this inward contemplation of the wayfarer Jesus, He most closely resembles that perfection of the Word by which we understand Him as Son of the Father, God from God, true light from true light, and who, with the Father, casts the mutual and eternal, paternal and filial look of love that breathes forth from them as the Holy Spirit. I was not a father before my son was a son; in some remote way, it is a reflection of that eternal filiation in the extraordinary and ravishing mystery of their eternal communion together.  

The wonder of all this is twofold: first, that Jesus the Son is the Way, the Truth, the Life, the very model on which our existence and identities are based, and He 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. Our active vocations will all reflect something of his dynamic service but in our personal vocations we capture something of that filial likeness, that outpouring of prayer and thanksgiving, that alone can make us pleasing to the Holy One. We must not ask who the crowds say we are, although our needy hearts ask this question continually; rather, we must ask who He calls us to be, and only then what He calls us to do.

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.

 

The way of the anawim

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

Today’s gospel (Luke 17: 7-10) comes among a series of admonitions from the Lord. Seen in the context of the preceding admonition concerning the necessity of faith, today’s passage may simply be advice not to become too prideful if our faith is such that even the elements obey our very word. We are servants, and even when we return from our hard labours in the fields, what should we expect but to be treated as servants are, with this final lesson:

We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.

Every vocation, every invitation to holiness, is only a call to reflect in some way the beauty of God, and to reflect in a particular, concrete way the beauty of the Lord Jesus, the Word of God made flesh who lived among us. Today’s admonition of the Lord is then just such another dimension of that call which, for all of us, is to live according to the mystery of the Lord’s self-emptying. In the Lord’s case, all honour was due to Him since He was God eternal, born of the Father before all ages. In the incarnation, He chose this self-emptying in order to walk among us, to embrace our every condition even the lowliest, and so to make real before our eyes that the delight of God is to be with the children of men; and more than that, to show His readiness to take on the burden of the world’s sin. How much more then should we be ready to follow the Lord into this mystery of His self-emptying, his kenosis as the theologians call it? For in our case the honour on which our hearts feed, on which our inner-self sometimes gorges, is not the honour due to us but the honour we seek for ourselves. What can this mean?

In the first place, what it cannot mean is to turn from self-aggrandizement to a condition known as abasement. Abasement is a dissonant need, a search within us for diminishment, a readiness to blame ourselves or to dwell upon our inferiority or unworthiness. Abasement is not humility; in fact, like so many bad tendencies, it is merely an ape or imitation of the good, like the devil is the ape of God. Abasement brings satisfaction, just as physical self-harm can bring satisfaction, i.e. in a way that reveals already the deeper disorders in our self-love. For self-harm or abasement are only the flipside of an inordinate self-love, and these extremes live in weird proximity to each other. To quote lines this blog returns to from time to time from the novel of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest: It is easier than we think to hate ourselves. Grace means forgetting ourselves. A third element in this toxic mix is that abasement may only be a reaction to the disappointments of another dissonant need: that of succorance, the need to be needed by others, with all its attendant processes where the heart expects payment for due deference or affection. Succorance is the vice of the looking glass where we imagine we are only what we believe others think we are, where we make ourselves indebted to their esteem.

It is a great paradox that the cure and remedy to both these dissonant needs lies in the self-emptying that Jesus recommends to us today in the gospel. After all our labours, He tells us, we must still regard ourselves only as unprofitable servants. But why? Because our ennoblement must come to us as through the gift of grace, for we are the sinners that He came to save. It is much as St Augustine of Hippo said:

If we examine the evil we have wrought, what we suffer is little, what we deserve is great.

What we have committed is very grievous, what we have suffered is very slight.

We feel the punishment of sin, yet withdraw not from the obstinacy of sinning.

So then, when we have done our duty, we can hardly boast about it.

Freedom here lies in neither conducting an inner trade with our self-esteem - demanding recognition for our works as if our slate had always been clean – nor in believing ourselves intrinsically incapable of any good. These extreme valuations or devaluations, we must pour out of our soul for them to be replaced by the example of the Lord who is meek and humble and peaceful of heart.

But if we cannot abandon the wage demands that we make to the Father, let our first demand be a living and unending union with Divine Love.

You have written well of my Sacrament, Jesus said to St Thomas Aquinas in a vision. What would you ask of me?

Nothing but yourself, Lord, was the reply of the Dumb Ox.

