Consider the birds of the air

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) takes us back to the parable of the sower that that we heard two Sundays ago, a story that contains several chapters within it, all full of meaning for our spiritual lives. Jesus in this passage explains one level of meaning that is embedded in the parable. The first seed falls on ground, our souls, from where it is instantly snatched away by the devil. That seed will simply never take root. The next seed does indeed take root, but the soil is rocky and unforgiving, and the shoots of new life, the new aspirations and desires of grace, cannot stand the tribulation that comes and so wither away. All that humble promise that arose when new life began is then lost in a few instants. The next seed takes root and grows well, even perhaps grows strongly, but there is a counter force in play now, an overgrowth of brambles, the attachments and lures of this world, that hold back the new life, and it is choked accordingly. The field becomes a battle ground and the life sprung from the seed yields before the enemy. Then, at last, some seed falls on good ground where no bird robs it, the roots can go deep,  and no bramble hinders its growth. Then, granted the sun of God’s joy and the rain of His grace, it springs forth and bears fruit in varying amounts.

Of course, this parable can be read as a lesson in how it is that some embrace the work of the Divine Sower and some do not. Like so many of the parables, it contains a lesson against the fantasies that some have, and indeed revive, for universal salvation. That awful reality is only another mystery that attends the freedom of the soul that not even God will transgress. Its counterbalance is of course the superabundant generosity of the Divine Sower who casts His seed with such abandon and confidence. Though three quarters of these seeds seem to be wasted, we can leave the harvest to the wisdom of God who knows all things and foresees all ends.

And yet in other ways, this parable is not merely about the drama of salvation and damnation, but also a set of lessons for those who are trying as much as they can to be the fourth kind of soil that receives the seed. We wish to be that soil in which the seed springs up and brings forth fruit. But this bringing forth, the ongoing health of these plants, is not the work of a moment only, of some fundamental choice at one point in time. A white fence post, says Chesterton, to remain a white fence post must be regularly painted. A well-tended garden to remain a well-tended garden must be thus tended regularly. And so it is that unless our soil is well tended and carefully watched over, it risks impoverishment, invasion, sterility, and fruitlessness. These are the chapters within this greater story of the work of the Divine Sower. For reasons of space and time, however, we will focus now only on the first of these challenges: the challenge of the birds.

What then are the birds of the air, the devils who come and steal the seed away from our souls? It is easy perhaps to spot the obvious ones, but the devil often appears as an angel of light. Deceit and deception are his modus operandi. We may feel we have done enough for our spiritual lives by removing or judiciously limiting distractions such as the television, the radio, or the mobile phone. Certainly, their unbridled use is not compatible with a commitment to the following of Christ, for our souls were not made to be the highways and byways of every thought and desire that the world broadcasts for our consumption.

But then, we forget that the original medium on which meaning is imprinted is our very souls. Anima est quodammodo omnia, says St Thomas: the soul is in some ways all things, for this is how it understands.  When those thieving birds from outside are identified, excluded or restricted, the battle is not yet won, for within our souls there are already many thieving birds: distractions, our inner voices and ponderings, our memories and fantasies, and all those internal forces that give echo to our past wounds, our present struggles, and our future desires. It is not only the demoniac among the tombs who has a legion within him; we all do to some degree.

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So, how do we make peace, how do we bring about order on the streets of our minds, in the garden of our souls? We blame our internal busyness on a lack of time and space, but if we lack these things, then we must make them. Time and space cannot be multiplied outside of us, but in our hearts, they are the fruit of stillness, and stillness only takes a little time and space; only the time and space needed to relax our grip, to let go and let God, as the saying goes.

Indeed, this exclusion of the birds that steal the seed should be not so much Operation Scarecrow, as Operation Birdman. Many birds must of course be excluded but many others need to be charmed and tamed, purified of their power of distraction, so they can contribute to the life of the field, rather than ruining it. Of course, many thieving birds in us are the fruit of illicit desires, and given the wounds of original sin, there is no surprise in that. And yet other thieving birds come from wounds untended, from corners of our lives where there were historic disasters that have never been properly healed, and that have left a burden and a distortion that we are so accustomed to, we hardly know the difference between them and ourselves.

If your eye offends you, pluck it out, says the Lord, and we can do this with the thieving birds that come to us from outside. But we cannot lose our minds to save ourselves. To be delivered there so that the seeds of the Sower can grow freely, we need deep inner work, a disposition to undertake it on our side, and a willingness to let it be done unto us, under the hand of the Vine Grower who wishes us to bring forth fruit; pruned, yes, of all that is superfluous, but purified also in all those distended and distorted parts of our souls where the world, the flesh, the devil, or merely the difficult circumstances of our lives, have led us astray.

