Only love abides

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

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Today’s gospel (John 17: 20-26) continues the priestly prayer of Jesus that we have been listening to throughout the week. Again, we hear its simple but sublime themes rehearsed: the relationship of the Son to the Father, their unity and mutual indwelling so to speak, their life in eternity before the foundation of Creation, the revelation that Jesus is to those to whom the Father sent Him. Increasingly, in this section we see also identified the fruits of the outpouring of the life of the Blessed Trinity on those whom the Father has given to the Son, and now not only their relationship to God, but their relationship with each other because of that God-relationship: that they may be one even as we are one. Yet, being one is only one of the four qualities of being, which is why there can be no unity without truth, no unity without goodness, and no unity that does not let break forth its rays of beauty. And none of those qualities could be what they are without their grounding in the unending love of God, which is why, as this passage concludes, Jesus prays:

That the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

As in our reflections earlier this week, there are some passages of Scripture that simply require the bowing of our heads and the stilling of our minds. Their enormity is beyond us in our usually busy and accelerated heads. The truths of this passage do not come to us in slow motion; rather they move at the pace of eternal life itself, and that requires something of us summed up in that famous quip:

Don’t just do something, stand there!

Stand and listen, stand and contemplate, stand and receive. The centre of our very being is not where we sought it, not in our inner harmony, nor in our restless perfectionism, not in our successes, and certainly not in our acquisition of pious moods and behaviours that we believe we have paid a stipend for.  The centre of our being is in Him and in Their life.

The centre of our lives is ultimately in the realisation of Jesus’ prayer in us:

That the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

We are not the end point and could never have been. We are children born into an existing ocean of love, only, for us collectively, that ocean is not bounded by human parents but by the unity of the three Divine Persons whose shared life has broken forth in Creation and our Redemption.

 That the Father’s love may be in us: that is no meditation for one morning’s reflection. It is a mystery that cannot be contained by any humanly imagined bounds. And yet its logic is a golden thread that we must pursue. What would our lives look like if lived by that love? If we allow Jesus’ prayer to be realised in us, how differently would we live?

We might also ask: what in our lives is truly compatible with that love? Have we been faithful to it? Have we sought to trade in currencies that have no part in that love? Have we preferred some other love to His?

We cannot keep ourselves safe in that regard; our fidelity to love must also come from Him. In order to find Him who is All, we must realise that we are as nothing. I write rhetorically of course; we are never nothing. But we are the broken ones who must be mended in the love of the Father who awaits us, ready to place the ring on our finger and hold a feast when we receive again His love.

What can our poor prayers – so broken like ourselves – do for if not echo, therefore, constantly the very petition Jesus has made known to us. Nothing else will matter in eternity: That the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in each and every one of us. Now and forever. Amen.

 

In our end is our beginning

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here. 

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Today’s gospel (John 17: 1-11) is one of the most mysterious, one of the most dazzling, passages in all of the New Testament. In it, we enter into the Sacred Heart, as into some vast cathedral where the soaring vaults carry both the thunder of the organ and the whisper of many prayers. It is hard to condense its content, as we usual do at the start of every reflection. Suffice it to say that we see two things principally: on the one hand, the relationship of the Son to the Father, and on the other, the care of both of them for those they intend to rescue from sin. First, a crucial moment has come in the Incarnation when the Son, who has laid down His glory to become man, will be both humiliated by men and glorified by His Father who is in heaven. Second, we hear then the prayer of Christ interceding for the apostles, his first disciples, and the very stem cell members as it were of His Mystical Body whom He has rescued from the world. Every prayer of the Church since that moment has been so to speak a chorus of, or a participation in, that prayer that Christ offers in that moment to the Father. How still the room must have been as these unforgettable words fell upon their ears! Nothing so sublime and yet nothing so strange and unheard of had yet been uttered in the history of the world as these lines!

The foundation of everything in our religion is found in this passage. First, in the relationship of the Father and the Son between whom of course is found the Holy Spirit, their mutual and eternal love, we find the origin of that source from which, first, Creation and then, later, Salvation, gushes forth. In our end is our beginning, and since God is the origin of all, God could have done nothing greater for us than to have offered us a share in His eternal and communal happiness. It is no wonder that St John is the evangelist that is prefigured as an eagle, for only his gospel gives us these lofty glimpses into the greatest of the mysteries of the faith, unfolding in the ocean of God’s eternal moment. When we speak of the eternal mode for our prayers or our thoughts, we are dipping our toes in that great ocean, even though we remain for now on the shoreline of human history and time.