For the self-emptying of the Son in our service is only a function of the greater cycle of Divine Love that passes between the persons of the Blessed Trinity and in which God Himself has called us to share if only we will follow the Son back to His heavenly Kingdom, the Divine Pied Piper. Our hearts still tremble for the foothills of human esteem, recognition, and affection, and may all these things be added unto us, but first we are called to seek the Kingdom of God and His love and His goodness, to receive His invitation to this adventure as our most precious possession, and as our greatest honour. It is this dignity, which comes to us by His gift, that raises us up from being merely unworthy servants, turns us into adopted children who receive a ring of honour, and sits us among His chosen ones at the Banquet of the Sacrificed Lamb.

Like our Mother Mary, we are the anawim, the little ones of the Lord. We do not recognise our unworthiness in order to sink into the mire. Rather, we recognise it so we can better appreciate the gift He makes us of His enduring and ever-faithful love. We do not recognise our unworthiness to persecute ourselves. We recognise it so as to be free of the shackles of our inner trade, grappling with all the imaginings of human self-promotion, so as to be free to rise and dance before our Father’s joy with a freedom wherewith His Son has made us free.

 

 

 

From the archives: they know not what they do

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

Today’s gospel (Luke 16: 1-8) is a strange one involving the parable of a dishonest man who is sacked for being wasteful with his master’s possessions. He ends up being praised for the dishonest albeit clever way in which, before he leaves his job, he buys friends by reducing their debts to the master. It must be one of the oddest parables Jesus ever told. As the scholastics used to say, every comparison limps except in the point of comparison, and so we must look here closely not at the dishonesty or wastefulness but at the reason given for the master’s praise of his servant:

The master praised the dishonest steward for his astuteness. For the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light.

Possibly, it should not surprise us that the children of this world are astute. The darkness which St John tells us did not understand the light is, nevertheless, characterised often by its cunning.  But, is it not a surprise that the children of light fail to be astute, to be insightful? What is going on here?

After all, the children of light are supposed to be blessed with particular gifts such as wisdom, knowledge, and understanding – all charisms that are concerned in one way or another with intellectual insights. How is it that they can, therefore, lack astuteness? And, ultimately, what does this tell us about them?

In one way, perhaps this lack of astuteness flatters the children of light. If they lack practice in planning and plotting to get what they want, that is possibly because they are not in the habit of planning and plotting to get what they want. It is not that they lack the brains to do so, but rather that they are consciously committed – or at least they try to be – to a more benign agenda. Evil falls back only on its own powers, or else preys on the weakness of others. Good turns to God for aid. In a sense, the children of light are not astute because they do not – or, perhaps we should say, they ought not - aspire to the falsehoods of power and influence. Our help is in the name of the Lord who inspires us to the dependence of children in His regard. The children of light are not astute in the same way that children are not astute. They live by trust, not by treason. When they are at their best, their language is surrender, not selfishness – or it ought to be.

Yet, taken in another way, this lack of astuteness might be far from being a credit to the children of light. Our souls are a battleground for two competing loves, and even when our conscious minds are committed to the path of the children of light who love God, we still battle against the flesh, the world and the devil who only love themselves. In other words, even when we have received that kiss of peace that comes to us in the Father’s love, we still struggle against the child in us who remains the child of this world.

Now, this child in us is astute, for this child – our worse selves – not only has the astuteness of the children of this world but can dress up that cleverness in the robes of righteousness. And, if we do not know ourselves, if we are naïve enough to believe in our own justice - or not so much to believe in it as to fail to remember that our justice continues to be besieged even by the lingering effects of original sin – then, we are on the path of the Pharisees who were, as the saying goes, as pure as angels and as proud as devils. Do we need the astuteness of the children of this world, therefore? Only insofar as it may help us spot its traces in our own motives, our own poorly regulated unconscious and dissonant needs whose feet trample everywhere beneath the surface of our consciences.

We are and remain a battleground:

Video proboque meliora

Deteriora sequor.

I see and approve the better things / But the worse things I follow. Even the pagan poet Ovid knew of this war in us. How is it that the children of light can so easily lose sight of it? As St Paul tells the Romans:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Are we then destined to be overcome both by our lack of astuteness as children of light and by our sinful weakness? Maybe we would be, were it not for the ingeniousness of love. For love, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the very essence and existence of our God, will find a way to help us seek the face of the Lord and yearn for it, even in the midst of our own self-betrayals. We are back again at those lines from St Augustine:

Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.

