The one thing necessary

 "Do not let you hearts be troubled," says Jesus in today's gospel (John 14: 1-6). It is almost the most important command of spirituality that Jesus delivers to us. In this scene we are at the Last Supper on the eve of the crucifixion. Earlier, we heard similar words during the sermon on the mount: "For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life, what you will eat, and not for your body, what you will wear" (Matthew 6: 25).

We worry because we are away from our Father's house. And yet in another way, it is only our perception - our lack of faith - that suggests we are absent from our Father's house. In the same discourse Jesus promised the disciples that He and the Father would live in those who love Him. For those who love Jesus, while we await what we hope for - final arrival at the Father's mansions - we find this extraordinary gift within our possession: that God comes to live in us. He takes possession of our souls and makes them all His own. If there are many rooms in the Father's house above, here on earth there are many rooms which God makes His own house to dwell in with His children.

So, why are we troubled? We cannot resolve this tension while we remain wayfarers. We are on a journey and yet we are already home. We are separated and yet we are united. We endure God's absence while knowing His presence in our lives. Our hearts are tethered to the eternal and to the temporal.  

"Do not let your hearts be troubled" means that as we live this tension, we should lean to the side that keeps us connected to the eternal ...and in the hands of the Eternal. We should, as St Paul invites us during the Easter season, "seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father" (Colossians 1:3). How many causes for the troubles of soul are the result of losing our grip on this eternal tether? Or rather, how often do our troubles arise when we unconsciously loosen our grip on the eternal and grasp for the things - even perfectly legitimate things - that the more we grasp, the more we crave? Recognition, respect, affection and ... that honey trap of safety. "Put out into the deep" (Luke 5:4).

"Do not let your hearts be troubled". Do we even recognise when we are troubled or do we dress up our troubles as legitimate concerns, rightful attention, responsible solicitude? 

"Seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father." In that end is our very beginning.

The bread that does not perish and our vocation

Today’s gospel (John 6: 52-59) presents us with another part of the episode that we have been following all week. Jesus continues his teaching on the Eucharist, and His listeners sink into ever deeper and deeper bewilderment and confusion. What is Jesus communicating to His listeners and to us in these moments?

I imagine Jesus in the 21st century having to sit through an obligatory workshop on pastoral homiletics where He finds himself subject to the judgment of pulpit experts who believe they have mastered the means of communication by trotting out a down-to-earth anecdote, a cheap admission of their own human frailty, and a reference to the latest drivel on the television. I have to say I also imagine Him addressing them as He addressed Saint Peter: get behind me Satan. Your thoughts are not of God but of man. With a wink of course!

Jesus does not spare his listeners in Capernaum. He does not tailor His message to their needs. He does not seek to connect with them and make them feel that He is just one of them really. He does not, as the saying goes these days, get down with the kids.

Instead, this teacher of teachers assaults their minds by drawing back a veil on the eternal drama of His life in the Father and on the temporal drama of the call He offers his listeners to enter into the communion of the Holy Trinity. We use the word ‘communion’ as a reference to the sacrament that is confected in the Holy Mass and distributed to the faithful. And yet its first meaning has nothing to do with us or indeed to do with the Holy Sacrament in itself, but rather gives expression to the internal life of the Blessed Trinity. The original communion is that in which the Father begets the Son, and both together breathe forth the Holy Spirit, in a perpetual giving of the divine essence in three persons equal and coeternal. If we find this hard to understand, it is because it is hard to understand; nay, impossible, at least for our minds. It is the deepest of our holy mysteries. It cannot be boiled down to the level of a funny anecdote, a cheap admission, or even a handbook for dummies that sells in the millions.

His listeners are scandalised by the idea of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Yet the real scandal here, if only they knew it - or rather the real surprise - is the invitation to commune in the life of the Son who Himself communes in the life of the Father in the love of the Holy Spirit.

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me …as I … draw my life from the Father.

The invitation to live in Him is the root of what in COLW we call our personal vocation. And our personal vocations are so varied not because humans have existed in their billions throughout the centuries and we cannot all do the same job (as if vocation were primarily our job in life), but because there can never be enough humans to reflect the endlessly rich and varied goodness of the God who shares His very self with us.

