The virtues of a lonely place

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 14: 13-21) contains two mysteries that are intimate parts of our journey back to God. The most obvious mystery is that of the Holy Eucharist, foreshadowed in this extract of the gospel in the distribution of bread and fish to the masses; not bread alone (anticipating the Eucharistic symbolism) but fish also (the sign of the reality of His flesh in the Eucharistic banquet). The fragments rained down upon the crowd like manna in the desert, or like the snowflakes on the Esquiline Hill in Rome on the night of 5^th August 352 when, according to legend, a miraculous snowfall marked the area where the Virgin Mother wished a church to be built in her honour. It does not matter whether we accept the legend - I do - so much as that we believe in miracles and the miraculous. The Eucharist is a miracle, our daily miracle, and would that we honoured its mystery like the angels do.

The other mystery in today’s gospel is more easily passed over, but while it is of a lesser kind than that of the Holy Eucharist, it is, nevertheless, fundamental to our journey:

When Jesus received the news of John the Baptist’s death, He withdrew by boat to a lonely place where they could be by themselves.

A whole world of wisdom is contained in this simple line. Let us be whimsical for a moment. Did it never cross Jesus’ mind on hearing of the death of John that He should check his Twitter feed or see what they were saying about it on Instagram? Could He not perhaps have tuned into the BBC on the apostolic radio, that being the only known way of discovering the truth of events in the Middle East?

Jesus’ instinct on hearing of John’s death is otherwise: He withdraws to a lonely place. He did not interact; as we might say nowadays, He self-isolated. The “welcoming” of others has been turned into such a Christian arch-virtue nowadays that the virtue of recollection seems rather to be suspiciously self-centred. If you hang your head in prayer after Mass, you will sometimes feel the eyes of disapproval around you, wondering at your lack of Christian charity in failing to indulge in a session of mutual hilarity, almost before the organ’s last notes have died away. Here in the gospel, Jesus’ action following John’s death is revelatory.

He does not react. He does not open wide His windows to the gales of anger and indignation that must have blown among John’s many followers. The hurricanes of hate had no opportunity to shatter the shutters of His heart and mind with their torrent of words. He did not allow them to. The anger of idiots fills the world, wrote the French novelist Georges Bernanos repeatedly and perhaps unkindly in the 1930s. He feared what was coming because of such anger. And he was right.

Were talk and dialogue not necessary in such a moment? Perhaps. But Jesus’ example is firstly one of steadying His own ship. John was His cousin, and if He wept over the death of Lazarus His friend, can we not imagine that He wept over John’s death also? In the Jesus who boards a boat, intending to retire to a lonely place, we find an example of One who wishes to give Himself time to embrace the Father’s forming action that now deprives Him of his Herald and Prophet. His own journey had taken another major step forward to its goal of Calvary, and recollection was needed.

At least it was His intention to withdraw to a lonely place. His time on the boat would have to suffice because, as soon as He stepped ashore, the crowds were around Him again: and he took pity on them and healed their sick. Well, of course, He was God; His action was an example for us, not a necessity for Himself. Nevertheless, note well His intention: His heart longed for the lonely place where He could be alone with God. Only from that cell of recollected self-knowledge where we can acknowledge our utter dependence on Him, can we go out to those who need our pity and our service.  All our pity and service will avail them little if we have launched ourselves into action without knowing who He is and who we truly are.

Before the mission come contemplation and self-knowledge. This is Jesus’s path; it must be ours.