The folly of God is greater than the wisdom or astuteness of this world, says St Paul to the Corinthians. If we wish to remain children of light, we can only do so by living in the love of God in whose wisdom all the astuteness of this world comes to nothing. In this light, even the traces of worldly astuteness that remain in us can serve to help keep our feet on the ground and our hearts in heaven where they ought to be. For power belongs, in the end, not to astuteness but to love.

Hearing the call

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 15-24) relates one of the great parables of the Kingdom of God which Jesus likens to a great banquet. Finally, the host sends out a message to the guests: Come, everything is ready! And yet it was not true: not everything was ready, for the guests themselves were not ready. Then, we begin to hear the procession of excuses; one has bought a field, one has acquired five yoke of oxen (i.e. ten in total), and a third has taken a wife. The guests are no longer available. Angry, the host of the banquet then sends his servants out to bring everybody they can to the feast, the desirable guests and the undesirable ones. The essence of the invitation now is not how good and worthy the guests are but how willing they are to put all else aside and come to share in the feast. They will henceforth be welcome, but the original guests will be excluded.

In a sense, this parable is profoundly about the process of vocation. The call of the Lord goes out. He gives it to whom He will. His pleasure is to be with the children of men. We tend to think of the host of the banquet as generous only when He invites all and sundry, but the original invitation is itself an expression of His goodness which He desires to share. And this is where vocation is at play.

We so often tend to think that vocation is about me, but that is too simplistic, not to say too inward-looking. Vocation has two dimensions to it: the call and the response. The call we receive from God: the vocation is literally a voice of God spoken to us in the circumstances that surround us, in the inspirations that come to us, or perhaps for some, as for Samuel, in a still small voice that calls our name. The second dimension of vocation is our reply, our response to love received: We love Him, says St John in his first epistle, because He first loved us. What more need we say to such a call, other than yes and thank you, Lord, as Mary our model did? But then there come the responses of the unworthy guests.

The first has bought a field and, therefore, cannot respond to the call. We may read this action in several ways but what if it simply means the guest intends to make his home elsewhere? Everyone needs a home. But if we have listened carefully to the Lord, we know that we here have no abiding city. If we pitch our tents, they are only bivouacs. We journey on; we can purchase a field so as to have the treasure there, but not so as to build our home there. And yet we do try to build our home other than in the Kingdom. We seek to make things perfect or as perfect as they might be in the eyes of the world. We wish to blend in as if we were not the privileged guests of a host beyond compare.

The second guest who refuses the call has purchased ten oxen and, therefore, cannot come. What holds this guest back now other than his attachment to other things? If we are invited by someone of great worthiness, then what sacrifices we make to answer that invitation! And yet here is this guest, who despite the call reckons that attending to his oxen is more crucial than hearing the invitation. Here the cultural gap does not help us. Does this man not have a legitimate excuse? But then we might consider that someone who can afford ten oxen could easily afford a servant to attend to that particular job. This is not a legitimate excuse; it is a self-serving pretext. The man now refuses to come not because he values his oxen but because he does not value his host. If the field of the first guest was a kind of alternative destination, the oxen of the second guest are simply encumbrances that distort his sense of value. The first guest does not hear his call because he is lost; the second guest does not hear his call because he is no longer listening.

And then comes the third guest who has taken a wife. Here, we have to understand that the metaphor of the wedding we see elsewhere in other parables is present by negation. The third guest insults the host more than the others for while they are lost or merely attached to other things, this third guest poses as a rival. It is not simply that he will not be coming; by implication, he is telling the host that he too is throwing a party. He is not merely lost or not merely encumbered; he is proposing that the host of the banquet is not that special.

And thus we see the obstacles to hearing God’s call, all concentrated in this one parable: the lure of the alternative, the trap of the things we hold, and the temptation to choose ourselves rather than God. These are the old enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil, blocking the road before us, severing our ties of communication with heaven, isolating us, making us turn inward to the perpetual vacuum of a sterile fruitlessness.

The desirables or undesirables who will be admitted to the banquet will not be admitted without condition; we know from another parable of a man who comes without the right gown and finds himself ejected. It is not enough just to hear the call; we must hear the call and realise its implications; we must hear the call and live out its meaning.

