Seeing is believing

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 23-30) allows us to hear four of Jesus’ most notable sayings: first, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; second, that with God all things are possible; third, that all those who have left houses, brothers, sisters, etc for His name’s sake would receive a hundredfold and inherit eternal life; and fourth, that many who are first will be last, and the last first.

These conversations must have come back to St Matthew while pondering on his many memories of the Lord. Maybe he discussed them with other disciples. Jesus probably said these things and similar ones many times in many circumstances. For us He dwells in His words, but for those who had actually met Him, He must also have dwelt in these memories, vivid in their mind’s eyes, His accent and the timbre of His voice sounding again on their inner ears. The disciples who slowly learned to live the Sacred Mysteries of the liturgy, founded on the ritual and Scriptural disciplines of their Jewish origins, first lived that Sacred Mystery of His presence on earth, and then lived and relived it how many thousands of times in their memories and minds. We have the following testimony from another evangelist, St John, in the first of his epistles:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

St John is so overwhelmed with His recollection of Jesus and wants to get across to his readers that wonderous thing: that the eternal mystery of the Son living in the Father had dwelt for a time among them, and they had seen and looked upon Him, and touched Him, and now recalled Him in their preaching continually. How true of both St Matthew and St John must be these words from Psalm 1:

Blessed is the man

who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

[…]

 but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

    and on His law he meditates day and night.

But we might change these words a little and say now:

But His delight is in the mysteries of the Lord,

    and on His mysteries he meditates day and night.

For in the Old Testament, God appeared to Moses, and Moses spent forty days and nights with Him before returning from Mount Sinai with the Law of the Decalogue. Whereas in the New Testament, God Himself walked among us and taught us, before seeming to desert Himself on Mount Calvary, and then, on the third day, returned not from a mountain but from the abyss of death with the Pascal Mystery of Life written not onto stone but into His resurrected flesh. The Law remains but now He is Flesh and Blood.

So, what has all this got to do with the sayings of Jesus today in the gospel? Only that we cannot read these passages like so many sayings and dictums of a sage, or of another wiseman, or another parallel repository of wisdom like the Dharma of Buddha, the Hindus’ Bhagavat Gita, the sayings of Confucius, or the Surahs of the Quran, as if all religions were merely different paths that led to the same God. Jesus is not firstly an ethicist but a divine mystery for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. He is not primarily a book but a revelation:

the only Son of God, 
eternally begotten of the Father, 
God from God, Light from Light, 
true God from true God, 
begotten, not made, 
consubstantial, with the Father.

We do not approach Him by pedagogy, like we approach Maths and Physics and Ethics. We know Him rather by a mystagogy which we encounter in the Sacred Liturgy, primarily the Eucharist, source and summit of the Church’s life, and then in the Sacred Scriptures, not as some separate path or province of sayings and doings, but as a reality somehow conjoined to the Mysteries of the Incarnate Lord; a mystery in itself, inspired but not dictated by the Holy Spirit; the work of human hands and yet divine in its origin and in its effects. For with God nothing is impossible.

To be the rich man condemned in the words of today’s Gospel extract is to be so besotted with the things of this world that we miss the reality of these mysteries. Moreover, to break the bread of Scripture together is to receive already some of that hundredfold that He promised His faithful ones. And to receive His Word and His very self, leaving all else behind, is to overturn the human ordering of our material world where power pushes in for first prize, and the anawim, the little lovers of His great Mysteries, often find themselves pushed out, strangers to their neighbours for the truth has made them strange.

And yet, it still remains that we are called to serve the Sacred Mysteries even in the contorted and impatient faces of the enemy who rail against His teachings, not daring ourselves to grab onto the advantages of a false peace with this world, not raising our hand against its servants (for His kingdom is not of this world), but loving them as the Divine Master loved them, for where the Masters is, there must the disciples follow.

For in the end, the last who is made first is the Divine Master who in the mystery of His incarnation became

despised and rejected by men;
    a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

And this is the mystery which, in the end, St Matthew related in the pages of his gospel: not a teacher of ethics, or a strange oriental prophet, but the promised Messiah, unrecognisable except to those who had broken together that fragment of the Book of Isaiah and lived with it – lived with its mystery - in their hearts. And when we now break apart these fragments of the gospel, we hope by the power of His Holy Spirit to see into

the mystery which we have heard in our inner ear, which we have seen with the eyes of our minds, which we have looked upon in our imaginations and touched with our hearts’ aspirations.

