“Dives, when you and I go down to hell”

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 16: 19-31) is the parable of the rich man and the poor man. The rich man is given no name in the parable, but I follow here the tradition of calling him Dives which means ‘rich’ in Latin. On the surface, this is a simple story in which Jesus points to the dangers of wealth and the mercy of God on those who suffer. Yet it is also a kind of anti- ghost story for it denies the possibility of communication between the living and the dead, at least in this sense: that there are no missions of mercy that originate in hell. Lazarus, who in this life suffered constantly poverty and ill health, now finds all his cares relieved. Dives, who in this life never missed a moment of pleasure and satisfaction, finds himself in torment. There is also a sting in the tail of this parable, for the lesson that Abraham gives to Divas is a foretelling of the unbelief of the Pharisees who, like the family of Dives, will not believe even if someone comes back to them from the dead.

Our last reflection on Tuesday concerned an uncomfortable truth about this life, i.e. corrupt religious authority. Our reflection today concerns an uncomfortable truth about the next life and what used to be called one of the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. Why is Dives in hell? If we read the words of Abraham carelessly, we might imagine that his punishment and the reward of Lazarus are simply meant to balance the scales against their fates in this world. Yet this would be a misunderstanding. Dives did not go to hell because he wore fine linen in this life; Jesus wore a fine tunic that was woven in one piece. Dives did not go to hell because he ate sumptuously; so too did Jesus and in the houses of sinners. So, how do we explain their respective fates?

Lazarus was in the bosom of Abraham, the limbo of the Fathers until the coming of Christ the Liberator, for the same reason that any human being escapes the punishment due to sin: simply because he was the beneficiary of the mercy of God. The parable does not tell us enough about his interior life, but since the Author of the parable is the one who tells us that what makes a man good is what comes from his heart, Lazarus’s virtues do not consist in his having sores and being poverty stricken. Somewhere in his soul, Lazarus belonged to God, longed for God; and like Job, he turned his heart to God despite his ill fortune.

In contrast, Dives was in hell for the same reason that any human being may go there: because he chose creatures over his Creator. But what do I mean by saying he made this choice? Dives’s crimes should trouble us all, for they were not crimes of commission but of omission; not so much about the bad things he did, as about the good things he left undone, the evil that he allowed by his failure to act.

Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults

as the psalmist prays. Jesus will return to the reality of this kind of sin in His foretelling of the last judgement when He says:

insomuch as you did not do these things to the least of my brethren, you did not do them to me.

We cannot see this as a punishment for ignorance, as if God were to punish those who simply do not think. The punishment goes rather to the root of that ignorance, for Dives’s ignorance and his inaction arise from a heart that is turned in on itself. Self-indulgence is only a superficial risk for the wealthy; the greater risk is the inner wounding that comes from selfishness and covetousness, the psychological grasping for the safety that our fallen human nature attributes to our environment and possessions. Nobody speaks today about the figure of the miser who has become something of a caricature. But there is a miser who lurks in every one of us. This miser has the desire to build our safety out of the things of this world and to cling to them tightly, if unwittingly, in an absurd communion of the damned and the perishable.

But the parable of Dives and Lazarus is not a tragedy, even if Dives’s damnation is a calamity for him. In the end, like the thieves crucified either side of Jesus, Dives received his just desserts. There is no consolation for him from the mouth of Abraham, either from the spiritual torment evoked by his unbearable thirst, anticipating the physical punishments of the damned after the Resurrection of the Dead, or the moral torment of his inability to warn his family about the dangers that awaited them.

We rely on the infinite mercy of God, but it seems that this infinite mercy is not an unconditional mercy expressed in the bromides of a thousand liberal do-gooders. There is a time given to us, and then there is a time when there is no more time. There is a day in which we can act, and then the light is lost, and our account must be paid. There is a morning when we will rise for the last time, when we may draft a diary that will have no following chapter, and in which plans laid will not be fulfilled. There is an hour of our responsibility in which we will be required to give our response.

Then, on that day, as on the day of the Last Judgment, let us pray now that we are spared what we may deserve and receive the gift given to Lazarus.

Humbly, I submit …

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 23:1-12) sees Jesus launch a scathing attack on the Pharisees for their hypocrisy. They must be obeyed due to their authority – they sit in Moses’ chair - but their example must be utterly shunned. Jesus lays emphasis on the fact that they burden others with duties that they themselves neglect, but especially that they seek their reward in the admiration or veneration of others. Not so should it be among Jesus’ disciples, neither overburdening each other, nor vying for the first place, but giving way to each other, ever decreasing as Christ increases in them. Resorting to hyperbole, Jesus tells His followers not to seek any honours whatsoever, for in the end only those who humble themselves will be exalted.