But how much more clearly does that call strike us when we realise but we are the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame? The call comes to us not because we are worthy of it but because the host of the banquet has deemed us worthy to receive this call. It is not because we are special in ourselves but because we have become special to Him, for all things are prepared for us. It only remains for us now to set aside our fields and our oxen and even our other plans for happiness and thus to turn and respond at last in love to love received.

Too much of a good thing

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 1-6) recounts another clash between Jesus and the Pharisees. Buried as they always were in their own perfectionism, the Pharisees had lost the capacity to see that it is the higher laws that bring life to the lower laws, and that even they made exceptions in certain cases of necessity. Not even they attained the rigorist standards they hurled at the feet of Jesus.

But there are arguably two striking and distinct matters that make this particular gospel different from other similar incidents. In the first case, it is easy to miss the irony of Jesus’ question: is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?  After all, why does He not ask the more immediate and the more practical question: is it possible heal on the Sabbath (or indeed on any other day)? Simply because the possibility of His doing so is beyond doubt. How many miracles has he already worked by this point in his mission? Too many to be counted or even recounted in all the books of the world, according to St John. The possibility, then, is beyond doubt, not only in Jesus’ eyes but even in the eyes of the Pharisees too. Thus, in one fell swoop, Jesus confronts their hardness of heart by assuming they accept His power and gives them a chance to step back from their own rigorist perversity. What else could we ask of a Saviour but that He not fail to confront us in our waywardness? If Jesus dialogues with sinners – and let us understand this correctly: the Pharisees were sinners like everyone else – He always stands ready with the surgeon’s scalpel, ready to cut out from their hearts the poison of sin. If Jesus skewers the Pharisees’ hypocrisy in this conversation, it is only in the interests of healing their hearts.

The second striking detail in their gospel vignette is the illness from which the man is suffering. Dropsy is an outdated medical concept. Nowadays we would see this not as an illness in itself, but as a symptom: the symptom of oedema. Jesus cures the man, and in that instant, we see again the power of the Saviour to heal physical ills. Yet what is the spiritual meaning of dropsy? In the ancient world, oedema was considered a sign or symbol of wealth and ambition. Oedema can be associated paradoxically with great thirst, even though the body becomes swollen with fluid retention. We can note here the appropriateness of Jesus’ challenge about rescuing an animal that has fallen down a well. The man with the dropsy is almost literally stranded in the well of his own body.

But we might discern something else in the condition of dropsy: the dangerous excess of any good quality, or rather the presence of some good quality in the wrong place. After all, water is vital to life, as virtue is vital to our spiritual good. Yet, water needs to be held by the body in a particular way. Oedema holds the fluid in all the wrong places. In like manner, all the virtues need to be exercised under the guidance of prudence, even in most cases the virtue of love, although, in the end, it is the virtue of love which gives even prudence its overall direction, even as prudence dictates how love is expressed. What unites them in the Christian soul is an overarching wisdom, the gift of the Holy Spirit by which the Lord directs His children by the highest principles of insight and the deepest forces of His love. Only the lover sings, says St Augustine, but in a way only the lover sees.

The person with spiritual dropsy, however, is the one who turns love into sentimentality or prudence into undue caution. Spiritual oedema is the imposture of spiritual good by excess. Spiritual oedema would turn faith into credulity, hope into presumption, mercy into corrosive permissiveness, and generosity into thoughtless extravagance. Under the influence of spiritual oedema, obedience becomes servility, zeal becomes fanaticism, modesty becomes prudishness, and fraternal correction becomes censoriousness. In all these distortions, the true nature of virtue seems to escape the soul more and more until it can offer only a parody of what it is as a Christian to be remade in the image and likeness of the Son. Now, we are called to the good, but only the good of which man is capable with the grace of God. Furthermore, God calls us to Himself but according to our different measures as individuals, for who we are or can be is already His work, reflecting in myriad ways the infinite distinctions of His Eternal Beauty. Even if we are all called to resemble Him, we do so in our own way, not as clones in a robotic army of uniform perfectionism.

In the end, Jesus cures the man with the dropsy, reminding his Pharisee listeners that even they would rescue an animal from a well on the Sabbath. Who, then, is the rescuer if not Jesus Himself - Jesus in whose grace we are all made partakers, as St Paul tells the Philippians today?

And it is my prayer for you, says St Paul, that your love may abound more and more, with all knowledge and all discernment.

Let us love to excess, he might have added, but let us be the excess that we alone are called to. 

