The God factor

Today's gospel contains instructions about what to do in times of persecution. Flee if you can, stand fast, don't worry. The Son of Man is coming. The words apply both to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. when the Romans besieged and destroyed the heart of Judaism, and also to the end of the world. In other ways, they might apply to any time in which the disciples of Jesus face into the storms of history. 

What is our place in all that tribulation? Many people become deeply concerned about preparing for the end times. They devour prophecies and adopt devotions of varying hues, backed by solemn promises from seers here and there. There are maps and calendars that offer themselves as clues for the initiated, detailing what to do and how to cope with the coming trials. This, the devout feel, is their duty in such times.

And yet, these are in many ways superficial responses to the tribulations. It is possible for our religiosity to create a lot of effervescent froth on the surface of our lives but not to penetrate to our very heart. It is not that we are above devotions: that was the error of the toe-curling hippies of the 1960s and 1970s. But rather, such devotions only make sense when they are grounded on a deep, inner living in the Divine Will; when they are begun and ended with our prayer to Mary to teach us always to say yes to the Lord every moment of our lives (a yes that might require us to be busy about the duties of our state of life); when they are accompanied by a resolve to remain the teachable disciples of Christ and by a refusal to become gibbering enthusiasts who are pleased with the strength of their own convictions. God save us all from the coarseness of enthusiasm!

This is not so much about conquering ourselves by our own power; it is about letting ourselves be rescued by the God who saves us. It is about welcoming His power into our hearts to relieve us of the palsy and the sclerosis of our vices. And when Jesus tends our wounds - when we let Him do so - then we can turn to Him. Then His energy becomes our elan. We are not the heroes here. God is. We need the God factor.

Yet there is a tendency sometimes to think ourselves the heroes of the scenes of the gospel. At the moment, we hear a lot about being a listening Church. We have to be attentive to what Jesus is telling us. But if we want to be the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we are going to have to accept that at some point Jesus will tell us we are being foolish! Our calculations are all too human; and our way of thinking is not God's way. Can we listen to that? Can we hear about our own fat-headedness? Or will we then hide away under cover of being a listening Church, listening to voices that are not of God?

Here too, we need the God factor. We need not worry that we are on the edge of a battle, or that we might flunk it in our foolishness. We need only keep our eyes on Him who keeps His eyes on us.

Taking the word of God to ourselves

 Today's gospel rehearses again the discussion of Jesus with the Sadducees from a couple of weeks ago. We noted then that this gospel tells us something important about discernment, and notably that the things of this world must be seen in the light of eternity. 

Every gospel, however, is brought in by a Gospel Acclamation and today's Gospel Acclamation is one that has a wide-reaching significance for lectio divina.  Blessed are those who, with a noble and generous heart, take the word of God to themselves and yield a harvest through their perseverance. There is much in these words for our COLW journey, and especially the practice of reading the Scriptures every day.

We all must want to be part of the Good Lord's harvest. We all need to bear the fruit that Jesus calls us to bear. Today's Gospel Acclamation tells us that the first condition of this project is a 'noble and generous -heart'. To be noble is not to be self-interested in action. To be noble is to turn our eyes towards God to seek His measure of goodness, rather than focusing on our own deceiving measures. To be generous in its traditional sense means to be 'of noble stock', but in its contemporary sense it means 'giving freely'. For the harvest then, we must turn away from self-interest (especially self-interested religion which wants us to be perfect in our own eyes) and to give freely - first to God (to whom of course we owe everything in justice as our Creator, even before we consider His invitation to divine friendship) and then to those around us.

With nobility and generosity, we then need to 'take the word of God' to ourselves. This is precisely what we do in lectio divina. The path is sometimes smooth and easy; and it is sometimes rough and uncomfortable. Sometimes we surge through a sea of thoughts, inspirations and movements of the heart, and sometimes we sit becalmed on a sea of words that yields no instruction other than the self evident. We thought we were plunging into an ocean of wisdom, but we have the sensation of having leapt into a puddle. Let's not despair! We all have to take the rough with the smooth. We all have to be patient. God did not call us to an 'experience'; He called us to follow Him, to learn and to grow. And growth comes sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. 