Thus is His life made manifest, and we see it, and must testify to it.

Teachability and blind spots

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be found here via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 3-12) once again shows the Pharisees coming to Jesus in an attempt to entrap Him, but despite their worst endeavours, this scene offers up several beautiful mysteries for our contemplation: the Christian laws of marriage, as God intended it from the beginning; the union of the spouses in one flesh; the gift of purity as it is given by God. There is here what one writer has called a Mysterierenlehre – a mysteriology in the sense that we may learn something through the mysteries. Yet from a COLW perspective, one sentence stands out amid all the others: that Moses tolerated divorce in the Old Testament because the people of God were so unteachable.

If we think of unteachability as a strictly intellectual limitation, we have not really understood all its implications. Another word for lack of teachability here would be hardness of heart. It was not just that there was a mental blind spot among God’s chosen ones; theirs was a moral refusal to rise to the responsibility enjoined by what God had established from the beginning. In mitigation, we should remember that the age of grace was not yet fully born before Jesus’ death on the Cross.

There is a correlation, therefore, between the higher expectations in the teachings of Jesus and the fulness of grace that His redemption makes available to us. His condescension to our weakness – His mercy on the sinner - is not a ticket for us to wallow in irresponsibility or indulgence. Jesus does not make cushions to put beneath the elbows of sinners, as false prophets do in the Book of Ezekiel. His mercy is a route out of our misery.  But how?

We become more teachable in two ways. First, our minds become more teachable when we allow our imaginations to embrace the breadth of God’s mysteries. In the nighttime discussion with Nicodemus, Jesus leads Nicodemus to see things in new ways. Nicodemus becomes, as it were, a model of teachability, allowing his imagination to become receptive to things beyond his normal ken. It is not that he is a passive listener, far from it; rather, he is an attentive questioner, and Jesus unfolds for him not only the mysteries of the past, but the promise of the new revelation that His own coming signifies. There are more things under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our normally limited philosophies. In an age when our visions have become narrowed to the limited breadth of our mobile devices, our minds and our Christian imaginations need to find their way back to the soaring breadth and height that our medieval cathedrals still symbolise for us. Like Dostoevsky said of Russia, we need to sit at the feet of Christ again and learn His gospel.

Yet, the second way we become more teachable is through our gradual surrender to the Father’s forming action, shaping now not only our minds but our hearts through His grace, enabling us to rise to the mysteries that He reveals and strengthening our wills to choose the responsibilities these mysteries call us to.

Our greatest tragedy is sin unrepented, but after that comes this tragedy of this unteachability which stunts and limits us, withers God’s work, undoes our best resolutions, even those of half an hour ago, renders us partially fruitless, and makes us spiritually sterile by our own childish hands.

Who will free me from the body of this death, says St Paul – from the blind spots and refusals that mar the work of God in us? Thanks be to God – He concludes - who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

 

Carousel

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 18: 1-5, 10, 12-14) sees the disciples preoccupied with that question of success which we discussed last week. Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Jesus’s response must have surprised them, for His measure of success was by no means an earthly one, but entirely divine: whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  The rest of the gospel is then an extended set of metaphors on the preciousness of even the least of the disciples: it is not the will of my Father in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.

This should be a gospel dear to all members of COLW for our Book of Life identifies us as anawim, the lowly ones of the Lord, the servants, the humble ones, who claim no special status, even though they know that they are precious in the eyes of the Father. Like all great truths, this insight into the ways of God contains extremes that reconcile in paradoxical unity, for it draws the disciples’ elevated expectations of what greatness is into the light that shines from the simplicity and innocence of the child whom Jesus brought into their circle. It also draws together those seemingly contradictory truths that honour, the reward of great achievement, is bestowed upon children of the kingdom as the beloved of our Father above. Even the least of us is ennobled, regardless of our talents, our successes, or our attractiveness.

In this moment, we learn of greatness in the eyes of God, and yet we also feel keenly that it is not the same as greatness in the eyes of men, nor does Jesus’ praise of the child align with our own ambient values. In our times, we are used to the celebration of youth, and parents habitually profess their undying love for their children. I am reminded of a verse from Chesterton’s Songs of Education:

I remember my mother, the day that we met,
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance at somebody’s bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me.

