A fear that is not fear

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging for gold

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From darkness to light

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

From the archives: Martha's mistake

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Luke 10: 38-42) offers us the famous scene in which we learn practically nothing of the teaching Jesus delivered! Instead, we hear the story of a harried woman run off her feet, feeling like she is the butt of everyone’s whims and like she has been let down by her supposedly lazy sibling. We do hear one lesson from the Lord, however: that Mary, Martha’s sibling, has chosen the better part and will not have it taken from her.

We know Martha learned deeply from this experience. We know this for when later came the grief of her brother’s death, it was she who had the composure to talk to Jesus first of all. She had seen by then the one thing necessary: the call to be in the presence of the Lord with all that that implied.

Martha was so hurried and so busy in her own house. But the question is: what was she seeking? Ostensibly, she sought the comfort and the refreshment of her guests. Martha was perhaps what some people call a “feeder”, one whose love language could be expressed in the care and the craft of the kitchen and in the triumphantly flourished plate of culinary dainties. But there was only one thing necessary.

Martha was so intent on this agenda of her own creation that it led her into mindreading. How do we know? Listen again carefully to the words she addresses to Jesus:

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?

Lord, do you not care? Thus do we all try to mindread the Mind of the Eternal One. It is not just that Mary is not helping; it is not even that Jesus has not yet spoken to correct Mary’s misbehaviour. Martha has gone one step further and read into Jesus’ failure to act an indifference that piques her annoyance. Lord, do you not care…?

Martha’s first sin may have been vanity in seeking the approval of her guests, or it may even have been resentment at judging her sister’s inaction. But where does it lead if not to the hopeless, the futile, the sterile attempt to squeeze the living God into the space and scope of her own desires and expectations? Lord, do you not care…? Martha, Jesus might have replied, do you not think?

Yet Jesus answers this question not by contradicting her assumption but by holding up a mirror to her soul: by showing her that what lay behind her actions was not care but carelessness. We have come to think of anxiety only as a psychological condition; but here we see that it may also have a moral root in a lack of purity of intention, an almost wilful lack of peace, in a failure to encounter the burdens of the day in a spirit of service: not where can I do good but where do I best please the Lord? There is all the difference here between the ethics of Christianity and its ethos. It is not really possible to do good (small g) unless in doing so we are seeking the Good (capital G); every other action falls in some way short of our calling.

Yet, Martha is not attentive to these things, for her own drives have gone unexamined. She has not learned to question her apparent diligence; her pride will not permit it. She has not learned to take a step back and remember that, whatever the day brings, God has a plan; that God plants an angel chorus at every turn of our day to cheer us on, if only we will learn to open our hearts to their song of perpetual adoration to the glorious Trinity.

Martha was rebuking the Lord for failing to sink to her level, to shrink His expectations until they were as petty as hers, until they sought her satisfaction. In return, Jesus gently rebuked her for failing to rise to His expectations, for not reflecting His largesse, or for not seeking above all merely to please the Lord, her God. This is the one thing necessary, the upper room, the heights of Tabor, the crux of the Cross before Jerusalem, from which transcendent place we are called to cast our blind eyes upon the world and receive His sight: the grace to rest our eyes on the Heart of the One, and the grace to see all things and people as He sees them.

Martha dictated to Jesus: Tell her then to help me. How often we dictate to Jesus, sometimes in bold statements, and sometimes by passive-aggressive non-cooperation! And yet Jesus offers no counter command in this instant. Rather, He instructs her heart by pointing out the value of what Mary had done, the value of the path that Martha had not yet found.

It was not that Mary was lazy, although we can imagine that when this exchange was over, she offered to take her sister’s role while she, Martha, sat at the Lord’s feet herself:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

But there, in the final analysis, as Martha had to learn, is where all true action for God’s kingdom must begin and end: not in schemes and plans, not in busyness and not-enough-time-for-youism, not in initiatives and campaigns, not in mission statements, committee meetings, or any of the hideous metaphors that assault us with their pious idealisation of building an ecclesial paradise on earth; but in a quiet yet fierce loyalty to the one thing necessary, to that command of the Lord that whispers still through the olive groves of Gethsemane: watch and pray. For only out of that mighty stillness comes the triumphant assault of the Lord on the Cross and on the Tomb.