But take the word of God to ourselves we must do without fail. Hopefully, we can manage the gospel every day. At least we should manage a few lines if we are truly pushed for time (though how often is our  'pushed for time' nothing other than our own disorganisation?).  We should read it and let it sit in our hearts. We should ruminate on it, reflecting on its meaning, connecting it to other gospels or sources, such as the lives of the saints (in whom the harvest was so great!). 

In season and out of season too. This world dominates our sense of time so much that we are strangers often to God's time with its own periods of quick-quick-slow, its sense of organic growth, of 'hear-for-the-long-run' endurance. The word that God speaks is His enduring love letter to us (the one good thing Kierkegaard said!). And why should we not pore over His love letters? How much we need their reassurance and wisdom.

And then, finally, we must persevere if we want to see the harvest. To see the harvest: not to feel good about ourselves but to rejoice in what God has brought about in us - his fragile vessels of clay - by His mercy. 

So, persevere with a noble and generous heart in taking the word of God to yourself. And let God give the increase.

From wonder to wisdom

The last blog left off with the need for discernment as well as docibilitas. And today's gospel gives us some of the strands of the habit of discernment that we need to develop with the help of the Holy Spirit. 

The gospel opens with a typical correction on the part of Jesus. The disciples are lost in admiration looking upon the shining spectacle of the great temple of Jerusalem. There is of course nothing wrong with wonder. Indeed, wonder is an essential element in our own education. Wonder can nourish and wonder can relax. Wonder is what this busy practical world we live in seems to exclude from every corner. We would be healthier all round if we spent less time gawping at our screens and more time gazing in wonder on the simple beauties of the world that God made and, yes, even the wonderful things that wonderful human beings have created (like the temple or great art). But Jesus does not want us to stop at wonder, and He seizes the moment to teach the disciples to look beyond wonder and reach for wisdom. Why? Well, ultimately, everything will be destroyed.  

Discernment has many dimensions but one of them is precisely this call: to look beyond the appearances. Wonder by all means, but do not become enthralled. Rejoice in the good, but be not seduced by a partial good. 

Jesus' admonition is then followed up by a mysterious and many levelled prophecy that evokes the fall of Jerusalem but also of the end of the world. Personally, as individuals, we may see the end of the world, or, conversely, the world may see the end of us instead. Yet, in some ways these words of Jesus' prophecy are realised in every persecution down the ages of the Church, and indeed in the lives of many faithful souls: you will be hated by all men on account of my name. How often do we try to dodge the burden that this fate seems to represent in our eyes? 

But to accept the burden of infamy, we must listen again to Jesus' call to step beyond the appearances. We might fear hatred, but it builds no lasting kingdoms. Only the immense love of God can do that. It is human to be awed by hatred when it is directed against us, but it is at that moment that we must put our hands in Jesus' and step towards wisdom. Not a stone will be left upon a stone. That kingdom of appearances and of human domination will crumble. 

Take care not to be deceived, Jesus invites us. Be divinely teachable, not humanly gullible. 

Keep this carefully in mind. Discern.

Teachability and teachables

We have been thinking about the theme of teachability in the last few weeks - docibilitas - and reflecting on what is means to say 'yes' and 'thank you' to God every moment of our lives.  If, however, we need to be teachable, what is it God intends to teach us? If, moreover, we need to say 'yes' to God, what is it we are saying 'yes' about? 

The gospel of today and indeed of yesterday shed further light on these questions. What is the mistake of the Sadducees in today's gospel? It is not so different from the mistake of the Pharisees in yesterday's gospel: it is the error of judging eternal things by temporal things. It is the mistake of evaluating heavenly things by earthly things. 

In today's gospel, the Sadducees try to reduce to absurdity the argument in favour of a resurrection. If a woman married seven brothers one after the other, they argued, whose wife would she be at the resurrection of the dead? But the problem here is not in the question: it is in the assumptions of the question, and mainly in the assumption that marriage is an institution that applies to our life in eternity. In other words, the Sadducees assume that the necessities of this life overhang those of the next. At least it is a very human error. It is as human as the populist versions of heaven with their cotton-candy clouds. 

