Precept and counsel, need and desire

 The strictures of today's gospel about how to go about preaching the gospel are so severe, one might be excused for feeling a little discouraged. "Carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals", is it, Lord? Well, we reason, maybe that works in Late Iron Age Palestine but spare a thought for twenty-first century Britain! But that would be wrong for at least three reasons. 

The first is that as we read the Scriptures, we should know that, at times, Jesus does use hyperbole when He speaks. Most of us probably understand that instinctively. Those who don't have already chopped off their hands or dug out their eyes in order to obey Jesus' command about what to do if we sin by hand or eye. Not all Jesus' apparent exaggerations can be attributed to hyperbole, like the number of times we must forgive. But others - like "Call no man 'Father' - fit that category precisely. Jesus' order here about no purse, no haversack and no sandals is a command about simplicity and bare minimum necessities, more than an order about the disciples' fashions.

The second reason it would be wrong is because it would depend on a fundamental confusion between precept and counsel, between a command and a better way. So much trouble comes to us by confusing these two things. For the habitual sinner, it seems easy to think that precept (a command) is merely a counsel, a piece of advice but not an obligation. Jesus cannot really mean that, can He? He said He came to make us free after all!

On the other hand, for those who have made a little more progress in the spiritual life, the opposite is true: they can easily confuse counsel for precept. In Jesus' day, it was the Pharisees who were perhaps most guilty of this, but it is a vice that can afflict those who are a lot nicer than the Pharisees. We see this when people become zealous about some devotion or other, and act as if they have been called to spread it through the whole world. Those who mistake counsel for precept become merchants of religious enthusiasm, not understanding that enthusiasm in a religious key is a kind of lack of freedom. It wants to draw its power from passion, and not from grace; it instinctively puffs itself up into a feel-good fuzziness (or perhaps a feel-righteous fuzziness) instead of waiting for the breath of the Holy Spirit. It would take those words of Jesus about going without sandals and purse and turn them into a hammer to crush the weakness of lesser Christians. Those who mistake counsel for precept are the spiritual Marthas of this life who are unwittingly anxious about many things, whereas they believe they are the ones serving the Lord with all their busyness. Yet they miss the one thing necessary; they lack the simplicity of Mary.

Which brings us nicely to the third reason why we cannot just overlook these words of Jesus: they are meant to help us discern between what it is we want and what it is we really need. We need many things in this life, as our Father in Heaven knows, but what we want and the way in which we want them can come between us and our following of Christ. We are right to deny the abusiveness of the religious enthusiasts who want to turn counsels into precepts and place on our shoulders the burdens of their enthusiasms. And yet, if we do not distinguish rightly between our needs and our desires, we are likely to remain just as worldly as those who do not profess to follow Jesus. Our legitimate freedoms can become our seductions. We can believe we are good for our occasional penances, whereas God might look on our indulgences as so many acts of betrayal because to those to whom much is given, much is rightly expected. Our simplicity can become an oversimplification or simply naivety, especially about our lower passions and their entrapments. Jesus told us to take up our cross, and that too is a precept. 

The challenge is that some counsels do indeed become precepts. We are all called to poverty, chastity and obedience, but if we take a vow to embrace them, they become precepts to us (understanding that chastity is fundamentally always a matter of precept in its essence). Yet in another way, counsel may become precept by some inspiration or perhaps through our own personal vocations which the Holy Spirit gives us to understand. This is when we must listen so carefully to the Holy Spirit and pray to discern His commands with wisdom. 

In the end, whether we are among the seventy-two disciples sent out or those who remain behind to hold the fort and pray for them, we need all to know the difference between precept and counsel, to abstain from placing our own burdens on the shoulders of others, and to watch closely that our freedoms do not become an excuse for waywardness. And then, our first words will always be, "Peace be to this house."

Indulgent pragmatism or transformative love

Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) offers us two profound truths of the spiritual life that can nourish us on a daily basis.

Why did Moses allow the Jews to divorce? Jesus says explicitly that it was because they were unteachable. Another translation expresses this as the hardness of their hearts. Yet, the challenge for us, especially in COLW, is to look hard at ourselves and wonder: where are we guilty of the same hardness? Where do we show ourselves unteachable?