From the archives: from self knowledge to knowledge of the divine

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

*****

Today’s gospel (John 1: 47-51) sees Jesus encountering the apostle Nathanael for the first time. The briefest of exchanges occurs, following which Nathanael professes his belief in Jesus’s divine sonship. It is an extraordinary moment of faith, and Jesus promises that Nathanael will see greater things: the very concourse of angelic traffic between this world and the next in the service of the Messiah.

The nub of this passage, however, lies in the first exchange which passes between them. Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit! says the Lord. How do you know me, Lord? replies the future apostle.  When you were under the fig tree, I saw you, Jesus responds. It is these words which trigger in Nathanael a profession of fervent faith.

What is it that the Lord perceived in Nathanael? What was it in those words an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit which told Nathanael that the Lord knew him through and through. Perhaps this little exchange dramatizes for us the tensions with which we live daily. For who among us can say that there is no deceit in their soul?

The best spiritual authors commend to us knowledge of God and knowledge of the self but we are still often strangers to ourselves. Our capacity for self-reflection is often undermined by the hall of mirrors within us which distends our self-knowledge, sometimes flatteringly and sometimes to our detriment. As one might say these days, objects in these mental mirrors may appear better or worse than they really are. On the one hand, we suffer the wounds of original sin, and pride stalks our good works to such an extent that the Lord tells us not to let our right hand know what our left hand is doing; pride takes fire like dry leaves. On the other, we hardly understand our own inner psychological wounds, the fruit of our unpurified experiences, which leave us clinging to bitter shards of misunderstanding and disappointment, the things that make us embrace deceit not usually out of perversity but for the comfort they appear to bring. It is hard sometimes to know which lies the world is telling us, and our neighbour is often full of subterfuge, perhaps even without knowing it. But, knowing ourselves and seeing our own capacity for deceit – which we choose sometimes as a tactic and sometimes as a false refuge - that is a life-long challenge. The Psalmist himself asks God to cleanse him from his hidden sins.

And, yet here is Nathanael, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Here is a man who, to quote one hymn, has already been reclothed in his rightful mind. We might almost say that poor self-knowledge – self-knowledge of the distorted kind that we have just considered a few moments ago - is in fact a form of being out of one’s rightful mind, for the mind is made to know truth - the truth about God and the truth about the world and ourselves. In contrast, we have the Lord’s word for it that Nathanael’s mind was not clouded with error; not for him the deluded ambitions of James and John, nor the empty braggadocio of Peter. He was, as the Lord observed, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.

What is even more striking about Nathanael’s self-knowledge is that it matches the Lord’s knowledge of him. How could it be otherwise? To see the truth of things, to see the truth about ourselves, is to see things and ourselves as they are seen by the Author of Truth. This Nathanael intuits simply by dint of the Lord’s having claimed to have seen him under the fig tree. We cannot know what was on Nathanael’s mind at that very moment, but what we see in the moments that follow is a grand convergence of hearts: a human heart that is ready for divine love because it dwells in the truth about itself and God, in freedom from all deceit, and a divine heart that pours itself out passionately to share the goodness of the eternal truth. It is perhaps the happiest of all the encounters that Jesus has with any of his future apostles, and Nathanael might have said, anticipating St Paul: Now I know even as also I am known.

And what does the Lord promise Nathanael? He promises a glimpse into the true relations between heaven and earth. Heart spoke to heart, faith affirmed belief, and the Lord of gifts promised Nathanael than he would be able to see the celestial mysteries surrounding his incarnate presence on earth.  We can trace now a path in Nathanael’s journey that goes from honesty and self-knowledge to divine encounter, and then from a profession of faith to mystical illumination. Nathanael’s path is firm, and the way before him was paved with clarity of vision leading to the truth of God and the truth about himself.