A hidden life

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 13: 18-21) is another short extract and its parables are themselves more like extended similes: the kingdom of heaven is like a tiny mustard seed that grows into a tree and houses the birds; the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman used to prove (or proof in the US) her bread. So many of Jesus’ parables or teaching points leverage the common features of the culture and society in which He lived, and today’s similes are no different. Sometimes parables do not need to be long, no more than blog posts, so let us emulate the economy of the Lord.

Why is the kingdom of God like a mustard seed? Because it thus escapes from human calculations and forecasts which would condemn it to be always small and inconsequential. Yet, lo and behold, the mustard seed and the kingdom defy the predictions of the experts and the money counters and not only mature into their fullest selves but also become a home for others. How did something so mean, so low in our all too human esteem, become transformed? Opening our minds to that reality lies along the path of wisdom. We must let go and let God show the way, God who designed the mustard seed, as He designed His kingdom. Love, like fire, begins with a spark of ignition but then is capable of consuming all before it. This is the power of the mustard seed, and the Lord has chosen the little ones of this world, the anawim, to confound the powerful.

The second simile of the leaven is similar but underscores more clearly the secrecy of the work of the kingdom. Watch a dough proving and you will see no spectacular signs of the extraordinary and transformative force within. Yet, turn away and return your gaze, and then you see what has been achieved. Life goes on, hope is not extinguished, but meanders along its course towards its appointed end, despite the indifference of all around. We might alter just a little the words of Auden’s poem Le Musée des Beaux Arts to express this thought:

 

About “the kingdom” they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood.

 

Hope for the kingdom is like that: patient, hidden, bearing all things, believing all things, enduring all things, while the leavening takes place.

And, how much such similes can bring comfort to our own souls when we feel becalmed on the seas of life, so little changed, so little repentant, so little resembling the face of Him whom we promised to follow.

But it is not the promise we make that will deliver the kingdom; it is the grace He has put in us – the smallest of traces, the hidden power – which, if we are faithful, may one day transform us so that our hearts become what they are meant to be: a tree of life for others, a bread for their nourishment, and the fulfilment of His word in us.

 

 

Storytime

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 12: 54-59) is a reminder that even if Jesus is a mystery to us, we are no mystery to Him. When He comments on the people’s knowledge of the weather, and when asks He why the people cannot read the signs of the times, it is not because He does not know what moves them. And when He draws the second scenario of this gospel about having to go to court and being in danger of ending up in a debtors’ prison, He was not telling the people anything they did not know; rather He was telling them things they knew very well but did not like to think about. In this regard, these hypocrites in the gospel are once again ourselves.

How was it that people knew what the weather was going to be: whether it would be hot or whether it would rain? There was no weather service in the Roman Empire. They probably knew the future weather in the format of stories. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. In its purpose, this saying is a weather forecast, but if we look at its structure or genre, it is a story. There are highs and there are lows. There is a hero – the shepherd. There is emotion; deep emotions of alarm or pleasure. Above all, this story helps people make sense of their immediate surroundings, and it tells people what to do in the short term, assuming of course that they already have a long-term plan. With this story of the coming weather, the people travel into tomorrow’s future; they may even take action now to shape that future, depending of course on the weather. Alongside all the models of humanity that anthropology has proposed, such as homo sapiens and homo faber (man the maker), we also find homo narrans - man the storyteller.

So, what is Jesus getting at in the first part of this gospel if not simply that we are rather good at telling ourselves one kind of story (the one that plays to our self-interest) but not so good at telling ourselves other kinds of story that are, shall we say, not so self-serving, the very stories that He Himself came to tell us? We are good at telling ourselves the stories that tickle our ambitions and needs or perhaps indulge our self-hatreds; those stories that lie in embryonic form in our imaginations and grow and shrink like a wicked genie. We are not as good, perhaps, at telling ourselves the stories that we need to hear: the stories of our fall, of our redemption, and of the long road home that we often seem so irresolute about. Why is it that we are wearied by the story’s development, or is it that we fear what the story will cost us next? 

In truth, audiences choose their stories. We characterise the cultures that we come across by the stories that they tell themselves. The people Jesus preached to liked stories about the weather, for many of them were farmers and this was an agricultural society. At least theirs were stories of education; our stories today are often stories of titillation. Today’s tales are plastered across the pages of the media or more usually on our screens, and they are rarely of the edifying kind. In that sense, maybe we read The Times or the New York Times but do we have any more sense of the signs of the times that the original peasantry of ancient Israel?

