No place for words

 Today's gospel (Luke 1: 57-66) sees the birth and naming of John the Baptist, and the miraculous lifting of the curse or burden that had struck Zachariah nine months earlier. Elizabeth's word was discounted when she wanted to name her son John. And yet it was ratified by Zachariah who then miraculously opened his mouth and began that hymn of praise we know as the Benedictus:

He will give light to those in darkness,

Those who dwell in the shadow of death,

And guide us into the way of peace.

****

Yet there is no place left now for further distraction, nor for lending our minds to other mysteries. Today we sing the last O Antiphon "O Emmanuel" and the final capital letter completes the mnemonic we have been forming since 17 December:

E*R*O  C*R*A*S

Tomorrow will I be.

The Lord is at hand; come let us adore Him.

****

"Silence is God's first language," wrote St John of the Cross. Stillness is the mood of the approaching mystery. The Word takes flesh, but breathes no word. The angels sing but men fall silent, overcome by a Presence which is more than any present they can receive. Bethlehem's streets are full of self-serving tumult, last minute Christmas shoppers and drunken visitors to town, but the stable stands quiet, the straw bedding like a muffle over the ring of thoughtless bustle in the crowded streets above.

****

It is good for us to be here. It is good for us to remain here in this moment of sublime stillness that is otherwise forgotten and ignored. This is the holy place where we must remove the shoes that carry our thoughts away to other places and other concerns; where we must unshoe our wandering hearts so they can wander no more. Let it be enough for us that a Child is born. And let all revelry hereafter sit still first a while, breathing in this inspiration and breathing out its adoration.

Christ is born in Bethlehem. Come let us adore Him.

****

The blog will now be in recess until 13 January.

Healing and new life

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) offers us once more the scene of the annunciation which we reflected on a week last Monday. Really, COLW is spoiled on the approach to Christmas as the liturgy revels in the central mystery which happens to define our charism. But, in truth the mystery of the annunciation never runs out, just as Mary’s yes to the Lord is never exhausted. Its inner depths go deeper than we can possibly fathom. But why this repetition of the same gospel again and again? Mary, now assumed and living in the eternal now of God, lived once in this world in its constant chain of passing moments when no doubt she said yes to Him in every instant, just as we ask her to help us to do. The recitation of this gospel again and again, therefore, is like an echo to Mary’s song, a theme and its variations, which are the same and yet different.

But for herself it is also possible that Mary said yes in every moment of her life without any need for variation whatsoever. While lesser and more complicated souls, like us, may find repetition harassing, children like Mary – for Mary is the little child of God Jesus asks us to be, more completely than any other human can be – children like Mary, I say, find repetition exhilarating. The case is much as G. K. Chesterton described it in his essay Orthodoxy:

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy.  A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.  For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.  But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

So, what if Mary says yes to the Lord in every moment of her life, not because she needs to cling on grimly for dear life like us, but because she cannot stop her joy from pouring out of her, a yes, a thank you, again, and again for the sheer happiness of the thing!

There is one variation, one difference, in this gospel scene which we can point to which is both wonderful and illustrative, and it is found in the difference between Mary’s lot and that of Elizabeth. Mary on the one hand is full of grace already, and the Holy Spirit will overshadow her to make her Mother of the Son of God; indeed Mother of God, for a mother gives birth to a person, not a nature, and the person she will bring forth and feed, clean, cuddle and educate, is – marvel of marvels - the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. In contrast, we know little of Elizabeth other than that her conception of John overturned the living shame of being infertile in an age when fertility was not understood. Yet in the contrast between the work of God in Mary’s life and in Elizabeth’s, we see a glimpse of the wonderful work of grace in its dynamic diversity.

First, grace heals and restores. It heals Elizabeth’s soul no doubt at the same time as her body, just as Jesus’ later physical cures came with an invitation to spiritual transformation; the angel ascribes her conception of John to God’s power for nothing is impossible with God, although this blessing is nothing like that of Mary’s. John was no doubt conceived naturally but the process was aided by divine intervention. At the same time, Elizabeth’s spiritual transformation is like our own, coming also from His merciful intervention now to heal our souls with a grace which makes us, like Elizabeth, able to recognise and welcome the Mother of our Saviour. We live constantly in the shame of our spiritual infertility; we long to bear the fruit of grace in our lives but find ourselves too often sterile, our souls neglected and choked with weeds from other fields, or else overworked and exploited by our own cleverly-disguised self-interest, like land exhausted and made sour by industrial farming; no matter the causes, they render us barren until we surrender to the health-restoring downpour of God’s grace. This is why we say then:

O Mary, teach us always to say yes to the Lord every moment of our life.