And the promise was extraordinary that he would see the ministry of angels to the Christ, the coming and going of divine messengers about the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, now incarnate in flesh and walking the earth. We never think about this beautiful angelic gift promised to Nathanael, although it is one that is echoed in the lives of many saints who lived and interacted with the angels around them. We do not know when it began, nor how he lived its reality later on. And yet we know it must have given birth in him to an awareness of, and reverence for, the messengers of the Most High, those spirits who see constantly the face of the Father in heaven.

Such blessings were not the choicest gift of Nathanael’s life: that was the intimate friendship of Christ. But those high privileges began where that same friendship began also: under a fig tree where Nathanael was sitting, humbly letting go the vestiges of self-deceit, like a fall of autumn leaves. 

What does it all mean?

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

***

Today’s gospel (Luke 9:18-22) is a scene that is better known to us under its version in the gospel of St Matthew. St Luke, who unlike St Matthew did not witness the moment personally, only gives us the bare bones: Jesus’ inquiry about who people thought He was, the disciples’ varied responses, and finally St Peter’s reply that He was the Christ of God. From this episode, we may be tempted to retain only Peter’s profession of faith, but what follows is also instructive and not only because it foretells Jesus’ sufferings to come.

Of course, there is a vast contrast in the two messages: one moment, we hear the faith of the Fisherman on whom the future Church is built, and the next moment, we hear Jesus explain the sufferings that will be the very lifeblood of that Church. So far, so much may we assume that this is all about the Church. Yet the way in which these two messages come together is also an instruction on how far the disciples had to go to be aligned with the will of God, to live in that will, and to learn to say in their own turn the fiat that challenges us all.

On the one hand, imagine how inspired they must have been to hear Peter make his declaration. Surely, they must have discussed it a little among themselves: exactly who is the Master? Now, Peter moved the game forward, committing himself and them too in a way to something that would change all their futures. Moreover, Jesus’ confirmation of Peter’s assertion, implicit in His declaration about Peter, must have turned this moment into a transformative one for all of them. Until now, they were just following this extraordinary Man. From now on, they would be building a future with Him for all His followers with Peter as the foundation. How much they must have felt that the future was now clear, the direction was confirmed, that there was certainty ahead, and that all would be well. The Jews of the first century anticipated a conquering Messiah, and so surely what they now knew of Jesus would have come together with their expectations: this was it, the triumph was imminent and – wonder of wonders – their little band was right at the heart of the action. Everything made sense, not least because they were at the heart of it all.

And, in our own discipleship, isn’t this very much like ourselves? We want to know what God wants of us, and then we seem to learn or discover something clarifying that points the way to the future. Here is the will of God for us, we say: full steam ahead. Like the disciples, there is clarity, there is meaning, and the meaning seems to make sense to us. My spouse and I used to call this the spirituality of spoons. It is the kind of discernment that comes about when people find that two soup spoons fit together and declare this fit to be a revelation of the plans of God. The mistake is easily made; how nicely these things fit together. Surely, this is what is meant to be! And yet, spoons as eating implements don’t go with spoons; they go with forks. And if the implication isn’t obvious, just ask yourself when you last saw anyone tucking into dessert with two spoons in their hands. Humans calculate meaning in sometimes very limited ways, but as God tells us in the Book of Isaiah, My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways.

And what comes next in today’s gospel shows Jesus giving this lesson to the disciples. For having confirmed His identity and filled their hearts with joy, Jesus then shows them the desperate vision of His future passion and death: His rejection, His sufferings, and His death. They were probably too shocked to hear at the end His prophecy of the resurrection. But surely, it cannot be this way, Lord. Being the Christ means riding out in triumph, breaking the power of the enemy, cleansing the temple, restoring God’s order. How could rejection, suffering, and death be the route towards a better future?