The people in this gospel extract do not know the signs of the times because they decline to listen to the stories that could unfold for them the signs of the times. Like us, they tell themselves stories of diversion or anguish about the things that they desire or the things that they fear to lose, and all the while they ignore the stories that would interpret for them their true reality and the dangers in which they really stand.

For this is the essence of Jesus' complaint. The people are not anxious about eternity; they are more stirred by a story about a potential law case than they are by the prospect of the courtroom of the last judgement. But, as we noted above, people choose their stories. They would indeed listen to these stories about the last judgement if their hearts were in the right place; if in fact their hearts were seeking God. Of course they liked stories about their own piety; flattering stories to give them reassurance about what fine fellows they were. We do the same. Yet these stories did not cut very deep…unlike the story of Scripture which St Paul describes in the following way:

For the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.

This is the story of the word of God and it is a tale of high emotion too; of a hero, Jesus, who comes to our rescue, and of the drama that plays out for our salvation. This is the story that gives us the signs of the times, the story that tells of our peril, and of the destiny which cuts through every living and waking moment. More especially, for each one of us, this is the story in which, like Mary, we have the choice of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the Lord. 

The only story left to tell, therefore, is what we are going to do about it right now.

A fear that is not fear

Your blogger is fighting an autumnal virus so please excuse the croaky voice! An audio version of the gospel and reflection from 16 October is available here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 12: 1-7) sees Jesus surrounded by a crowd of thousands but, as if dramatizing what He is about to say, He speaks His warnings only to His disciples: Whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops. There is a sense in which these words are not only a commentary on the Pharisees’ sneaky behaviour – their love of being seen to be good while they short changed justice behind the scenes – but also an insight into the true significance of human moral choice. This choice is not a private and autonomous affair, like our taste in socks, but a public engagement in, or refusal of, our call to the path of goodness. Along that path, Jesus then gives us two commandments which appear on the surface to contradict each other: on the one hand, fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell, and on the other, Fear not: you are of more value than many sparrows. What does He mean, this Teacher of all Teachers, by being so apparently self-contradictory?

This last passage begins with a third commandment which casts its own light on the contradictory injunctions about fear: do not fear, says the Lord, those who kill the body. And yet it is they who we do fear most: a fear inbred or learned through experience, or perhaps a fear gone autonomic, embedding itself in the overworked amygdala of an age of anxiety. How we fear those who kill the body! As a society, though hopefully not as individuals, we fear the Jihadi terrorists who plant bombs that tear their victims limb from limb, more than we seem to fear the cultural terrorists who dissolve all dignity, purity and decorum in a stew of normalised, popular erotica.

Nevertheless, Jesus’ injunction is not to fear the destruction of the body but to go against our habits, our sense of safety. How could He not be conscious of what this challenge asks of us, He who sweated blood in the garden at His own approaching sufferings? To our shame, not only do we fear those who kill the body; we fear those who hurt the body; we even fear those who threaten to hurt the body of our oversized sensitivities and who slight and frustrate our sense of how things should be. Is it any wonder He needs to train us through deprivation of the things we cling to, He who has urged us to leave all things and follow Him? Perhaps the body is, therefore, a metaphor for all those things we have wrongly learned to hold even unconsciously dearer than Him. When we do not fear those who kill the body, we will have arrived at a perfect freedom, for we will then be prepared to see all those things that we normally cling to unconsciously stripped from our possession, like skin flayed off a prisoner’s back. It is human to wince; but our Christian call is to let go, to let it happen, to let ourselves be stripped of our outer garments and attachments and even comforts as we follow Him to the cross.

So, how does all this illuminate the two injunctions to fear and to fear not? In the first case, the injunction to be afraid is not a command to fear cravenly, but to recall the fear of the Lord as a necessary element in our relationship of creatures to Creator. This is not to fear He will do us harm, but rather a recognition of the gulf that separates us from Him in purely existential terms: I am He who is, you are she who is not, as St Catherine of Sienna was told. Jesus was not being mean when He said this; He was allowing Catherine to be formed by the reality of who He was and who she was. Only in the light of that just fear could she or any of us truly have some inkling of the meaning of the Incarnation where the Almighty pours out His dignity, takes flesh, and walks among us.

