The God factor

Today's gospel contains instructions about what to do in times of persecution. Flee if you can, stand fast, don't worry. The Son of Man is coming. The words apply both to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. when the Romans besieged and destroyed the heart of Judaism, and also to the end of the world. In other ways, they might apply to any time in which the disciples of Jesus face into the storms of history. 

What is our place in all that tribulation? Many people become deeply concerned about preparing for the end times. They devour prophecies and adopt devotions of varying hues, backed by solemn promises from seers here and there. There are maps and calendars that offer themselves as clues for the initiated, detailing what to do and how to cope with the coming trials. This, the devout feel, is their duty in such times.

And yet, these are in many ways superficial responses to the tribulations. It is possible for our religiosity to create a lot of effervescent froth on the surface of our lives but not to penetrate to our very heart. It is not that we are above devotions: that was the error of the toe-curling hippies of the 1960s and 1970s. But rather, such devotions only make sense when they are grounded on a deep, inner living in the Divine Will; when they are begun and ended with our prayer to Mary to teach us always to say yes to the Lord every moment of our lives (a yes that might require us to be busy about the duties of our state of life); when they are accompanied by a resolve to remain the teachable disciples of Christ and by a refusal to become gibbering enthusiasts who are pleased with the strength of their own convictions. God save us all from the coarseness of enthusiasm!

This is not so much about conquering ourselves by our own power; it is about letting ourselves be rescued by the God who saves us. It is about welcoming His power into our hearts to relieve us of the palsy and the sclerosis of our vices. And when Jesus tends our wounds - when we let Him do so - then we can turn to Him. Then His energy becomes our elan. We are not the heroes here. God is. We need the God factor.

Yet there is a tendency sometimes to think ourselves the heroes of the scenes of the gospel. At the moment, we hear a lot about being a listening Church. We have to be attentive to what Jesus is telling us. But if we want to be the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we are going to have to accept that at some point Jesus will tell us we are being foolish! Our calculations are all too human; and our way of thinking is not God's way. Can we listen to that? Can we hear about our own fat-headedness? Or will we then hide away under cover of being a listening Church, listening to voices that are not of God?

Here too, we need the God factor. We need not worry that we are on the edge of a battle, or that we might flunk it in our foolishness. We need only keep our eyes on Him who keeps His eyes on us.

Taking the word of God to ourselves

 Today's gospel rehearses again the discussion of Jesus with the Sadducees from a couple of weeks ago. We noted then that this gospel tells us something important about discernment, and notably that the things of this world must be seen in the light of eternity. 

Every gospel, however, is brought in by a Gospel Acclamation and today's Gospel Acclamation is one that has a wide-reaching significance for lectio divina.  Blessed are those who, with a noble and generous heart, take the word of God to themselves and yield a harvest through their perseverance. There is much in these words for our COLW journey, and especially the practice of reading the Scriptures every day.

We all must want to be part of the Good Lord's harvest. We all need to bear the fruit that Jesus calls us to bear. Today's Gospel Acclamation tells us that the first condition of this project is a 'noble and generous -heart'. To be noble is not to be self-interested in action. To be noble is to turn our eyes towards God to seek His measure of goodness, rather than focusing on our own deceiving measures. To be generous in its traditional sense means to be 'of noble stock', but in its contemporary sense it means 'giving freely'. For the harvest then, we must turn away from self-interest (especially self-interested religion which wants us to be perfect in our own eyes) and to give freely - first to God (to whom of course we owe everything in justice as our Creator, even before we consider His invitation to divine friendship) and then to those around us.

With nobility and generosity, we then need to 'take the word of God' to ourselves. This is precisely what we do in lectio divina. The path is sometimes smooth and easy; and it is sometimes rough and uncomfortable. Sometimes we surge through a sea of thoughts, inspirations and movements of the heart, and sometimes we sit becalmed on a sea of words that yields no instruction other than the self evident. We thought we were plunging into an ocean of wisdom, but we have the sensation of having leapt into a puddle. Let's not despair! We all have to take the rough with the smooth. We all have to be patient. God did not call us to an 'experience'; He called us to follow Him, to learn and to grow. And growth comes sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. 