Then, we come to the second aspect of this gospel: Jesus’ prayers for those the Father had given Him. Please God that we number among those whom Jesus prays for at that moment, for while His sacrifice was offered for all, not all receive His truth and His love, as St John has told us from the very first chapter of the gospel. But note here the emphasis: those who are taken to the bosom of the Father by the Son are a gift from the Father to the Son. They are part of an eternal exchange of love. The dignity and the glory of those who enter His happiness are summed up in this: that as the Father communicates everything to the Son, so He restores through the Son’s prayer His wayward creatures to this ever-living and unstoppable cascade of divine self-giving. Here, our vocation is universal: to be in our own particular way one small reflection of that unified light and life of the Living God whose very being is love poured out.

The only response befitting such revelation is that great silence of heaven retold in the Book of Revelation at the start of Chapter 8. Lost in wonder, all we can do is wish to echo the prayer of the Son’s Sacred Heart, and speak our love, our 'yes' and our 'thank you' with Mary, back into the eternal harmony that lies between Father, Son and Holy Spirit: their gift to us the life in which to share; their gift to us the means by which to share that life.

In our end is our beginning, but in their love lies our end. Pray for us, dear Sacred Heart, that we may be yours and the Father’s for ever and ever. Amen.

 

The mission goes ever on and on

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 28: 16-20) focuses our minds on the sending of the apostles during the last chapter of the gospel of St Matthew. There stood the eleven in a wavering state of mind, some adoring Jesus, some doubting Him, and all of them surely wondering what was coming next.

What came next was in some ways only a continuation of what had come before, but it was also a transformation of it. Now, the Lord hands on His mission to His chosen ones, sending them out as He too had been sent, bearing His task, labouring in His name and for the glory of His Father. The dynamic of the mission comes from the outpouring of grace and holiness that Jesus wins for us in His death and resurrection and which the Holy Spirit communicates to us through the ministry of the Church, through His personal gifts, and through His own presence.   

Notice the two sides of this mission: Go… baptising them … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. These orders – the last ones Jesus gives the Apostles - place the tasks of sanctification and teaching at the heart of the mission. Note the nuance also: all that I have commanded; not half of it, not a best-bits version, not a bowdlerised copy with the tough bits omitted, not tailored for the shifting fashions and sensitivities of the age which will be something else by the end of next week. The teaching is to be given in season and out o season, for our desperate humanity needs not only consolation but conversion. The woundedness and needs of the human heart are much the same from age to age, no matter the prevailing winds, no matter how many castles in the air are built by our pride and our self-indulgence, not matter how delusional we become about new ages and year zeros. Below the changing currents at our surface lie the same rip tides that always bedevil us, quite literally at times: we are always damaged goods. Fashion chasing is for fools, not for followers of the Lord.

We see also in these two tasks an order and a logic: sanctification and then teaching. In time, the Church will come to say: Lex orandi lex credendi - the law of prayer is the law of belief. Because in point of fact, while truth perfects our minds, we can never truly understand the mysteries that Jesus has revealed to us. We do not need to fabricate mystery: God’s revelation is all a mystery of love and transcendence that surpasses our human capacities; of love, because God is good and total love is the response to total goodness, and of transcendence, because God is holy and we are the creatures who, along with the angels, were given the capacity to be conscious of what it is to honour freely their creator. At the same time, because it is possible for us to be misled by our own lights, the Church also reverses the law stated above and says: Lex credendi lex orandi – the law of belief is the law of prayer. Even the greatest mystics submitted their insights in prayer to the Church for she is the custodian of Revelation and faith.

If all this seems a tall order, Jesus gives the apostles one last consolation in this gospel: that even though He leaves them bodily, He is with them always until the end of the age. With them and with us in His sacred words of course; but because our total sanctification is His goal, sanctification meaning radical union with Him, He is with them and us pre-eminently in His Eucharistic presence the mystery of which will unfold over the centuries. He is with them and with us lastly in the Spirit which He sends into the world from the Father to remind us of all things and grant a deeper appreciation of them.

The procession of goodness, therefore, goes on, beginning with the persons of the Blessed Trinity, in essence one, through the hands of the ministers of Christ commissioned to share His gospel, through the action of the Spirit, and through all those who make themselves docile instruments of the purposes of Providence in this world.

