Who are you and who am I?

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Luke 17: 26-37) contains several alarming descriptions of the end of the world, and yet in another way, these descriptions are as enigmatic as all prophet texts. First, Jesus looks back and evokes the experience of the people who lived at the time of the flood, and then reflects on the events that preceded the destruction of Sodom. So, it will also be in the days of the Son of Man, He observes. Next, Jesus evokes the drama of those who will face that end-of-the-world moment, and how they will know the sudden sundering of the human race in two: then, there will be one taken, and another one left. Finally, He ends with yet another enigmatic reference: where the body is, there too will the vultures gather. Other translations render this differently and refer to eagles. How are we to know how to read the implications of such a text?

Yet, like all texts of Sacred Scripture, this mysterious passage begins to yield when we approach it with two fundamental questions in mind: who are you, O Lord my God, and who am I? For knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves are the two lights which make sense of the reality of the universe and help us prepare to hear His call and receive His friendship.

Who are you, O Lord my God? You are a God of just desserts and rewards, punishing as well as rewarding. It is unfashionable to speak of this, but we should reflect on the fact that the word for hell is mentioned more often in the gospel than the word for heaven. Would it be so, if this were not a possibility? Unless we do penance, we shall all likewise perish, Jesus tells us in Luke 13: 3.

But this God of justice is also a God of revelation and redemption who has sent His Son, and the Son will come again in due course to complete the great cycle in which mankind is led back to God, or at least that portion of mankind that has not definitively rejected Him. Still, what are we to make of the suddenness of His action? God seems to deal with things not in our time but in His own. Whole centuries seem to pass with chaos ensuing, only for a crisis to provoke precipitous collapse and judgement. Jesus evokes the sudden interventions of God in this passage, as well as the precision of His judgements that differentiate the fate of one human from that of another. Everything is in His hands. If we fear and tremble, we do no less than obey the command of St Paul in working out our salvation. And, yet, at the same time, we hear the voice of Jesus: be not afraid. Like all paradoxes of the faith, it is not one that we should try to resolve in one sense or the other; God is three and one, Jesus is God and man, Mary is Virgin and Mother, we should be afraid and not afraid: let us hold the paradox in prayer and our ignorance in humility. Only by the gifts of the Holy Spirit is human fear properly driven out, while a divinely-inspired fear of the Lord continues to move us.

From there, we come to our second question: who am I? Am I one of those who wants to look back with Lot’s wife, or to flee with Lot? Am I one of those whose taste for eating, drinking, buying and selling prevails over my taste for coming to the Lord in prayer and humble love? Am I the kind of soul who returns to their house for their possessions, rather than turning their hearts towards the Lord’s temple? Who am I before these choices?

In a sense, the answer to the first question about God provides the answer to the second question about us, without being able to solve it for this or that individual who is still a wayfarer in this vale of tears. If God is our maker, our redeemer and the spouse of our souls, there should only remain in us the fear of offending Him, just as we fear to hurt anyone we love. But this dilemma casts light upon what we are truly attached to, and upon who we are in this moment: for by its light are our secret attachments – and, thereby, all our secret fears – driven out into the open, revealed in their abjectness, exposed in our lifelong capacity for betrayal of God and of ourselves. By refusing to let go of our false selves – our deluded self-image – we are like those who try to preserve what we think life is, rather than accepting to die like the grain of wheat…

And here we discover whether our abjectness is true humility or unhealthy abasement: for humility liberates us to cast ourselves into the arms of the Lord who comes to our aid and hastens to help us, while abasement enslaves us to self-hatred, serving for the soul a dish of disappointed vanity that tries to find some self-respect in sterile self-inflicted pain.

Let us fear only that the vultures attend upon those who depart this life dead in sin. And let us also take heart for we are His body, His mystical body, and our lives are hidden with Christ in God whose grace can overcome our mistaken pride to bring us back to Himself by helping us become who we are meant to be.

Three impossible things before breakfast.

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 17:1-6) gives us a taste of Jesus at His most demanding: in this case, He apparently wants us to achieve three impossible things before breakfast.

Obstacles are sure to come, He says, but alas for the one who provides them. But how am I, a sinner, to avoid being an obstacle – a scandal – if even the just man falls seven times a day? And, how, thereby, am I to avoid being the one cast into the sea with the dubious, sartorial distinction of a millstone for a necktie?

Next, Jesus also commands, if your brother wrongs you seven times a day and seven times comes back to you to say, “I am sorry,” you must forgive him. But Lord, we might say, surely the brother or sister who says sorry so often has rendered the word as meaningless as it is in the mouths of polite English gentlemen. To forgive one offence seems noble; to forgive liberally seems to make forgiveness cheap.

