Precept and counsel, need and desire

 The strictures of today's gospel about how to go about preaching the gospel are so severe, one might be excused for feeling a little discouraged. "Carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals", is it, Lord? Well, we reason, maybe that works in Late Iron Age Palestine but spare a thought for twenty-first century Britain! But that would be wrong for at least three reasons. 

The first is that as we read the Scriptures, we should know that, at times, Jesus does use hyperbole when He speaks. Most of us probably understand that instinctively. Those who don't have already chopped off their hands or dug out their eyes in order to obey Jesus' command about what to do if we sin by hand or eye. Not all Jesus' apparent exaggerations can be attributed to hyperbole, like the number of times we must forgive. But others - like "Call no man 'Father' - fit that category precisely. Jesus' order here about no purse, no haversack and no sandals is a command about simplicity and bare minimum necessities, more than an order about the disciples' fashions.

The second reason it would be wrong is because it would depend on a fundamental confusion between precept and counsel, between a command and a better way. So much trouble comes to us by confusing these two things. For the habitual sinner, it seems easy to think that precept (a command) is merely a counsel, a piece of advice but not an obligation. Jesus cannot really mean that, can He? He said He came to make us free after all!

On the other hand, for those who have made a little more progress in the spiritual life, the opposite is true: they can easily confuse counsel for precept. In Jesus' day, it was the Pharisees who were perhaps most guilty of this, but it is a vice that can afflict those who are a lot nicer than the Pharisees. We see this when people become zealous about some devotion or other, and act as if they have been called to spread it through the whole world. Those who mistake counsel for precept become merchants of religious enthusiasm, not understanding that enthusiasm in a religious key is a kind of lack of freedom. It wants to draw its power from passion, and not from grace; it instinctively puffs itself up into a feel-good fuzziness (or perhaps a feel-righteous fuzziness) instead of waiting for the breath of the Holy Spirit. It would take those words of Jesus about going without sandals and purse and turn them into a hammer to crush the weakness of lesser Christians. Those who mistake counsel for precept are the spiritual Marthas of this life who are unwittingly anxious about many things, whereas they believe they are the ones serving the Lord with all their busyness. Yet they miss the one thing necessary; they lack the simplicity of Mary.

Which brings us nicely to the third reason why we cannot just overlook these words of Jesus: they are meant to help us discern between what it is we want and what it is we really need. We need many things in this life, as our Father in Heaven knows, but what we want and the way in which we want them can come between us and our following of Christ. We are right to deny the abusiveness of the religious enthusiasts who want to turn counsels into precepts and place on our shoulders the burdens of their enthusiasms. And yet, if we do not distinguish rightly between our needs and our desires, we are likely to remain just as worldly as those who do not profess to follow Jesus. Our legitimate freedoms can become our seductions. We can believe we are good for our occasional penances, whereas God might look on our indulgences as so many acts of betrayal because to those to whom much is given, much is rightly expected. Our simplicity can become an oversimplification or simply naivety, especially about our lower passions and their entrapments. Jesus told us to take up our cross, and that too is a precept. 

The challenge is that some counsels do indeed become precepts. We are all called to poverty, chastity and obedience, but if we take a vow to embrace them, they become precepts to us (understanding that chastity is fundamentally always a matter of precept in its essence). Yet in another way, counsel may become precept by some inspiration or perhaps through our own personal vocations which the Holy Spirit gives us to understand. This is when we must listen so carefully to the Holy Spirit and pray to discern His commands with wisdom. 

In the end, whether we are among the seventy-two disciples sent out or those who remain behind to hold the fort and pray for them, we need all to know the difference between precept and counsel, to abstain from placing our own burdens on the shoulders of others, and to watch closely that our freedoms do not become an excuse for waywardness. And then, our first words will always be, "Peace be to this house."

Indulgent pragmatism or transformative love

Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) offers us two profound truths of the spiritual life that can nourish us on a daily basis.

Why did Moses allow the Jews to divorce? Jesus says explicitly that it was because they were unteachable. Another translation expresses this as the hardness of their hearts. Yet, the challenge for us, especially in COLW, is to look hard at ourselves and wonder: where are we guilty of the same hardness? Where do we show ourselves unteachable?