In the end, to be apostolic is to become a willing channel of the great fount of gifts that pours out of the communion of the Blessed Trinity and breaks forth in this world from the rock which is Christ, who is admitted to this world by Mary’s great yes and who is handed on in the willing yeses of the faithful disciples. The apostolate that we in COLW aspire to is nothing other than to do our part to facilitate this flow of His goodness into the world, through the Church, through the hands of Mary, channelled through our poor minds and hearts and – please God – into the ears and hearts of our neighbours, families, and friends. We only need to let ourselves be the voices, hands, and feet that the Master sends forth into the world.

What a mission, what a hope! How little we have done and how much remains to be undertaken. But listen again to His last word to us: behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Leave to remain

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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In today’s gospel (John 16: 5-11), we continue to listen to Jesus’ discourse after the Last Supper, further explaining His mission, the mission of the Holy Spirit, and the path that lay ahead of the apostles who, in just a little over fifty days, would inherit His mission to the rest of the world. They are sad but, Jesus explains, He must leave so that they may receive another Helper who will enlighten the world about sin, righteousness, and judgement. Let us leave aside the last mysterious remark for another reflection and focus instead on Jesus’ even more mysterious remark at the beginning:

It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you.

The Helper here is better known in Christian discourse as the Paraclete, but what can Jesus mean by this conditional phrase: If I do not go away, He will not come? Cannot God do everything? Have we reached here the limits of One we formerly called the Almighty? Indeed, if He is to go away, must we not also wonder that Jesus would later say that He will be with them always, even to the end of the world? Our Saviour is as ever enigmatic. He is not an instruction booklet to be unfolded and skimmed by simplistic minds. He is the Truth whose words cut to the very quick of those who are blessed enough, and who dare, to raise their eyes to look for Him, even the simple. What then does He mean here? Let us dare to ask …

Jesus, who is with us always in the Eucharistic presence, has yet gone away in His historical presence; He has left the ambit of our planet in the cosmos not by His presence and power but only in the physical dimension of His incarnation. Body and blood He remains with us, but sacramentally only, i.e. under other physical appearances that are signs of an unseen reality and that make real His presence. We are amazed at those who looked upon the Babe and saw the Saviour of the World, but everyone who professes their belief in the Eucharist performs an even greater wonder of faith, looking upon a fragment of what appears to be bread and by faith knowing – discerning, as St Paul says – mysteriously but overwhelmingly the real presence of the Lord.

But, why then would the Paraclete not have come if Jesus had not left us in the historical, material and physical sense? Imagine the impact. We would not be going to Rome to see the pope but to see Jesus Himself! Perhaps He would have continued to perform miracles! Would not the whole world have been converted in a carnival of conviction? Would not the Trumps and Ayatollahs of War have bent their knees to the peacemaker? Would not the Dawkins and the Frys have had their every doubt solved like Nicodemus in the night? In other words, did Jesus get it wrong? Surely, He needed a better PR strategy! Think how close His kingdom was, instead of which He left its fate in the hands of the amateurs, the illiterates, and – worst of all - the zealots!

But I think we need to temper this enticingly counterfactual history of Christianity, of what might have been, and not only because sometimes these things are mysterious and held under the veil of His inscrutable wisdom. Just look at Israel at the time of Jesus. Not everyone believed. Indeed, the maddening thing about those privileged witnesses of the steps of the Messiah is that so many of them saw and yet remained unmoved; or else they saw and yet stopped seeking for Him when they encountered a difficulty; or else their hearts were pitted against Him from the beginning, and the more He showed Himself to be who He was, the more they sank in their satanic resistance. The counterfactual idea the whole world would have converted had Jesus stayed needs to be consigned to the garbage dump of history, along with the comfortable notion that everybody is sincere, everybody means well, and that good will is everywhere. It is not that we judge hearts - that is God's business; rather, it is that the gospel has taught us to understand that there is a lot more going on in the average human heart than appears on the surface…

And that is the point, indeed perhaps the very reason why Jesus had to go. A physically present Jesus performing regularly in Rome like P. T. Barnum in his circus ring would have risked making it possible for the world to carry on with its surface level engagement with His message. The world would have been like Pontius Pilate who was physically present to the Lord but whose heart seemingly remained closed. Perhaps worst of all, a physically present Jesus from whom we could be physically distant might have made us think we had no deep work to do in our own hearts. But our illness is of another kind.