O Mary, teach us always to give thanks to the Lord every moment of our life.

These are the paths to our restoration.

But grace also elevates us too, as it did with Mary the health of whose soul was never in doubt since she was born immaculate and remained so. Grace restores nature, as we noted with Elizabeth, but it also elevates it as we see most tangibly in Mary in the scene of the annunciation, promising to draw us into the intimacy of life in the Blessed Trinity in whose embrace we are made a child, a sibling, and a spouse of our Creator. The Holy Spirit comes upon us and the power of the Most High overshadows us, now in the interests of bringing forth into the world siblings of the Word who was made flesh in Mary, new incarnations made alive in the likeness of Jesus.

If yes and thank you mark our gradual restoration to health, joy and love are the qualities of a life recreated and raised up into the bosom of God. On this journey, we follow a Saviour whose path leads us from the valley of our death to the mountain of His welcoming embrace, the eternal dwelling of the house of Jacob and its unending festivities over the prodigal children who are home at last with their Father. And this is why we cannot help ourselves saying also:

O Mary, teach us always to rejoice in the Lord every moment of our life.

O Mary, teach us always to love the Lord every moment of our life.

Amen. 

Children of the revolution

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

****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 21: 23-27) should be a sobering one for us to read because it is full of pious, apparently godly people being exposed and getting nowhere fast. Let the shipwrecks of others be your seamarks.

Jesus is approached by the chief priests and elders of the people, asking questions about the source of His authority. He sets them a kind of theological brainteaser before He will answer their question -  was John the Baptist from heaven or not? – and this puzzle undoes them. Because they cannot answer it, He will not answer their first question. The scene is set for the approaching denouement only a few chapters later in the gospel of Matthew with the betrayal of Judas and the events of the Passion.

What are the mistakes that the chief priests and elders make? They are multiple, and they started longing before this gospel scene began to unfold. We should not be deceived by the first question: it is not likely to have been an honest inquiry about Jesus’ authority. Jesus had been working miracles for years at this point. There is a tone about it that suggests not an investigation but the justification of a conclusion the leaders had probably reached already: Jesus must be stopped. They do not ask Him about His authority because they want the answer but because they are out to defeat Him and His influence. We are all at risk of the same kind of mistake: prejudging a situation negatively and then, instead of undertaking honest discernment, justifying the decision we have already attached our hearts to. Discernment is a challenge, not only because it seeks to attain the as yet unknown, but also because it requires our hearts to be genuinely free and responsive to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. How easy it is to confuse the latter with interior movements that merely confirm our established biases towards what we want and against what we would rather avoid!

The genius of Jesus’ answer to the chief priests and elders is just one more warning to the unwitting who believe they can wrestle with God and win: was John’s baptism from heaven? In their pride, humans believe they can measure the truth, whereas in reality, it is truth that is the measure of human beings. Jesus’ question is like a mirror held up to the slow and stumbling minds of His accusers, and they find themselves gazing on an image than none of them particular likes.

If they answer Jesus’ elegantly simple question by saying ‘from heaven’, their answer will show them to be hypocrites, for the problem then becomes why they did not believe the Baptist. Why did they fail to act on something that they perceived was the work of God? Any one of us might ask ourselves the same question. Why do we neglect the signs of His work? Why do we close our eyes to the possibilities He illumines for us? Ultimately, why do we do such things while smugly if unconsciously priding ourselves on how good, how nice, how proficient we really are? Why do we hold ourselves to be devotees when our lives lack the integrity required of us, or when our lives lack the genuine, health-giving penitence that consciousness of our lack of integrity ought to inspire in our hearts?

We fear to be exposed for who we know ourselves deep down to be, as did Jesus’ questioners, yet fear is also what a negative answer to Jesus’ question will induce in them. For if they say John’s baptism was not of heaven, it is the people that they will fear! In fearing the people, they are really afraid of losing control, or losing influence and power, and possibly afraid of the Romans. To answer the question one way or the other, therefore, they must face two realities; either that they have previously been shamed by the light, or that they are now cravenly afraid of the dark.  If saying ‘of heaven’ risked exposing them as hypocrites, saying ‘of earth’ will risk exposing them as cowards.