It is for this reason also that vocation is not primarily an exercise in our self-definition, a project for our fulfilment, or a kind of subconscious therapy to make us feel like our gifts are recognised and valued. Our gifts would be recognised and valued in the eyes of the Eternal Lord, even if we found ourselves stranded on a desert island for the rest of our natural lives; even if we found our ambitions thwarted and ourselves surrounded by apparent futility in a desert world of hi-tech secularism apparently exorcised of God's presence. And while it is fully human to need the company of others, it is our fallen natures that clamour for attention and for that sense of public self-realisation (in which our God-given talents are recognised) which is the most subtle form of the bread that perishes. 

In such a dumb pursuit of perishing bread, we miss the richness and depth of a personal communion with Christ who, if only we surrendered fully to Him, could either deploy us to transform the entire world (if that were our mission), or simply spend eternity delighting in this creature who by His grace has also become His child (and ‘praise of His glory’, like St Elizabeth of the Trinity). Our personal vocation gives us no leverage on the world; it calls us into something much greater by which the world and we are defined, despite our infidelities, despite our ingratitude.

Let us not look down on the scandalised congregation of the synagogue of Capernaum. In so far as we do not embrace all the implications of our personal vocation, and revel in the meaning of communion as an internal sharing in the inner life of the God of Eternal Love, we are just as unbelieving and as sceptical a congregation as they ever were.

Beware the bread that perishes

Today’s gospel (John 6: 22-29) is an important one for all those who consider themselves close to the Lord. Like the crowd that watched Jesus closely after his multiplication of loaves, the hearts of the devout follow Jesus, lifted with elation to see what He will do next.

At one level, this is better than the indifference of those who forgot that miraculous meal and wandered off to some other adventure, or who perhaps saw the miracle but decided it was a conjuring trick of some kind. The hearts of the devout honour Jesus’ power and they want to follow Him. At least that is what they say! But do they understand themselves? Do we understand ourselves?

Jesus at least questions the assumption that the crowd know why they are following Him.

You are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had the bread you all wanted to eat.

In other words, the crowd perhaps congratulated themselves on having holy motives (because they saw the signs of the Messiah), but it was their animal appetites (for food) that really drove them on.

This is not an especially flattering account of the devotion of the crowd, and if we apply it to ourselves, things get even worse. We make some important sacrifices to follow Jesus, don’t we? After all, we give up at least 60 minutes on a Sunday to go to Mass! Some of us do a lot more – what about them?

You are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had the bread you all wanted to eat.

Well, we could counterargue, Jesus, YOU gave us the bread! He did! And He does! But that is not the point. The point for the crowd (and the danger for ourselves) is that rather than following Jesus, we risk following our own sense of satisfaction. Do we take delight in His gifts? So we should. But we should not thereby lose sight of who He is and what our hearts really need.

Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you.   

So wrote St Augustine. Our hearts are restless for God, but our lower passions, and not least our self-regard, persuade us not to pursue God but to pursue our own satisfaction and then – like this crowd -  to dress up this quest for satisfaction as a quest for God.  

So, the crowd (and possibly ourselves) are doubly duped. They pursue their own satisfactions rather than the words of the Messiah, and they hold themselves to be devout whereas they are just as base as the ones who didn’t follow Jesus (many of whom do not deceive themselves that they are good fellows!). How does Jesus respond to this?

Do not work for the food that cannot last but work for food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you.

Once we realise this, our next step should not be to hate ourselves for our baseness! Rather, it should be to be thankful to know ourselves a little bit better than when we considered ourselves really quite good at this discipleship business.

Where can I go that I will not find myself? says St Augustine elsewhere. And that is true for us all. Amidst our best efforts, our worse selves poke up their heads and subtly – with the best motives - demand attention: we believe we have earned the rights of the faithful; we believe in our own competence.

It is not that we intend to be faithless. Nor that we are irredeemably bad. But when these subtle forms of self-deception overtake us, we simply forget that we are clay vessels, prone to blemishes, prone to crack and leak. We become Peter at his most pompous, or James and John at their most righteously angry.

Pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, says Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The devout need to realise this applies to them, as much as to those they quietly, subtly but inexorably look down on.

Seek not the bread that perishes, says Jesus in another translation. In other words, seek not something that is finite and will wither.