Unteachability may show itself in major matters, as in the question over marriage and divorce. Or it may show itself in small matters. In those who commit to a more devout life, perhaps unteachability goes along with a way of living through which our eyes are more focused on ourselves than on the divine horizon ahead of us. In that sense, being unteachable means not looking towards our Divine Teacher. Instead, we look to ourselves and our own supposed self-sufficiency, or else we judge our actions merely by our own lights, be they indulgent or severe. Who can learn in those circumstances? O that today you would harden not your hearts. Such is the appeal we hear in the Psalms. O that today we would be teachable, and be all ears for the lessons of the Master.

One objection that might be raised as we read this gospel is to wonder whether Jesus is less merciful than Moses. After all, Moses allows divorce and Jesus doesn’t. Therefore, Moses shows mercy and … Jesus doesn’t?  How can that be?

Yet this brings us to another profound truth of the spiritual life in today’s gospel: Jesus comes not just to govern us but to transform us.

God’s creation is not the work of a manufacturer who designs his invention, sets it running, and then wanders away. Creation is suffused not only with God’s presence but with His wisdom and inner working; with the attention of its Divine Lover who cares for all things in their right order. The Divine Law is not imposed on the world as some exoskeleton but is intrinsic to it by God’s design; all things are possible with God except those that are contrary to His nature. He could not design a world in which He worships us, for example. In this sense, Moses is but a technician of the Law; his ruling on divorce is like the work of a mechanic who finds the inventor’s machine malfunctioning and does a botch job until he can work out a better solution. Moses was not responsible for the Law. He was merely its guardian, even when he made this exception about divorce.

But Jesus is no technician of the law; He is its author. The indissolubility of marriage is wedded to how God designed the sexes. In this sense, it is not that He is less merciful than Moses. Rather, He is giving us something more than Moses could ever offer: the call to be transformed by His grace in a new life of divine intimacy and friendship.

Moses’s mercy is the mercy of the pragmatist managing the appearances.

Jesus’ mercy belongs to another dimension. He takes us through the darkest valleys where we must die to ourselves only to lead us to the sunlit uplands of the Resurrection.

Are we tempted by the pragmatism of Moses rather than the transformative call that Jesus offers us? O that the Almighty had not fixed His canon against self-slaughter, says Shakespeare’s despairing Hamlet. In our darker moments, we might be able to taste such bitterness.

But, could we ever say O that the Almighty had not offered us His deepest, transforming love and His abiding friendship? After Jesus' death and all His labours, such a plea would be shaped by the indulgent malice of hell.

A day in the life of Mary

 Today’s blog (John 19:25-34) sees Mary stood beneath the cross of Jesus, receiving John her son (and in him all those who are born spiritually of Mary), witnessing Jesus’ death, and His final indignity of having a spear driven through His side. And in such a scene, we see her become the Mother of the Church with a motherhood that far exceeds anything we have known or experienced in this life.

Mary is our model, standing before the cross of Jesus. This spectacle is the condition of her joy, for there is no longer any victory over sin and evil in this word except along the path driven by the Saviour through the heart of Satan’s kingdom. Victory – and the woman shall crush the head of the serpent, not as the flesh of Eve and of her fallen sons and daughters but as the first fruit of the New Adam in the name of whose merits she was preserved from all stain of original son. Her immaculate vocation, her glorious vocation, was the call to be His mother and in Him, the Mother of all his offspring, now beside the cross with her: the indomitable John, the constant Magdalene, and a small gathering of less well known but faithful supporters.

Sacred tradition teaches us that her birth of Jesus was without physical pain, but not this birth on Calvary; not this birth of the often treacherous brothers and sisters of her only Son. No sooner had she become a mother to them than she saw Jesus mocked in His thirst by the bitterness of vinegar, and then abused in his death by an unnecessary and vicious wound to His heart; Jesus, become a rag doll victim of the wild violence of men, the unthinking and unwitting objects of his prayers for their forgiveness. They know not what they do.

And through it all, there remains the joyous conviction of the fulfilment of the Father’s forming action: the Father’s forming action on her Son and on her, associated now with His labour of love that appears all but wasted and lost, as the rain lashes mercilessly down on her.

Must all Thy harvest fields be dunged with rotten death?

