From the archives: from self knowledge to knowledge of the divine

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

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Today’s gospel (John 1: 47-51) sees Jesus encountering the apostle Nathanael for the first time. The briefest of exchanges occurs, following which Nathanael professes his belief in Jesus’s divine sonship. It is an extraordinary moment of faith, and Jesus promises that Nathanael will see greater things: the very concourse of angelic traffic between this world and the next in the service of the Messiah.

The nub of this passage, however, lies in the first exchange which passes between them. Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit! says the Lord. How do you know me, Lord? replies the future apostle.  When you were under the fig tree, I saw you, Jesus responds. It is these words which trigger in Nathanael a profession of fervent faith.

What is it that the Lord perceived in Nathanael? What was it in those words an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit which told Nathanael that the Lord knew him through and through. Perhaps this little exchange dramatizes for us the tensions with which we live daily. For who among us can say that there is no deceit in their soul?

The best spiritual authors commend to us knowledge of God and knowledge of the self but we are still often strangers to ourselves. Our capacity for self-reflection is often undermined by the hall of mirrors within us which distends our self-knowledge, sometimes flatteringly and sometimes to our detriment. As one might say these days, objects in these mental mirrors may appear better or worse than they really are. On the one hand, we suffer the wounds of original sin, and pride stalks our good works to such an extent that the Lord tells us not to let our right hand know what our left hand is doing; pride takes fire like dry leaves. On the other, we hardly understand our own inner psychological wounds, the fruit of our unpurified experiences, which leave us clinging to bitter shards of misunderstanding and disappointment, the things that make us embrace deceit not usually out of perversity but for the comfort they appear to bring. It is hard sometimes to know which lies the world is telling us, and our neighbour is often full of subterfuge, perhaps even without knowing it. But, knowing ourselves and seeing our own capacity for deceit – which we choose sometimes as a tactic and sometimes as a false refuge - that is a life-long challenge. The Psalmist himself asks God to cleanse him from his hidden sins.

And, yet here is Nathanael, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Here is a man who, to quote one hymn, has already been reclothed in his rightful mind. We might almost say that poor self-knowledge – self-knowledge of the distorted kind that we have just considered a few moments ago - is in fact a form of being out of one’s rightful mind, for the mind is made to know truth - the truth about God and the truth about the world and ourselves. In contrast, we have the Lord’s word for it that Nathanael’s mind was not clouded with error; not for him the deluded ambitions of James and John, nor the empty braggadocio of Peter. He was, as the Lord observed, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.

What is even more striking about Nathanael’s self-knowledge is that it matches the Lord’s knowledge of him. How could it be otherwise? To see the truth of things, to see the truth about ourselves, is to see things and ourselves as they are seen by the Author of Truth. This Nathanael intuits simply by dint of the Lord’s having claimed to have seen him under the fig tree. We cannot know what was on Nathanael’s mind at that very moment, but what we see in the moments that follow is a grand convergence of hearts: a human heart that is ready for divine love because it dwells in the truth about itself and God, in freedom from all deceit, and a divine heart that pours itself out passionately to share the goodness of the eternal truth. It is perhaps the happiest of all the encounters that Jesus has with any of his future apostles, and Nathanael might have said, anticipating St Paul: Now I know even as also I am known.

And what does the Lord promise Nathanael? He promises a glimpse into the true relations between heaven and earth. Heart spoke to heart, faith affirmed belief, and the Lord of gifts promised Nathanael than he would be able to see the celestial mysteries surrounding his incarnate presence on earth.  We can trace now a path in Nathanael’s journey that goes from honesty and self-knowledge to divine encounter, and then from a profession of faith to mystical illumination. Nathanael’s path is firm, and the way before him was paved with clarity of vision leading to the truth of God and the truth about himself.

And the promise was extraordinary that he would see the ministry of angels to the Christ, the coming and going of divine messengers about the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, now incarnate in flesh and walking the earth. We never think about this beautiful angelic gift promised to Nathanael, although it is one that is echoed in the lives of many saints who lived and interacted with the angels around them. We do not know when it began, nor how he lived its reality later on. And yet we know it must have given birth in him to an awareness of, and reverence for, the messengers of the Most High, those spirits who see constantly the face of the Father in heaven.

Such blessings were not the choicest gift of Nathanael’s life: that was the intimate friendship of Christ. But those high privileges began where that same friendship began also: under a fig tree where Nathanael was sitting, humbly letting go the vestiges of self-deceit, like a fall of autumn leaves. 

What does it all mean?