And, is that not just like us at the crossroads the good Lord brings us to, perhaps each day? We thought we knew what He wanted, but then things do not work out. We thought we knew the meaning of the pleasant joke, but Jesus’ punchline seems literally like a punch.

Why is this so? Because, unwittingly, we had begun to write the next chapter in our own heads, instead of allowing the author of all things to show us His draft. Reverting to our best animal instincts, we had believed that our future required a tangible and visible reduction of uncertainty. To make God laugh, they say, tell Him our plans. Yet to make God weep, we tell Him implicitly all the time that our plans are much better than His.

We don’t mean to do this of course. Our head can say a thousand fiats a day. Yet it is deep down in the darkest recesses of the heart, well away from the holy images we keep of ourselves, that our human vanities and insecurities lurk, that our wounds are at their deepest. Perhaps our outer peripheries have been evangelised but what about our inner self? Like Peter, we are unconsciously confident about our fidelity, and we forget that in the gospel of Matthew, when Peter, the newly minted pope, rebukes Jesus for His prophecy of future pain, the Good Lord turns a withering eye on His Petrine Holiness and calls him Satan to his face. We are all worthy of the accusation, not that that makes us especially bad. Jesus came to rescue us from the fate of being delivered exclusively into our own wretched hands!

So, what is the meaning of it all? For us, there is only one meaning, and that is the following of Christ. Today’s gospel extract breaks off after the prophecy of the resurrection, but St Luke’s gospel continues with words that cast a light on Peter’s fate and on the fate of us all, at least those of us who are prepared to admit that God’s plans might just be better than ours. The message is ominous all the same:

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

Always keep ahold of nurse

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

***

Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 19-21) gives us once more the scene in which Jesus’ mother and relatives arrive to see Him but cannot gain access. When He is told they are there to see Him, He announces that His mother and cousins – called here brothers and sisters by Jewish custom - are those who hear God’s word and do it.

The obvious lessons of this passage are easily grasped and are a constant consolation to us. If obedience to God makes us the near relative of Christ, we can be sure of two things. First, nobody was closer or more pleasing to God than Mary who by her obedient fiat at the Annunciation counterbalanced in a sense the disobedience of Eve. This was the second chapter of her role in the restauration of humanity and made the way for Jesus’ own supreme and triumphal actions by which she was saved and, with her, those who do the will of God. The second thing we can be sure of is that this obedience of which Jesus speaks is at the heart of our conformity to Him through whom we become the adopted children of the Most High. Baptism in His death and resurrection is only the beginning of that conformity, which is meant to break forth in a glorious growth and flourishing by our transformation in Him. Thus, like all relatives, our kinship is signalled by our very likenesses. This is how they will know we are Christians: by our love for one another, for the obedience of the Lord makes us like the One who is Love Divine, all loves excelling.

Yet, these are not the end of the lessons in today’s gospel. On earth Jesus was content to appear a man and even tolerated the judgements – let us say the misjudgements - of the crowd as part of His earthly state. Thus, we can quite imagine that some of the onlookers in this scene, hearing or seeing that He did not instantly welcome the arrival of His mother and relatives, might easily have assumed He felt about them as we often feel about our own relatives. On a quiet country road near where your blogger lives, one sign proudly hangs at a front gate: Relatives by appointment only. Seeing a man dodge his nearest and dearest is practically a joke because it is so very understandable, and so very unlike the customary honour we rightly pay parents and family, the former by ordinance of the Most High.

But if the crowd would have been wrong to judge Jesus thus, the truth remains that, as everyone knows, our families can sometimes hurt and wound us in ways that nobody else can. Jesus came for this too. In humanity’s severed branches and crooked timber, the wounds of those who are meant to be our dear ones can be savage, probably because they go back to our earliest days. These wounds are manifest in us through those parts of the inner man that withdraw and hide away, caught as it were in an ancient amber of the soul that has immobilised them, making them less sensitive to pain perhaps, but also less apt for healing. These wounds are protected by other inner guardians, the defensive behaviours that experience claims can protect our deepest, most damaged selves.