Where is your joy now, Mary? It is hidden in the depths of a heart that is held by His grace, unbroken by the worst the powers of evil throw at her and that the Father allows to strike her full on. The fiat in sorrow can only come from a deeper and more lasting fiat in joy. For God is love; and joy, mercy and peace are the essence of love.

But this is not today’s gospel, you say? It is yesterday’s, isn’t it? No, dear reader, don’t think like the progressives who declare today a step forward on yesterday and would rather we forgot the past. Time is circular, every part of it touching the same eternal truth, like a wheel around a hub or a circumference to its periphery. 

And so, Mary’s motherhood of the Church belongs to today and tomorrow. Her example and her care are there always. We only need look for it.    

 

 

Remaining in His love

 With today's gospel (15: 9-17), we enter a little more deeply into the mystery of the love that God shares with us through His Son Jesus Christ. These words of Jesus at the Last Supper are echoed somehow in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

What is our Lord's love for us like then? How does He love us? He Himself gives the answer: 

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Yet this is utterly breath taking. The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father breathes forth a third person - the Holy Spirit. In these days before Pentecost, we can only wonder at what this mystery of their mutual love means, and how it comes to us as a gift of them both. Now, to wonder is to contemplate, and to contemplate is at the heart of the Colwelian vocation. 

When we hear the Colwelian call to contemplation, we are listening to the music of this love. In our naivety, perhaps we sometimes think of it in terms of prayers and devotions; the quantifiable panoply of religiosity, as dignified and as honourable as they are. But, contemplation is rather what fills the sails of our prayers and devotions with a divine wind. As the Father has loved the Son...just think of it. As the Father has loved the Son! We will never finish contemplating that mystery, and so, we will never finish contemplating the mystery of His love for us. 

My song is love unknown,

My Saviour's love to me,

Love to the loveless shown

That thy might lovely be.

To contemplate means to gaze attentively - literally as in a temple - where we behold the mysteries of our faith. Our temples are our churches of course, but they are also our own souls in which the Blessed Trinity comes to dwell.

And there He shares His joy with us so that our joy may be complete. But why should it not be complete after this? If He has loved us like the Father has loved Him, it only remains for us to become fully awake, fully alive, to the implications of that love. 

And to return it to Him with a strength only He can lend to us. 

Let us remain in this love and do everything it requires of us. Our lives can have no other meaning than this.

His joy!

We have been poorly and normal service has been interrupted. Nevertheless, I did not want to let today's gospel go by without making some remarks. Today's gospel (John 15: 9-11) is an essential COLW gospel. 

It begins in the love of the Father for the Son - As the Father has loved me - which is the origin of everything. It begins in the communion which, as this blog observed a few posts ago, is the origin of all forms of communion in this life or the next. Religion begins not in our action but in this outpouring of God's very self in love which needs must share its goodness with the world. As St Francis Xavier put it, " O Deus ego amo te, Ne prior tu amasti me ("My God, I love you, because you first loved me.")

Jesus then links that generative love to submission to the Father and the keeping of the commandments. People tend to speak of the commandments as moral injunctions, but only the second part of the Decalogue concerns the moral life. The first part concerns everything we owe to God before we have set foot outside our door or even acknowledged our life in society. Ultimately, Jesus' injunction here recalls His answer to the question about the greatest commandment: you shall the love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:30). The first act of religion is surrender and submission in the same way that Jesus' role of saviour is initiated in His self emptying. Just as He put aside His rightful dignity in order to bring us back to the love of the Father, so we must put aside our wrongful pride in order for that love of the Father to take us back home: If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in His love. To remain in His love is already to be home with God, for home is the stable place where things do not change, least of all the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Holy Spirit which they breathe forth.

And finally we come to the Colwelian heart of this gospel:

I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

We find our own joys fleeting and subject to change. They ebb and flow with our moods and often with the events of the day .We often sail three sheets to the wind and so are blown off course with every gale. 

But if we only realised this gift of Jesus' joy - that my own joy may be in you -  the stable joy of His eternal peace, the joy He radiates when He forgives the sinner, His joy in doing the will of the Father. His joy is present even in the midst of His sorrows and the midst of our sorrows; it is rooted in the endless torrent of love that flows from the communion of the Blessed Trinity in whom all loss can be understood and assuaged. As Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven put it: 

All which I took from thee I did but take

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost I have stored for thee at home

Rise clasp my hand and come! 