But it is also a failure of imagination, not to say faith. It is a failure to imagine that the realities of God might far outstrip our limited realities. The same could be said of the Pharisees in yesterday's gospel who laughed at Jesus' scorn of money. Their assumption was not so much that the realities of this life overhang those of the next but that human mastery of the realities of this life - ni this case money - is a foregone conclusion. Are we in control of our possessions or are our possessions subtly in control of us?

It has rightly been said that money is a good servant but a wicked master. Our problem today is that not only are we mistaken about ability to be in control of our money, we make the same error with regards to all our sources of power: technology, politics, sex. All those things by which we aspire to dominate the world or craft our own destiny bite us back badly. So much for the laughing Pharisees. 

These two lessons, therefore, marks the gospel today and yesterday. The lessons are simple but easy to forget. The first is: do not judge the next life by the standards of this life; judge this life by the standards of the next. See this life in the light of eternity. Likewise, the second lesson is: do not think we are captains of our fate, at least not like the Pharisees did. We make our world but our world makes us too, and tries to refashion us in its own image.

Thus, finally, we come back to the importance of docibilitas: if we are to avoid these errors of Sadducee and Pharisee alike, we must be teachable with respect to God and not with respect to the standards of the world. We must try to see things as God sees them, and not as the world sees them. 

It is to God that we must say 'yes', not the world. Of course, in our concrete lives, the dividing lines are so often unclear. We need not only docibilitas, therefore, but also discernment. 

But that is for another blog...

  

The Church suffering and triumphant

 Today's gospel sees Jesus raise the dead son of the widow of Nain. Resurrection is the leitmotif of Jesus' ministry and finally the process by which He overturns the effects of death. We tend to remember the three individuals He raises - the widow's son, Jairus' daughter and of course Lazarus - but we forget the uncounted number of people who rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, according to St Matthew's account (Matt 27: 51-53). These were public signs of the deeds Jesus had wrought. They must have terrified and thrilled the people of Jerusalem at the same time. These incidents would have been redolent of the works of the prophets Elijah and Elisha and, more particularly, of the power of God to overturn the usually grubby business of the earth.

Yet, the resurrection of the dead lies ahead of us now. What remains in the meanwhile are the realities of the Church triumphant in heaven (yesterday's feast) and the Church suffering in purgatory (today's feast). Seeing the crowds, as yesterday's gospel told us, Jesus went up the hill.

                                                (Photo of the "the hill" where Jesus preached by Susanne, COLW Group 1)

The beatitudes that He announced from this hill would require a lifetime's inner work to understand fully. St Thomas associates them individually with the work of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in us. It is a timely reminder that the blessings of union with God are His gift and His work in our hearts through grace.

But this truth is also a reminder of a reality stated plainly by the great French novelist Georges Bernanos: the Church is the Church of the saints. He might have said: the Church is the Church of the beatitudes. In other words, the measure of the Church is not seen in the human appearance of her power or internal politics, but in the inner strength of the holiness of her members who are transformed by grace. Happy are those who ...The Church triumphant in heaven comprises souls who have offered themselves up to be conquered by the Saviour whose likeness is most especially found in those who are abused, persecuted and calumniated on His account. 

The last of the beatitudes contains quite an admonition. Fear popularity. Be grateful - albeit with human distaste - if you are thought a failure. Perhaps it is God's blessing. You can't begin to serve God until you've lost your reputation, said St Teresa of Avila. 

Lo, all things flee thee, for thou fliest me, 

writes Francis Thompson in his masterpiece poem The Hound of Heaven. We should recognize in this beatitude, as in all the beatitudes, God's longing for us to share His likeness, His goodness, His love.

***

So, let us pray for the Holy Souls this month, among whom may be many of our acquaintances, and let us pray especially for the forgotten ones. They can do nothing for themselves, though they can intercede for us and many saints have asked their prayers. 