There are many lessons on which we could dwell in this gospel passage but let us go to an uncomfortable one today. For this gospel is a commentary on what direction our path should take in the face of corrupt religious authority. The Pharisees were the keepers of the law and readily reminded others of how they were failing in that regard. Yet their rigidity and pedantry were only a secondary fault. Their primary fault was in defacing the image of God in themselves and warping it in others, even as they feigned to serve Him. Yes, this was a matter of hypocrisy, but there are many hypocrites out there whose peccadillos are known to them alone. In the case of the Pharisees, their faults were obvious and public, and there they were, acclaiming themselves the voice of the divine while preening and congratulating themselves on looking so holy and so refined. Both saintliness and devilry proceed by imitation: either we become perfect like our heavenly Father, remembering at all times our lowly status as disciples, or we arrogate to ourselves privileges that do not belong to us, in imitation of the Father of Lies. The devil, says St Jerome, is the ape of God i.e. his insincere imitator.

Thus, corrupt religious authority, which has the appearance of godliness but departs from it in tone, manner, or substance. And let us not indulge in the fantasy that its presence is limited to a few books of Scripture and the remote and misty depths of history. The story of the Church is uncomfortably filled with the ranks of Pharisees in every generation, betraying their duty to reflect the image of God to others, from the traitor who was first appointed within the ranks of the apostles, to those who turned the church of Corinth into a chaotic community; from Pope Alexander VI who hosted notorious orgies to Pope Leo X whose excesses finally stirred Luther’s temper to breaking point; and more recently, from clergy who have destroyed the innocence of the little ones by a depravity that is itself a profound mockery of sexuality, to the religious superiors who wreck subordinates with their destructive models of leadership and the burdens of their own inner wounds. Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, a play which is all about the abuse of authority, found the right formula for such individuals:

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.

Incidentally, Pharisees would not prosper were it not for a band of individuals who stand, as it were, between them and the people, who flatly refuse to accept that the Pharisees are corrupt or wrong, either out of wayward respect, or out of wayward charity, or out of an unregulated sense of their own need for safety. Yet they too become in their turn Pharisees, or at least pale imitators of the holy and humble restraint that filled St Catherine of Sienna, even as she warned Pope Gregory XI. Prophets speak truth to power, and we are all baptised priests, prophets, and kings.

Yet this passage in the gospel today also offers a lifeline to every Pharisee and to those who look on in horror at their actions.

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

How often has it been said, by saint after saint, that the true foundation of the spiritual life is humility? Humility, the virtue by which we recognise that we are hummus of the earth:

Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.

But hummus is not a poor soil; it is a dark, rich, nutrient dense material, made of decomposing plant and animal matter. In that sense, it is a surprisingly apt metaphor for us, for our self-knowledge is like the breakdown of all that happens to us, all that we experience, as we ruminate on God and on our lives in the light of the gospel. With humility’s energy, we grow, please God, day by day, in an awareness of how much we depend on God, of how weak we are on our own, of how much real life comes not from ourselves but from His seeds planted in us that long to spring forth with new growth and fruit in abundance.

Humility is then the only answer to the Pharisees and to those who are corrupt in the exercise of their religious authority. For humility is integrity, as is daring to speak the name of evil when we are faced by it. Humility is, in other words, the surest way to keep a grip on the truth, and not to be satisfied with any of its many phoney replacements.

This is a lesson which is good for us, regardless of what level of authority we may possess. In this regard, we can read and reread the words that Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest, wrote about the differences between St Francis and Martin Luther in the following terms:

It is quite possible that Saint Francis of Assisi was no less disgusted than Luther by the debauchery and simony of prelates. We can even be sure that his suffering on this account was fiercer, because his nature was very different from that of the monk of Wittenberg. But Francis did not challenge iniquity; he was not tempted to confront it; instead, he threw himself into poverty, immersing himself in it as deeply as possible along with his followers. He found in poverty the very source and wellspring of all absolution and all purity. Instead of attempting to snatch from the Church all her ill-gotten goods, he overwhelmed her with invisible treasures. And under the hand of this beggar the heaps of gold and lust began blossoming like an April hedge…

 

Ask, seek and knock

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

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Today's gospel (Matthew 7: 7-12) gives us another extract from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus commands His listeners to ask God for what they need. At the same time, He assures them that they will receive what they ask for. To prove this, He reminds them that no parent refuses food to a child who needs it, and that since God is so much better than them, He is bound even more to do good to his children. Likewise, as God is good to them, so they must be good to others.