Unteachability may show itself in major matters, as in the question over marriage and divorce. Or it may show itself in small matters. In those who commit to a more devout life, perhaps unteachability goes along with a way of living through which our eyes are more focused on ourselves than on the divine horizon ahead of us. In that sense, being unteachable means not looking towards our Divine Teacher. Instead, we look to ourselves and our own supposed self-sufficiency, or else we judge our actions merely by our own lights, be they indulgent or severe. Who can learn in those circumstances? O that today you would harden not your hearts. Such is the appeal we hear in the Psalms. O that today we would be teachable, and be all ears for the lessons of the Master.

One objection that might be raised as we read this gospel is to wonder whether Jesus is less merciful than Moses. After all, Moses allows divorce and Jesus doesn’t. Therefore, Moses shows mercy and … Jesus doesn’t?  How can that be?

Yet this brings us to another profound truth of the spiritual life in today’s gospel: Jesus comes not just to govern us but to transform us.

God’s creation is not the work of a manufacturer who designs his invention, sets it running, and then wanders away. Creation is suffused not only with God’s presence but with His wisdom and inner working; with the attention of its Divine Lover who cares for all things in their right order. The Divine Law is not imposed on the world as some exoskeleton but is intrinsic to it by God’s design; all things are possible with God except those that are contrary to His nature. He could not design a world in which He worships us, for example. In this sense, Moses is but a technician of the Law; his ruling on divorce is like the work of a mechanic who finds the inventor’s machine malfunctioning and does a botch job until he can work out a better solution. Moses was not responsible for the Law. He was merely its guardian, even when he made this exception about divorce.

But Jesus is no technician of the law; He is its author. The indissolubility of marriage is wedded to how God designed the sexes. In this sense, it is not that He is less merciful than Moses. Rather, He is giving us something more than Moses could ever offer: the call to be transformed by His grace in a new life of divine intimacy and friendship.

Moses’s mercy is the mercy of the pragmatist managing the appearances.

Jesus’ mercy belongs to another dimension. He takes us through the darkest valleys where we must die to ourselves only to lead us to the sunlit uplands of the Resurrection.

Are we tempted by the pragmatism of Moses rather than the transformative call that Jesus offers us? O that the Almighty had not fixed His canon against self-slaughter, says Shakespeare’s despairing Hamlet. In our darker moments, we might be able to taste such bitterness.

But, could we ever say O that the Almighty had not offered us His deepest, transforming love and His abiding friendship? After Jesus' death and all His labours, such a plea would be shaped by the indulgent malice of hell.

A day in the life of Mary

 Today’s blog (John 19:25-34) sees Mary stood beneath the cross of Jesus, receiving John her son (and in him all those who are born spiritually of Mary), witnessing Jesus’ death, and His final indignity of having a spear driven through His side. And in such a scene, we see her become the Mother of the Church with a motherhood that far exceeds anything we have known or experienced in this life.

Mary is our model, standing before the cross of Jesus. This spectacle is the condition of her joy, for there is no longer any victory over sin and evil in this word except along the path driven by the Saviour through the heart of Satan’s kingdom. Victory – and the woman shall crush the head of the serpent, not as the flesh of Eve and of her fallen sons and daughters but as the first fruit of the New Adam in the name of whose merits she was preserved from all stain of original son. Her immaculate vocation, her glorious vocation, was the call to be His mother and in Him, the Mother of all his offspring, now beside the cross with her: the indomitable John, the constant Magdalene, and a small gathering of less well known but faithful supporters.

Sacred tradition teaches us that her birth of Jesus was without physical pain, but not this birth on Calvary; not this birth of the often treacherous brothers and sisters of her only Son. No sooner had she become a mother to them than she saw Jesus mocked in His thirst by the bitterness of vinegar, and then abused in his death by an unnecessary and vicious wound to His heart; Jesus, become a rag doll victim of the wild violence of men, the unthinking and unwitting objects of his prayers for their forgiveness. They know not what they do.

And through it all, there remains the joyous conviction of the fulfilment of the Father’s forming action: the Father’s forming action on her Son and on her, associated now with His labour of love that appears all but wasted and lost, as the rain lashes mercilessly down on her.

Must all Thy harvest fields be dunged with rotten death?

Where is your joy now, Mary? It is hidden in the depths of a heart that is held by His grace, unbroken by the worst the powers of evil throw at her and that the Father allows to strike her full on. The fiat in sorrow can only come from a deeper and more lasting fiat in joy. For God is love; and joy, mercy and peace are the essence of love.