For reasons that Chesterton himself could see even a hundred years ago, never has childhood itself been so oppressed spiritually as it is in our contemporary societies where immersion in digital and screen culture ruins mental health and innocence on a daily basis, and bends souls so out of shape that it often leaves them stuck along a spectrum of immaturity. How must their angels grieve who see in one and the same moment the eternal face of God to whose vision their wards are called and the awful chaos that has been wrought in the souls of the young by devilry or carelessness? There is good reason to assert a preferential option for the young, and yet that option must be clearsighted about current realities.

Yet we would be missing something important if we assumed Jesus in this gospel meant to refer to human childhood alone as an exhaustive model of divine greatness. Whoever humbles himself like this child…Who is the child in the scene but Jesus Himself, the child of the Father, the only one in the scene who does not need to turn and become like a child? For it is possible even for a child to leave childhood early, driven out of their home by precocious vice or corrupting influences. Then, not only the adults but the children too will need to hear Jesus’ call: Unless you turn… you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself…is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

Unless we turn, i.e. unless we become like Jesus of whom we must learn for he is meek and humble of heart. Benedictines traditionally took a vow of conversion of life, an odd choice if we examine their path only from the outside. Does a religious need conversion? Are they not beyond such a basic task? But we hear the reality here in the gospel. It was a reality known to the disciples who had spent all this time in the presence of the Lord. To them, Jesus says: unless you turn… We turn first of all perhaps in our most shallow sentiments. We catch that breeze of enthusiasm and find in the turn an easy task for the heart. But then, we begin to find the turn difficult, as it requires now not only an emotional investment but an investment in the reform of our habits. We feel the G-forces of sin and selfishness, tugging at our efforts to follow the Lord, and if we persevere, God’s grace can maintain us on our trajectory. But the turn is still not yet done, for we are not yet converted all the way to the bottom of our hearts. On this merry-go-round of conversion, turning again is the only way forward; there is deep inner work to do, and while all our outward appearances may seem Christian, He has not yet fully conquered us until we allow Him to dwell in our very depths, to remake us utterly in His image so that we may now be as the little child in the midst of the disciples.

It is not the will of the Father that we little ones should perish, but unless we turn, we cannot enter His kingdom. The challenge of greatness is not the challenge of human achievement, nor the conquest of glory on the way to success and accumulation. The challenge of greatness comes in our readiness to take on this lesson of humility that is found in the Eternal Child, the Son of the Eternal One, and so to be worthy - or a little less unworthy - of the precious gaze that the Father casts upon us. 

The wages of suffering

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 16: 24-28) challenges us in our deepest understanding of what it means to be a success in life. If we will be His disciples, then, like those Sons of Thunder James and John, and like Peter, the newly appointed pope, who had just been rebuked as Satan by the Lord Himself in verse 23 of this chapter, we too must be ready to lose ourselves to save our souls, or at least to lose the idea we have made of ourselves, our own unwitting deity of the hearth. Let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me, says the Lord. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. A man may yet gain the whole world, but if it comes at the price of his eternal soul, what is that really worth? For God will repay every person according to what he has done, and what if one of us has chosen the appearances over the reality, or the temporal over the everlasting?

Sometimes, the gospel calls us to encounter the Lord, and then we are overwhelmed with awe at the Master and Shepherd on whose face we dare to cast our gaze, But sometimes the gospel calls us not so much to encounter the Lord but to take a look at ourselves, and before we know it, the Scriptures hold up a mirror before our stained and deformed faces, and then Lord help us if we refuse in our hearts to perceive what our mind’s eye is given to see.

We humans are born romantics with a longing for the safety of the womb. No wonder we get excited at the exaltation of our hearts over the consolations of wisdom or even, God help us, at the excitement of something we hardly realise is probably cheap and nasty religious sensationalism. But here in this gospel, the Lord points firmly to the path that leads to eternal wisdom, and to our surprise, it is not along a dainty primrose path to nicer feelings, but rather via that stoney road that leads us to Mount Calvary where eternal joy embraces an abyss of temporary sorrow. Not that way, Lord, surely, we say; even St Therese of Lisieux said it. And, yet we hear again and again the words of the Lord:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.

This is not by the way a school of stoicism. Christ is not issuing His disciples merely with an agenda of heroic forbearance, like some Navy Seal instructor. Notice the pronouns: follow me; deny himself. This is not a code primarily, but a creed not of self-belief but of belief in the Eternal Other. It is a call to cast our eyes upon Him who promises to be for us the source of all our strength:

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

And, then, St Paul will give echo to this reality:

I live; now not I, but Christ lives in me.