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 9:18-22) is a scene that is better known to us under its version in the gospel of St Matthew. St Luke, who unlike St Matthew did not witness the moment personally, only gives us the bare bones: Jesus’ inquiry about who people thought He was, the disciples’ varied responses, and finally St Peter’s reply that He was the Christ of God. From this episode, we may be tempted to retain only Peter’s profession of faith, but what follows is also instructive and not only because it foretells Jesus’ sufferings to come.

Of course, there is a vast contrast in the two messages: one moment, we hear the faith of the Fisherman on whom the future Church is built, and the next moment, we hear Jesus explain the sufferings that will be the very lifeblood of that Church. So far, so much may we assume that this is all about the Church. Yet the way in which these two messages come together is also an instruction on how far the disciples had to go to be aligned with the will of God, to live in that will, and to learn to say in their own turn the fiat that challenges us all.

On the one hand, imagine how inspired they must have been to hear Peter make his declaration. Surely, they must have discussed it a little among themselves: exactly who is the Master? Now, Peter moved the game forward, committing himself and them too in a way to something that would change all their futures. Moreover, Jesus’ confirmation of Peter’s assertion, implicit in His declaration about Peter, must have turned this moment into a transformative one for all of them. Until now, they were just following this extraordinary Man. From now on, they would be building a future with Him for all His followers with Peter as the foundation. How much they must have felt that the future was now clear, the direction was confirmed, that there was certainty ahead, and that all would be well. The Jews of the first century anticipated a conquering Messiah, and so surely what they now knew of Jesus would have come together with their expectations: this was it, the triumph was imminent and – wonder of wonders – their little band was right at the heart of the action. Everything made sense, not least because they were at the heart of it all.

And, in our own discipleship, isn’t this very much like ourselves? We want to know what God wants of us, and then we seem to learn or discover something clarifying that points the way to the future. Here is the will of God for us, we say: full steam ahead. Like the disciples, there is clarity, there is meaning, and the meaning seems to make sense to us. My spouse and I used to call this the spirituality of spoons. It is the kind of discernment that comes about when people find that two soup spoons fit together and declare this fit to be a revelation of the plans of God. The mistake is easily made; how nicely these things fit together. Surely, this is what is meant to be! And yet, spoons as eating implements don’t go with spoons; they go with forks. And if the implication isn’t obvious, just ask yourself when you last saw anyone tucking into dessert with two spoons in their hands. Humans calculate meaning in sometimes very limited ways, but as God tells us in the Book of Isaiah, My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways.

And what comes next in today’s gospel shows Jesus giving this lesson to the disciples. For having confirmed His identity and filled their hearts with joy, Jesus then shows them the desperate vision of His future passion and death: His rejection, His sufferings, and His death. They were probably too shocked to hear at the end His prophecy of the resurrection. But surely, it cannot be this way, Lord. Being the Christ means riding out in triumph, breaking the power of the enemy, cleansing the temple, restoring God’s order. How could rejection, suffering, and death be the route towards a better future?

And, is that not just like us at the crossroads the good Lord brings us to, perhaps each day? We thought we knew what He wanted, but then things do not work out. We thought we knew the meaning of the pleasant joke, but Jesus’ punchline seems literally like a punch.

Why is this so? Because, unwittingly, we had begun to write the next chapter in our own heads, instead of allowing the author of all things to show us His draft. Reverting to our best animal instincts, we had believed that our future required a tangible and visible reduction of uncertainty. To make God laugh, they say, tell Him our plans. Yet to make God weep, we tell Him implicitly all the time that our plans are much better than His.

We don’t mean to do this of course. Our head can say a thousand fiats a day. Yet it is deep down in the darkest recesses of the heart, well away from the holy images we keep of ourselves, that our human vanities and insecurities lurk, that our wounds are at their deepest. Perhaps our outer peripheries have been evangelised but what about our inner self? Like Peter, we are unconsciously confident about our fidelity, and we forget that in the gospel of Matthew, when Peter, the newly minted pope, rebukes Jesus for His prophecy of future pain, the Good Lord turns a withering eye on His Petrine Holiness and calls him Satan to his face. We are all worthy of the accusation, not that that makes us especially bad. Jesus came to rescue us from the fate of being delivered exclusively into our own wretched hands!

So, what is the meaning of it all? For us, there is only one meaning, and that is the following of Christ. Today’s gospel extract breaks off after the prophecy of the resurrection, but St Luke’s gospel continues with words that cast a light on Peter’s fate and on the fate of us all, at least those of us who are prepared to admit that God’s plans might just be better than ours. The message is ominous all the same:

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

Always keep ahold of nurse

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 19-21) gives us once more the scene in which Jesus’ mother and relatives arrive to see Him but cannot gain access. When He is told they are there to see Him, He announces that His mother and cousins – called here brothers and sisters by Jewish custom - are those who hear God’s word and do it.