Seek rather the Eternal One, the one who feeds us with the Bread of Life. 

Let us seek Him and not ourselves.

Let your yes mean yes/no

In the shadow of today's holy feast, we can only sit and wonder at the endless mystery of God's mercy - and He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy (as Shakespeare puts it). All the excitement of the Exsultet during the Easter Vigil is ours (and the angelic host's) again. The Eternal Father intervenes to interrupt the murderous course of human history and lays down the foundations of the bridge that can lead us back towards salvation. This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.

And in the midst of it all is this quiet figure of the Virgin Mary who will rise from the grimy obscurity of a troubled Roman province of the Late Iron Age - more troubled now than it ever has been - to be recognised and honoured in churches and hearts on every continent as the Mother of the Redeemer. 

Every Colwelian wants to echo Mary's 'yes' today. What today's gospel gives us, however, are the conditions of that 'yes' or rather its gravitational centre. The paradox is that our total 'yes' is a 'yes' that, unlike Mary's, includes a kind of 'no'. 

After all, how will the fulfilment of Gabriel's message come about? As we reread this passage of St Luke's gospel, we note one thing; it will come about primarily through the action of God: 'the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow.' If Gabriel is asking for Mary's 'yes', it is only implicit: he knows she will say 'yes'. God's foreknowledge of her 'yes' does not mean she has no choice; the man who proposes to a woman who totally loves him knows she will say 'yes' freely. Moreover, she does not need to say a coquettish 'no' to prove she is free. Without taking anything away from Mary's freedom, therefore, we can say there is no way in which this creature who belonged totally to God would have said 'no' to such a plan.

Yet more than that, neither was there any way in which Mary would have imagined that her 'yes' was sufficient. She is the one who is not, He is the One who Is. Jesus needs to tell St Catherine of Sienna that but no need to tell Mary whose very soul is consumed by such an awareness of the Most High. So, when she says 'yes', there is no shadow of a 'no' in her reply; for there has never been sin. She is immaculate from her conception. Every dynamic, every movement of her heart, soul and body is a longing for the Lord and to be satisfied only in Him.

Not so her children by grace. As we want to echo her 'yes', we owe it to God to recognise the same insufficiency, and yet we struggle to: we do not have Mary's freedom. In this sense, it is not enough for us to say 'yes' to Him; we cannot echo Mary's 'yes', although we can emulate it. Our 'yes' must be underpinned constantly by the necessary confession of the truth of our dependence on God - a truth Mary never denied but one which we baulk at with every unconscious urge and often some conscious ones. And the corollary of this confession is to affirm our insufficiency. He is the One, not us, and our being and sufficiency can only be His gift to us.

Thy will be done not only means Thy will but also through through Thy means and by Thy grace. It is not just that we must do this Will. We must also ask the means to do this Will; to beg, as the French writer Fabrice Hadjadj says, our very voices from God to announce His praise, to cooperate in His work, and even and perhaps above all, to long for Him. 

And all the while, we must say 'no' - a NO by God's grace of course! - to the incipient rebellion that shakes our being since the Fall and creeps back again and again into the most intimate enclave of our heart to sit in God's place at its centre. How often we ambush ourselves with our own self-sufficiency! Again, paradoxically, we are not at our freest when we take command and act as if we can solve all our challenges, but when we surrender this inner throne to the One who made us and works out our salvation. This is what it means to be anawim - little ones - of the Lord. 

Then, and only then, can we echo Mary's coda: behold the servants of the Lord, be it done to us according to God's word.

The road to Emmaus

 Today' gospel (Luke 24:13-35) continues the dilemma we saw on Monday. Then, the choice was between following the path of the awestruck disciples, rapt in wonder before the Risen Lord, and that of the desperate guards who swapped the truth they knew for a convenient, advantageous lie. In today's gospel, the choice is no longer about whether we want to be a disciple; rather, it is about what kind of disciple we are willing to be.

The point is that these disciples are going away from Jerusalem, the city of the Most High. Maybe they had business to attend to ("I have married a wife and cannot come"?) Or maybe they were simply escaping the still charged atmosphere of a city where Jesus had just been put to death. The reality is they were deliberately driving themselves away from the conflict. They were agitated.  And because they were agitated, they could not understand what had just happened in Jerusalem. It is not just that we need to be patient with events. We need to be patient with ourselves. We need to have enough humility to recognise when we have kicked up the silt at the bottom of our hearts. And then, we need to be still and wait for the waters to clear.