What is this gospel saying to us today? Sometimes, if we look at our prayers, it seems that we think that this passage is Jesus’ invitation to us to write the Father a Dear Santa letter.  We even secretly hope that since in our estimation we have been very, very good, the good Lord should really do the right thing and answer our prayers. I am not saying that we think these things consciously, but do they not look like this in the back of our mind, revealed perhaps by that niggling resentment that arises when what we so hoped or prayed for does not materialise?

Yet this is not the meaning of Jesus' words today. His words offer us so much more than Dear Santa ever could. At the heart of His message are these words:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

Ask for what? we wonder. Ask for the Kingdom of God; this is what Jesus had just told them a few moments before: Seek first the Kingdom of God. We seek then, and it is His righteousness that we will find. And when He bids us knock, there is only one door that He intends for us to approach.

Can we not, therefore, ask for the temporal and material things that we need? This anxiety too Jesus answered just a few moments before:

Do not be anxious about your life, what you should eat or what you should drink, nor about your body, what you should put on.

Of course, we should ask, but only with our eyes on this other, wider horizon. Sometimes, our human pains are great, but even then they are a reminder that we have here no abiding city. We stand in the material world and in so many ways belong to it. Our sinful human nature inclines us, likewise, to choose the privileges and pleasures that other creatures can offer us, rather than the happiness that God holds in store for us. And in all these ways, we stop up our ears to the call, the vocation, that echoes incessantly around us. We are dupes for the fool's gold of temporary satisfaction and misuse those gifts that bring us to the eternal shore. All of us could say these words with Saint Augustine of Hippo:

Before thy eyes, O Lord, we bring our sins, and with them compare the stripes we have received. If we weigh the evil we have done, we find what we suffer to be much less than what we deserve.

And yet, at every moment, we hold the solution in our hands, and here it is in today's gospel:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

What are these words of Jesus if not His simple invitation for us to be sensible of our burdens and to come to Him to seek our rest? What should we ask for but His help? What should we seek but Him? On whose door should we knock but heaven’s door? If we seek for a salve to ease the pains of all our anxieties and human frustrations, is it not to be found here in this command of Jesus: ask me?

For He knows full well that all our misguided searching or mistaking the things of this world for our destiny is a sign that beneath the ugly agendas we have given ourselves, there can be discerned all the promise that He associated with us from the moment of our conception. He knows us already by name. And He calls and calls us continually to die with Him so that we might rise with Him. When Jesus commands us to ask, He is in fact telling us to answer Him. For we only seek Him because He has first sought us. We only ask after His name because He has been asking everywhere for us. And we only knock at His door in answer to the knock that He gave at ours.

Liberty, equality, patriarchy

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 6: 7-15) sees Jesus teaching the disciples how to pray. In this scene, we hear for the first time the words of the Our Father, the Lord’s prayer, as it is called. We listen again to the seven petitions in which Jesus formulated our dependency on the Father in heaven. And finally, we hear Him underline at the end the parallel structure of forgiveness. We cannot ask forgiveness if we ourselves do not forgive. In that case, let forgiveness be done on earth as it is in heaven, for He is not only our Father but the judge of the universe.

How many petitions could Jesus have included in this prayer! Could He not have had His disciples pray for the blessing of always following Him, or always being born again each day in the Spirit, of always being perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect? No doubt He could. Yet in many ways, all such petitions are already summed up in the petition He gave us. For what is it to follow Him and to be born again in the Spirit if not for the kingdom to come in our hearts?

Still, there is another logic in these petitions that comes from their order in this august prayer and through which we experience once again the pedagogy of the Father. Adopted by God in Christ, we are taught by the first petition to call upon God as our Father. So familiar are we with this idea that we forget the remoteness of the gods in the old pagan religions – remote, that is, unless they were coming to earth on some self-serving adventure of their own or else to trade favours with useful, favoured humans. In Judaism, in contrast, the benign tenderness of God is a tangible thing, as is suggested by the Song of Songs alone. But the emphasis remains on the distance that separates us from God: Uzzah is struck dead for touching the ark of the covenant, and even the High Priest could only enter the Holy of Holies once a year. Now, by Jesus’ own invitation, God becomes our Father – Abba in Aramaic, the word for Daddy. There is the first logic of the gospel: we are invited to the feast to celebrate our return to the arms of our loving Father who is in heaven. Christianity is a homecoming, a reconciliation, but only for those who recognise they are far from home and stand in need of reconciliation.