And let us continue to pray for the intercession of all the saints that we may be received by them, like Lazarus the poor man, into everlasting dwellings. 

Longing for Him who longs for us

Today's gospel is a revelation of a truth that some think about rarely but which should ideally be our hourly meditation: the longing of God for us. Too often we focus on what we are doing - or failing to do - and there is a grain of truth in that: we must all of us pick up our beds and walk. Nevertheless, what is it that we walk towards if not the open and loving arms of our Father who looks for us, like the father of the Prodigal Son who awaits his return from exile? 

We cannot out-love God in this regard. Jesus tells us to be as perfect as the Father is perfect but not because we can be. What He means is that as God is perfect as God (i.e. it is in the nature of God to be all perfect), so we should strive to be perfect in our own measure - the measure that God calls us to in our own calling. Later in our Holy Mile journey, we will consider the nature of vocation, but we can sum it up in a simple phrase here: our calling is God's dream for us.

Coming back to our gospel today, how do we know what the calling of Jerusalem is (or the vocation of any of us)? Simply by listening to God's longing for it (or for ourselves). How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings'. What is God's dream for me? I can only know by asking Him. I can only hear that dream by listening to the Heart that wants to gather me to itself. And I can only embrace that dream by asking for the grace to open my hands to receive it as His gift.

And, finally, how do we listen to His Heart except by learning the ways of docibilitas - teachability? We can make our prayer along the lines of today's Responsorial Psalm:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

who trains my arms for battle,

who prepares my hands for war.

To receive God's dream for us, we need His training and His preparation. Perhaps as we saw in the gospel a few days ago, we also need some manuring! But with that training and preparation (and the manuring!), our hearts can learn to answer - anawim and beggars though we be -  the all-powerful longing of the One who made us.

Figs, manure and docibilitas

Today's gospel gives us a good picture of what happens when we lack docibilitas: our fruitfulness is limited. In a way the figtree is deaf to its duties, resistant to bringing forth fruit, and solidly uncooperative.  The figtree is us! Or at least ourselves minus docibilitas. 

A lack of docibilitas - teachability - belongs to the worst version of ourselves. And we ought to admit that when we are in our comfort zones, that is precisely when impediments to fruitfulness can multiply. No wonder we need the manure!

We all love the idea of bearing fruit, but perhaps we underestimate its cost. The loving regard we want to cast upon the Lord must somewhere include an admission of our poverty before him. We are the anawim, the servants of the Lord. We are loved, but as He knows us to be - in all its unflattering light! - not as we want to imagine ourselves to be.

But to have docibilitas is not to be inclined to self-hatred. Rather it involves a thirst for truth about God and about ourselves. 

And then, with that knowledge, we can prepare to bear fruit. Let the manuring begin!

Laws and the spirit of laws

 All week long the gospels have been relating to us Jesus' analysis of the Pharisees and the Scribes, and the picture He has drawn is not a pleasant one. There seem to be three problems (though there may be others) that Jesus has dwelt upon: the first is that of hypocrisy, i.e. that the Pharisees and the Scribes follow laws that require outward religious conformity while neglecting to conform their own hearts to the greatest law of divine love; the second is that of rigidity, i.e., that they have overlooked the major laws in order to fulfil the minor laws; and the last problem is that of delinquency (in the sense of neglecting their duty or maladministration) in advising others to carry legal burdens they do not shoulder themselves. Let's be careful though. The one thing Jesus does not seem to say is that, to quote the Pirates of the Caribbean, they are not really laws - they're really more like guidelines! Jesus elsewhere, for example, says: "Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them." (Matt 5: 17).

It is important to see what is going on here with the Pharisees. In a way, the problem is not the laws at all; it is the spirit with which they are kept. The notion that Jesus is somehow encouraging a slapdash approach to the law is deeply flawed. Later in the gospel of Matthew (the very gospel aimed at a Hebrew audience), Jesus says:  

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone." (Matt 23: 23). 