The obvious lessons of this passage are easily grasped and are a constant consolation to us. If obedience to God makes us the near relative of Christ, we can be sure of two things. First, nobody was closer or more pleasing to God than Mary who by her obedient fiat at the Annunciation counterbalanced in a sense the disobedience of Eve. This was the second chapter of her role in the restauration of humanity and made the way for Jesus’ own supreme and triumphal actions by which she was saved and, with her, those who do the will of God. The second thing we can be sure of is that this obedience of which Jesus speaks is at the heart of our conformity to Him through whom we become the adopted children of the Most High. Baptism in His death and resurrection is only the beginning of that conformity, which is meant to break forth in a glorious growth and flourishing by our transformation in Him. Thus, like all relatives, our kinship is signalled by our very likenesses. This is how they will know we are Christians: by our love for one another, for the obedience of the Lord makes us like the One who is Love Divine, all loves excelling.

Yet, these are not the end of the lessons in today’s gospel. On earth Jesus was content to appear a man and even tolerated the judgements – let us say the misjudgements - of the crowd as part of His earthly state. Thus, we can quite imagine that some of the onlookers in this scene, hearing or seeing that He did not instantly welcome the arrival of His mother and relatives, might easily have assumed He felt about them as we often feel about our own relatives. On a quiet country road near where your blogger lives, one sign proudly hangs at a front gate: Relatives by appointment only. Seeing a man dodge his nearest and dearest is practically a joke because it is so very understandable, and so very unlike the customary honour we rightly pay parents and family, the former by ordinance of the Most High.

But if the crowd would have been wrong to judge Jesus thus, the truth remains that, as everyone knows, our families can sometimes hurt and wound us in ways that nobody else can. Jesus came for this too. In humanity’s severed branches and crooked timber, the wounds of those who are meant to be our dear ones can be savage, probably because they go back to our earliest days. These wounds are manifest in us through those parts of the inner man that withdraw and hide away, caught as it were in an ancient amber of the soul that has immobilised them, making them less sensitive to pain perhaps, but also less apt for healing. These wounds are protected by other inner guardians, the defensive behaviours that experience claims can protect our deepest, most damaged selves.

And all the while, as in all damaged conditions, we are not free to respond to God’s love in the fullest sense of our fiat, and we do not love others as we are called to love them. Parents can wound us through breaching the unwritten and yet deeply intuited contract binding their state in life and ours. These wounds we are capable of carrying forward into our relationship with God who, we struggle to learn, is not as imperfect in His parenting as they were. Yet, siblings can wound us also. Many years ago, I visited the Royal Courts of Justice in London and entered a public gallery during a civil case that I chose merely at random. The theatre was extraordinary. Two brothers were suing each other, angry and relentless in a mutual persecution over a disputed heritage. These two had stopped opening the door to each other some time before, and I was hardly surprised by a later newspaper report explaining that their dispute had helped eat up much of the disputed estate in legal costs.

Because that is what all wounds do: they consume us from the inside. At worst, they become infected and suppurate, poisoning the system. Perhaps more commonly, they recondition the heart, blocking the arteries of love. They change and chill our behaviour to those we should love best. We hug them less closely; we leave their calls unanswered. We act to protect ourselves, and all the while we fail the vocation of love.

For the vocation of love, our obedience to the Father, would call us to be present to them, even in our discomfort. Contradicting every instinct to protect an old wound from further damage and pain, we are called to renounce the malign spirit that drives us to withdraw. In that moment, we must enter the mystery of Christ by enduring the presence of the people and the things that most seem to threaten us, for in the end, our safety always did lie in God, our harbour and haven.

Our mothers, brothers and sisters stand without; it could of course be much, much worse, as it is for our persecuted Chinese or Nigerian brothers and sisters. But then whatever stands without, we are called to give our fiat to embracing whatever and whomever the Lord asks us to be present to today.

And in being thus present, in refusing to anesthetise ourselves to their very resonance, we will be walking the path of obedience to our Father in heaven and taking on more and more the likeness of our Brother who came to save us all.

From the archives: along the path

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 8: 1-3) is a text of great simplicity. At a first read, there seems almost nothing for our edification. Unlike certain parts of scripture, we can feel that we might even bounce off its surface, uncertain of why the Church asks us to read this passage. And yet, in spite of appearances, every sentence is pregnant with mysteries that light our way and draw us towards the One who has called our name.