This is not the end of God’s work in us. It is not even the beginning of the end. Yet it might be the end of the beginning, a work of gentle, judicious wisdom, rather than sadistic self-persecution. We are always in the gentle hands of God, although we do not always recognise them.

To understand this from one last angle, we can reflect on a terrible moment in Chinese history - let us call it a counter-parable - the episode of the Chinese communist campaign against what they called the four pests. According to their propaganda, rats, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows, held back the great crop potential of the Chinese fields in the 1950s, and so the Communist Party launched a campaign whose spearhead was the fight against the sparrows who were targeted by hunters, stoned by little boys and women in the fields, collected in great stinking bags of rotting corpses, and brought for a meagre bounty to the local Party headquarters. They soon learned the folly of this policy, however, as the crops now failed because of the insect population which had been previously kept back by the birds. The mismanagement of this situation contributed to the greatest famine in world history and the deaths of around 50 million people. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

The thieving birds of the air must of course be fought back; but every well-tended garden needs some semi-tame ones also, who are part of its ecology, can serve its purposes, who have their place and even their own charm, and who, properly considered, may even bring a certain beauty to the place. They only thieve the seed of the Sower because they need taming, but when they are tamed, and when we hear their music, we will realise why St August said: cantare amantis est: only the lover sings.

Mary, last and first

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 46-50) is brief 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? Here we see that the last or the least is the first in the kingdom, and that those who are humbled will be exalted.

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First, we probably should see His response in the context of its time in Israel. In a society 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 no 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 because of her election by God, she became His mother and did the will of the Father by what we call a prevenient grace. 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 that 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 because God had first loved her. 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, the cause of our joy, because she is 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 is meant to transform 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 was so before us all; we are priests, prophets and kings with and through Him, and Mary was so first of all; we collaborate in our redemption and the redemption of others with and through Him, and Mary did so 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. 

In bread we trust

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 12: 1-8) shows us a dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees who spot the disciples plucking and eating ears of corn on the Sabbath. Jesus answers their objections by citing the case of King David who ate the Bread of the Presence reserved for the priests. He refers also to the case of Temple priests who were held innocent while profaning the Sabbath by their work. The logic of these suspensions of the law, conceded by the Pharisees, is meant to cast a light on their hypocrisy by which they sought to entrap Jesus. More than that, of course, as He concludes: The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.

This gospel is usually approached from the perspective of Jesus’ teaching on epikeia, the jurisprudential principle that enables us to avoid legal literalism by honouring the intentions of the law giver. If my neighbour’s house is burning down, epikeia would allow me to try to get inside to save him, even though on other days of the week, doing that would make me a burglar; the lower law of private property cedes to the higher law of preserving life. It is not that Jesus is a law-destroying revolutionary, but rather that He situates lower laws in the context of higher ones.

But today, let us approach this extract from the gospel of St Matthew by dwelling on the Bread of Presence that David ate. The Bread of Presence consisted of twelve loaves to represent the twelve tribes of Israel, which sat on a golden table inside the Holy Place (not the Holy of Holies), alongside the menorah and the altar of incense. They symbolised God’s care for the twelve tribes and His covenant with them, and at the end of each week they were replaced with new loaves while the priests consumed the old ones. The spiritual significance of each of these details is almost overwhelming.

For first of all, they were bread, that ancient symbol of life, conviviality, and the fruit of labour. Bread tells a human story in its own terms, from the fact it is still made from crushing many individual grains so that they can become one flour, one dough, to the historical accident that bread was once baked in common ovens, as it still is today in poorer parts of the world where families do not have their own stoves. Conviviality means living together in shared joy. Every culture worthy of itself generates such conviviality spontaneously. It is a sign of the morbidity of our contemporary culture that so many of our communities are dead in this regard, for our relations are now almost purely economic, transactional, and the word “community”, a term long honoured more in the breach than the observance, is trotted out only as a comforting lie to cover up the nakedness of our widespread coldness and indifference. Our culture’s departure from this story of bread is a sign there is something humanly awry.

Yet, bread also tells a part of the story of God’s action in the world, from the manna of the desert to the House of Bread – Bethlehem – from where David, the sacred loaf eater himself came, and where Jesus, the Bread of Life, was born. Like Jesus who crafted miracles sometimes literally out of the earth, God speaks to us in all these symbols through which His care for His people is revealed. When Jesus performed His first miracle in Cana, He did not create a public spectacle but, behind the scenes and under the very noses of His hosts and the wedding guests, He saw to their needs, and spared them embarrassment and disappointment, all the while finding in these events a sign of His hour still to come. The Bread of Presence then found itself paralleled again in the feeding of the five thousand where, when the multiplied loaves had done their job, there were still fragments left over to be gathered up (and no doubt later eaten) by those who would become priests of the New Testament. Funny the gospel writers never say what happened to the gathered fragments, but wasn’t it obvious? They were probably shared by the disciples and among the poor over the following days.