And all the while, as in all damaged conditions, we are not free to respond to God’s love in the fullest sense of our fiat, and we do not love others as we are called to love them. Parents can wound us through breaching the unwritten and yet deeply intuited contract binding their state in life and ours. These wounds we are capable of carrying forward into our relationship with God who, we struggle to learn, is not as imperfect in His parenting as they were. Yet, siblings can wound us also. Many years ago, I visited the Royal Courts of Justice in London and entered a public gallery during a civil case that I chose merely at random. The theatre was extraordinary. Two brothers were suing each other, angry and relentless in a mutual persecution over a disputed heritage. These two had stopped opening the door to each other some time before, and I was hardly surprised by a later newspaper report explaining that their dispute had helped eat up much of the disputed estate in legal costs.

Because that is what all wounds do: they consume us from the inside. At worst, they become infected and suppurate, poisoning the system. Perhaps more commonly, they recondition the heart, blocking the arteries of love. They change and chill our behaviour to those we should love best. We hug them less closely; we leave their calls unanswered. We act to protect ourselves, and all the while we fail the vocation of love.

For the vocation of love, our obedience to the Father, would call us to be present to them, even in our discomfort. Contradicting every instinct to protect an old wound from further damage and pain, we are called to renounce the malign spirit that drives us to withdraw. In that moment, we must enter the mystery of Christ by enduring the presence of the people and the things that most seem to threaten us, for in the end, our safety always did lie in God, our harbour and haven.

Our mothers, brothers and sisters stand without; it could of course be much, much worse, as it is for our persecuted Chinese or Nigerian brothers and sisters. But then whatever stands without, we are called to give our fiat to embracing whatever and whomever the Lord asks us to be present to today.

And in being thus present, in refusing to anesthetise ourselves to their very resonance, we will be walking the path of obedience to our Father in heaven and taking on more and more the likeness of our Brother who came to save us all.

From the archives: along the path

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind.

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

The missing link

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 2: 33-35) gives us a brief moment in the lives of Mary and Joseph but one in which Jesus takes centre stage, identified as Saviour by the words of Simeon who is, so to speak, the last but one prophet of the Old Testament, followed only by John the Baptist. Yet, as brief as the moment is, how many truths these lines contain.

First, we have a glimpse into the interior lives of Joseph and Mary for, as Saint Luke tells us, they marvelled at what was said about the child. One of the fundamental virtues that they both exercised throughout their lives was the virtue of faith, utterly necessary insofar as the immense prophecies that surrounded their son were often contradicted by the difficult and thankless circumstances in which they often found themselves. Faith was the virtue that Saint Elizabeth most praised in Mary for she was blessed in having believed the words that had been spoken to her.

Next, we hear the words of Simeon's prophecy about the role Jesus would play in the life of Israel. Here, we must understand Israel both in a concrete and in a spiritual sense, in the sense both of His own people and of the spiritual Israel constituted by His mystical body:

Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed.

Why is this so? Why is not everything done and finished, indeed accomplished, with the action of Jesus alone? Quite simply because redemption is not yet salvation; quite simply because, as paradoxical as it is, there is something lacking in the sufferings of Christ, as Saint Paul tells the Colossians. There is a portion to be made-up, and that portion is seen in our transformation in Christ by which we become the adopted children of the Father and bear the duties of the First Born with a true co-responsibility. To be a Christian is not simply to profess His name and recognise Him as our personal Lord and Saviour; if that were sufficient, than, all those who say Lord, Lord would indeed enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

More is needed. The rise and fall of many in Israel will come about because some will follow Him into death and resurrection, and some will choose not to. Some will recognise that the mystery of His passion and His glory must become their own mystery, and some will not. Some will accept that their own story must be written into His story, and some will not. And This is why He is opposed. We should not be surprised at those who reject Him, and neither should we despair; God alone keeps the secret of all hearts. This is the mystery of iniquity, and we have been warned to expect it.