Thereafter, in the Our Father we honour His name. Who among us offers the prayer of praise as much as we ought? It is the one prayer the angels never tire of which is why their example is held up for us in each Preface at Holy Mass. This is not just a rhetorical flourish before the Eucharistic Prayer; God our Father is also the Lord of all, the One who is above those who are not, to paraphrase His words to St Catherine of Sienna. He is the One on whom all are dependent for existence, even those who deny Him, even – mystery of mysteries - the very devil himself. Holy be the name of the Lord then, and here the Old Testament can teach us much by its legacy of reverence and humility before the ineffable God for whose kingdom we pray and whose will we beg to be done.

For now, we move from God to His creation where we discover the great laws of alignment and communion in His will. Creation is not a world of chaos without order; rather its intrinsic structure points towards the Intelligence who orders it continually; who holds it in being; and in whom all Creation fulfils its purpose. This is the coming of the kingdom, the realisation of God’s purposes in the order of Creation and in the human order – political, social, and individual. Psychological freedom involves the freedom to sin. But authentic freedom, a freedom which is consistent with its own grounding in God’s being, is not freedom to sin but freedom to use our powers to choose what is good, i.e. to return to God

For when He evokes the will of the Father, Jesus is already hinting at the task of redemption and His incarnation. Mankind had sinned and destroyed the order of God, but by the will of God a path of salvation was reestablished:

And He who might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy.

And, so deep was the logic of that reordering that Jesus said the will of His Father was the very bread He lived on. Not my will by thine be done.

Thereafter, all the other petitions of the Our Father are further petitions of alignment with His holy purposes: His purposes for our material good and our daily bread; His purposes for reconciliation which cuts both ways between God and man and among men; His purposes for our spiritual safety which we obtain through the trial of temptation where God alone can deliver us from the hands of the evil one.

One of the most sinister tendencies in contemporary culture is the contempt for patriarchy; not that men have not been abusive, yet what we might call patriophobia is, so to speak, an attempt to throw out the father with the bathwater. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But in a return to our Father in heaven, there is the hope that fatherhood on earth can be redeemed along with all the other elements of redemption. Of course, there is a lot of hypocrisy spoken about equality too, but it is often the way that those who feel themselves most hurt by patriarchy are the very ones who unwittingly reassert power in some other form, backed up now by their own grievances. What would it take for us all to realise our own humble condition before the Father and Lord of all?  

Jesus is not ultimately a revolutionary so much as a restorationist, not to restore human dreams of phoney glory and habits of subtly abusive power, but to build sure paths for all to return to the glory of God and the harmony of creation from which they fell by sin. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Saying yes to death

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9: 22-25) offers us one of Jesus’ starker prophecies: the foretelling of His passion and death. It also contains an explanation of the implications of one of His first commands to the disciples: follow me. Follow me in living…well, why not, Lord? we reply…Follow me to my death…hmm, did we hear that right, Lord? The sufferings of the Lord will be multiple: rejection, slaughter, but then… He will be raised up. We are likely not to hear this last part, not least because Jesus punctuates it with the paradoxes of our discipleship: whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Why so much loss? we wonder.

After the rigours of yesterday’s fast, maybe we crave an easy time on the first morning. Some might think they are being humble by not aspiring to too much this Lent: the lower you aim, the less distance you can fall, perhaps? Given the paradoxes of Christianity, it might be that the lower you aim, the wider you miss.

Some may even think of Lenten idealists as they would of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s hero in the famous poem:

The shades of night were falling fast

When through an alpine village passed

A youth who bore, mid snow and ice,

A banner with this strange device,

Excelsior.

If what happened to him happens to Lenten enthusiasts, the risk is that they end up frozen by their own idealism and the bitter winds of pride.

The gospel here, however, is neither idealistic nor bitter.

It is not idealistic because Christ is not an ideal type, but a real person of flesh and blood. He does not invite us to be guided by higher aspirations, like Wadsworth’s youth, but by an inspiration that comes close to the centre of His being: His eternal communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit that pours forth with a torrent of love to His creation and His creatures. And this communion is sweet not bitter, moreover, because it is not secured through our all-conquering elan. Rather, it comes to us as a gift from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the Holy Spirit, overflowing into us through our redemption and sanctification.