The Bread of the Presence, however, symbolised something more profound about the choices Israel made in coming into the obedience of God. The twelve loaves were part of the liturgy of the Temple, an honoured symbol kept in the Holy Place. And thus, they cast in a new light those words of Jesus:

My bread is to do the will of Him who sent me.

The material, physical loaves of the Holy Place had to be replaced with an offering that would not need replacing at the end of the week. When Jesus came, this Bread of Presence, was replaced forever by the bread of His obedience to the Father. Divine obedience is for life, not just for Christmas. Thus, the new bread of the Holy Place is the fiat that Jesus makes to the will of the Father: a fiat at times in joy and a fiat at times in sorrow. When we consume the Bread of Life, we are saying literally that we wish also to eat that bread of obedience to the will of the Father.

This then is the bread that gives life, the bread of eternal conviviality – behold, I come to do your will - not to be confused with the bread that perishes that Jesus denounces in the sixth chapter of St John’s gospel. This bread, which is one with the leavened hypocrisy of the Pharisees, is the bread of self-pursuit, a loaf that is not for sharing, the bread that only resembles bread, like the plasticated loaves we find on the shelves of most supermarkets in our dead towns. And yet, tragedy of tragedies, how we have a taste for such impostor bread, how it pleases our palette even as it rots our gut, the inner self that can only be fed by the bread of the will of the Father.

The lower laws must cede to the higher ones. The law of the Temple ritual ceded to the law preserving David’s life. But since there is a more perfect Temple in the body of the Jesus, the law of sin and wilfulness in our bodies must now cede to the higher law according to which we must choose this new bread, the bread of the Father’s will, the bread of a new Presence by which He is present to us and we through Him are present to each other in His name. Conviviality.

Lord, restore our hunger; revive our appetites that have gorged on the fake bread of disobedience, so that our hearts, like David’s, might sing to you with the new conviviality of the Bread of Life.

From the archives: the humble servant

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23: 8-12) again presents us with a set of aphorisms of the Lord. You are not to be called rabbi, says the rabbi to His disciples. Neither be called instructor, says the instructor of all. And finally comes the greatest of His warnings in this passage: whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

As so often in the gospel, the Lord is here in paradoxical mode. Thus, He often says things that are apparently contradictory, but which express a truth not immediately obvious to our earthly minds. The particular form of paradox in today’s passage is hyperbole, a truth expressed via exaggeration. So, Jesus says call nobody your Father? Did He thus forbid us to call our own fathers “Dad” or our priests “Father”? Not at all. Certainly, St Paul did not think so, for it is he who points out to the Ephesians that all paternity in heaven and earth is named after the Father. So, what does the Lord mean by saying: Call no one Father? Simply, that we should make nobody but the Lord our God our ultimate father, or rabbi, or instructor. We should, in other words, have no strange gods before Him: the god of material or existential security, the god of worldly adulation, the god of fashionable opinion, the god of a self-serving anxiety whose direction we secretly seek after more than we attend to the word of the Lord. How many things do we unwittingly make our “Father” by interiorising their diktats, rather than trusting humbly in the Lord on whom we are meant to cast our every care?

Then comes the final paradox of this passage: whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. These words are mysterious indeed, for they are not to be understood only as an observation on the fate of human decision making. Taken in their moral sense, of course the first part tells us more or less that pride comes before a fall. But what about the second part: whoever humbles himself will be exalted? In another way, these words have not a moral sense but we might say a Christological sense, telling us intimately about our Saviour and His mode of dealing with us:

The greatest among you will be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Now, the words have not so much a moral sense as a historical one, for they evoke the history of our creation, our fall, and our salvation. From the beginning, the Lord was the servant of all, for it was by His labour that we were, and are, constantly brought into being. Was this labour? According to Scripture, so much was it labour that the Lord rested from it on the seventh day. Of course, we know this expression is a human one adapted to our understanding, for God is ever the same and, being pure spirit, does not suffer weariness. It was, therefore, this Servant who, when our first parents exalted themselves and brought themselves down in a humiliating ruin, humbled Himself even more than in his creative labours, poured Himself out in the incarnation, and came to save us. For which reason, again St Paul tells us, He has been given a name which is above all others.

We are reminded again here of the Lord’s call to follow Him. This is not only a following in a moral sense, but also in the sense of how we orient our inner selves. Like Him, we are called to share our very selves, and it is impossible for anybody wrapped in self-exaltation to share themselves in this way. We must, says French philosopher Gustave Thibon, either become like God through our adoration and love, or else we will find ourselves becoming false imitators of our maker; why else did the devil tempt our first parents by promising that they would be like gods?