In both these possibilities, the souls of these men – and our own souls – are dissected and left out to dry in the sunlight. We have all been hypocrites, knowing what we should do, but lacking the integrity to do it, to count the cost or to take the risk of averting our eyes from the looking glass of our own self-image only to cast them upon the Holy Face. We have all been cowards likewise, fearing to let go the out sized theatrical costumes of our own vanity, too scared to be right for fear of getting things wrong and being exposed as the gentle, fumbling clowns we really are.

What should be a warning to us in this gospel scene, however, is its conclusion:

So, they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

In truth Jesus had already told them by what authority He did such things. The authority was written into actions which nobody on earth had ever done. Indeed, He had specifically and explicitly demonstrated His power to forgive sins through working the cure of a paralysed man in Matthew Chapter 6. For those with hearts open to the truth, He had already provided the answer that the chief priests and elders then supposedly came looking for in Matthew Chapter 21.

And why is this a warning to us? Because even though sin is in the will, it is possible in our minds to sin against the light. It is possible not only to close one’s selfish heart around the things one is unprepared to let go of, but also to close one’s tiny mind around the deceits that satisfy our hearts, rather than opening them up to the expansive grandeur of God’s invitation. It is possible – heaven help us! - to blot out the truths that frighten us and fail to take the risks our Divine Friend wants us to embrace.

The world belongs to risk takers, says Georges Bernanos, author of Diary of a Country Priest. But to brave the opening our minds to His light, or to dare to choose His dangerous call to us, we must run the risk of declaring a revolution against everything in us – the hypocrisy, the cowardice - everything that makes us children of the chief priests and elders rather than children of God. Let us then, in God’s name and in His power, be revolutionaries against our worst selves, abandoning our destiny to the action of the Eternal Rabble Rouser who overturns tables in the temples of our hearts to make them fit for His presence. For as Bernanos says in the same essay, in the end prayer is the only revolt that is left standing.

Sorrow and joy in counterpoint

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

****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 11:16-19) evokes the song of the Lord that we heard sung in the liturgy of the feast of the Immaculate Conception on Monday. Jesus addressed the crowd with what seemed an obscure parallel. This generation, He said:

is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”

He goes on to bewail the contradictory criticisms levelled first at John the Baptist and then Himself, and concludes quite enigmatically:

Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.

What are we to make of such a collision of conundrums, collecting so decidedly in the space of a few verses? What does the Lord mean?

It all depends on what He refers to as this generation. It would be easy – and it is indeed common – to assume that He means His listeners, the people who would go on to criticise both John the Baptist and Himself. But what if He does not? What if, instead, this generation means precisely John the Baptist and Himself, the generation born in the reign of King Herod, the generation whose births were announced by angelic visitors, and who speak now in the reign of Herod’s son?  

For John the Baptist sang a dirge of repentance to the Israelites of his time. John offered the Chosen People the possibility of pronouncing, as it were, a fiat in sorrow, a recognition that they had sinned, and that they needed God’s forgiveness, an admission that there was much that they had to let go of in order to have open hands to welcome the coming Kingdom of God. Of course, some heard and embraced John’s message; but so many more did not, including the leaders of the Jewish people, and notably Herod Antipas himself who, though attracted to the tone of John’s music, could not agree to the sorrow it sought to induce in his heart.

But John’s music was only a preparation for Jesus’ melody which found its key, as we reflected a few days ago, in the original harmony of His mother with the Eternal Father and the grace notes of the Holy Spirit. Jesus echoed John’s theme of fiat in sorrow, but He added another richer strain of a fiat in joy, telling His followers from the Sermon on the Mount to rejoice in suffering and persecution. While John came in sackcloth and ashes, Jesus proceeded in festivity after His extraordinary fast in the desert at the beginning of His ministry, returning to John’s sorrowful dirge only from time to time, and most especially in His Passion.  

Like all the greatest truths of our faith, then, the flute of Jesus and the dirge of John hold together in a paradox, bringing to light the false joys of those who resist John’s lament and the dourness of those who neglect Jesus’ joy. The harmonious blending of the two is the fruit of wisdom who is justified in her deeds, says Jesus.

What deeds, we ask? The deeds of salvation which require, first, conversion in a repentant mode, and then, a living out of our adoption as children of God, in which we are exposed to the great festivity of a Father - who rejoices at the return of His wayward little ones - and commanded to share in it.

How can we join that new song of the Lord, initiated in the Immaculate Conception, continued in the harmony of Mary and the Father, and that takes flight in the glorious melody of the Son of God? We join it now by listening deeply to the sorrowful dirge of John and the joyous flute of Jesus, and then little by little, by raising our voices, to turn their duet of wisdom into a mighty choral outburst of eternal love. 