But take the word of God to ourselves we must do without fail. Hopefully, we can manage the gospel every day. At least we should manage a few lines if we are truly pushed for time (though how often is our  'pushed for time' nothing other than our own disorganisation?).  We should read it and let it sit in our hearts. We should ruminate on it, reflecting on its meaning, connecting it to other gospels or sources, such as the lives of the saints (in whom the harvest was so great!). 

In season and out of season too. This world dominates our sense of time so much that we are strangers often to God's time with its own periods of quick-quick-slow, its sense of organic growth, of 'hear-for-the-long-run' endurance. The word that God speaks is His enduring love letter to us (the one good thing Kierkegaard said!). And why should we not pore over His love letters? How much we need their reassurance and wisdom.

And then, finally, we must persevere if we want to see the harvest. To see the harvest: not to feel good about ourselves but to rejoice in what God has brought about in us - his fragile vessels of clay - by His mercy. 

So, persevere with a noble and generous heart in taking the word of God to yourself. And let God give the increase.

From wonder to wisdom

The last blog left off with the need for discernment as well as docibilitas. And today's gospel gives us some of the strands of the habit of discernment that we need to develop with the help of the Holy Spirit. 

The gospel opens with a typical correction on the part of Jesus. The disciples are lost in admiration looking upon the shining spectacle of the great temple of Jerusalem. There is of course nothing wrong with wonder. Indeed, wonder is an essential element in our own education. Wonder can nourish and wonder can relax. Wonder is what this busy practical world we live in seems to exclude from every corner. We would be healthier all round if we spent less time gawping at our screens and more time gazing in wonder on the simple beauties of the world that God made and, yes, even the wonderful things that wonderful human beings have created (like the temple or great art). But Jesus does not want us to stop at wonder, and He seizes the moment to teach the disciples to look beyond wonder and reach for wisdom. Why? Well, ultimately, everything will be destroyed.  

Discernment has many dimensions but one of them is precisely this call: to look beyond the appearances. Wonder by all means, but do not become enthralled. Rejoice in the good, but be not seduced by a partial good. 

Jesus' admonition is then followed up by a mysterious and many levelled prophecy that evokes the fall of Jerusalem but also of the end of the world. Personally, as individuals, we may see the end of the world, or, conversely, the world may see the end of us instead. Yet, in some ways these words of Jesus' prophecy are realised in every persecution down the ages of the Church, and indeed in the lives of many faithful souls: you will be hated by all men on account of my name. How often do we try to dodge the burden that this fate seems to represent in our eyes? 

But to accept the burden of infamy, we must listen again to Jesus' call to step beyond the appearances. We might fear hatred, but it builds no lasting kingdoms. Only the immense love of God can do that. It is human to be awed by hatred when it is directed against us, but it is at that moment that we must put our hands in Jesus' and step towards wisdom. Not a stone will be left upon a stone. That kingdom of appearances and of human domination will crumble. 

Take care not to be deceived, Jesus invites us. Be divinely teachable, not humanly gullible. 

Keep this carefully in mind. Discern.

Teachability and teachables

We have been thinking about the theme of teachability in the last few weeks - docibilitas - and reflecting on what is means to say 'yes' and 'thank you' to God every moment of our lives.  If, however, we need to be teachable, what is it God intends to teach us? If, moreover, we need to say 'yes' to God, what is it we are saying 'yes' about? 

The gospel of today and indeed of yesterday shed further light on these questions. What is the mistake of the Sadducees in today's gospel? It is not so different from the mistake of the Pharisees in yesterday's gospel: it is the error of judging eternal things by temporal things. It is the mistake of evaluating heavenly things by earthly things. 

In today's gospel, the Sadducees try to reduce to absurdity the argument in favour of a resurrection. If a woman married seven brothers one after the other, they argued, whose wife would she be at the resurrection of the dead? But the problem here is not in the question: it is in the assumptions of the question, and mainly in the assumption that marriage is an institution that applies to our life in eternity. In other words, the Sadducees assume that the necessities of this life overhang those of the next. At least it is a very human error. It is as human as the populist versions of heaven with their cotton-candy clouds. 