So, why must this sweet communion seem so bitter to us, at least until the moment of resurrection? Why is it only reached along the paths appointed by this dreadful prophecy? Because since our fall in the Garden of Paradise, our only way back is through the Garden of Gethsemane. Since our betrayal of God’s friendship before the Tree of Knowledge, the only road home takes us by via the Tree of the Cross.  Since we tried to take our destiny into our own hands, we can only recover through recognising we are in his Hands. As the poet says:

   Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

   'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

   I am He Whom thou seekest!’

Francis Thompson could equally have written:

   'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

   It is thou whom I seekest!’

For in entering the desert of Lent, we do nothing for the Lord but attend to a call He has already sounded; we mirror the gesture of an already proffered hand that bears on it the mark of the nails.

If we can add to our cooperation a COLWelian skip of joy in our step, all the better. It is not easy to die on the Cross under whatever guise it comes to us this day (stresses, strains, losses, pains). But if we think of it as dying in His arms – His arms outstretched caressingly – then maybe, like Mary our model, we can say yes; yes just this once, as if answering an offer of marriage; yes, yes and thank you this one day and every one of the moments of our life to the end.

The truth of self-insufficiency

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5: 17-37) presents us with a series of injunctions from Jesus who places His demands at the centre of the new law. Be perfect as you heavenly Father is perfect, He tells them, but the details of this injunction are even more startling. Henceforth, justice to others is no longer a matter of merely respecting their life. It is also a matter of not even being angry with them, of exercising patience, i.e. our capacity to bear with others. Purity is not to be thought of only as the avoidance of adultery but also as the purity of mind and heart where even our feelings and imaginations are shaped by a virtuous balance. Finally, truthfulness cannot be contained simply by speaking the truth, so much as in being above the need to swear to one’s veracity. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, but Jesus’ followers are supposed to be intrinsic truthtellers.

When we distil these commandments to their bare outlines, they sound like a heavy burden. There is indeed a way of keeping the commandments which is not only wrongheaded but wrong-hearted. This was in part the sin of the Pharisees who only judged things by their appearances. Nevertheless, the heart can go wrong not only when it seeks to seem good rather than to be good, but also when it attempts to meet the challenges of the law by its own resources. If the sin of the former is hypocrisy, the sin of the latter is self-sufficiency. James and John sometimes exhibit hypocritically skin-deep virtue, losing their temper to the point that Jesus called them the Sons of Thunder. Peter, in contrast, is the patron of self-sufficiency, declaring his undying adherence to the Lord until the moment of trial brought a bitter defeat. As he then learned, the burdens of patience, purity, and truthfulness are all the more momentous when we face them all alone.

But this is why no part of the gospel can be read in isolation from the rest. Jesus’ commandments in this gospel extract only make sense when connected with the rest of His teachings, not least the surprising lesson of the Good Shepherd: learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart. Or, If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink – if by thirst we understand the thirst for justice in the disciple who wants to carry out his Master’s wishes.

The madness of our self-sufficiency – for madness it is – comes even more to the fore in the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper. There, we see that our path of perfection is in point of fact a path towards union. Not only does Jesus promise to dwell with the Father in those who love Him, He also affirms that we are only the branches to His vine. St Paul will say a similar thing later on by calling us all members of Christ’s body. We are not our own, nor are we Romantic heroes who strike a blow for rugged authenticity. Paul longed to be dissolved and to be with Christ, and so should we all, no longer clamouring for our hour in the spotlight, acclaiming our “I” before the world, but surrendering to the author of our existence our readiness to receive the incomparable gift of Himself.

There within, when all the noise dies and God has sculptured His silence within, then, we might know what it is to have the Lord come and pronounce His own Fiat within our hearts and minds, to speak His thank you to the Father in our own members in justice, patience, and truthfulness. 

Drink l’chaim to life

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

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Today’s gospel (John 2: 1-11) gives us that classic gospel episode of the wedding at Cana. Mary, an honoured guest at the occasion, sees they have no wine. She and Jesus exchange remarks that indicate they had a shared understanding of the symbolism of both ‘wine’ and His ‘hour’ that John does not explain for the reader. Next, we hear Mary’s imperious command: do whatever He tells you. Hardly have the servants followed Jesus’ instructions than the feast is suddenly flowing with wine again, to the mystification of the caterers and the joy of the guests. It is a foreshadowing of the feast of the Lamb that St John will relate later in his Book of Revelation.