If we in that moment have not the courage to say our fiat beneath the cross, what does it matter? Let us invite Him to say His fiat to the Father in us! And from that moment, we can allow our sails to be filled again with the gentle breeze of His Holy Spirit, resigning ourselves not to our misery, but rather to His kind embrace that picks us up and carries us forward. Then, perhaps, when we have wept for our sins, we can smile a little on our own misery, no longer wounded in our pride by our consistent inconsistency, but touched like Him with compassion for the broken.

Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

In that surrender to His almighty hand lies in fact the secret of our personal vocations, our particular callings, by which we are meant to reflect some dimension of the beauty of the Eternal One. When Jesus says to lose our lives, He does not mean our real lives in Him, but our fake lives, our tawdry and self-constructed lives, the ghastly castles we have built from our pound-shop plans and our mass-produced lusts; the lives our impoverished imaginations have designed, the existences our grasping fingers have drawn in the sands of our passing years. This is what we must lose; not the things that reflect Him and thus invigorate us, but the things that are merely the grotesque reflection of our own lack of eternal aspiration. There, where we have wedded our hearts not to His dreams but to our cheap designs: that is where the axe must be laid to the root of the tree.

This is no once-and-for-all moment, it is a daily duty, for the cross must be taken up every day. Cats have nine lives, they say, but the old man in us seems to be capable of an endless number of zombie-like resuscitations, stirring from the ashes of our last repentance, attempting to draw us back down into the mire that we never quite lose the taste for. Such is the legacy of original sin, overcome but never entirely erased, as even St Paul could testify:

To keep me from being too elated, he tells the Corinthians, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.

In this incarnational agenda, therefore, our own life story finds its glory, but only and always at the end of the journey that goes by the royal way of the cross.

Blind in both eyes

A recording of the gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 15: 1-2, 10-14) brings us another episode in which Jesus is questioned insincerely by the Pharisees and scribes. The extract read in today’s liturgy omits verses 3-9 in which Jesus demonstrates the Pharisees’ insincerity with regard to the fourth commandment, making it void so one of their rules could be observed. Quoting Isaiah, He tells the crowd:

This people honours me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me;
 in vain do they worship me,
    teaching human precepts as doctrines.

We do, however, hear Jesus explain that food cannot make a person impure; rather, impurity is the effect of a wayward heart. As for the Pharisees, He concludes, they are blind guides, and their actions will bring about their own doom and the doom of those who blindly follow them.

This then is a spikey encounter that occurs during the late Galilean ministry but before Peter’s appointment as the ‘rock’ and Jesus’ final journey towards Jerusalem. It is a gospel which encourages us to reflect on the mystery of our own call as disciples: a call to listen and hear carefully, but a call also to internalise the lessons given. Do we consciously sit everyday at His feet and try to hear His gospel? Are we doing so even now, letting its words search our hearts and test our deepest motives?

The case of the Pharisees should stand as a warning to us, as we undergo that process. Who were reputedly the best Jews if not the Pharisees? Who knew the Scriptures better, and who observed the law more carefully than they? And yet, Jesus criticises them mercilessly – if such an epithet can be said of the merciful Saviour. How did they end up as the blind ones, leading other blind followers into the pit? We are accustomed to think of mysteries only in a positive sense, but here we are faced with a kind of mystery of iniquity.  

Jesus’ words suggest two problems. The easier one to understand is simply that the Pharisees are blind guides. Human beings proceed by insight. Even those who prefer to think of their religion as an affair of the heart require some kind of light where their minds perceive the truth to lie. That is why it is so dangerous just to be a sentimentalist. As Chesterton said, the aim of opening one’s mind, as of opening one’s mouth, is to close it again on something solid. The need for insight and direction, indeed, our lack of insight and direction, is brought home to us by Jesus describing Himself as the way, the truth and the life: the way for we need His direction, and the truth for our minds are like an image of the Son’s relationship to the Father, begetting truth through internalising the act of another’s being (not that the Father causes the being of the Son; their being is one, but it is always hard to speak of that mystery!). When Jesus says the blind cannot lead the blind, He is saying that error cannot of itself lead to anything but error. Notice He does not say here that we must focus only on what unites us with the Pharisees. Unfortunately, some things must be called out lest the blind mislead the blind and both fall into the pit. Truths have consequences, especially the most controverted ones.