Whatever Jesus' teaching, he is not simplistically opposed to laws or rules. Some cultures just have more rules than others. It is how they organize things for the common good. In Jerusalem today you can still see taps for washing by the Western Wall, the one remaining part of the Second Temple.

(Photo of taps by the Western Wall by Susanne, COLW Group 1)

Why, then, is the spirit so important if even the minor laws should not be left "undone"? Perhaps it is because laws are in a way a kind of tool or instrument: a tool for order and justice. Yet the problem here is that we human beings are all too prone to being controlled by our tools. If you want proof of that, just look at how novel technologies, which we all lived happily without yesterday, suddenly become tomorrow's necessities. Invention is the mother of necessity as Melvin Kranzberg quipped. And so, laws or rules can have this feedback effect on us, and instead of becoming a path towards the good, they seem to become a sort of exoskeleton or a suit of heavy armour, weighing us down and robbing us even of legitimate freedom. In this sense, the letter of the law can kill by a kind of negative feedback effect. Those who disregard the law do not understand this effect precisely because they do not take the law seriously. It is a flaw of those who take the law seriously that they can sometimes take it as it is not meant to be taken!

Yet we are left then with the problem of what to do when lower laws seem to contradict higher laws. What should the priest and the Levite do on the road to Jericho when they see the man robbed and beaten and left for dead? What they should do precisely is not set the law aside; rather they should let the higher law prevail over the lower law. The Samaritan who saved the man robbed was not lawless; he was living by a higher law This is not merely a rule of divine justice; it is a path of interpreting the law that is recognised in human courts. The famous "Nuremberg defence" - I was only following the orders of my superior officers - is not a valid defence because the lower law of obedience to superiors bows before the higher law of justice and charity to all.

Of course, the devil is in the detail. I cannot say I will leave my spouse to live with my lover because the law of love is higher than the law of fidelity (not that I have a lover either!). That would be nonsense, because infidelity is radically incompatible with divine love. 

But the general rule should be clear: do not keep a lower law at the expense of a higher law. If a house is on fire, the fire brigade cannot let the law of trespass stop them from running into it to rescue those in danger. From which principle we must deduce the conclusion that rigidity is not a true characteristic of the law, for the law is meant to be both hierarchical and supple - strong enough to sustain but flexible enough not to break. Rigidity is the victory of whim over substance; it is a victory of nearsightedness over true perspective. 

And the true perspective of the law, both in the gospel and in life, is to love God above all things, to love our neighbour as ourself, and - if we listen to Jesus at the Last Supper - to make that love of neighbour akin to His love for each of us. 

Yes and thank you

 Friday's gospel (of the Annunciation) cast a light on the first part of the summary of the COLW charism:

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

Yesterday's gospel (the grateful Samaritan leper) cast a light on the second part of that summary: 

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

We could not have hoped for a more serendipitous choice of gospels to get our new Book of Life journey started. In some ways, however, it is the second part of the summary of the charism which is the more mysterious, the more difficult to fathom. 

Saying 'yes' to God is not easy but there is a certain simplicity about it. It is the fundamental challenge of the human will that takes us back to Eden and the drama of the fall of our first parents. Will we be children of Eve and say no to God? Or children of Mary and say yes? Will we impede the kingdom of God through our rebellion, or will be say in our actions what we say in words every time we pray the Our Father: Thy kingdom come, they Will be done? This is a choice that takes us straight to the heart of the mystery of the Annunciation, the drama of the Holy House, and gives us a foreshadow of the spirituality of Walsingham.

But what about the thanks? In Mary's case, the expression of that thanks is not recorded until the moment of her Magnificat during the visitation to Elizabeth, though who can doubt her heart was full of thanks from the second she pronounced her fiat before the Angel Gabriel? Before Elizabeth, however,  we hear her song of thanksgiving given full rein in a hymn of praise to the God of the humble (whom the Book of Life calls "the anawim of the Lord"). In contrast, in the case of Sunday's gospel, the thanks of the Samaritan comes after Jesus shows His power in the lives of the lepers by freeing them from this terrible disease. 