This episode is one of the few times we hear of Our Lady being present in the adult life of Jesus, and it is certainly the most dialogue that we get from her. And what dialogue! What does she mean when she turns to Jesus and says, They have no wine? The plain meaning is that the wedding guests had drunk the feast dry of course. Yet Our Lord's reply suggests another level of meaning, understood by both of them: Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. Woman, as we know, is a little like the French expression 'Madame'; it is a title of honour. But what about My hour has not yet come? Clearly, He is not talking about the wine, as she appeared to be. But when we read the next verse, we understand that she knew perfectly what He meant: His mother said to the servants, Do whatever He tells you. Mary and Jesus move thereby between different levels of meaning in their own conversation. It is a moment of intimate exchange for them and insight for us. This is what happens when a saint's heart (Mary's) is so deeply fused to God's will (her Son's) that the communion between them tells its own tale.

We owe this gospel anecdote to the observant St John who was present at the wedding feast. Marvellously, he was close enough to hear this dialogue, or one of the interlocutors repeated it to him later on. Many years ago, someone of my acquaintance used to say mischievously that this scene was all about wine, women and song, and these are the reasons why.

The wine in Cana evokes both about our physical and spiritual needs. The wedding hosts physically lacked wine, and Mary was kind enough to notice their embarrassment. What then is the spiritual meaning of wine? We can only grasp that when we note the meaning of Jesus' hour: the appointed hour of His sufferings, the hour he remarks upon on the night of Holy Thursday, the hour of darkness but also the hour of redemption. If what the wedding guests lack is what Jesus can obtain in His hour, then the spiritual meaning of the wine is grace and salvation; its meaning is the work of love and the fruit of love, for God so loved the world.... The COLW prayer after Holy Communion turns this fusion of wine and eternal love into an act of love returned: 

May COLW be a little grapevine in your pure hands to quench the thirst of Jesus.

In this image Mary helps us return the eternal love shown to us by God into a love that returns to God. It is symbolized in this prayer by the fruit of the vine which itself will be taken by Jesus at the Last Supper to become the sacramental sign of His precious blood. And just as the juice of grapes comes flooding from the winepress, so the blood of Jesus will come flooding from the cross to shed His blessings far and wide.

After the wine of the scene, the Woman is of course Mary who tells the servants at the feast: Do whatever He tells you.  I wonder if these are about the only words Mary ever addresses to any servant of Christ. As we would say these days: Just do it! Or to put it another way: fiat - let it be so.  When we utter the summary of the COLW charism Mary teach us always to say yes to the Lord we are in effect saying: Mary, take us always to Cana to serve the Lord. To which she no doubt replies: Do whatever He tells you.

Finally, in this scene, if we listen carefully, there is also song. The only recorded time in the gospel that Jesus sang is on Holy Thursday when He and the disciplines walked from the Upper Room to Gethsemane. And yet I can only imagine this scene in Cana being full of song: l'chaim, l'chaim to life! But not only that. Song is one of the age-old human expressions of celebration: it is a sign of deep joy. It is also - and let's be plain about this - one of the notable signs that people have been drinking. Nobody who hears singing late at night in the street would think that the singers had just been downing lemonade or Earl Grey tea. Is it irreverent to think of Jesus facilitating a boozy wedding feast? No doubt some would think it is. Yet Providence could easily have arranged for it to be the food, not the wine, that failed in Cana, and Jesus could have rustled up a magnificent feast, as He does later in the gospel. Jesus too sings L'chaim to life: human and divine life.

The wine, Woman, and the song and thus all linked. At the request of the Woman, Jesus provides the wine - the love, the grace, the salvation - and we can only imagine the rousing choruses that broke out when that excellent wine was shared around. The wine - the love, the grace, the salvation - produces its effects in the hearts of the guests, and filled now with joy, the guests could only have responded accordingly. In the Gregorian chant setting of the Communion verse of this day - which uses the steward's words to the bridegroom: You have kept the best wine till now - the music leaps around vigorously when the steward speaks, as if he too is already showing the inebriating effects of the excellent wine. Is this not because, as St Augustine observes, only the lover sings? 

The conclusion, therefore, is simple. If we wish, like the disciples, to be taken to the eternal banquet, we had best look like we have a taste for wine (love and salvation), "woman" (Mary's obedience) and song (the return of love for love received). Indeed, we should indulge as frequently as we can!

PS The acquaintance who inspired this reflection lost his way very badly; I can only surmise it was because he did not follow his own advice about wine, woman, and song. Please pray for Benny. 