For us, then, there remains the question of undertaking the great task expressed so often in the invitatory of the office of Matins:

Come, let us worship and bow down,

  bend the knee before the Lord who made us;

for he himself is our God and we are his flock,

  the sheep that follow his hand.

But we cannot be complacent about this. Not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. We must depend utterly on Him in the process of putting to death our every act of self-seeking, which is always an act of self-exaltation. Our preferential option for the self stalks us like our shadow, entwining around our words, our thoughts, and most especially around our unconscious world. In that moment, we cannot appoint ourselves the champion to conquer the hidden armies of our revolt. Then, we are truly dependent only on the One who graciously humbles Himself to step into our flesh and to harrow the very depths of our last stronghold where we have not yet surrendered to His loving mercy. For it is He, the greatest, who makes Himself then the servant of our recovery.

  

From the archives: a seedy business

Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) tells us how Jesus understands His own parable of the sower who went to sow his seed. Yet even this explanation does not exhaust the layers of meaning within it. The parable may apply in different ways to those who, it could be argued, have welcomed the seed and in whom the seed has yielded a harvest. Who among us has fully integrated the seed into our lives?

How do we hear the word of God without understanding? We do so by separating understanding of the faith from our devotions or our spiritual journey. This is arguably an even greater danger for those who have heard God’s call to intimacy and try to respond to it with more or less vigour. St Teresa of Avila preferred a learned spiritual director to a holy one; just think about that for a second. It means she was aware that mystical experience could be misleading without the compass points of the creed in all its depth and richness. In the inner life, while intimate knowledge of God comes through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, our normal progress is a life lived through faith in the mysteries and of the mysteries. Doxa (praise) and doctrine are not opposite poles, but oxen yolked together. Faith is not just conviction but conviction about something. To think of faith only as a conviction of the heart or an engagement of the will is to hear the word of God without understanding. Here, we must become literally disciples: i.e. those who learn.

The second class of people in the sower’s parable can also show themselves among the devout. They receive the seed with joy but fall away when adversity comes. If the first class of the devout suffer from lack of knowledge of the mysteries, might we say that the second class of the devout suffer from lack of self-knowledge? That and perhaps also radicality: self-knowledge because perhaps they thought quite wrongly that their initial joy in the word was proof of the depth of their discipleship; and radicality, because that discipleship requires precisely something much deeper, a greater depth of self-surrender than their current levels of maturity and self-awareness allow for. Did we think we were grown up because people address us as mister and misses?

Even the third class of people in the sower’s parable might be found among the devout in whom the worries of this world and the lure of riches choke the word. For the worries of the world are not just tangible, material goods from which it might be easier in some ways to hold oneself aloof. The worries of the world can be the simple but subtle attachments that we have, for example, to how we are perceived or valued; or our belief that we deserve perhaps some grander task than the one we have ended up with. Yet this kind of fretting is also a blind spot obscuring the fact that our value and dignity in God’s eyes do not come about from what we achieve. Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire, says St Catherine of Sienna. If the world is not ablaze then, it is not because we have materially failed, and certainly not because people have failed to recognise how wonderful we disciples of Christ really are. It is because somehow, somewhere, in some subtle way we have damned up the graces that would flow out of us were we to be faithful.

But, we say, we have not gone in for the lure of riches! Look at our sacrifices! Well, that depends. Perhaps if we collect devotions and spiritual milk-bottle tops like the young now collect tattoos, we do choke ourselves with the lure of riches – riches that do not become a part of our life but lie on the surface and clutter our souls, like our unused kitchen gadgets or, heaven help us, our unread books.

Happily, our lives are a journey, not a fine art. In knowledge of God and knowledge of self, coupled with detachment, the seed of His word might produce more fruit in us yet

The two detachments and the one love

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 10: 16-23) sees Jesus in his role as Teacher or Prophet, the one who comes not only to rule as King, not only to sanctify as Priest, but also to guide and direct, to advise and enlighten, a mission that is complemented by the work of His Holy Spirit. The paradoxes come thick and fast: be wise as serpents but innocent as doves; beware of men, a paradox for Jesus has promised to make the disciples fishers of men, and how can one beware of what one is to fish? And then, those who love us best may despise us most. The prophecy of rejection must have been a shock to the disciples for their naïve Judaic imaginations probably envisaged the triumphant procession of the servants of the Messiah, whereas the Messiah among them prophesied that they would be as abject and unwelcome as Himself. This then is a cold comfort gospel for our contemplation, or is it? Only if we refuse the journeys which Jesus here bids that we take; only if we hear and hear but fail to listen to the melody that underlies it.

Simply put, this gospel calls us into harmony with two detachments: detachment from the self and detachment from others. Why must we be so detached? Are we only meant to be as cold as fish, we Christians? Not at all! Rather, the cause for both detachments is so that neither our love of self nor our love of others impede and stifle our love of God. In fact, we might go as far as to say that only those who do love God, who live in His love, who know themselves and others as beloved of the Father, and who reciprocate that love by His grace and His gift, can know what it is to love themselves wisely, and to love their neighbour as He has loved them.