And lastly – as if these commands were not already impossible – the Lord gives us an outlandish measure against which to assess our Christian belief: Were your faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you. Well, if mulberry trees are not common in our own country, it is certainly not because of the faith of the people! If we have ever taken pride in the bellowing chorus of Faith of our Fathers, we might reflect in our more sober moments on the fact that the local trees are probably quite safe in our presence, God helps us.

Jesus never heard of SMART targets - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely – but then His targets are so much more than any we can conceive of. Indeed, this is our challenge here: not to assume we can achieve in any concrete sense the demands that He places on us, but rather to confess our insufficiency before the task of redemption ahead and our utter dependence on Him.

Will obstacles – scandals - come because of our actions? God help us, there is every chance that they will. Which should be a reminder to us that our renewal in grace depends on our returning again and again for the Lord’s forgiveness. For our weaknesses before the calls of the Christian life are legion, but so too are the gestures and mercies of the Lord of grace who comes to our aid and makes haste to help us. The first impossible task, therefore, is to refuse to believe we can stand except by God’s power: if any man think he can stand, let him take heed lest he fall, says St Paul to the Corinthians, and perhaps it is also to cover our unsteady tracks across the sands of time with a torrent of prayer poured out for those in whose lives we did not play the role assigned to us by Divine Providence. Moreover, there is this further consolation that if we have fitted the yolk of prayer for others onto our shoulders, perhaps there will be no room for that millstone that is otherwise destined for us.

And, if God can be our sufficiency in that regard, He is also our sufficiency with regard to our constant need to forgive. To always forgive is not to be weak or cheap; rather, it is to choose the peace of God before what Thomas Hobbes called the war of all against all. How easy it is to elect persecution and conflict, to choose to protect our sense of self by damaging that of others. So many of the ancient religions of the world purged their social conflict through persecuting the innocent, and here is Jesus, the victim of sin, who chooses not to retaliate; who chooses to say peace be with you, even to those who have connived in His death. To tell us to forgive our brothers and sisters seventy times seven is no less a task than to tell us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. And here again, our sufficiency comes not from our own strength, but from His grace that pours out upon our hearts the impulse of His love and the peace that it engenders.

In this light, we can also lastly hope that our faith might not remain smaller than the mustard seed. The mulberry trees might remain safe in our presence, but who can plant trees in the sea if not the One who walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee? Like our torrent of prayer for those for whom we have been obstacles, here we may offer another kind of prayer: 

Lord, increase my faith or else, Lord I believe, help my unbelief; please help that part of my scandal-causing, unforgiving soul that still says “no” to you, just help it to dab its finger in your precious blood and write Credo – I believe – in the sand of my life.   

We cannot do three impossible things before breakfast; we cannot even do one. But we can do all things in Him who strengthens us: whose grace prevents us, and whose mercy refreshes our taste for peace. And, then, in the light of the Morning Star of our Mother, we can turn our meagre faith heavenwards once more.   

They know not what they do

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (Luke 16: 1-8) is a strange one involving the parable of a dishonest man who is sacked for being wasteful with his master’s possessions. He ends up being praised for the dishonest albeit clever way in which, before he leaves his job, he buys friends by reducing their debts to the master. It must be one of the oddest parables Jesus ever told. As the scholastics used to say, every comparison limps except in the point of comparison, and so we must look here closely not at the dishonesty or wastefulness but at the reason given for the master’s praise of his servant:

The master praised the dishonest steward for his astuteness. For the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light.

Possibly, it should not surprise us that the children of this world are astute. The darkness which St John tells us did not understand the light is, nevertheless, characterised often by its cunning.  But, is it not a surprise that the children of light fail to be astute, to be insightful? What is going on here?

After all, the children of light are supposed to be blessed with particular gifts such as wisdom, knowledge, and understanding – all charisms that are concerned in one way or another with intellectual insights. How is it that they can, therefore, lack astuteness? And, ultimately, what does this tell us about them?

In one way, perhaps this lack of astuteness flatters the children of light. If they lack practice in planning and plotting to get what they want, that is possibly because they are not in the habit of planning and plotting to get what they want. It is not that they lack the brains to do so, but rather that they are consciously committed – or at least they try to be – to a more benign agenda. Evil falls back only on its own powers, or else preys on the weakness of others. Good turns to God for aid. In a sense, the children of light are not astute because they do not – or, perhaps we should say, they ought not - aspire to the falsehoods of power and influence. Our help is in the name of the Lord who inspires us to the dependence of children in His regard. The children of light are not astute in the same way that children are not astute. They live by trust, not by treason. When they are at their best, their language is surrender, not selfishness – or it ought to be.