 

Of salt and light

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

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Today's gospel (Matthew 5: 13-16) sees Jesus deliver a teaching that is all about the self-awareness of the disciple. Jesus addresses His disciples with two metaphors: you are the salt of the earth, and you are the light of the world. The stakes of self-awareness enter into the equation when He invites the disciples to reflect on whether they are faithful to these challenges of discipleship: let your light shine before others. Self-awareness and an awareness of others that is oriented towards their good, not one’s own.

In both cases - salt and light - it is a matter of balance. On the one hand the salt must not be tasteless. Salt induces the sense of taste precisely by stimulating the sensitivity of taste buds. If food is not excessively salted, what we taste is the food that is enhanced, not the salt. In the case of the disciples, what is interesting is that Jesus calls them the salt of the earth. God made the earth and everything in it: every joyous thing - from the scent of a delicate flower to the pleasures of marital union - is His gift. But sin alienates as from every good thing, and it is only within the framework of our relationship with Almighty God that we can rediscover the truth of things, even of ourselves. In this sense, discipleship must itself be a journey of incarnation in which divine grace reshapes the fabric of the world and the fabric of our lives in it according to His image. When the Holy Spirit moves the Gift of Knowledge in us, we read deeply into things of the earth the imprint of the finger of God. Beyond the physical appearances lie the mysteries of the love that conceived and created everything around us. Perhaps, if we are faithful, others too will discern that mystery through what they see in us: in that perspective, we can be the salt that awakens them to the mystery just waiting for them.

But I said above that this is a matter of balance, and perhaps this is better seen in the second metaphor of the gospel: you are the light of the world. On Ash Wednesday, we will hear Jesus tell us to hide ourselves away when we pray and do penance. In today’s gospel, we hear Him command the opposite: let our light shine before men. In other words, just as salt must be balanced, so too must light. We must not hide away unnecessarily; even Jesus chose his moments to speak but sometimes fled the crowds and would not disclose His intentions. Not to hide our light is a matter of just being who we are. While this commands integrity, it also requires discretion. Jesus’ command is to be the light of the world, but there is a difference between being the light of the world and trying to shine that light directly into someone’s eyes! This differs according to context and individual. Some people are ready to look for the light; yet others are so accustomed to darkness that a rude illumination is as likely - if not more likely - to provoke them to screw their eyes up tight, rather than opening them.

While being the salt of the earth requires the Gift of Knowledge, being the light of the world requires the movements of the Gift of Counsel: the gift of knowing when and how to intervene, of when to echo the words of Jesus and when to emulate His silence. The divine gifts we cannot use of our own accord. All we can do is beg the Holy Spirit to move them in us; all we can do is try to remove every obstacle in us to their movement, readying ourselves to be docile instrument in the hands of the Master. Even then, only He can truly prepare us for that service which we are called to give. We must beg from him even our beggar’s voice, as Fabrice Hadjadj says.

Then, both we and those for whom we aspire to be both salt and light may be able one day to give praise together to our Father in heaven.   

 

A dangerous lack of self-knowledge

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

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6: 1-6) sees Jesus back in his hometown, preaching as He did elsewhere, but finding the people incredulous. After all, they knew Him, did they not? He was just Jesus, the carpenter’s son. They knew his nearest and dearest relatives. What on earth, they wondered, did He think He was up to, swanning around the place talking like a prophet? And so, Jesus worked few miracles there, and turned to other villages instead.

              In the middle of this scene, there are at least two mysteries that deserve reflection, and that give us cause for being humble. The first is that, often, the hardest thing to evangelise within us is the thing that is closest and most familiar to us. We take it for granted that we know ourselves, that we cannot be surprised by ourselves. Here, Jesus is among His own people who find it impossible to accept that they had misunderstood such a familiar figure, one of their own. They were wedded to the familiar so much – they had problematized it to such an extent– that to see its mystery was beyond them, as it is often beyond us. Affirming command of our surroundings, the sense of knowing our nearest and dearest: these things are part of our security. We do not like to think the unknown can get so close to us. It upsets our sense of safety; we are unprepared for its strangeness. But lo and behold, here is the Unknown among us, and unless our hearts are ready for it, we do not turn to face the mystery, and, by the same token, the mystery does not bring us the light we need. Our lack of awareness then should keep us humble; without humility, we risk letting the unknowns remain unknown.