But sometimes, just sometimes, we might have the extraordinary grace granted to these disciples of having the Lord enlighten us. Why did they not recognise Him? Some say the Risen Lord looked different, and so even His friends did not know Him. St Mark says He appeared "under another form" to two disciples, but the meaning of this is not entirely clear. I think we can be allowed to believe that the barrier to recognition lay not entirely on His side but on theirs. It was not that He looked different; it was that they did not recognise the Lord as He was. It was necessary for them to lose their notions of what the Lord was like, in order to learn to know the Lord who really is. 

Because for all their knowledge, they had no understanding. They knew the faith, but their minds were full of self justifying rationalisations. For all that they were disciples, they were on their way out of Jerusalem, like the first Bishop of Rome, who years later, as he fled the city of Rome, would see a vision of Christ going towards the imperial capital: "Quo vadis?" Peter asks Him (where are you going?). "I am going to Rome to be crucified," replies the Lord. Like the disciples in Emmaus,  Peter turned around and went back to resume his calling.

Why do we leave Jerusalem for Emmaus? What possible reason do we brandish to justify leaving the storm of the present moment for our oh so necessary occupations elsewhere? It is not that in our lives we must only attend to the Lord; we all have other duties. But unless we fill those duties with the Lord, we will inevitably flee from the one thing necessary.

Let us always carry Jerusalem with us in our hearts where the Risen One dwells. Otherwise, the road to Emmaus will not stop there.

Two roads diverged in an Easter garden

Today's gospel (Matt 28: 8-15) tells us something about the power of a garden. The women emerged amazed from the tomb and started to run to tell the disciples about what they had seen, but before they had gone any distance, Jesus is there before them. The women are instantly prostrate at His feet. What else would one do when meeting a person one saw crucified two days before? Their souls are filled with a sense of His adorable power, and they receive His message. Those who have encountered the Lord respond in this way. Human nature can only bear so much mystery: thereafter, it must either submit or distract itself. The rapidity with which people talk after prayer is a measure of how far they have travelled with the Lord. We can imagine these women delivering their message to the disciples but at the same time being lost on wonder, not to say flabbergasted, by what they had just experienced. 

Contrast the women with the guards who are in the garden also. In the garden, they know full well what has happened. They have just seen a dead man walking, and no longer towards his crucifixion, but from his tomb into the morning light. These pragmatic, hard bitten Roman soldiers, some of whom may even have assaulted Jesus on Friday, were now the bearers of a hardly-to-be believed report: He's back, and maybe He's coming for us! 

In the garden, they know the truth, but what do they then do? They go into the city. They flee back from the place of truth to a place of counter-narrative and confusion. They leave behind this bucolic vision of reality and open up their ears to the voices of serpents, no longer entwined around a tree but sitting in the judgement seat of Moses. As it were, they stop thinking about what they have seen with their own eyes, and ask their overlords for a new briefing. 

And they are misled. Not only are they provided with a lie, but they are, bribed and promised protection to maintain the falsehood. What matters is not longer what is but how the power of darkness requires things to be. Like all of us, these men now have a choice: accept the bribes and espouse the lie, or risk their all for the truth of something hardly understood but so marvellous that they can hardly believe it. 

But, did not Christ conquer death yesterday? Was not evil vanquished as the Saviour spoke his last words on the cross: It is accomplished? Can't we just put our feet up and let the Easter eggs roll in?

Everything needed for evil to conquer was overthrown; of that there is no doubt. But every individual must live that conflict in themselves, even now. I am just as capable today of raising my hand against my brother as I was on Thursday.  Every human being that breathes has this choice to make: will he submit to the reign of the Lamb or continue to revolt?

And those of us who believe too much in our own piety should ask ourselves too: how can we remain the wonderstruck, adoring servants of the Lord? And likewise, what must we do to avoid becoming those who flee to the city of distraction, accepting the bribes of darkness to engage in the deceits of the powerful, be it the mob or the mobsters, whose bullying voices ring in our ears on a daily basis? 

Only through the all conquering grace of the Risen Lord can such questions be solved.