So, there are serious implications that arise from this, the first and the easier of the problems with the Pharisees. One is that the pious are wasting their time and the Lord’s if they are just superficially pious. God has no interest in our deceiving ourselves; He is unimpressed by pedantry and appearances. Those who unconsciously consider themselves just because their external actions conform superficially to the rules have not even begun to open themselves up to the work that God wishes to accomplish in them. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, says St Paul. What is required here is not greater effort towards superficial perfection, but rather a greater, a finer contrition, a heart that has learned to break itself over even its smallest faults, because in the end, God calls us not merely to perfection so much as to the depths of union with Him; that we might be One with Him in the eternal communion of the Blessed Trinity. As we noted the other day, the ethics of Christianity are important, fundamental, but it is the ethos, the spirit, which runs to the very depths. That is why there is hope for the undeserving workers of the eleventh hour, and why not even the apparently meritorious workers of the first hour may presume on their superiority. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Speaking of superiority, let us come finally to the second of the problems I mentioned above, for the Pharisees are blind in both eyes. Here, Jesus’ words may be the cause of some anxiety:

Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.

While some see this verse as referring to the idea of a fixed predestination, others see the plant metaphor as a reference to those man-made doctrines that Jesus had just denounced – those growths on the Jewish religion that had nothing to do with the Law of God. Yet we may go in a slightly different direction. One lesson this line contains is the reminder that, as every gardener knows, not all those things that look like plants are indeed plants. The devil is the ludicrous ape of God but best appears as an angel of light, and his kingdom is a kingdom of imposture and deceit.

 One of the fundamental mistakes of the Pharisees, therefore, is the vice of self-deception, the sin of being impostors to themselves but it is by no means restricted to them. We may think of this as a kind of blindness that produces hallucinations! To be humble is not only to restrain our burgeoning vanity; it is also to challenge the little lies we tell ourselves, those dear but misleading ego-facing fantasies that blossom and bloom like weeds in the blink of our imagination’s eye. If, as St Thomas teaches, humility moderates an appetite for excellence, it must block most concretely the workings of the inner movie screen on which the spectacle of our wonderfulness appears to us. Here, we are often torn between what we think of ourselves, and what we consider others might think of us. When I am vain, when my deepest question and need are how I appear to the world, then I am who I think you think I am. When I am humble, in contrast, when my deepest question is how I stand before God in all my real misery and my potential glory, then I am not who I think you think I am. I am who God knows me to be, but with this difference: that only when I come to know who God knows me to be can I become who God calls me to be – to know God’s dream for me.  

Then, even if I am blind, rather than following other blind guides, I can sit beside the blind beggar Bartimaeus who is there on the dusty road in Jericho, crying out to the passing Lord: Son of David, have mercy on me!

 

On counting the cost

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

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Today's gospel (Luke 14: 25-33) sees Jesus turning to a large crowd and speaking to them some home truths. What must they have thought, these enthusiasts who followed after Him? For Jesus does not want enthusiasm; He wants fidelity, a completely different thing. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. These are not comforting words, no more than the words He had said first of all:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

 Thus, it would appear, Jesus expects them all to count the cost carefully before they follow Him. For in the rest of this gospel extract, he asks a series of rhetorical questions about those who begin a thing but cannot finish it. And what is that cost? Jesus answers with a rhetorical finish:

Therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

This gospel takes us back to another scene in the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus promised His disciples that they would be hated even by members of their own family because of their allegiance to Him. This time the cards are turned. Jesus tells his disciples flatly that they must hate all those nearest to them, otherwise, they cannot be His disciples. Here, as so often in the gospel, Jesus is in full hyperbolic mode and not for one instant does He mean that we must disobey the greatest commandment to love God and to love our neighbour; not for one instant does He demand that we do anything so unnatural as to break the fourth commandment to honour our mother and father; never is it in His plan that we should be perverse enough to detest our own flesh and blood.