What a wonder such a continuing physical presence of Jesus would have been, except that it is dwarfed utterly by the even greater wonder that the Lord through the Spirit now accompanies every single one of us on those inner paths within, down the valleys and abysses of our own hearts, to bring us to knowledge of our own great woundedness and of His infinitely greater power to heal and to raise us up after sin. Lost in the raging waters of discordant needs, undue attachments and blood-red revolt, we are rescued time and again by the Fisher King of souls, the one and the same God who created the world, took flesh in Jesus Christ, and who comes to us to recreate us anew if we will but walk these paths with Him, follow the surgeon’s knife and allow Him to cut out the poison, and replace it with His infinite goodness. And thus we will pray in the exquisite poetry of the Pentecost Sequence:

 

Lava quod est sordidum, (Cleanse what is unclean),

Riga quod est aridum, (water what is parched),

sana quod est saucium, (heal what is wounded).

 

Flecte quod est rigidum, (Bend what is inflexible),

fove quod est frigidum, (warm what is chilled),

rege quod est devium (correct what has gone astray).

Veni Sante Spiritus

 

If He had not gone away, would He work such wonders now within us? And that is the point.

In His going away, we have paradoxically a sign and a promise of His visitation.

Draw me after thee; let us run

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 15: 9-11) is what jewellers call a melee – a micro-jewel of precious stone. Barely more than half a dozen lines, it further explains the relationship of the Son to the Father and its parallels with our relationship to the Son. Through doing His will, which is also that of the Father, we abide in His love. As in all things, we the disciples are called to be where the Master is, and since He is in the obedience of the Father, so too must we be. But then comes the crowning jewel of this passage which can only be cited in full:

These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

This is one of the quintessential COLW gospels, the maturation as it were of the Magnificat. Bathing in the memory of the Angelic message, Mary once confessed to Elisabeth her rejoicing in the Saviour. Her joy came from the very depths of her spirit and carried her on through the difficulties of her pregnancy, the challenges of life in Egypt and Nazareth, and all along the road to the foot of Calvary. Then, mingled though it was with pain, how could her joy cease even there, since her Saviour was ever living? Like the sorrowing soul of Jesus on the cross, Mary’s sorrows were but her passage through the tumult of this life. As Henry Scott-Holland, the friend of Chesterton, wrote on the topic of a royal death:

How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

Mary’s furrow was set, and she ploughed on. Her trajectory, her journey, and always her very essence was that of rejoicing in the Lord, the fount of eternal love and, therefore, of eternal peace, joy, and mercy, the fruits of love.

So, now, thirty-three years later, in this quiet upper room on the night of the Passover, Jesus who received so much from His Mother - to whom of course He had already given everything - Jesus shares His joy with the apostles gathered around him.

But note the nuances here: these things I have spoken to you. We must learn to listen for we are often guilty of not hearing others. And yet our first and ever-present duty is to listen to the Lord when He speaks. The rule of St Benedict whose order planted the seeds of Christian Europe opens with the following lines:

Listen, my son, to your master's precepts, and incline the ear of your heart.

Listening is of the essence of obedience, the obedience of the Son to the Father and of the disciple to the Son. This is the first condition of joy: that it begins in an open obedience, an obedient openness to the Eternal Word, spoken in the communion of God’s love and shared with us through His mercy. This law of listening, however, also devolves upon the suppliant, upon those who need to be heard, for whatever their wounds and burdens, they cannot be healed without the reconciliation in obedience that plunges its roots into the obedience of the Son to the Father.

Jesus has spoken of this obedience to the Father, therefore, that my joy may be in you.

Here is the Lord once again, ever faithful, ever the same, sharing not only His love, but its inevitable fruit of joy – joy eternal, living joy, the joy that transports and transforms. How can it be otherwise when it is His joy?

What is this joy of Jesus if not the joy of the vision of the Blessed Trinity in His human soul which, because He is now incarnate in human flesh, a wayfarer in this life, as well as a contemplator of the Divine Mystery, finds and takes joy in every mountain top and flower petal, in every rainfall and glorious sunset, in what Gerard Manley-Hopkins calls the dearest freshness deep down things and, most especially, in the features of men’s faces where He looks constantly to find the reflection of His Father? This is His joy, a joy that is renewed and refreshed in His labour of redemption, to restore to those faces the image of the Father marred through sin and disobedience. For even the labour of repair is a joy, for it is a restoration, and as Fulton Sheen reminds us, broken things are precious. What makes us perfect is not perfection conceived in a narrowly human sense but our union with Him who works His perfect work in us according to His mercy.