In this regard, all our faith is about paradoxical balances: God is three and one, the Eucharist is sacrifice and sacrament, Mary is Virgin and Mother. So, the fear of the Lord, one of the seven privileged gifts of the Holy Spirit, a fear that speaks of reverence, humility and worship paid to the Almighty, complements even the most passionate and complete love of God through the virtue of charity, the theological gift par excellence. Fear is the gift that leads to docibilitas and docility: docibilitas, the teachable frame of mind that opens us to the lessons He is constantly teaching us; and docility through which we say our fiat upon hearing His voice. In this case, we should speak of a filial fear, a fear not of the waywardness of divine power but of its excellence, an eternal and everlasting excellence in all things from justice to love.

And here, with this evocation of love, is found the pivot point between today’s apparently contradictory commandments. While the command to fear bids us attend to God’s immense dignity as judge – the one who has the authority to cast into hell – the second command to fear not bids us attend to the loving condescension of the Father who visits His people from on high, who knows us to our very most intimate fibre, and to whom we matter more than we can ever understand. For God so loved the world.

Fear, therefore, and fear not; walk in reverence, therefore, but with passionate step; be humble, therefore, but reach up and touch the hand of the Father who only thinks thoughts of peace and not of affliction. In this fear-that-is-not-fear lies humility, the romantic soundtrack of our loving union with Him.  

Digging for gold

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 11:37-41) sees Jesus dining with a Pharisee whose heart is full of judgement on his neighbour. Jesus, the reader of souls, does not let the challenge pass but piles up criticism upon criticism in return: this Pharisee is greedy, wicked and foolish. Then, comes the lesson of the giver of the New Law: give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.

Like so many of these brief vignettes given to us by the gospel writers, there is a world of movement and consequence in these few lines. The Pharisees were the religious purists of the day, the most accomplished in their observances, at least outwardly speaking. But already, here we can discern a lesson of the gospel that provides the most practical of workaday truths: that things or rather people are rarely what they claim to be about. Why should that be? We humans are not singular in heart; rather, we are laminated instead. If one could take a cross section of our souls, the horizontal seams would expose complex layers, the paths in which our personalities have been laid down over the years by many experiences; by the formation of our educators and the unwitting deformation of others. We like to think that we know what drives us, but even the Psalmist prays to be cleansed of his secret sins. So too should we.

Worse still, we struggle to recognise this in ourselves, believing or thanking God in this age of individualism that we are not like other men. And yet we are, man being the imitative biped par excellence. The difference between the Pharisee and us is twofold, at least if we are not Pharisees: first, he has learned to master his exterior actions, and second, his ideology has shifted the burden of the law onto externalist conformity with minutiae, culminating in a confirmation bias of his own design and making. I thank you Lord that I am not like this publican. The Pharisees thus set and mark their own homework. No wonder this Pharisee ends up at the top of the class, at least in the inner movie of his own self-regard. We may ourselves sneer at the Pharisee, but who among us is not complacent in some way, as if God’s assessment of us should corroborate our own secret and oh-so-swift self-congratulation?

The Pharisee would probably have deeply resented being called to order by one whose claims included the power to dismantle the public status of Pharisaic legalism. Notice the nature of the accusations that Jesus makes: none of them can be judged from the exterior. Humans may be greedy and wicked in their heads and still appear generous and good to the world. Humans may pose as wise and sagacious and yet be full of foolishness. The Pharisees had so focused on the exterior that their inner compass was awry. Now came the Pharisees’ nemesis, and all the more powerfully as they must have felt the acuteness of His judgement on them. Did he run from the light, this Pharisee, as we often do? Or was he prepared to take a risk and look into the mirror that the Lord had held up to his soul?

Jesus does two things in the conclusion of this extract. First, he makes the Pharisee feel the weight of his judgement. Imagine sitting down to eat with a guest who has just labelled you ‘greedy’, ‘wicked’ and foolish. Yet, second, Jesus offers the Pharisee a route out of his vices, and it is not necessarily the one the Pharisee was expecting: Make alms of those things that are within. Here the Light of Life invites us to share our inner light; the lover of souls asks us to pour ourselves out in affection and service for others; the bearer of truth commands us not to hide our light under a bushel but dare to brave the darkness in the heart of our neighbour.  Make alms of those things that are within.

And in this, we are only following Him who made alms of all those things in His own heart. The entire gospel is indeed in a sense the alms of the beneficent generosity of the heart of our God, revealed in the incarnate Son who has visited His people from on high.  