And now He teaches his disciples the love of the Father so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. We must pray that He open our hearts to receive this extraordinary gift. Of course we can no more contain that joy than a hole in the sand can capture all the sea. But if we were at least filled with it to the measure of our fulness, would it not radiate out to others and help reflect His light into their hearts too? 

Jesus, make us worthy vessels of your joy to share your love in the joyless darkness of our world.

The one thing necessary

 "Do not let you hearts be troubled," says Jesus in today's gospel (John 14: 1-6). It is almost the most important command of spirituality that Jesus delivers to us. In this scene we are at the Last Supper on the eve of the crucifixion. Earlier, we heard similar words during the sermon on the mount: "For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life, what you will eat, and not for your body, what you will wear" (Matthew 6: 25).

We worry because we are away from our Father's house. And yet in another way, it is only our perception - our lack of faith - that suggests we are absent from our Father's house. In the same discourse Jesus promised the disciples that He and the Father would live in those who love Him. For those who love Jesus, while we await what we hope for - final arrival at the Father's mansions - we find this extraordinary gift within our possession: that God comes to live in us. He takes possession of our souls and makes them all His own. If there are many rooms in the Father's house above, here on earth there are many rooms which God makes His own house to dwell in with His children.

So, why are we troubled? We cannot resolve this tension while we remain wayfarers. We are on a journey and yet we are already home. We are separated and yet we are united. We endure God's absence while knowing His presence in our lives. Our hearts are tethered to the eternal and to the temporal.  

"Do not let your hearts be troubled" means that as we live this tension, we should lean to the side that keeps us connected to the eternal ...and in the hands of the Eternal. We should, as St Paul invites us during the Easter season, "seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father" (Colossians 1:3). How many causes for the troubles of soul are the result of losing our grip on this eternal tether? Or rather, how often do our troubles arise when we unconsciously loosen our grip on the eternal and grasp for the things - even perfectly legitimate things - that the more we grasp, the more we crave? Recognition, respect, affection and ... that honey trap of safety. "Put out into the deep" (Luke 5:4).

"Do not let your hearts be troubled". Do we even recognise when we are troubled or do we dress up our troubles as legitimate concerns, rightful attention, responsible solicitude? 

"Seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father." In that end is our very beginning.

The bread that does not perish and our vocation

Today’s gospel (John 6: 52-59) presents us with another part of the episode that we have been following all week. Jesus continues his teaching on the Eucharist, and His listeners sink into ever deeper and deeper bewilderment and confusion. What is Jesus communicating to His listeners and to us in these moments?

I imagine Jesus in the 21st century having to sit through an obligatory workshop on pastoral homiletics where He finds himself subject to the judgment of pulpit experts who believe they have mastered the means of communication by trotting out a down-to-earth anecdote, a cheap admission of their own human frailty, and a reference to the latest drivel on the television. I have to say I also imagine Him addressing them as He addressed Saint Peter: get behind me Satan. Your thoughts are not of God but of man. With a wink of course!

Jesus does not spare his listeners in Capernaum. He does not tailor His message to their needs. He does not seek to connect with them and make them feel that He is just one of them really. He does not, as the saying goes these days, get down with the kids.

Instead, this teacher of teachers assaults their minds by drawing back a veil on the eternal drama of His life in the Father and on the temporal drama of the call He offers his listeners to enter into the communion of the Holy Trinity. We use the word ‘communion’ as a reference to the sacrament that is confected in the Holy Mass and distributed to the faithful. And yet its first meaning has nothing to do with us or indeed to do with the Holy Sacrament in itself, but rather gives expression to the internal life of the Blessed Trinity. The original communion is that in which the Father begets the Son, and both together breathe forth the Holy Spirit, in a perpetual giving of the divine essence in three persons equal and coeternal. If we find this hard to understand, it is because it is hard to understand; nay, impossible, at least for our minds. It is the deepest of our holy mysteries. It cannot be boiled down to the level of a funny anecdote, a cheap admission, or even a handbook for dummies that sells in the millions.