Jesus made his way through towns and villages preaching, and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God. For Jesus is the teacher, and He comes to reveal to us who God really is, how much He loves us, and how we can find our way home to Him. Jesus is the way, the truth and the life; by grace He becomes our way, our truth, and our life. Jesus is the path. No name is given to us under heaven or on earth by which we can be saved. And our obedience to God begins, as the roots of the word obedience suggests, in listening: listening to Jesus’ voice, listening to His preaching, listening to His tales of the Kingdom. When we consider this Jesus who walks the paths through the towns and villages of Israel, we have a glimpse of what Saint Patrick saw when he wrote those beautiful words: Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me.

With Him went the Twelve, as well as certain women who had been cured of evil spirits and ailments. In this line also, we find truths that run deep and that console us. The Church is not one of cheap, doe-eyed anime saints, no matter the horrors committed against their memory by vacuous contemporary Church art. Down the ages, we have seen many kinds of Saints; some, like Saint Joseph or St Therese of Lisieux, seem logical and obvious invitees to the glories of heaven; others, like Saint Augustine of Hippo and of course St Didimus, whose cross stood beside Jesus’, are less likely candidates, humanly speaking. But this is only to see things in a very worldly way, like St Peter, the first pope, trying to block Jesus’ path to the cross. Jesus, who, as we have said, walks through the towns and villages, comes in search of His lost sheep, to fix that which was broken, to restore that which has failed, to redeem that which is captive. We know from the gospel of the woman with the alabaster jar earlier this week that such women were regarded with suspicion, not to say loathing in the time of Jesus. It is not so long ago in our own culture that certain moral failures brought down shame and social exclusion, while, it should be recognised, other moral failures, perhaps even worse ones, went overlooked. In truth, all sin is shameful, for all sin disfigures in us the image of our Creator, and mortal sin robs us of the life of grace. These damaged women with their unsavoury histories, not to mention the Twelve disciples too, are the first fruits of the harvest that Jesus wishes to offer to the Father. Like our Blessed Mother, they are masterpieces of His grace, although they are restorations of another kind. The loving John who stands by the cross at the end begins his apostolic career with vile ladder climbing. And Mary Magdalene who meets Jesus in the blessed Easter garden reverses in that instant the many wayward and unholy trysts of her wretched past. As the saying goes, every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.  

The last clause of this very short gospel reads: Mary surnamed the Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna, and several others who provided for them out of their own resources. On the surface, such details reveal something of the sources that Saint Luke was able to draw on as he wrote his gospel. Saint Luke had names, places, and timings. Whoever reported these things to him was an eyewitness of what had happened.

Yet, on another level, this line is a reminder to us that the Jesus who seeks us along the paths of the towns and villages of the world, calls us by name, knows us already intimately, and bids us listen carefully to that call. For COLW, this line is a reminder that we must read the gospel through a vocational lens and allow the Holy Spirit to show us little by little the next steps along the path.

For the path goes on, through those towns and villages, and for us the path continues along the secret ways of our heart where, as Francis Thompson says sadly,

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind.

But where, please God, little by little and by His grace, our flight will at last cease, so that we may sit at the feet of Jesus in the cell of our heart to learn His gospel afresh.

The missing link

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 2: 33-35) gives us a brief moment in the lives of Mary and Joseph but one in which Jesus takes centre stage, identified as Saviour by the words of Simeon who is, so to speak, the last but one prophet of the Old Testament, followed only by John the Baptist. Yet, as brief as the moment is, how many truths these lines contain.

First, we have a glimpse into the interior lives of Joseph and Mary for, as Saint Luke tells us, they marvelled at what was said about the child. One of the fundamental virtues that they both exercised throughout their lives was the virtue of faith, utterly necessary insofar as the immense prophecies that surrounded their son were often contradicted by the difficult and thankless circumstances in which they often found themselves. Faith was the virtue that Saint Elizabeth most praised in Mary for she was blessed in having believed the words that had been spoken to her.

Next, we hear the words of Simeon's prophecy about the role Jesus would play in the life of Israel. Here, we must understand Israel both in a concrete and in a spiritual sense, in the sense both of His own people and of the spiritual Israel constituted by His mystical body:

Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed.