A new song to the wonders of the Lord

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 1: 26-38) relates the central mystery of our charism in COLW – the Annunciation. What is announced is not only the coming of the Saviour, the Son of the Most High, not only His reign over the house of Jacob and His everlasting kingdom, but also the mysterious privileges that underpin the vocation of the Virgin Mary, paving the way for the restoration of the human race to its original course of friendship with God. Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you … Mary, you have found favour with God. God, who sees all time in one moment, anticipates in this one human creature the effects of the infinite merits of his Son and gives to her the extraordinary grace of conceiving a Son by whose grace she too has been saved. We all enjoy God’s gifts; this privilege was His to her. As she will soon proclaim to her cousin, her spirit thus rejoices in God her saviour. In Adam all have sinned; in Christ all have the possibility of redemption. But just as the original Adam’s fault was prepared by a woman, his companion Eve, so now the second Adam’s redemption is prepared by a reversal of Eve’s original disobedience in Mary’s fiat. This “yes”, she chooses freely in her sinless state, just as Eve freely chose sin in her sinless state; their sinlessness did not take away free their choice.

This, then, is the favour in which God the Father finds His daughter Mary: a state now of original harmony. And it is her harmony with Him which becomes the counterpoint for a new song to the Lord whose melody will be added by the Son she raises. When we pray in our turn that our lives may become a song of constant praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, all we do is add another line, another verse, to this existing harmony that begins through Jesus’ work in Mary’s soul at her conception. And as she was chosen by Him before the foundation of the world, so we too find ourselves beneficiaries of a similar election and, like her, find ourselves called to be holy and blameless, according to the purpose of His will.

Her mysteries are ours; from her immaculate conception comes in some sense our conception in grace. For there is no motherhood without begotten children, and in some way, her immaculate conception not only prepares her to bear God’s son - painlessly, say the Fathers of the Church - but to bear in a spiritual way His mystical body in the ugly labour pains of Calvary. For nothing will be impossible with God who reaps where He did not sow and gathers where He did not scatter and who, in the case of His Son, has already sent a herald ahead of Him, to prepare His ways and announce His coming, first in the previously barren womb of John's aged mother Elizabeth.

And now Mary does not begin her song but adds a new verse with the Father’s bass and foundation, the grace notes of the Holy Spirit, the melody of her Son from the depths of her womb, and her own haunting descant, learned in the holy solitude of her immaculate heart where she had long mediated on the favours of her maker:

Behold I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.

There is no other key in which we can sing. Our new song is only a variation on the melody and harmony of Mary’s song, the theme tune of the Mystical Body in which reverberates the mercies of God in this world and in the next.

Glorious things are spoken of you, O Mary, for from you arose the sun of justice, Christ our God. We need no other song. This is the new song, God’s redeemed composition, its instruments chosen, its harmonies grounded in love and mercy, its verses unfolding in the lives of those who echoes Mary’s fiat; its climax the singing of the same mercies in a grand choral and orchestral tutti, the perpetuum mobile of the eternal chorus.

Broken vessels

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

*****

Today's gospel (Matthew 9: 27-31) sees another healing at the hands of Jesus, son of David. Two blind men follow Him along the path and approach Him when he reaches His destination. They profess their belief that He can cure them and cure them He then does. Finally, He warns them sternly not to tell anyone about this, but they go and of course spread the news throughout the local area.

On one level Jesus’ behaviour in this scene seems hard to understand. These are blind men, and He fully knew they were there. Why did He leave them stumbling after Him in search of their cure, instead of stopping to assist them? Why did He ask them if they believed He could cure them when, surely, only determined believers would have followed Him in the circumstances just described?  And finally, why did He warn them sternly to conceal what must have been a life-transforming joy, a warning He knew full well they would ignore anyway? Truly, Jesus, as St Teresa of Avila said to Him, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you don’t have many!

Nevertheless, there are layers within the layers of this story, and undoubtedly unknown factors that Jesus knew full well but about which we could only speculate. More concretely, we have to start from the principle that Jesus’ healing ministry is not to the body alone but to the soul of man. Jesus is not a genie to be summoned by the magic words “Son of David”. These blind men ended in faith, but where did they begin their journey if not perhaps with the equally blind enthusiasm of the crowd with its taste for the spectacular rather than the transcendent? Jesus made them follow Him not to take them on a journey away from Capernaum, but on a journey away from their worse selves to discover something better than they had anticipated. Wherever I am, my servant must be there too. They could not arrive at this destination on the wings of religious fervour; only by following the perhaps stony lakeside path along which Jesus wound His own way to a house that was not identified in this scene but which we may well assume was in various ways the house of the Father.