His listeners are scandalised by the idea of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Yet the real scandal here, if only they knew it - or rather the real surprise - is the invitation to commune in the life of the Son who Himself communes in the life of the Father in the love of the Holy Spirit.

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me …as I … draw my life from the Father.

The invitation to live in Him is the root of what in COLW we call our personal vocation. And our personal vocations are so varied not because humans have existed in their billions throughout the centuries and we cannot all do the same job (as if vocation were primarily our job in life), but because there can never be enough humans to reflect the endlessly rich and varied goodness of the God who shares His very self with us.

It is for this reason also that vocation is not primarily an exercise in our self-definition, a project for our fulfilment, or a kind of subconscious therapy to make us feel like our gifts are recognised and valued. Our gifts would be recognised and valued in the eyes of the Eternal Lord, even if we found ourselves stranded on a desert island for the rest of our natural lives; even if we found our ambitions thwarted and ourselves surrounded by apparent futility in a desert world of hi-tech secularism apparently exorcised of God's presence. And while it is fully human to need the company of others, it is our fallen natures that clamour for attention and for that sense of public self-realisation (in which our God-given talents are recognised) which is the most subtle form of the bread that perishes. 

In such a dumb pursuit of perishing bread, we miss the richness and depth of a personal communion with Christ who, if only we surrendered fully to Him, could either deploy us to transform the entire world (if that were our mission), or simply spend eternity delighting in this creature who by His grace has also become His child (and ‘praise of His glory’, like St Elizabeth of the Trinity). Our personal vocation gives us no leverage on the world; it calls us into something much greater by which the world and we are defined, despite our infidelities, despite our ingratitude.

Let us not look down on the scandalised congregation of the synagogue of Capernaum. In so far as we do not embrace all the implications of our personal vocation, and revel in the meaning of communion as an internal sharing in the inner life of the God of Eternal Love, we are just as unbelieving and as sceptical a congregation as they ever were.

Beware the bread that perishes

Today’s gospel (John 6: 22-29) is an important one for all those who consider themselves close to the Lord. Like the crowd that watched Jesus closely after his multiplication of loaves, the hearts of the devout follow Jesus, lifted with elation to see what He will do next.

At one level, this is better than the indifference of those who forgot that miraculous meal and wandered off to some other adventure, or who perhaps saw the miracle but decided it was a conjuring trick of some kind. The hearts of the devout honour Jesus’ power and they want to follow Him. At least that is what they say! But do they understand themselves? Do we understand ourselves?

Jesus at least questions the assumption that the crowd know why they are following Him.

You are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had the bread you all wanted to eat.

In other words, the crowd perhaps congratulated themselves on having holy motives (because they saw the signs of the Messiah), but it was their animal appetites (for food) that really drove them on.

This is not an especially flattering account of the devotion of the crowd, and if we apply it to ourselves, things get even worse. We make some important sacrifices to follow Jesus, don’t we? After all, we give up at least 60 minutes on a Sunday to go to Mass! Some of us do a lot more – what about them?

You are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had the bread you all wanted to eat.

Well, we could counterargue, Jesus, YOU gave us the bread! He did! And He does! But that is not the point. The point for the crowd (and the danger for ourselves) is that rather than following Jesus, we risk following our own sense of satisfaction. Do we take delight in His gifts? So we should. But we should not thereby lose sight of who He is and what our hearts really need.

Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you.   

So wrote St Augustine. Our hearts are restless for God, but our lower passions, and not least our self-regard, persuade us not to pursue God but to pursue our own satisfaction and then – like this crowd -  to dress up this quest for satisfaction as a quest for God.  

So, the crowd (and possibly ourselves) are doubly duped. They pursue their own satisfactions rather than the words of the Messiah, and they hold themselves to be devout whereas they are just as base as the ones who didn’t follow Jesus (many of whom do not deceive themselves that they are good fellows!). How does Jesus respond to this?

Do not work for the food that cannot last but work for food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you.

Once we realise this, our next step should not be to hate ourselves for our baseness! Rather, it should be to be thankful to know ourselves a little bit better than when we considered ourselves really quite good at this discipleship business.

Where can I go that I will not find myself? says St Augustine elsewhere. And that is true for us all. Amidst our best efforts, our worse selves poke up their heads and subtly – with the best motives - demand attention: we believe we have earned the rights of the faithful; we believe in our own competence.