What Jesus means here is to remind His disciples of His call to the two detachments without which we cannot embrace the one great love of our lives. For what is it to hate our mother and father or our wife and children other than to be detached from them in the deepest Christian sense of this word? Not to be detached in some unemotional way, but not to be so attached as to put them before God. Should we renounce our faith to save the life of a child? A secular pragmatist would say: absolutely. The son of God would say: those who try to save their lives in this world lose them in the next. This is why not even therapeutic abortion is possible. Does Jesus know what He is asking when He places this demand on us? Undoubtedly, yes, for He knows all things. He knows that our nearest and dearest are not simply close to our hearts; they live in our minds and dwell in our bones and bowels. If we love them, our hearts leap up to behold their smile, and our tears run freely at their grief. Hence, Jesus’ teaching in this gospel: He knows how much we are attached to those we love, for so was He attached to those He loved; to Mary and Joseph, to Martha, Mary and Lazarus. And yet, love of God came first, for He is the Lord our God above all things and Him only must we serve. No greater love is there than this that we lay down our lives for those we love, which we do even when we love God more than them.

Friendship runs as deep in me as it does in you, I think, Norfolk, but only God is love right through

says Thomas More to the Duke of Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons.

But then comes that second detachment, not now from others but from ourselves. And this detachment is much more difficult, requiring a deeper renunciation; it cuts through our very flesh and bone to reach the centre of our nervous systems. At the edges, this detachment requires our separation from the desires of this world, with all its riches and advantages. But thereafter, how much deeper a renunciation must take hold, a renunciation which requires our dethronement, the dethronement of our selfish wounded hearts, and the enthronement of the loving heart of God within the depths of our being. This is the meaning of incarnational when we speak of the charism of COLW. For this detachment from our very selves enables us to say with Saint Paul:

I live; now, not I but Christ lives in me.

How can we count the cost of this detachment from self? It is not just about the outward senses but also about the inward senses down to our most instinctive and autonomic levels. Our sense of safety, our sense of security, our sense of being and belonging: our very sense of self must be subsumed into the torrent of His eternal love:

That they may be one, Father, as you and I are one.

For our transformation into Christ in our very selves brings with it the mystery of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity, so that even the individual Christian, the lowly disciple of the Lord, the anawim, in their interior life reflects the interior life of the Incarnate God when He walked on earth within whose human soul was found the vision of the Blessed Trinity.

For all Jesus’ rhetoric in today's gospel, few of us have really counted the cost, and fewer still have paid it. If we had, we would already have set the world on fire. But this is our duty now. This is our calling; the universal call to holiness has gone out. And the carrying of the cross which Jesus calls us to today, the fiat in sorrow that we must offer as we offer the fiat in joy, is only the messy side of the tapestry on the other side of which is the extraordinary prospect of the God of Eternal Beauty who poured himself out so that we might share in His Eternal love.

Martha’s mistake

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

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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.

  

 

Consider the birds of the air

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

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 18-23) takes us back to the parable of the sower that that we heard two Sundays ago, a story that contains several chapters within it, all full of llessons for our spiritual lives. Jesus in this passage explains one level of meaning that is embedded in the parable. The first seed falls on ground - our souls - from where it is instantly snatched away by the devil. That seed will simply never take root. The next seed does indeed take root, but the soil is rocky and unforgiving, and the shoots of new life - the new aspirations and desires of grace - cannot stand the tribulation that comes and so wither away. All that humble promise that arose when new life began is then lost in a few instants.

 The next seed takes root and grows well, even perhaps grows strongly, but there is a counter force in play now, an overgrowth of brambles - the attachments and lures of this world - that hold back the new life, and it is choked accordingly. The field becomes a battle ground and the life sprung from the seed yields before the enemy. Then, at last, some seed falls on good ground where no bird robs it, the roots can go deep,  and no bramble hinders its growth. And, granted the sun of God’s joy and the rain of His grace, it springs forth and bears fruit in varying amounts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary, last and first

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

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

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

Who is this that looks forth like the dawn,

    fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array?

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

So, why does Jesus respond as He does in today’s gospel, in a manner that might almost suggest He no more believes in family bonds than one of Mao’s Red Guards? Here we see that the last or the least is the first in the kingdom, and that those who are humbled will be exalted.

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First, we probably should see His response in the context of its time in Israel. In a society where family ties and tribal identity are everything, Jesus is launching a gospel of spiritual kinship that transcends all earthly belongings. One can imagine the way in which perhaps well-meaning persons might have announced the coming of His mother, implying that Jesus had to drop everything and run outside. In this context, His words are no disrespect to His Mother but a reminder of the foundation of the kinship of grace that underpins all the work of the New Covenant in His blood.

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

fair as the moon, bright as the sun,

    terrible as an army in battle array.

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

First of my joys – their foundation and origin,

Root of mankind’s gracious redemption,

as the Pinsent Ballad says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In bread we trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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