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth, and he will remind you of all that I have said to you,

declares today’s Gospel Acclamation. That is the foundation of the love I have just evoked. That love is the complete truth: the truth about God, and the truth which we are called to live and to share with others.

And, then, we come to the impediments, the blockages, that hold us back or prevent our progress. But we cannot see them. Lost on the foggy moor of our own mind, we need adversity to bring us to an awareness of what it is we lack.

When they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak.

Why not? Because Christ has us and holds us, even when, perhaps most especially when, we feel most isolated and alone, even in our Garden of Gethsemane moments. What must it be to live those moments not overwhelmed by our own incapacities, but resting in Him who has promised us a kingdom?

Do not worry about how to speak or what to say.

But we worry incessantly, Lord, because we have not yet lost trust in ourselves. We say it is because we do not know what to say, or that there is nothing to say, or that nothing can be said. How often do we feel such things in the maelstrom of absurdity that is the twenty-first century? But our problem will ever be the same: we have been trusting in ourselves too much and not trusting enough in Him. We have taken the obligation to prudence and imagined it was the same as Wisdom. But Wisdom is a higher thing; it is not a human calculation but a divine insight that somehow makes sense; that makes sense because it is the fruit of His love, not of our mistaken self-belief.

But there is another detachment which still remains to come about: detachment from others. Jesus warns us that all our securities may yet be torn from us by the fallibility of men:

Brother will betray brother to death…children will rise against their parents…You will be hated by all men on account of my name.

Here again, the logic is similar to the logic of the detachment from self. We must not be detached because we are cold; rather, we must be detached so that our hearts can burn with the true fuel of love which is the will of the Father. We long for communion, but we too readily forget that our baptism calls us to root all communion in the Communion of Love that is the Blessed Trinity. So fundamental is this to us that this Communion is now to be preferred to all other communions; indeed, it is so fundamental to all communions that every communion not rooted in their Divine Communion is a mere illusion. The whole world could be united, living side by side in a most perfect harmony of sentiment, but if that sentiment were the love of this world’s promises, or the neglect of God, what harmony could it truly offer?

Peace is not peace unless it is first rooted in God’s peace which comes through forgiveness of sins. Concord is only fake concord unless it is rooted first in the reconciliation of the wayward children with their Father in heaven.

And this is why the man who stands firm to the end will be saved: not because stoicism and endurance are the source of our salvation, but because the raging love of God is. And when we love God truly above all things, and trust only in Him, then our love of self and love of our neighbour become what they are meant to be: an imitation of, and participation in, the unceasing and ever flowing love of the Most High.

 

 

 

The look of love

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 9:32-37) sees Jesus cure a demoniac to which the Pharisees respond by concluding He is in league with the devil himself. He goes about Israel, proclaiming the good news, healing those who are sick and reconciling those lost in their sins. Having given this example, His heart is filled with compassion for those He ministers to, and He says to his disciples: The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few..  

On one level, this gospel is especially about the priestly vocation, the vocation to be a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, and to gather in the harvest in due season. No matter the criticisms of Pharisees and others, the priest must pursue the work of the Lord out of compassion for the multitude. Nevertheless, these duties of the priesthood are paralleled by a wider collective duty imposed on all of us, and that we reflect on all too little, to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Parishes are being closed or amalgamated all over our country and in other European countries. Diocesan quangos with multiple MBAs are writing the taglines about being “Ready for mission” or “Sent to bear fruit”, but evangelical bromides can never cover up the corporate failure of self-knowledge. If we lament our lack of priests or the sadly ageing priesthood, we should also collectively lament, first, our failure to honour the vocation that feeds the priestly production line, the vocation of marriage with its call to fruitfulness, and second, our collective sin of omission to hear and obey this command of the Lord to beg for the extraordinary blessing of priestly vocations. If we do not sow with the Carmelites in prayer and sacrifice, we will not reap like the apostles.

In one sense, of course, all vocations are extraordinary. What a thing it is, what a beautiful thing it is, for the Lord to call our name and to say to us: Follow me.

If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

At the root of our personal vocations and the paths we take in our lives is this wider command, the universal call to holiness, to be conformed to the image of Christ, as adopted children of the Father so that He find in us the image of His son.