Why then did Jesus ask them if they believed He could cure them? Once again, this is not so much about seeking reassurance for Himself, as about helping them grow out of their jejune mindset to arrive at something more mature. They had begun by craving the admittedly jackpot-winning prize of the restoration of their sight. While they wanted something miraculous, they crowded about Jesus like a couple of game-show contestants, looking to get their hands on the lucre. Jesus was a wonderworker, was He not?

Indeed, no, He wasn’t, and He isn’t. Jesus is not after an admiring crowd and a grateful audience; He is not a P. T. Barnum in sandals. He walks the earth to call its inhabitants to something better than riches, more real than power, and more far-reaching than self-satisfaction. Do you believe that I am able to do this? He asks the blind men. What is this? We assume He means restore their sight but let us not be dupes of the spectacular also. Jesus is looking beyond the appearances, to a transformation that lies deeper than this mere return to vision. After all, if they eye offend thee, pluck it out. Jesus spent little time demonstrating His power over nature; to demonstrate His conquest over sin, however, He went to the cross. Merely to believe in the spectacular is an exercise in naivety; to believe in redemption, on the other hand, takes something more truthful, humbler, and more mature, a readiness to recognise and accept the fallen condition of man, the need for a redeemer, the incapacity of human beings to work their own passage to heaven, and our utter dependence on Him in every moment of our lives. To say, yes, I believe, to Jesus should not be a profession of belief in His magical powers to deliver whatever our hearts desire, no matter how good that is in itself; it is to admit and confess who He is, and to recognise everything about us that estranges us from Him and from the Father, wrecking His work in us. To say I believe is thus to accept the truth about Him and, by corollary, about us.

For these men – and this is not always the case in those who are healed - the first condition of preserving the fruits of this confession and of persevering in the following of Jesus was to keep it to themselves. Jesus wanted no return to the sensationalism than drove them to follow Him in the first place. He wanted them to spend time reflecting on what He had done for them; to realise its implications; to figure out where to go and what to do next. Instead of which, as the gospel wearily tells us, they went away and spread His fame through all that district.

What was this mistake? It was of course a very human one, but a mistake none the less. They wanted, invoked, and seemed to have obtained a display of the spectacular. What had actually happened was that Jesus had cured them, while calling them to something deeper and more real; and instead of pausing to draw breath, to realise what had just happened, they resorted to their taste for the old razzle dazzle. They were in touching distance of the gold of His love, and they chose the fools’ gold of being legends in their own lunch time.

There will be a moment to spread the word, but it does not come before something more genuine, something deeper, something more radically transformative than a hurriedly muttered profession in Jesus’ power has taken place within us. We must recognise Him but also ourselves for what we truly are: loved but very chipped and broken earthen vessels. 

Mountains that move faith

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

*****

Today’s gospel (Matthew 8: 5-11) sees once more the incident of the curing of the centurion’s servant which we heard on 16^th September. What informed the centurion’s confidence was not his vestigial Roman religion, but his understanding of how military authority worked. Jesus spoke and acted as one with authority. That the centurion’s Roman mind could see a lot more clearly than many of the children of the Father’s own house. Faith and humility are two of the virtues that Colwelians honour in Mary our Mother, and they are enshrined deeply in this gospel scene of the centurion’s request for his servant's healing.

I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.

These were perhaps shocking words to Jesus’ listeners, grown fat with pride on the predilection of God’s favour. If many will come from east and west to the kingdom, just what did it mean to be a descendant of Abraham in the faith, they might have asked? What was the point of all their faithfulness, if its reward was not to be exclusive to them? It is the pride of the eldest brother of the prodigal son. It is the jealousy evoked by the rewards given to the workers of the eleventh hour.

But there is a warning here in Jesus’ words for all believers not to impose human measures on divine plans. It is a warning which holds true for us now. We look for certitudes when we are invited to confidence. We want estimates when our minds could not even begin to fathom the exactitude of the divine knowledge which knows every hair upon the head of the most hirsute among us. Some things - many things even – we cannot encompass, nor should we seek to. It is enough to know they are in the divine hands. If this is a warning not to look down our noses like the elder brother of the prodigal son, it is also a caution not to place others on pedestals, which we do likewise to sure up our insecurities, for this too is the result of human measures run wild. The poverty-stricken widow of last Monday’s gospel was probably the holiest woman to set foot in the temple that year, apart from the Blessed Mother. As for the phylacteried Pharisee, suppurating with feigned piety, let us leave his status and his destiny to the mercy of God.