For Jesus to contradict the Pharisee, therefore, is not just for Him to dismantle the corroding influence of the hypocrite. It is to reestablish the true form of all goodness which lies not in the human comfort blanket of skin-deep conformism but in allowing the all-powerful God to dig through the seams of our souls, and to craft out of the raw material He finds deep down in us the very likeness of His blessed Son.

From darkness to light

An audio recording of today's reflection can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 13: 47-52) contains a lesson that may chill us but one which we must listen to. Jesus sets out a parable about fishermen sorting fish, and then interprets it for the crowd, applying the sorting to the Last Judgement and the sifting of the good from the wicked.  

 We do not like to think about the risks to our salvation. Yet the parable that Jesus tells clearly indicates that final judgement is a feature, indeed the penultimate feature, on the landscape of humanity. There are many mysteries that lie ahead for those whom the fishermen collect in the basket. May we be among this number. For those that the fishermen throw away, however, one truth is crystal clear even now: that it is possible to lose God, and that if we lose God, we will pay the price.

 Perhaps there was a time when Christians dwelt rather too much on damnation, although like so many myths in the popular imagination, I suspect that the stereotype of hellfire preaching has often been prone to exaggeration. Nevertheless, what the prospect or possibility of heaven or hell both have in common is that they show to what degree our actions have a real importance and real-world consequences. According to the parable – Jesus’ parable, not mine – it is possible for our existence to conclude with, I might almost say evolve into, the tragedy of damnation. Our existence is not just like having a life in a video game which we can unplug and walk away from, or which we can renew by pushing another coin into the machine or switching it off and on again. Naturally, it reassures us to dwell on God’s mercy, but we must not take God for a fool. It is comforting to say that God loves us unconditionally but there are certain things He simply does not accept. Happily, we live now in the hour of His mercy which is never more than a prayer away from us but which comes with this double paradox: that we must lose our lives to save ourselves, or else we keep our lives but lose ourselves and lose God.

The fundamental reason for His refusal to accept certain things is that disorder and wickedness are real and yet not real. So too, we can add, is the universal human instinct to lie and deceive the self about the wickedness one has wrought. Why is this a real thing? Because God respects our free will. Our liberty is a real power. And yet it is not real; for its fruits can be an attempt to uncrown the Lord of all, a sin we cannot commit without undoing the very logic of our existence which is called to the Divine Beauty like a body following the space-time continuum. Every sin is a rebellious act of violence against the kingdom, and every attempt to disguise that rebellion is a myth. 

In contrast, Jesus' forgiveness brings not only pardon but enlightenment - enlightenment about God but also about ourselves. Jesus does not treat the sinner like a leper but neither does He behave towards them like a sugar daddy, or like a well-meaning, holy social worker, or indeed a shop assistant catering to sir’s or madam’s requirements. God is not a subcontractor to our self-esteem; the one who is necessary makes us unnecessary ones so close to His heart that He describes Himself as our lover with full rights to be jealous of our love. The embrace of this Saviour means we will have to let go of everything we have wrongfully laid our hands on. We must, therefore, be like Zacchaeus, come down from our tree, and make restoration for the wrong we have done. We cannot stay in the tree simply for the view or perhaps because we identify as a 'tree person', or because God only made trees for us to climb. There is work to do; there is a responsibility that surpasses our immediate view of the world. We must climb down from the tree that undid us in the garden.

Moreover, if He came to die to save us from sin, it is not only because He wants to invite us into the extraordinary mystery of His friendship. It is also because sin is a real, fundamental, and profound problem in our lives, no matter how much we dress it up with our self-deceit and our self-indulgence, and no matter how fruitless and unproductive of the real sin can be. Our ignorance diminishes our guilt – Father, forgive them - but it does not save us from the disorder that arises from living as if God's plans did not matter.

There are, therefore, some things in our lives that - with God’s help and grace - we must exclude, for fear that in choosing them over God, we too could become part of the catch that the fisherman can find no use for.

Are we who aspire to be good, therefore, no more than dead fish, even if we are a good catch? Perhaps there lies the sense of the last enigmatic remark of Jesus today:

Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

We are not meant to be like dead fish: there, the parable breaks down. We are meant rather to be fruitful. Our hearts are meant to multiply love and share its effects wherever we are in our lives, witnessing to the ancient truths that cast their light on history’s newest every day; illuminating them, exposing the things that hide in the dark, or bringing into the light new-born beauty and claiming it for the gospel.