... a pilgrim's prayer journal ...

"You are the Christ, the son of The Living God"

Mtt 16:13 

Who you say the Son of Man is? 

When Peter responds to Jesus he knows that Jesus is the Messiah.  He has turned out to be very different from the messiah they thought they had been waiting for all their lives.  It was by the grace of God that Peter recognised Jesus and only by God's grace is Peter ever going to be qualified to lead the church.

We know by now that the disciples took a long time to learn what Jesus was teaching them patiently every day for the years of His ministry.  We know too that Peter is about to be rebuked by Jesus for trying to stand in the way of God's plan for our salvation.

However, even though Peter will deny Jesus at the last moment on Good Friday, he still becomes the Rock upon which the Church will be built.

What about us?  We may well feel unqualified for the tasks God has for us.  Even though we know Jesus is the Messiah and our only Way to heaven, we might still be trying to change the course of God's plan for us. So often we don't want to accept whatever we perceive to be too hard, too demanding or even too extraordinary for our small lives to cope with.

However, just like Peter, we need to rely on God's grace, His action in our lives, His formation of our hearts.  We need to be teachable and available for His will.  

Though Peter was remonstrating with Jesus because he wanted to protect Him from suffering, he was still blocking the will of God, putting himself in the way of the plan God had in mind for our salvation.

Let's not let our own 'good intentions' stand in the way of God's will for us.  If God has called us to to a thing, then He will qualify us to do it.  Its not up to us to decide if this call fits into a polite pattern of pleasing others or fulfilling apparent expectations.  If God has called us to something, then He will bring it to completion, just as He did with seemingly rather hapless Peter.  

Mary didn't let all the risks or consequences of her situation stop her or try to convince the angel to change the plan. Her 'fiat' was said humbly, joyfully, fully relying on God to qualify her for the task ahead, in spite of her littleness and the seeming impossibility of the task.

Let's follow her example, every day.

... a pilgrim's prayer journal ...

Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod

Mark 8:14-21

Don't worry about the bread, Jesus can deal with bread!  

The disciples had forgotten to bring food.  After all that business with not having enough to feed everyone and then the miraculous moment with the five loaves and two fishes, we might have thought they'd have made sure they always had provisions with them after that.  

But no, here they are again, twice, it would seem, in a very short time, without enough between them to feed everyone.  Someone pipes up that they have one loaf between them on the boat.  

Jesus comes back however with something completely different.  They're still concerned about what they will eat, still feeling stupid for having forgotten food and thinking He is complaining about that.  Bothered that they look silly.

But no, He couldn't care less about the next meal, that was small fry, He could handle that in a moment and according to Him they should have realised this.

What He wanted them to be concerned about was a different kind of 'leaven' or 'yeast' - 

"the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod"

What was that?  It was enough for them to learn to be fully reliant of Jesus for all their bodily needs, to entrust themselves to Him to manage the food question as well as the clothing and lodging question.

Now He was over their heads again and over ours too probably, if we just read the words without pondering and considering what Jesus really wants to say here.

Its not about bread, or fish, or raising agents...  

However, it is about relying on Jesus, trusting Him to deal with the small stuff and then going deeper.

We know what Jesus thought of the way the Pharisees went about their religion as He is reported several times in the Gospels chastising them for various things.  We also have a detailed description of the way Herod thought and acted, in the telling of the arrest and subsequent murder of John the Baptist.

The Pharisees thought they could earn their way to heaven, they were scrupulous to the extreme and tied themselves and others in knots with their rules.  For them the worst thing was to be seen to be breaking a 'jot or tittle' of the law... They were primarily relying on themselves for the health of their spiritual lives. 

Herod on the other hand, was concerned with success by the world's standards, being seen to be a great king, a strong ruler and keen to stay riding the waves of popular acclaim and adulation, even fear as long as he kept his earthly status at all costs...  He was primarily relying on himself (his status, power and earthly authority, riches and appearance) for success in his earthly life.

As Jesus tells the disciples - and us - to be on guard against both of these temptations, clinging to our own control and working it all out by ourselves.  He seems incredulous they were still talking about the bread.  As so often happened during Jesus' ministry on earth with His disciples, and as so often happens with us here today as we try to follow Him, we get bogged down in the daily doings of life and don't notice when we're being influenced by the leaven or yeast of the Pharisees or even Herod.  