But the lesson Jesus serves today with regard to the need for humility comes precisely from the centurion’s exceptional faith, a faith that exceeded all the human estimations of what was possible. We cannot believe this was the end point of the centurion’s faith either. Beyond this healing, would he not have heard an even steadier, deeper call from God, urging him to let that mustard seed of confidence in Christ grow into faith in the Father of all, and thus to go up to the mountain of the Lord?

In a sense the centurion’s destiny which Jesus foretells here – of feasting with Abraham, Issac and Jacob in the eternal kingdom – cannot be understood except in the light of the first reading today in which Isaiah prophesies that

the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up among the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many people shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.

In all humility, we must recognise that if we have faith, then this too is our mountain, the dwelling place of our Father and, therefore, of His children. If humility teaches us to be lowly, it is in the nature of this mountain of faith – the mountain of the kingdom - to place us among the heights, to give us glimpses of things that no lowland dweller can see. Here, we walk in the light of the Lord, like climbers above the clouds, thrilled by visions that we never expected and could not have imagined. While humility teaches us to let go of our human measures, faith teaches us to drink deep of the divine measures, as Isaiah says

that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.  

From the faith of the centurion then, we can reach out in our prayer and perhaps catch a glimpse of the vision that inspired the military poet John Gillespie Magee who stepped on heights

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Living on the edge

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

***** 

Today’s gospel (Luke 21: 29-33) crowns the series of complex prophecies that we have listened to all week – complex, not because Jesus’ language is difficult, but because these prophecies refer to different historical events, at least from a human perspective. We like our histories linear and neat, not interwoven and cast under an eternal light. And yet we find Jesus inviting us to another point of view which is ultimately the standpoint of eternity. Here, God lives among men.

There are at least three ends of the world evoked in the gospels of this week: the end of the world at the end of time, anticipating the return of the Son of Man and the last judgement; the end of the Jewish world of the Old Testament with the sacking of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jewish people; and lastly – since death is for every individual the end of their own world – one cannot evoke the end of time without also evoking the end of every individual’s moment under the sun, the point at which the pilgrim in this world reaches the end of their natural life or perhaps has it taken from them.

What does Jesus mean then that when the disciples see all these signs, they will know that the kingdom of God is near them? Is it just possible that while these signs will have their historic fulfilment, there is another layer of meaning to them? For few of the signs He has evoked in these passages are distinctive or unique. There have always been wars and famines, there have often been earthquakes and plagues. Jerusalem has frequently been surrounded by armies from empires and neighbouring countries, from the sands of Arabia and from the green fields of Europe, ordered there by Roman consuls, Ottoman sultans, French kings, and British imperial governments. How is it then that the kingdom of God can be identified if all the signs for it surround the disciples of Jesus in what seems like an undifferentiated cacophony? Where is our liberation when the dreadful signs of the end appear to be signs of the middle and the beginning as well?

But perhaps Jesus seeks here to wrongfoot the disciples’ taste for the spectacular. When will it be, they wonder? When, indeed? The answer is not then but now. Jesus might easily have said: when you see the sun rising, when the bird is on the air, the sea laps the shore, when nature slumbers at night and wakes by day, then you will know that the kingdom of God is near. In other words, don’t await the drama, the crisis of the final cataclysm, although these things will come. O that today you would listen to His voice, harden not your hearts.

For the boundaries with eternity cross not only some future historical timeline but intersect the heart of every living, breathing human being. Time rises like the crest of a mountain line, giving way on the one side to the country of God and on the other to the lake of fire in St John’s vision in today's Mass. God, who is omnipresent, upholds in being every thinking intelligence in the universe, angelic, human, and demonic. How can it not be that eternity thereby crosses our very thoughts and haunts our desires, even for those who have rejected Him?

But this eternity is not an endless time but an ever-present now, already unfolded and made vital through God’s very life in which we are merely sharers: all sharers in His being, some – those who accept Him – sharers in His friendship and love. Eternity thus is not at the end of our lives but stands in some overarching dome that encompasses us and, if we are open to it, fills our hearts with its promise and its riches.