But it is also a failure of imagination, not to say faith. It is a failure to imagine that the realities of God might far outstrip our limited realities. The same could be said of the Pharisees in yesterday's gospel who laughed at Jesus' scorn of money. Their assumption was not so much that the realities of this life overhang those of the next but that human mastery of the realities of this life - ni this case money - is a foregone conclusion. Are we in control of our possessions or are our possessions subtly in control of us?

It has rightly been said that money is a good servant but a wicked master. Our problem today is that not only are we mistaken about ability to be in control of our money, we make the same error with regards to all our sources of power: technology, politics, sex. All those things by which we aspire to dominate the world or craft our own destiny bite us back badly. So much for the laughing Pharisees. 

These two lessons, therefore, marks the gospel today and yesterday. The lessons are simple but easy to forget. The first is: do not judge the next life by the standards of this life; judge this life by the standards of the next. See this life in the light of eternity. Likewise, the second lesson is: do not think we are captains of our fate, at least not like the Pharisees did. We make our world but our world makes us too, and tries to refashion us in its own image.

Thus, finally, we come back to the importance of docibilitas: if we are to avoid these errors of Sadducee and Pharisee alike, we must be teachable with respect to God and not with respect to the standards of the world. We must try to see things as God sees them, and not as the world sees them. 

It is to God that we must say 'yes', not the world. Of course, in our concrete lives, the dividing lines are so often unclear. We need not only docibilitas, therefore, but also discernment. 

But that is for another blog...

  

The Church suffering and triumphant

 Today's gospel sees Jesus raise the dead son of the widow of Nain. Resurrection is the leitmotif of Jesus' ministry and finally the process by which He overturns the effects of death. We tend to remember the three individuals He raises - the widow's son, Jairus' daughter and of course Lazarus - but we forget the uncounted number of people who rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, according to St Matthew's account (Matt 27: 51-53). These were public signs of the deeds Jesus had wrought. They must have terrified and thrilled the people of Jerusalem at the same time. These incidents would have been redolent of the works of the prophets Elijah and Elisha and, more particularly, of the power of God to overturn the usually grubby business of the earth.

Yet, the resurrection of the dead lies ahead of us now. What remains in the meanwhile are the realities of the Church triumphant in heaven (yesterday's feast) and the Church suffering in purgatory (today's feast). Seeing the crowds, as yesterday's gospel told us, Jesus went up the hill.

                                                (Photo of the "the hill" where Jesus preached by Susanne, COLW Group 1)

The beatitudes that He announced from this hill would require a lifetime's inner work to understand fully. St Thomas associates them individually with the work of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in us. It is a timely reminder that the blessings of union with God are His gift and His work in our hearts through grace.

But this truth is also a reminder of a reality stated plainly by the great French novelist Georges Bernanos: the Church is the Church of the saints. He might have said: the Church is the Church of the beatitudes. In other words, the measure of the Church is not seen in the human appearance of her power or internal politics, but in the inner strength of the holiness of her members who are transformed by grace. Happy are those who ...The Church triumphant in heaven comprises souls who have offered themselves up to be conquered by the Saviour whose likeness is most especially found in those who are abused, persecuted and calumniated on His account. 

The last of the beatitudes contains quite an admonition. Fear popularity. Be grateful - albeit with human distaste - if you are thought a failure. Perhaps it is God's blessing. You can't begin to serve God until you've lost your reputation, said St Teresa of Avila. 

Lo, all things flee thee, for thou fliest me, 

writes Francis Thompson in his masterpiece poem The Hound of Heaven. We should recognize in this beatitude, as in all the beatitudes, God's longing for us to share His likeness, His goodness, His love.

***

So, let us pray for the Holy Souls this month, among whom may be many of our acquaintances, and let us pray especially for the forgotten ones. They can do nothing for themselves, though they can intercede for us and many saints have asked their prayers. 

And let us continue to pray for the intercession of all the saints that we may be received by them, like Lazarus the poor man, into everlasting dwellings.