Lastly, this gospel draws back a curtain on the extraordinary mystery of how Mary herself enters the passion and resurrection of her Son. At the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus asks her directly:

What is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come.

In other words, what Simeon's prophecy anticipates – the piercing of Mary’s heart by a sword - is in fact Mary's vocation to be associated with Jesus in the fall and the rise of Israel. How could we doubt that in this prophecy we hear Mary's personal vocation: not her active vocation to mother the Saviour of humanity, but her personal vocation that means of all human creatures she is the one most closely associated with the hour of the Saviour.

And this too is why the purpose of the piercing of her heart is that the thoughts of many may be revealed. For in our personal vocations, that particular dimension of the inexhaustible beauty of God which He has appointed to us to reflect is shown forth to the world. In this moment, Mary is shown not only as His mother but also as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, the human creature who is drawn most deeply into God's outpouring of Himself: in His creation, in His work of redemption, and now down the ages of the Church in His work of sanctification.

Jesus is the bridge maker but Mary is the bridge head: His first conquest, His greatest masterpiece, and His most intimate cooperator, working then, and even now, to make up in her own sufferings, her own sorrows, the sufferings that are lacking to the passion of Christ for the sake of His body, the Church.

None so blind

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Luke 6:39-42) presents us with Jesus’ teachings on the connection between purity of intention and clear moral vision. The blind cannot lead the blind. It is a teaching which comes into even greater focus when applied to the criticism of others and when, Jesus tells us, we are in even greater danger of hypocrisy. 

First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

In this conclusion, not only does Jesus tell us what we must do – i.e. wash our own laundry before criticising others for not washing theirs - but He also reminds us how our perceptions of the faults of others are often distorted. Yet the problem of hypocrisy and the challenge of reforming ourselves before trying to reform others only arise from the difficulty that Jesus pinpoints at the outset: 

can the blind lead the blind? 

Yet, what does He mean in this?

The scholastics used to say: every comparison limps except in the point of comparison. What blind people lack in vision, they often compensate for by some other extraordinary facility or other. Still, Jesus’ comparison here is apt. By saying the blind cannot lead the blind, what He means is that those who lack moral and spiritual insight cannot effectively enable others to see morally and spiritually. Very few people intentionally blind themselves; but when it comes to a loss of moral vision, we face three difficulties.

The first is that a certain moral blindness is one of the wounds of original sin; to be human is to be born blind in a sense. 

The second is that we rarely know all the facts around another’s case and need to be wary of prejudging their situation. Going after the log in our brother’s eye is interference, but it is almost always an error of judgement to begin with.

The third difficulty is that our own moral failings create, as it were, our own moral and spiritual cataracts of various hues and colours that block our vision. Our minds easily turn rose tinted with blind optimism, perhaps dark and sombre with sour pessimism, or even a jaundiced yellow from world-weary cynicism. We fall into folly through thoughtlessness, or perhaps into wilful depression through a lack of hope. God forbid we lapse at times into cynical scorn, knowing the price of things without weighing their value. All of these denote in themselves barriers that we unwittingly erect to the fruitfulness the Holy Spirit wants to bring forth in us.

How different we are then from those visionaries Elizabeth and Mary who meet and greet each other in a spirit of faith. Where we fumble in our pride, they perceive God’s ways in humility; while we unconsciously revel in our mistaken superiority, they let go and let God, waiting for His light in patience, rather than rushing to simulate their own.

To try to pick out the speck in our brother’s eye before removing the log from our own is, from a COLW perspective, to place mission before contemplation; it is to favour activity over reflection, or to deny to the apostolate the benefits of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. After all, if we knew ourselves like Elizabeth and Mary did, we would not appoint missions to ourselves, but wait in joyful hope for the beginning and end of all mission, the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Only in that school can we learn assuredly the lessons that Dom Chautard shared with the Church a hundred years ago: that contemplation is the soul of the apostolate, that faith is the condition of knowing God and coming to the truth about ourselves, and that overreaching activism and frenetic doings should be recognised for the blindness that they are.