              While this first lesson is an uncomfortable one, the second lesson is sobering. Why doesn’t Jesus just try harder with the Nazarenes? Surely, the thing to do in the face of such incredulity is to perform the big miracles. That way, they will believe, won’t they? Where does this refusal to go the extra mile come from in the Lord? After all, He has come down to earth for them; why not just grant them a glimpse of the power that lies within to defeat their resistance? Or why not organise some tables and chairs and conduct a conversation in the Spirit with the villagers, a pre-evangelization jamboree? He spends half the night talking to Nicodemus.

              To a great extent, the Lord’s choices in this moment are a mystery to us. Yet, perhaps it is something to do with His timing. Some people suppose that everyone else should share their culture with its sensibilities and customs. Others make a similar assumption that everyone lives in the same historical moment. Be wary of those who speak of the ‘modern world’, as if the modern world were as identifiable as a piece of self-assembly Ikea furniture or a flip calendar. Some of us are simply not the contemporaries of others; our mentalities, our virtues and vices smack of another age that only partially shares the contours of our own. For some of us, the parochialism of the present day is as dark as any of the supposed dark ages, while those who boast of their fresh innovations are unwittingly pale imitators of yesterday’s fashions. Yet the moment we live in is defined less by our preferences than by our unconscious biases. As we have said already, we can be strangers to ourselves.

The Lord knows all this. Nazareth will have another moment, but it will not be now. Now, the Lord will go and preach elsewhere. Like the first mystery, this second mystery then is another reason to remain humble lest we miss the Lord’s passing, the moment that God has chosen to intervene in our lives.

Jesus passed on, therefore, to other villages, but I wonder if, before He left the area, He looked back on that village of His youth and shed a tear or two over its resistance, saying:

If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.

             

             

Of sorrows and joys

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5: 1-12) gives us so many criteria by which we can identify those who belong to God: happy are the poor in spirit, happy the gentle, happy those who mourn, happy those who hunger…In a way this is the counter agenda to so many of the values that prevail around us: happy are the successful, happy are the comfortably well off, happy are those who know how to look after their own interests first, happy are those who express themselves... Jesus’ criteria are self-effacing, turned towards God and neighbour; the counter proposals of the world are self-seeking, turned towards the ego, even when ostensibly focused on others, like the people who limit their families so the children can “have everything”.

Yet, for all the tension between these two sets of values, it is the last criterion of Jesus that is the most challenging for us. “Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you … Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” It is not our nicer virtues that are the deepest proof of where our hearts are turned. Anyone can be enthusiastic for the pleasant or even the generous dimensions of the gospel - feeding the poor, being a peacemaker, showing mercy: accolades for such actions are given to secular saints, as well as religious ones.

Yet, these qualities do not quite get to the roots of our heart. Ultimately and regardless of our state in life, the following of Christ grows out of an act in which we give ourselves totally to God and wherein God becomes our joy. The fiat of sorrow, which we are required to say in the face of persecution, comes out of the fiat of joy which is the fruit of our love for Him. There where our hearts are, there will be our treasure also. In today’s gospel, Jesus is not saying we should be happy because of the abuse, but rather we have an additional cause to be happy when persecution comes and does not rob us of what we treasure most… But what if it does?

Insofar as persecution takes our joy and robs us of peace, perhaps that is the measure of how far we have to go yet before we are truly united to Him; of how much we must long and pray for that union with him. According to the great French Dominican and master of mysticism Fr Garrigou-Lagrange, in Jesus on the cross desolation and perfect peace and joy dwelt together. In contrast, if suffering bends us all out of shape and traumatises us, perhaps that is because we are not yet fully surrendered to God and to the Father’s forming action. We may think we love the people around us, but the people we really love are those we refuse to be separated from, despite our suffering, despite what their love costs us. It is not the suffering that reveals who we are, therefore, but the steadiness of our hearts when the suffering comes: grace and joy under pressure.

Another gospel parable that illuminates these Beatitudes is the story of the man who found a pearl in a field and went away and sold everything he had to buy the field. We think too easily about the pearl in this parable, of what a great pearl it must have been: literally a pearler! But what lies on the other side of the parable – the untold story - is everything the man sold in order to obtain the field with the pearl. What did he give up? What treasures did this man part with to obtain that pearl? How angry was his wife that he was selling up the family possessions? What a fool did his neighbours consider him? How much pity did he endure from his drinking buddies?

But he had found the pearl of great price. The questions of those around him made no sense or were only fragments of an older story that was no longer the measure of his life and of his possessions. The pearl - a symbol of union with God - was now, he realised, everything he could ever desire or need in this world. 

The man was standing on a different horizon. And so must we.

Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you…for this is how they persecuted the prophets before you.