And then at last comes the final nuance in Jesus’ address: that your joy may be full. Jesus never spoke of His ecstatic aspirations for His followers more clearly than in that moment. All the feeble tsunamis of sexual ecstasy that have turned the heads of disobedient man since the dawn of lust are but pale and wayward imitations of the hallowing love of God who desires to give Himself to us:

Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.

So speaks the wisdom of Solomon. Yet these paradoxical lines of the Song of Songs express also our failure to capture that irresistible and unconquerable torrent of love that flows at this moment from the Heart of Christ: that your joy may be full.

That our joy may be full: this is the gift He offers to us, to draw us by His mercy into the eternal mystery where our praise of His glory may harmonise with the very song of the heart of our God.

 

 

All I am sayin’ is give peace a chance

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

Today’s gospel (John 14: 27-31a) comes right after Jesus’ teaching on the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in our souls through grace. The focus in today’s gospel, however, is now on the fruits of that indwelling: God’s peace and our liberation from anxiety; the synchronisation of our wishes with those of Jesus as He rejoices in His return to the Father; and our need to endure the one He calls so ominously the ‘ruler of this world’. Finally, He indicates for the listening apostles the mark that distinguishes Him from the world’s Satanic ruler: His obedience to the Father, His eternal fiat, His eternally redemptive ‘yes’ that overcomes the inner collapse and self-ruination of an infernal ‘no’.

My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives. What do we find in this offer of Jesus? In our age, we are surrounded by the constant talk of peace, although it offers very thin pickings. Why is this the case if not that the only absolute peace, the only peace which is intrinsically the tranquillity of order – to use St Augustine’s definition - is the peace of utter and final reconciliation with God through Christ? The world gives peace as another good to be traded in, a desirable item of merchandise; the peace of this world is only a negotiated settlement that will inevitably prove temporary, even when it is dressed in the rhetoric of friendship. As one sage put it, every postwar period is actually a between-the-wars period. At its best, the peace of this world may for a time shelter those traumatised by conflict, and that is not to be deprecated or neglected. Perhaps it is even a way stage on the path to God. But it cannot be mistaken for the reconciliation of Christ.

In fact, the peace of this world can be just as abused as any other good of this world. At our worst, we ourselves may unwittingly prefer the peace of this world, the harmony we want to enjoy with those around us, to the peace of Christ. Paradoxically, to remain true to His peace we may need to do violence to ourselves, or to contradict gently but persistently the world, or else suffer the violence of others as did our Master. I came not to bring peace but to bring the sword, Jesus tells us in the gospel of Matthew. Thus speaks the one who declares Himself meek and humble of heart. And let us not forget that we have heard in an earlier chapter of the gospel of John that wherever the Master is, there must the disciple follow. These paradoxes are not meant to confuse us; they are meant to strip away from us every self-serving inner act of seeking our comfort and peace in places where we know deep down we have no lasting abode.

My peace I give you, said Christ, the sword bringer, to the apostles. And yet in His heart He surely saw in that same moment the vicious persecutions they would undergo, the oppressive burdens they would suffer, the demonic aggression that would confront them, and every ache and bruise of their afflicted spirits that lay on what, to the apostles, was the unknown road ahead…

Unknown except in one regard: that He would be with them, even till the consummation of the world. And this, now, this is the joy of the road, and even the joy of peace: that despite the conflicts that surround us, despite the buffeting of circumstance, perhaps the betrayals and the tragedies, despite the inexplicable abandonment that may make us cry out My God, why have you forsaken me? His peace remains.

Why is the peace of Christ so superior to the peace of this world? Why, if it brings with it all the tears of the Suffering Servant, is this the only peace we can long for? Because, in the end, only a peace rooted in the eternal love of the Son for the Father and the Father for the Son, only this eternal love that we call His Holy Spirit, brings us into the communion of their love and home to our eternal dwellings. The ruler of this world wanted peace outside that communion. Indeed, all talk of enduring peace that does not have its origin and end in the communion of the Trinity is a peace that builds not the Kingdom of God but the ersatz and temporary kingdom of the ruler of this world. How can it be otherwise?  