We need our trust and faith to grow.  To trust He will provide for us - both physically and spiritually - that He can do miraculous things with some very ordinary things (even bread - both physically and spiritually) and He can do the same with us.

We need to be open and teachable - docibile - trusting that God can give us all we need on every level.  We don't need to worry about looking perfect in the eyes of the world or in the eyes of religious leaders.  We can't earn heaven through ticking boxes.  We can't earn a gift that is given freely.

Another way of looking at it, which I've been pondering lately, is the worker of the eleventh hour, who obtains his full reward at the very end of a long day.  The other labourers, who had sweated for hours through the hottest part of the day and would receive the same pay. complained that this late-comer was getting off lightly.  The result was the same, they were to be rewarded just as he was.  We really need to make sure we're not like them - we can't earn heaven through decades of hard graft and then demand our pay.  

Suddenly someone we have known forever as not being quite up to scratch in our opinion, could one day present to Our Lord a childlike, simple, open, teachable heart and might surprise us by passing 'Go', getting their £200 and receiving a 'get out of jail free' card before us... even when it would appear that they have done nothing to deserve it (like we have).

Neither can we earn our way to heaven through decades of climbing the greasy pole, priding ourselves in success or status or achievement.  Or even measuring our worth by the approval ratings of our bosses, colleagues or peers.  This is another sort of bread Jesus didn't much like, he called that 'the bread that perishes'.  That would have been the bread Herod served at his palace banquets.  

We need to be like Our Lady, one of the poor ones, the little ones - anawim - full of wonder at what God can do, fully aware of God's power, fully trusting and reliant on Him, despite what it looks like on the outside.  

We need to be teachable, fully reliant on Jesus - for the spiritual as well as the physical - saying our 'yes' in each moment and knowing that He has everything in hand if we would only let go and allow Him to be our God.

Beatitude in joy and sorrow

 "Rejoice when that day comes, and dance for joy." (Lk 6: 23)

Today's gospel sums up in many ways the commingling of joy and sorrow that comes with our saying yes to God. The fiat in joy and sorrow, that we explored in the last study session, is here attached to a rainbow spectrum of human sufferings - poverty, hunger, tears - that, as we know, are to be understood in their spiritual sense first of all. The privation which each of these sufferings carries with it is an invitation to us to take stock of our radical insufficiency and to abandon ourselves to the Father. It is also a reminder that much of our faith comes to us in paradoxes: God is three and one; Mary is virgin and mother; and in the beatitudes, those who have nothing are ready for heaven. 

In truth we are likely to run away from this invitation to abandonment and the recognition of our poverty that it entails. Something in us wants to measure up to Jesus' teachings, and when we fall short, we can hate ourselves for it. But, as the great French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest, says at the end of that novel: it is easier than you think to hate yourself. Grace means forgetting yourself. This is genuine poverty: to forgo the satisfaction of self regard for the reformation that can begin - and begin and begin again! - when we abandon ourselves to the loving, piercing regard of our Saviour.

In avoiding the commingling of joy and sorrow - what artful dodgers we are! - I wonder if we are also likely to invent forms of fake spiritual wealth to serve as cheap holiness. There are many necessary weapons in the spiritual armoury - lectio divina, adoration, novenas, rosaries, all manner of devotions - but if we do not approach them with humility and moderation, we risk using them to veil ourselves off from our own emptiness, treating them like conquests (and who has not prided themselves on the spiritual achievement of the unmissed novena prayer?). Sometimes in the storm, they feel like all we have to cling on to, especially when Jesus seems to be asleep in the boat. In this moment, however, we are most at danger of thinking that our fidelity, rather than God's graciousness, will determine the outcome. Save us, Lord, else we perish, is the sentiment that should shape all our prayers. Prayer should involve a revolt against our self sufficiency. In moments of consolation, we should also take care not to let such spiritual armoury, as glorious and as dignified as it is, hinder us from facing our own spiritual poverty, our failure to forgive, our ongoing refusal to let go of our vanity and withstand the hatred of the world that Jesus points to as our lot in life. As another poet said, at that point we're so full of what is right, we can't see what is good. 