But this is not today’s gospel, you say? It is yesterday’s, isn’t it? No, dear reader, don’t think like the progressives who declare today a step forward on yesterday and would rather we forgot the past. Time is circular, every part of it touching the same eternal truth, like a wheel around a hub or a circumference to its periphery. 

And so, Mary’s motherhood of the Church belongs to today and tomorrow. Her example and her care are there always. We only need look for it.    

 

 

Remaining in His love

 With today's gospel (15: 9-17), we enter a little more deeply into the mystery of the love that God shares with us through His Son Jesus Christ. These words of Jesus at the Last Supper are echoed somehow in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

What is our Lord's love for us like then? How does He love us? He Himself gives the answer: 

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Yet this is utterly breath taking. The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father breathes forth a third person - the Holy Spirit. In these days before Pentecost, we can only wonder at what this mystery of their mutual love means, and how it comes to us as a gift of them both. Now, to wonder is to contemplate, and to contemplate is at the heart of the Colwelian vocation. 

When we hear the Colwelian call to contemplation, we are listening to the music of this love. In our naivety, perhaps we sometimes think of it in terms of prayers and devotions; the quantifiable panoply of religiosity, as dignified and as honourable as they are. But, contemplation is rather what fills the sails of our prayers and devotions with a divine wind. As the Father has loved the Son...just think of it. As the Father has loved the Son! We will never finish contemplating that mystery, and so, we will never finish contemplating the mystery of His love for us. 

My song is love unknown,

My Saviour's love to me,

Love to the loveless shown

That thy might lovely be.

To contemplate means to gaze attentively - literally as in a temple - where we behold the mysteries of our faith. Our temples are our churches of course, but they are also our own souls in which the Blessed Trinity comes to dwell.

And there He shares His joy with us so that our joy may be complete. But why should it not be complete after this? If He has loved us like the Father has loved Him, it only remains for us to become fully awake, fully alive, to the implications of that love. 

And to return it to Him with a strength only He can lend to us. 

Let us remain in this love and do everything it requires of us. Our lives can have no other meaning than this.

His joy!

We have been poorly and normal service has been interrupted. Nevertheless, I did not want to let today's gospel go by without making some remarks. Today's gospel (John 15: 9-11) is an essential COLW gospel. 

It begins in the love of the Father for the Son - As the Father has loved me - which is the origin of everything. It begins in the communion which, as this blog observed a few posts ago, is the origin of all forms of communion in this life or the next. Religion begins not in our action but in this outpouring of God's very self in love which needs must share its goodness with the world. As St Francis Xavier put it, " O Deus ego amo te, Ne prior tu amasti me ("My God, I love you, because you first loved me.")

Jesus then links that generative love to submission to the Father and the keeping of the commandments. People tend to speak of the commandments as moral injunctions, but only the second part of the Decalogue concerns the moral life. The first part concerns everything we owe to God before we have set foot outside our door or even acknowledged our life in society. Ultimately, Jesus' injunction here recalls His answer to the question about the greatest commandment: you shall the love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:30). The first act of religion is surrender and submission in the same way that Jesus' role of saviour is initiated in His self emptying. Just as He put aside His rightful dignity in order to bring us back to the love of the Father, so we must put aside our wrongful pride in order for that love of the Father to take us back home: If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in His love. To remain in His love is already to be home with God, for home is the stable place where things do not change, least of all the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Holy Spirit which they breathe forth.

And finally we come to the Colwelian heart of this gospel:

I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

We find our own joys fleeting and subject to change. They ebb and flow with our moods and often with the events of the day .We often sail three sheets to the wind and so are blown off course with every gale. 

But if we only realised this gift of Jesus' joy - that my own joy may be in you -  the stable joy of His eternal peace, the joy He radiates when He forgives the sinner, His joy in doing the will of the Father. His joy is present even in the midst of His sorrows and the midst of our sorrows; it is rooted in the endless torrent of love that flows from the communion of the Blessed Trinity in whom all loss can be understood and assuaged. As Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven put it: 

All which I took from thee I did but take

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost I have stored for thee at home

Rise clasp my hand and come! 

And now He teaches his disciples the love of the Father so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. We must pray that He open our hearts to receive this extraordinary gift. Of course we can no more contain that joy than a hole in the sand can capture all the sea. But if we were at least filled with it to the measure of our fulness, would it not radiate out to others and help reflect His light into their hearts too? 

Jesus, make us worthy vessels of your joy to share your love in the joyless darkness of our world.