On the surface, the wonder of this story is that only one leper returned to thank the Lord. At the same time, we have to admit that our own thanks can be often short lived, evaporating as the feelings of gratitude abate. That may in fact be a useful way to distinguish thanks and gratitude: that gratitude is the emotion while thanks are the action we undertake to express it. 

Nevertheless, even true gratitude must be more than a mere emotion for it can never be separated from thanks. Together they lead to a chain of realisations and actions on our part. We realise our own poverty has been made richer by a gift; we realise the gift comes from a giver who looks upon us; we respond to the gift and the giver by acknowledging the gift and the sentiments behind it. 

In this last action lies the difference between the Samaritan leper and the others whose gratitude, ironically, was but skin deep. The others realised they had received a gift and no doubt rejoiced in it. But the Samaritan alone saw beyond the gift to the Giver who had healed him. Here is the challenge of true thanks. And here also is a key to the meaning of the thanks that we ask Mary to teach us how to give. With our thanks not only do we see beyond the gift we have received. We acknowledge the Giver who gave us life and calls us to union with Him.

Let us sum up the COLW charism and the lesson of this gospel this way, therefore. Our 'yes' is the way we submit to God; our 'thanks' are the fruit of that 'yes'. With our thanks, we see beyond all His gifts to the blazing heart of love that offers itself to us.

Discernment and the Word of God

In today's gospel we hear Jesus point out one of the key paths towards holiness: ‘Still happier those who hear the word of God and keep it!’  There could be no better gospel to reflect on what the Book of Life invites us to do. Incidentally, Jesus' words here are not a rebuke to his Mother in whose womb he took flesh and at whose breast he suckled. Rather, these words highlight one of the key virtues of Mary that COLW particularly meditates on: her obedience to God. Mary is the first of the saints - those whose inner life is the life of Jesus - who listens and does what God requires. Let it be done to me, according to your word.

Who is it that hears the word of God? This is a theme that comes up later in the gospel when Jesus points out that not all those who hear the word are in fact listening. To hear God's word requires us to do two things: to set aside our own thoughts and preoccupations and to allow God to reshape our minds with his truth. To listen to the word is to accept that we can only see so far, even in the matters that affect us the most. Usually, our vision is bound to this earth and often restricted by the appearances of things: our defeats wound us, our disasters depress us and the dashing of our hopes can leave us despondent.

In contrast, God's word comes to show us how those concerns of our daily life can be understood in His eternal light. And when we stand regularly in that light, when we think often on His word, we begin to hear more clearly His call to us to come further up and further in, and to perceive the mystery of His love for us. We are loved individually with a boundless love and He wills us only to say 'yes' - to say our 'fiat' (let it be) in joy and sorrow - to His plans for us.

Our lectio divina gives us this opportunity to listen to God. Day by day, line by line, thought by thought, our lectio divina is a way of slipping our hand into the hand of Jesus and holding our ear close to His heart which "thinks thoughts of peace, not affliction" (Jer 29 : 11). Keeping a journal of our thoughts during lectio divina from time to time is a way of helping us dwell on the fruits of that listening. In fact, if we wish to keep the word, as Jesus says in today's gospel, then keeping a note of what we have reflected on can help us to preserve the insights of this precious time, and to take a step forward in our commitment to being obedient to the gospel. 

Hearing the word of God and keeping it: this is what Mary does and what Mary has always done. We saw in the gospel of the Feast of the Holy Rosary that Mary heard the angel's word and embraced it. She kept it as she bore the child Jesus in her womb; she kept it as she raised him in Egypt and then in Nazareth; she kept it as she followed His ministry; and how firmly she must have clung to it when she followed her Son to Calvary where once again she heard the word of God spoken seven times from the Cross. 

This is the true form of discernment that everyone seems to be talking about these days: to hear the word of God and allow it to remold us into something new, like Mary who, having heard the word of the angel, declared her obedience to God and wandered away into the hills of Judea.

Photo of the hills of Judea from Susanne (COLW Group 1)