Yet, taken in another way, this lack of astuteness might be far from being a credit to the children of light. As we noted on Monday, our souls are a battleground for two competing loves, and even when our conscious minds are committed to the path of the children of light who love God, we still battle against the flesh, the world and the devil who only love themselves. In other words, even when we have received that kiss of peace that comes to us in the Father’s love, we still struggle against the child in us who remains the child of this world.

Now, this child in us is astute, for this child – our worse selves – not only has the astuteness of the children of this world but can dress up that cleverness in the robes of righteousness. And, if we do not know ourselves, if we are naïve enough to believe in our own justice - or not so much to believe in it as to fail to remember that our justice continues to be besieged even by the lingering effects of original sin – then, we are on the path of the Pharisees who were, as the saying goes, as pure as angels and as proud as devils. Do we need the astuteness of the children of this world, therefore? Only insofar as it may help us spot its traces in our own motives, our own poorly regulated unconscious and dissonant needs whose feet trample everywhere beneath the surface of our consciences.

We are, as we noted before, and remain a battleground.

 Video proboque meliora

Deteriora sequor.

I see and approve the better things / But the worse things I follow. Even the pagan poet Ovid knew of this war in us. How is it that the children of light can so easily lose sight of it? As St Paul tells the Romans:

For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Are we then destined to be overcome both by our lack of astuteness as children of light and by our sinful weakness? Maybe we would be, were it not for the ingeniousness of love. For love, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the very essence and existence of our God, will find a way to help us seek the face of the Lord and yearn for it, even in the midst of our own self-betrayals. We are back again at those lines from St Augustine:

Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.

The folly of God is greater than the wisdom or astuteness of this world, says St Paul to the Corinthians. If we wish to remain children of light, we can only do so by living in the love of God in whose wisdom all the astuteness of this world comes to nothing. In this light, even the traces of worldly astuteness that remain in us can serve to help keep our feet on the ground and our hearts in heaven where they ought to be. For power belongs, in the end, not to astuteness but to love.

Seeking the face of God

An audio version of today's gospel can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 12-14) offers us once more a lesson in many layers. On the surface, it is a simply matter of whom one extends charity to: Jesus tells one of the leading Pharisees not to invite desirable guests to his dinners but the humanly undesirable ones, so that his reward will be given him in terms of eternal merit, not some earthly currency.  This teaching follows the lesson in Matthew chapter 6 when Jesus warns His listeners not to practise their virtues ostentatiously in front of others:

When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then, your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Yet this is not so much about whom one invites to dinner or whom one extends one’s charity to, as about the motives behind such actions.

Jesus does not, for example, mean that people should not invite friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbours at all, as if the standard of the gospel were not so much to love the poor as to deliberately offend the wealthy. There are the physically poor and lame, and then there are the spiritually poor and lame; the former benefit from our corporal works of mercy, while the latter from our spiritual works of mercy. They may sometimes be the same person!

Of course, Jesus Himself deliberately offends against the niceties of the Pharisees but His aim is not to give offence, so much as to offer two further lessons.

The first of these is for the Pharisees whom we should understand as those devout in their religion, and the lesson is not to do the done thing, so much as the thing that is pleasing to God. The Pharisees seem to have operated like a select club; appearances were important; conformism was expected; a judging eye for failures in observance was simply de rigueur; unity mattered more than justice; and as for cover-ups, they were probably considered a duty. All of these tendencies reflect what happens to religion when it seems to become skin deep, enmeshed in shallow priorities, attached to a kind of performative, self-congratulatory perfectionism. This kind of religion is up with the latest trends or else it is all ears for the voices of the right-minded people. Pharisaism invented virtue signalling long before the twenty-first century adherents of what some call moralistic, therapeutic deism, the touchy-feely and intolerant version of Christianity that loves the Way but neglects the Truth and the Life of the gospel. Jesus’ reproaches to the Pharisees offer a standing rebuke to every devout soul who becomes absorbed not in God but in their own service of God.

But if we should not do the done thing, what then is pleasing to God? This is the second lesson to take on board here. Ultimately, as we noted in last Friday’s gospel, and in Sunday’s gospel, what is pleasing to God is that we should love Him above all things, seeking His face and yearning for it. St Augustine of Hippo summed it up nearly four hundred years after Christ walked the earth:

Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.