How, then, can we pronounce our fiat, our abandonment to the Father in the face of joy and sorrow, without looking for pain relief or satisfying our vanity? As mentioned above, I wonder if the beginning of an answer lies simply in St Luke's description of Jesus before he begins enunciating the Beatitudes, fixing his eyes on his disciples. How would it be if instead of measuring ourselves against the outward appearances of holiness, we looked first in every devotion or spiritual practice to catch the fixed gaze of Jesus - the gaze of the One who has already fixed His eyes on us - and meditated on what that loving gaze means and what it requires of us? Would that not change our readiness to accept both who He is and who we are too? Would that not begin to break down the barriers that our pride constructs against the invasion of our divine conqueror? 

At the very least, such an attempted gaze might bring us up to the level of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, the patron of those who daily struggle to recognize their purblind poverty.  Then, we might alter the words of another piece of poetic wisdom:

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as Jesus see us!

And not only to see ourselves, but to make ourselves dependent on His power to establish His kingdom in our hearts. And that would indeed be something to dance with joy for.

Fishing for customer satisfactions

 "And when they had done this, they netted such a huge number of fish that their nets began to tear." (Lk 5:5)

We all want to make sense of our lives, sometimes too much so. Maybe it is something in the traditional stories we were told as children; maybe we might blame it on the Hollywood films that teach us to think of lives in complete story arcs. Whatever the cause, our minds seem to want polished narratives that make sense of our lives, and because of this, we appoint ourselves commentators on how the story is unfolding. In this way our sense of 'the will of God' and 'our vocation' can become entangled in our own attempts to make sense of our lives, rather than being triangulation points that redirect us to God's path. 

Now, this is a mistake for three reasons at least. First it is a mistake because we already know what God's will is for us: it is our sanctification, our being remade in Jesus' image, and being drawn ever more deeply into the inner life of the Trinity. Second, the problem is that in laying down a narrative - "so, that's what God was doing", we want to say - we risk trying to take control of the story, looking for signs and portents of His will. My spouse and I used to joke about our naive attempts to read the signs of God's will by calling out 'Spoons!' to each other. The thing is: spoons always fit together, whether they are meant to or not. The third mistake is that all this waiting around for God to issue us with some certifiable vocation means that we are trying to make God follow our calendar, instead of embracing the uncertainties of God's own good time; in that case, it also might mean we are missing what He is doing today.

So, what has all this to do with today's gospel? The essence of it is captured by the disciples while they were still serving as fishermen in their boats. Was that not their vocation? Was that not the will of God for them? And, there they were, after a night's fishing, facing the fruitlessness of their own efforts. Something in us wants to see successful people as having found their way, and unsuccessful people as needing to find their way. Yet maybe we need to be more detached than that. Wanting to know the bigger story - wanting a bona fide, recognizable, genuine vocation now, thank you God - can block our attention to the little details that surround us and that are full of meaning and sense. How easily we forget that the God we believe in draws meaning out of absurdity and joy out of terrible pain. He is after all the one who reaps where He has not sown, and gathers where He has not strewn. Of course we all have a vocation, but let us not behave like we can pluck it off the shelf, take it to the counter, and pay for it like a customer. Our vocation is a journey, an education and a love story; it is not a bargain, a comfort blanket or a lottery win.

What is needed then is not to turn the will of God or our vocation into an idol or a product that we hope to grasp and brandish, but rather to see them as the ways in which our life with Blessed Trinity can unfold. Then indeed, we might discover the abundance of fish that God lands in our nets daily, if only we were paying attention. 

Pope Benedict xvi On God's Will for Our Life

"Every day in the prayer of the Our Father we ask the Lord:

“thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10).

In other words we recognize that there is a will of God with us and for us, a will of God for our life that must become every day, increasingly, the reference of our willing and of our being; we recognize moreover that “heaven” is where God’s will is done and where the “earth” becomes “heaven”, a place where love, goodness, truth and divine beauty are present, only if, on earth, God’s will is done."

How can we build practical links in our lives between the Colwelian commitment to say yes and thank you to the Lord, and what Pope Benedict calls the “will of God for our life that must become […] the reference of our willing and of our being”?