So, the enemies of Christ are not only the violent tyrants whose bloodlust or whose indifference to destruction is patently obvious to all. The enemies of Christ, those who serve the cause of the ruler of this world, are also the soothsayers of all false peace, the clients of easy accommodations, the mystical whisperers of seductive but superficial harmony draped in the fading popularity of this world. That does not mean that we should not be peaceable neighbours or seek to build better understanding, of course. But it does mean we should not build castles in the air. It does mean that every time we do build such castles in the air - for we are weak and we love the comforts of this world - we are in fact building castles of the infernal abyss, for as Simone Weil says, hell is occupied by those who mistakenly thought they were choosing paradise.

In the end, we are not charged with thinking for others but with attending to our own house before we shoulder the burdens of His mission. In that regard, unless we are faithful – faithful by His power, faithful to His peace – how will the false merchants of peace ever know that the Son loves the Father?

From the archives: vocation, not self promotion (updated)

 A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 54-58) recounts an episode in which Jesus visits Nazareth and finds the population sceptical about His ministry. Where did this man get his wisdom and these mighty works they wonder. Their questions come thick and fast, and before long the mood grows dark: They took offence at him. Jesus’ response to this precipitous judgement was philosophical but also practical. A prophet is not without honour except in his home town, He concluded, and He performed few miracles for them, the gospel says, because of their unbelief.

Sometimes, human beings are sunk simply by their own shortcomings. Here is Nazareth, the neediest of Israel’s villages, well known as a place of dishonour. And yet, instead of celebrating their local celebrity, the people were filled with scepticism at Jesus’ works. Was it not right to ask questions? Of course, it was. Was it not a normal requirement to discern well in such circumstances? Without a doubt. So, why did the Nazarenes go so wrong in the process?

The clue might be found in this gospel’s subtext, in what lies beneath the surface. Where did this man get his wisdom only appears to be a fair inquiry; behind it is a kind of jealous attack. It is not Jesus’ wisdom that they were inquiring about. They were reacting instead to the very fact of His preaching, like neighbours who react and say: have you seen what the Joneses have done now? After that first question, therefore, every other inquiry was an attempt to demean the Messiah in their midst: Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? Yet again, we must read the subtext, the motives that are hidden beneath the surface: these questions were rhetorical, not genuinely interrogative. They were not about what they were about. They did not seek information. Rather, they sought to make the point that whatever Jesus had done, He was simply a local boy and didn’t deserve the acclaim. And there, dear reader, is the wayward human heart in a nutshell, souring like milk in the warm summer sun.

Jesus cannot heal us until we have fully recognised how broken we are, but we cannot fully recognise how broken we are when we are jealously comparing ourselves to others. The crowd’s questions almost amount to asking: why should we not be just as renowned as Jesus? Jealousy manifests itself in different ways; in the impious, it is simple, raw, and aggressive, as it is in this scene. In the pious, it might show itself through flattery or imitation or in an ill-disguised competitiveness for heavenly glory or spiritual oneupmanship. But both the pious and the impious are moved by the same force from within, the same instinct to want to show that they are as good as the one they are jealous of, or at least that those they are jealous of are no better than them. Perhaps it is because they do not know their own worth, for only those who neglect their worth in God’s eyes look upon the qualities of others as a measure of their own failings. If our hearts are truly aware of God's loving gaze upon us, why are we shaken by the hostility of others or by their successes? Our dissonant need to be needed, what we call succourrance, is at the root of this weakness.

But is God or man the measure of who we are, of what we are to become, and indeed of what we are worth? Are these things not determined by our vocation: our personal vocation, calling us to be some reflection of the goodness and beauty of our divine Creator, and our life’s vocation, calling us to some particular path of living? St Joseph, the very subject of today's feast, lived out both these realities, reflecting in a sublime and unique way the fatherhood of the Father through the mystery of his paternal authority over the Eternal Son, and undertaking the responsibility of providing for Jesus and Mary during the Hidden Life of the Lord. Instead of finding our guide in these two realities, however, it seems we often allow who we are and what we are worth to be shaped by so many other forces in the human game of inauthenticity in which we are all unwitting players: through social pressures – the kind that the crowd try to exert in this gospel – or through covetous pursuit  - when we run towards not what God calls us to be, but towards the thing that most seems attractive to us: wealth, fame, influence, the admiration of our cynical neighbours. Instead of vocation, we seem so easily to aspire to self-promotion. The truth is that we are least ourselves when we most wish to seem and to grab.

Nazareth of Our Lord’s day is the anti-culture of vocation: it is not interested in hearing God’s call, nor in honouring God’s call in others. To dwell spiritually in the Nazareth of England in the living holy house of the heart, proposes another way.