And this is why, properly considered, there is no such thing as the humdrum. All the boredom and weariness of life is a deception, the dirty inside of our windows on eternity that we struggle to clean or give up the cleaning of. All flight from the humdrum is in fact a flight from this ever-present eternity; all flight from the humdrum is in a sense a refusal to bear with the eternal being so close to us, and to engage instead in a false attempt to give meaning to our lives when they are severed from this eternal perspective. The kingdom is near to us when we see these signs, but the real question is: are we near to the kingdom? Are we prepared to look upon it and see it with the joyous eyes of Mary, with a heart full of festivity at His love made tangible, even in the simple tasks of a humble reality unadorned by the finer things?

Of course, we are wounded and need the Lord’s mercy. We are as yet convalescent; surprised and grateful beneficiaries of the kindness of the Divine Samaritan. But if we look to the windows that open constantly on eternity, how we can put to flight the burdens of our sickroom and the weariness of the everyday to rejoice and say ‘yes’ to the Lord in every moment of our lives!

Love like no other

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

****

Today’s gospel (Luke 21: 1-4) once again sees Jesus in the temple, as seems so often to be the case in the gospel of St Luke. This briefest of scenes, in which a poverty-stricken widow puts two small coins in the temple’s treasury, might strike us as being as insignificant as the woman’s offering, and yet its importance far exceeds all appearances. For it tells us something important about the way God judges things in comparison to us, and about what our hearts are called to do in relation to God.

This incident sits between two other crucial moments and comments on them both. In the first, Jesus warns the disciples about the teachers of the law who love attention and the honours paid them, but who pray with hypocritical ostentatiousness and who, Jesus says, devour widows’ houses, possibly by abusing their role as legal executors for the deceased husbands of the widows.  In the second scene, following the incident of the widow’s mite, Jesus responds to the disciples’ admiration of the glories of the temple by promising that not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.

Both these lessons call for the disciples and for us to readjust our evaluation of the things of this world: our adulation for certain people and our attachment to material things. We love to create heroes, and we savour the thrill of appearances. Transposed into a religious mode, these enthusiasms risk leading us, first, to lionize certain classes of people – perhaps clerics or consecrated religious, perhaps those with certain talents – and, second, to be enthralled by sacred affectations.  The preening status of the scribes and Pharisees was offensive to Jesus for two reasons, first, on account of the hypocrisy and unworthiness of the Jewish leaders, and second – we tend to forget about this - on account of the foolishness of those who idolized them. This same foolishness also came into play in the disciple’s admiration for the temple with its fine decorations and gilded dome. It would be easy to assume that the affectations Jesus here condemns consist in sacred formalism with its pomp, circumstance, incense, and ceremony. The temple was, after all, the centre of the Jewish liturgy. And yet, such formalism is just as deeply present in every one of our contemporary religious affectations for informality. Some decades ago, a big to-do was made of the abolition of the papal coronation, but thereby was abolished the ceremony in which, three times in succession, a Master of Ceremonies would show the newly crowned pope a brand of burning flax and announce in a loud voice: Sic transit gloria mundi – thus passes the glory of the world. It would be hard to turn such formalism into a cause for self glorification. No pope now benefits from this physical and public demonstration of the transience of his position. Would that every leader and CEO were led to their office chair by their own underlings with as tangible a display of the fact they will not be there for long. The point is that we must hold the dignity of others and the dignity of things sincerely but lightly; not turn them into idols that secretly shore up our insecurities or serve our own satisfactions.

In the middle of these two scenes, as I say, comes the scene of the widow’s mite. Who was this woman, the poverty-stricken widow, a figure after whom surely the Lord quickly sent a disciple primed with a generous donation? Poverty-stricken is the English translation, a term suggesting humiliating levels of deprivation. One might fancy the widow was Jesus’ own mother – the as yet unrecognised ark of the new covenant in the temple of the old covenant – were it not that Mary’s poverty is likely to have been of a gentler kind.

No, this widow who gave her last mite to the temple clearly had no protectors left but God alone. With her husband gone, she may well have been defrauded of any residual wealth by the actions of one of those corrupt lawyers whom Jesus had just denounced, and yet here she was before the treasury ready to give her last penny. It would be the typical position of such lawyers to accuse her of rash providentialism in her readiness to give away her last coins. Was it not, they might ask, the act of a desperate fool to make this donation, instead of looking after herself?

But thereby, they would have shown themselves unfit for the spiritual moment in which they were living. Like Simeon and Anna, this widow was probably one of the faithful ones of Israel whose hopes were bound up solely in seeking the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and awaiting the coming of the Messiah to liberate God’s people. She may have had no physical wealth left, but in her heart was written the Shema Yisrael of the Jewish faith:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

Why then did she give her last two coins, as poverty stricken as she was? We do not know for certain but we can surmise. She did so because she had no adulation left for the nostrums of rich lawyers and religious heroes; she did so because she had no material possessions left to enthral her widow’s heart with their attractions; thus denuded of every earthly kind of wealth and reduced to utter spiritual and physical poverty, she did so, in the end, because love knows no measure. 