This then was the challenge for the Pharisees, as it is for ourselves. Our souls are a battleground for two competing loves. No matter our levels of piety or regular devotion, the battle is not done. It wages on, even as we seek the face of the Lord. The terrible thing about total self-surrender to God is that it may not be half so pretty as all the regular practices, the pious statuary, and the romantic imaginings our minds prefer to conjure. It may involve something as cruel and painful as wrongful condemnation, a tortured final mile, and an agonising death on a rain-soaked hill of humiliation. But perhaps it is much harder to find the face of God in the darkness if we have not become accustomed to finding the face of God in the ordinary world that surrounds us, or even in those aspects of the human world that repel us. There is the peace of God that keeps us – united in love with a common purpose and a common mind: the mind of Christ.

For the Pharisee, it was never wrong to invite the rich and famous to supper. It was only wrong not to seek the face of God and to yearn for it in the dinner guests, yearning instead for the earthly gain that such company seemed to offer. For the Pharisees, Jesus’ counsel to invite the humanly undesirable guests was only ever a way of removing that temptation from the table so that their souls could journey towards God, rather than sinking more deeply into the mire of their own self love.

It is mostly easy to spot the temptations of the world and the devil around us. What is more difficult to spot is the more insidious temptations that our own self-love draws into the very fabric of our religion, making a parody of the kingdom of God within us.

The alternative is to seek the face of God and yearn for it, in every moment of our lives like Mary. For there is the peace of God.

Rejoice and be glad

An audio file of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 5:1-12) could be easily mistaken for a set of moral injunctions. When Jesus says blessed are the meek or blessed are the peacemakers, He seems to be telling us to be meek and peaceable. And so He is … but that that is not all. That these precepts are not merely a set of moral injunctions becomes apparent in other parts of this discourse.

Happy are those who mourn; happy the pure in heart; happy those who are persecuted. These are not prescriptions for behaviour. Rather they are about the inner transformation of the disciples. And the inner transformation of the disciples is not purely a moral agenda but a spiritual one; we might even say, a mystical one.

Which is as much to say that the following of Jesus is not like membership in a club whose rules we observe. The following of Jesus is more like a spousal relationship in which our very hearts are moulded in a new way.

Invite your spouse the Paraclete to make of our hearts a living Holy House.

The truth is that we either want this or not. But too often, we commit to it on the surface but do not accept it in some parts of our hearts. This is of course because we are not yet poor in spirit, preferring instead the satisfactions we derive from the chintz curtain arrangements of our reputations and our supermarket-value pleasures. Hoodwinked into thinking our intentions have been pure, we then find every excuse to dodge the responsibilities that fall upon us, all the while asking the very Mother of God to pray that the Holy Spirit would transform us like He once transformed her humble house in Nazareth. The cheek of it! I mean, the sheer cheek of it!

But we do not fail because we cannot to live up to the standard. We fail because we are still too actively building the city of man in our hearts instead of letting Him build the city of God. We fail because some parts of our hearts have not really surrendered to the Father’s forming action. It is not because we are weak; when our hearts have ceased to choose sin openly, we still act out our selfishness in more subtle ways, assuming instinctively that we can realise those beatitudes by our own powers. And then of course we realise we are weak but not in the way we thought. Ultimately, that is because we have still not grasped the fullness of the call to life and love, the call to the fullness of joy, and the call to wholeness, and let these calls - His calls - fill the sails of our souls.

What power on earth could make us rejoice and be glad when we are abused and persecuted and when people speak calumny against us? We could only rejoice in such circumstances if the treasure of our hearts was truly the love of God, and it only becomes our treasure through His gift. The beatitudes are not, as I said above, a set of moral injunctions. They are rather a map of the transformation of those souls who are so deeply in love with God that their hearts and minds are already living the life of the blessed, steeped in the immense love that can only come from the Holy Spirit.

Are we right to aspire to this? Are we right to think that this could be the reality of our own lives? Jesus has no doubts about this. He has already said: follow me. He has already said: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant must be there too.

And then, when we love Him, we will find him everywhere: smiling at us through the crowd as the busyness of our days pulls us apart, shedding tears we can wipe away from the face of a neighbour, asking too much of us through some needy client, only to help us surrender more to the urging of His love; waiting for us in the prayers we offer before the tabernacle, as in those snatched from the dimness of some half sleep.

Rejoice and be glad for your reward will be great in heaven. The more our hearts belong to Him under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the more that rejoicing and gladness become ours even now.