And yet the priestly vocation includes that conformity to Christ which encompasses His own relationship with His Mystical Body, the Church. People often prefer the language of the “people of God” these days, but that can be a very public and collective sort of phrase. The term the “Mystical Body”, celebrated by Pope Pius XII in his letter Mystici Corporis, says something not only deeply Pauline but also deeply intimate and spiritual, just as the body is intimate and spiritual, the person – the individual - incarnate. Now, the priest, the labourer who is sent to the harvest, shares Christ’s role as the privileged intimate partner of the Mystical Body. For only Christ as high priest, as head of the Mystical Body, ministers to that body, gives to it the spousal gifts of the seven Sacraments, and so helps it become day by day His worthy spouse, and fruitful beyond all measure.

This incidentally is why the priesthood cannot be reduced to a mere social function, to be seized on and instrumentalised by any individual, whether because they are socially privileged, or because of some ambient gender equality that is blind to the mystery that it represents. The sin of clericalism, an excessive reverence for the clergy, is only the opposite vice of anticlericalism, an excessive disrespect for the clergy. Somewhere in the middle stands a proper spiritually anchored and wisely tempered reverence for the priest as an icon of Christ, symbolised so beautifully in the customs of our Syro-Malakara or Syro-Malabar brothers and sisters who kiss the hands of their priests - not as an act of priestcraft but because the priest too is a kind of sacrament, the outward human sign of the inward grace of Christ who acts through him.

Every individual can reflect Christ in some way; this is the universal call to holiness. But just as in the Sacrament of the Eucharist only the foodstuffs of bread and wine can be turned into the body and blood of Christ for our spiritual nourishment, so in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, only a man can be made the icon of Christ's relationship with His spouse, the Church.

And in some mysterious way, the relationship is reciprocal. The priest who has left home and family and brothers and sisters and wealth can, if he lives the mystery of his priesthood in the spirit of Christ, discover that he is repaid a hundredfold in this life. For just as we have a duty to pray for more labourers to be sent into the harvest, so we have a duty to care for the labourers who are already there, men who are both privileged and afflicted by a calling which, according to some, requires of them all to be crucified before the end.

In answer to the many betrayals by priests who have become abusers, we have often heard tell of the serious difficulties of the priesthood. These should not be underestimated, of course. But no vocation can be understood and grasped only by its difficulties. Every vocation has its difficulties. The spirit of a culture of vocation is found rather in the beauty and the truth of every vocation. Perhaps, if we were to understand the beauty of our own vocations, we would live them with greater fidelity. For we love our grumbles and groans. But how much more have we cause to find in the blessed calling which each and every one of us has been given a glimpse of – just a small glimpse – the beauty of our loving God who pours out His heart for every one of us, even to the ultimate sacrifice of laying down His earthly life.

Every vocation then includes a calling to understand His compassion. Instead of looking down at our own misery, we should look up to try to catch in our Master’s eye that eternal compassion, His willingness to look upon the crowds who are harassed and helpless, casting upon them the gaze of a Shepherd who wishes to gather the sheep to Himself. And then, fixing it in our memories, we should go and try to share that same compassion wherever we can.

 

The calm after the storm

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 23-27) offers us a scene that says something both about Christ and about His Church. Jesus and the disciples have boarded a boat and set out across the waters and before long the Lord falls asleep. He awakens to the sight of the disciples panicking at the strength of the sudden storm that has blown up and is tossing their vessel. Jesus then rebukes both the disciples and the wind, the disciples for their weak faith, the wind for its rage, and all becomes calm again to the astonishment of the disciples.

Perhaps we are tempted to see Jesus sometimes as separate from the Church, He up in Heaven or in the tabernacle, the Church over here somewhere. Our limitations in seeing this relationship are a little like the limitations of the early heresies about the incarnation which could not cope with the fact that God had made Himself incarnate in a human nature, true God, true man. He appeared to the eye as a man, and so indeed He was, and yet He was the Second Person of the Trinity. God Himself, walking the earth, He did not merely clothe His appearance in the flesh and garments of a first century Jew from Nazareth, but he really was a Jew from Nazareth, born of a woman, a descendent of many generations. So many of the truths of the faith are a paradox, calling us out from our little reductive schemas and narrow materialism, and urging us to open our minds to a mystery that is beyond us if not for faith. So too is the Mystical Body, His body and yet His believers too.

And so, we come to the Church which is conjured in this gospel scene by the comical image of twelve burly, bearded blokes, wetting themselves in craven fear that the boat will be upended by the waves and they lost. What, even the fishermen, we wonder – although St Matthew was one of the non-seafarers on the crew and treats the disciples here as one body: united, of one mind and heart but gripped in an unholy communion of conformist, lemming-like panic.

Jesus’ judgement upon them when He is woken is swift and decisive: why are you so frightened, you men of little faith? That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it, we might wonder… But then, by this point in the gospel, the disciples had already witnessed countless miracles in Galilee, notably that of the humble leper, the healing of the Centurion’s servant who was not even present, and multiple exorcisms which showed His authority over the world of the spirit. Why then did they have such little faith, they who had been given so much reason to believe? Multiple times in Matthew’s gospel and in the other gospels, Jesus will ask His disciples that simple question: do you not yet understand? Despite all the miracles, despite all the proofs, despite all the light the Lord shone upon them, they misunderstood His teachings, His words, His very identity, and most especially the logic of His sufferings and death.