Why is this so? Why is not everything done and finished, indeed accomplished, with the action of Jesus alone? Quite simply because redemption is not yet salvation; quite simply because, as paradoxical as it is, there is something lacking in the sufferings of Christ, as Saint Paul tells the Colossians. There is a portion to be made-up, and that portion is seen in our transformation in Christ by which we become the adopted children of the Father and bear the duties of the First Born with a true co-responsibility. To be a Christian is not simply to profess His name and recognise Him as our personal Lord and Saviour; if that were sufficient, than, all those who say Lord, Lord would indeed enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

More is needed. The rise and fall of many in Israel will come about because some will follow Him into death and resurrection, and some will choose not to. Some will recognise that the mystery of His passion and His glory must become their own mystery, and some will not. Some will accept that their own story must be written into His story, and some will not. And This is why He is opposed. We should not be surprised at those who reject Him, and neither should we despair; God alone keeps the secret of all hearts. This is the mystery of iniquity, and we have been warned to expect it.

Lastly, this gospel draws back a curtain on the extraordinary mystery of how Mary herself enters the passion and resurrection of her Son. At the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus asks her directly:

What is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come.

In other words, what Simeon's prophecy anticipates – the piercing of Mary’s heart by a sword - is in fact Mary's vocation to be associated with Jesus in the fall and the rise of Israel. How could we doubt that in this prophecy we hear Mary's personal vocation: not her active vocation to mother the Saviour of humanity, but her personal vocation that means of all human creatures she is the one most closely associated with the hour of the Saviour.

And this too is why the purpose of the piercing of her heart is that the thoughts of many may be revealed. For in our personal vocations, that particular dimension of the inexhaustible beauty of God which He has appointed to us to reflect is shown forth to the world. In this moment, Mary is shown not only as His mother but also as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, the human creature who is drawn most deeply into God's outpouring of Himself: in His creation, in His work of redemption, and now down the ages of the Church in His work of sanctification.

Jesus is the bridge maker but Mary is the bridge head: His first conquest, His greatest masterpiece, and His most intimate cooperator, working then, and even now, to make up in her own sufferings, her own sorrows, the sufferings that are lacking to the passion of Christ for the sake of His body, the Church.

None so blind

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

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Today’s gospel (Luke 6:39-42) presents us with Jesus’ teachings on the connection between purity of intention and clear moral vision. The blind cannot lead the blind. It is a teaching which comes into even greater focus when applied to the criticism of others and when, Jesus tells us, we are in even greater danger of hypocrisy. 

First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

In this conclusion, not only does Jesus tell us what we must do – i.e. wash our own laundry before criticising others for not washing theirs - but He also reminds us how our perceptions of the faults of others are often distorted. Yet the problem of hypocrisy and the challenge of reforming ourselves before trying to reform others only arise from the difficulty that Jesus pinpoints at the outset: 

can the blind lead the blind? 

Yet, what does He mean in this?

The scholastics used to say: every comparison limps except in the point of comparison. What blind people lack in vision, they often compensate for by some other extraordinary facility or other. Still, Jesus’ comparison here is apt. By saying the blind cannot lead the blind, what He means is that those who lack moral and spiritual insight cannot effectively enable others to see morally and spiritually. Very few people intentionally blind themselves; but when it comes to a loss of moral vision, we face three difficulties.

The first is that a certain moral blindness is one of the wounds of original sin; to be human is to be born blind in a sense. 

The second is that we rarely know all the facts around another’s case and need to be wary of prejudging their situation. Going after the log in our brother’s eye is interference, but it is almost always an error of judgement to begin with.

The third difficulty is that our own moral failings create, as it were, our own moral and spiritual cataracts of various hues and colours that block our vision. Our minds easily turn rose tinted with blind optimism, perhaps dark and sombre with sour pessimism, or even a jaundiced yellow from world-weary cynicism. We fall into folly through thoughtlessness, or perhaps into wilful depression through a lack of hope. God forbid we lapse at times into cynical scorn, knowing the price of things without weighing their value. All of these denote in themselves barriers that we unwittingly erect to the fruitfulness the Holy Spirit wants to bring forth in us.

How different we are then from those visionaries Elizabeth and Mary who meet and greet each other in a spirit of faith. Where we fumble in our pride, they perceive God’s ways in humility; while we unconsciously revel in our mistaken superiority, they let go and let God, waiting for His light in patience, rather than rushing to simulate their own.

To try to pick out the speck in our brother’s eye before removing the log from our own is, from a COLW perspective, to place mission before contemplation; it is to favour activity over reflection, or to deny to the apostolate the benefits of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. After all, if we knew ourselves like Elizabeth and Mary did, we would not appoint missions to ourselves, but wait in joyful hope for the beginning and end of all mission, the coming of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Only in that school can we learn assuredly the lessons that Dom Chautard shared with the Church a hundred years ago: that contemplation is the soul of the apostolate, that faith is the condition of knowing God and coming to the truth about ourselves, and that overreaching activism and frenetic doings should be recognised for the blindness that they are.