It is as the poet Edna St Vincent Millay said in a rather different context:

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - 

It gives a lovely light!

May we be privileged to say "yes" to the Lord like the widow, even when we give our last coins.

Temples of the Holy Spirit

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

****

Today's gospel (Luke 19: 45-48) is rather brief and presents two contrasting scenes that, on the first reading, seem to be difficult to relate to each other. In the first, Jesus takes a whip and drives the traders out of the temple, saying: my house will be a house of prayer. But you have turned it into a robbers’ den. In the second, we see that He teaches every day in the temple and that the chief priests and scribes, although they would like to do away with him, dare not touch him for the people hang on his words. What are we to make of these words, and how did these two scenes complement each other?

One way in which we might read these scenes is to consider that other verse of Sacred Scripture in which Saint Paul tells us that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. In this context, Jesus is no doubt as eager to drive out from our souls the evils of which He wished to rid the Jerusalem temple. For in the temple, there was a constant commerce in progress, and its transactions, its noise, and its distractions, were an offence to the sacred character of the holy precincts. These services that visitors to the temple had to pay for were ostensibly for the benefit of worshippers but in reality, they robbed the temple of its essence. Jesus took such offence at this crime that it is the only scene in the gospel where we witness His anger - an anger which is not remotely sinful since, as Saint Thomas tells us, there is such a thing as holy anger through which the just man is angry at injustice. We do not think about it very often, but the virtue of religion is a part of the virtue of justice for it intends to give to God what is owed to Him. From this perspective, the merchants in the temple have committed a sin against God by defiling the holy places.

If we then consider that through our baptismal consecration, we are made the temples of the Holy Spirit, we have the chance to perceive how undignified, how unworthy of our vocation, is the trade and commerce that happens within our own souls. For we are traders: we trade secret parts of ourselves for the esteem of others, and perhaps we even have trade agreements with our own egos to protect our self-respect, topping up our prayer lives in quantitative excess. Who was it who said, Never mind the quality, feel the length? Can it be just coincidence that, in English at least, the word trader is only one phoneme away from traitor? But both words come from the Latin tradere which means to hand over. It is, then, as William Wordsworth says:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

How do we lay waste our powers, except in betting and spending our affection on everything but the one thing necessary; betting and spending our attention on the riches of this world – the tangible ones and the intangible ones – that clutter the aisles of our inner temple, wasting our energies on the tinsel currency of a thousand satisfactions, rather than on the pearl of great price? His house should be a house of prayer, a house of unalloyed joy and festivity in His love, and too often it is a den where we gamble only for what we can grab of this passing world’s thinnest offerings? How did it come to this, and how can it ever be otherwise?

It is the second part of today’s gospel that offers some kind of answer to this second question. For what protected Jesus, surrounded as He was by the chief priests, the scribes, the A list celebrities of Jerusalem, and other vipers of that ilk, was that the people as a whole hung on His word. In the trade-filled corridors of the outer temple, the attention of the populace was not directed to getting and spending but rather to listening and attending to Jesus. We do not discover until Chapter 20 what He was saying to the people, but in a sense that is immaterial. Jesus could have delivered a sermon on drying paint that would have held them all transfixed. To whom should we go Lord? You have the words of eternal life. And if the people hung on His every word, what did those who truly loved Him do in His presence? Mary, the sister of Martha, as we know, sat in rapt attention, while her attention-grabbing sister played the role of overworked and underappreciated hostess – a proto-martyr before even St Stephen to a meal whose menu was forgotten before the night was out.

But Martha’s initial mistake in that gospel scene was not to complain to Jesus. It was rather to have lost her inner festivity; to have forgotten what a joy it was to have the Lord beneath her roof and thereby to become distracted by her own dissonant needs.

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

What a difference it would make to the temple of our own souls if, instead of giving room to our inner scribes and Pharisees, instead of trading for all the intangible titbits that our worse selves crave, we could hang hour by hour, minute by minute even – every moment of our lives -  on the Word that we know is within us, listening to Him speak His words of love, mulling over them instead of over the costume jewellery of success, or reputation, or popularity, or power and command, or whatever sordid boon we happen to crave today.

And hanging on His word every moment of our lives, we could then make ourselves a little more worthy of being the temples where He and His Father delight to be with us.