Yet, ultimately, it does not matter what we know if our hearts are not daily transformed by such knowledge; it does not matter how pure and upright our knowledge of doctrine is if our wills are as cold as the dying embers of a neglected fire. And, so, what we see in the boat during the storm are not men who know nothing of the Lord with every excuse for despair. Rather, we see men who have been given every reason to hope in Him and yet have not risen from a slavery of the heart.

Why are they so frightened? Let us answer for them, for we answer for ourselves: we are so frightened because despite His invitation, our yes is not pronounced from the very depths of our selves; we are frightened because our thank you is drowned out by the constant whataboutism of our unconscious needs and desires (what about safety, what about security, what about suffering, we unconsciously obsess to ourselves); we are frightened because our contemplation is as yet so shallow that we have not yet been transformed in Him sufficiently, our wills and minds, imaginations and senses, rule us still too much, and we cannot yet say with St Paul: I live; now not I but Christ lives in me. O we of little faith!

O Jesus, rebuke the winds and waves of our needs and wilful weaknesses; rebuke the fears that hold us back from your invitation. In the midst of a Church sometimes full of the rage and fury of the demons or else almost becalmed in a whispering chill breeze of infidelity, let us not lose our faith in your power and your loving Heart:

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm,

O still, small voice of calm.

 

 

The cure

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 1-4) shares with us a simple scene that, like so many gospel scenes, is layered with meaning. Jesus had just finished His sermon on the mount and was now pursued by large crowds. A leper approached Him with a vital need: if you want, you can heal me. Jesus first answered the conditional doubt, for indeed He did so wish, before proceeding to heal the man and ordering him to fulfil the law of Moses which ordained that the priests should verify recoveries from leprosy. This scene is a world of trouble and redemption in a few short lines.

First, it is always easier for Jesus to be followed when He comes down from the mountain. We like walking on the flat; we struggle to follow Him to the heights, whether it is to the heights of prayer or the heights of suffering. We should not struggle, then; we should surrender ourselves so that He takes us there. Or rather, we should await His command and His orders, for He may need us elsewhere, for our sake or the sake of others. God, who wishes mercy and not sacrifice, requires obedience and cooperation from us, for that is the currency that really counts; not the actions we heroically imagine for ourselves. We are called to the fruitfulness He desires for us; not the fruitfulness our dissonant needs secretly draw us towards where we are only ever a legend in our own lunchtimes, like a kind of St Walter Mitty.

Then, we see in this passage the approach of the leper with the words: if you want to, you can heal me.  We must not read this line as if the leper is trying to put Jesus on the spot; those who put Jesus on the spot in the gospel usually get short shrift. In the conditional clause here, if you want to, we would be better off hearing a prayer of surrender and of confidence. If you want to means according to your will; if you want to means I recognise who you are, the one who disposes of everything. If you want to in a sense means the same as Thomas’s My Lord and My God. You are the Master, or as the beautiful prayer during the Stations of the Cross has it:

              Grant that I may love you always, then do with me what you will.

How do we know these words carry all these various meanings? Only because Jesus treats them as a humble appeal and not as if the man had tried to corner him.

But then, let’s not be too hasty. The man says: if you want to, you can heal me. Yet the question here is not only whether Jesus desires to heal the man. Lepers were excluded from Jewish society and forced to beg for a living for exclusion meant no work. It is quite possible, however, that not all lepers lived this exclusion as a trial or a suffering. Some of us like dependency; some of us are glad to shelter from responsibility. As long as we can draw on the charity of others, we may be relieved not to shoulder their burdens. Those who suffer draw our pity, but human nature sometimes draws sufferers into selfishness, a moral instinct to try to protect themselves from even more suffering.

This is human nature; we sometimes prefer to suffer than to give something up, to surrender something that in truth we ought to surrender. The French fable writer La Fontaine concludes his fable of the Woodcutter and Death with these famous lines:

Le trépas vient tout guérir ;

Mais ne bougeons d'où nous sommes :

Plutôt souffrir que mourir,

C'est la devise des hommes.

Death cures all / but let us stay where we are / suffering rather than death / is man’s motto.

So, the question for us is not whether Jesus wants us to be healed, but whether we want to be healed? Do we want to surrender to Him all that such a healing will require of us? Do we want to end our life of exclusion and irresponsibility for a life in which our hearts must first break in contrition for our ongoing rebellion, a life then lived in His friendship where we ask Him to join our yes to His in every minute we draw breath, to the glory of the Father? The prison of sin is miserable, but it has its consolations, its comfortable isolation where we can be king of our own dung heap and not suffer the humiliation that comes to visit us from our own imperfection; we fear the crooked cross only because it will oblige us to offer our own crookedness to be straightened out by His grace.

None of this can be done in us without the sacraments either, for just as the leper must show himself to the priests, so we too must go to where the priests offer the sacraments, to where the gifts of the Lord are distributed, to where we can see in tangible form the gift of Himself taking flesh again in our own histories. Then, as in Mary our model, the conception that happens first in our hearts through His inspiration can become real, substantial, and formative in our actions, our words, our lives, and our world.

And, thus in this passage from the gospel of St Matthew, we hear again and again the Lord send His invitation to us each day:

If you want to, I can cure you… What will we answer today?

 

A moody birthday

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 57-66, 80) sees the birth of St John the Baptist. Like all new mothers, Elizabeth’s joy was great, and greater still because she had given up all hope of ever having a child. Then comes a moment of tension: unnamed persons assume that John should be called Zechariah, but they do not see that with this child, a new age is dawning, and customs are about to be overturned. His mother protests: his name will be John. Dismissing her, they turn to Zechariah, and then the truly miraculous begins to unfold: Zechariah, this priest who stands for all that comes before and foreshadows the future Messiah, recovers his speech and pours forth his joyous praise of God in words that Christians throughout the centuries will sing every morning. For this is the dawn of the morning of our redemption, and even though there is work to be done, a way to be prepared that will lead the Messiah to His sufferings and death, we can but greet the morning with joy for the hand of the Lord is with us.

All these events are suffused with three moods that are necessary to sons and daughters of God.

When Zechariah told them that the baby’s name was to be John, his speech returned to him, and, as the gospel says, all their neighbours were filled with awe and the whole affair was talked about throughout the hill country of Judea. Awe is great respect that is filled with wonder. Religion that is so filled with awe it has no room for intimacy is at risk of being cold or servile. Religion that is so fixed on intimacy there is no room for awe is at risk of becoming selfish and manipulative. Awe reminds us that religion is itself a virtue, a part of justice, and it is especially owed to God and His great works. Yet awe is also connected to respect for the mystery of any other person – be they divine or human. Just as we sometimes write our desires onto our image of God, we often write them onto other people, and wonder why they cannot see things as we do. We lack awe and the humility it fosters.

Before the people felt this awe at God’s works, they were left first in a state of astonishment by Zechariah’s confirmation that the baby’s name was to be John; John was not a family name, and its use was, therefore, unprecedented. We too need to awaken our capacity for such astonishment, which likewise made the people speculate about what John would do when he grew up. For God and His ways are so different from our daily round. Astonishment is a capacity for surprise, but fundamentally, it requires a ready willingness for that surprise, an openness to the way of things that lie beyond my ken and beyond my conventions. Conventions are part of every society and are in fact very helpful, but not when they close down our freedom to the surprises of God. Not that God contradicts Himself; we must not confuse the humble feeling of astonishment with a rightful sense of absurdity, although there is a vice common these days of manipulating the rightful astonishment of the Christian soul into thinking that it simply needs to bow before every fashion and fad as if it were a divine surprise and not the work of the demon. The habit of sin too closes our eyes to what might astonish us; perhaps this is why we think of astonishment and innocence as being closely linked. John’s name was a surprise. Jesus’ incarnation was a surprise. Astonishment is, as I say, our readiness to be open to God’s wrong-footing us. G. K. Chesterton ends his essay Orthodoxy with these beautiful lines:

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

If only we were prepared to be astonished at God, perhaps we would perceive this mirth more readily.

And the last mood that suffuses this gospel is that of the joy of St Elizabeth; simple and enduring, unperturbed by the lack of astonishment and the slowness to awe that left her leaders and her neighbours so clay footed. Joy – a fruit of the Holy Spirit and one of the actions of love. Joy - that God had worked a miracle in her life and would subsequently call her son out into the wilderness until the day he appeared openly to Israel. The gospel records nothing of St John’s childhood other than that he grew up and his spirit matured. But can we imagine for a minute that his mother and the mother of his soon-to-be-born cousin never saw each other, especially given that the one had dashed to see the other as soon as she heard news of her pregnancy?

Mary too was filled with joy, and with astonishment and awe. For her joy came from a love so constant its like had never been seen; her astonishment came from an openness to God and His mirthful ways; and her awe issued from the depths of her Old Testament education which taught the Jews to cover their faces in reverence for God, like the Seraphim before the throne of the Almighty.   May Jesus grant us all astonishment, awe, and joy on this solemnity of St John the Baptist. O Mary, teach us to be joyful every moment of our life; teach us to be astonished every moment of our life; teach us to live in awe every moment of our life. Amen.