It is not that we intend to be faithless. Nor that we are irredeemably bad. But when these subtle forms of self-deception overtake us, we simply forget that we are clay vessels, prone to blemishes, prone to crack and leak. We become Peter at his most pompous, or James and John at their most righteously angry.

Pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, says Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The devout need to realise this applies to them, as much as to those they quietly, subtly but inexorably look down on.

Seek not the bread that perishes, says Jesus in another translation. In other words, seek not something that is finite and will wither.

Seek rather the Eternal One, the one who feeds us with the Bread of Life. 

Let us seek Him and not ourselves.

Let your yes mean yes/no

In the shadow of today's holy feast, we can only sit and wonder at the endless mystery of God's mercy - and He that might the vantage best have took / Found out the remedy (as Shakespeare puts it). All the excitement of the Exsultet during the Easter Vigil is ours (and the angelic host's) again. The Eternal Father intervenes to interrupt the murderous course of human history and lays down the foundations of the bridge that can lead us back towards salvation. This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.

And in the midst of it all is this quiet figure of the Virgin Mary who will rise from the grimy obscurity of a troubled Roman province of the Late Iron Age - more troubled now than it ever has been - to be recognised and honoured in churches and hearts on every continent as the Mother of the Redeemer. 

Every Colwelian wants to echo Mary's 'yes' today. What today's gospel gives us, however, are the conditions of that 'yes' or rather its gravitational centre. The paradox is that our total 'yes' is a 'yes' that, unlike Mary's, includes a kind of 'no'. 

After all, how will the fulfilment of Gabriel's message come about? As we reread this passage of St Luke's gospel, we note one thing; it will come about primarily through the action of God: 'the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow.' If Gabriel is asking for Mary's 'yes', it is only implicit: he knows she will say 'yes'. God's foreknowledge of her 'yes' does not mean she has no choice; the man who proposes to a woman who totally loves him knows she will say 'yes' freely. Moreover, she does not need to say a coquettish 'no' to prove she is free. Without taking anything away from Mary's freedom, therefore, we can say there is no way in which this creature who belonged totally to God would have said 'no' to such a plan.

Yet more than that, neither was there any way in which Mary would have imagined that her 'yes' was sufficient. She is the one who is not, He is the One who Is. Jesus needs to tell St Catherine of Sienna that but no need to tell Mary whose very soul is consumed by such an awareness of the Most High. So, when she says 'yes', there is no shadow of a 'no' in her reply; for there has never been sin. She is immaculate from her conception. Every dynamic, every movement of her heart, soul and body is a longing for the Lord and to be satisfied only in Him.

Not so her children by grace. As we want to echo her 'yes', we owe it to God to recognise the same insufficiency, and yet we struggle to: we do not have Mary's freedom. In this sense, it is not enough for us to say 'yes' to Him; we cannot echo Mary's 'yes', although we can emulate it. Our 'yes' must be underpinned constantly by the necessary confession of the truth of our dependence on God - a truth Mary never denied but one which we baulk at with every unconscious urge and often some conscious ones. And the corollary of this confession is to affirm our insufficiency. He is the One, not us, and our being and sufficiency can only be His gift to us.

Thy will be done not only means Thy will but also through through Thy means and by Thy grace. It is not just that we must do this Will. We must also ask the means to do this Will; to beg, as the French writer Fabrice Hadjadj says, our very voices from God to announce His praise, to cooperate in His work, and even and perhaps above all, to long for Him. 

And all the while, we must say 'no' - a NO by God's grace of course! - to the incipient rebellion that shakes our being since the Fall and creeps back again and again into the most intimate enclave of our heart to sit in God's place at its centre. How often we ambush ourselves with our own self-sufficiency! Again, paradoxically, we are not at our freest when we take command and act as if we can solve all our challenges, but when we surrender this inner throne to the One who made us and works out our salvation. This is what it means to be anawim - little ones - of the Lord. 

Then, and only then, can we echo Mary's coda: behold the servants of the Lord, be it done to us according to God's word.

The road to Emmaus

 Today' gospel (Luke 24:13-35) continues the dilemma we saw on Monday. Then, the choice was between following the path of the awestruck disciples, rapt in wonder before the Risen Lord, and that of the desperate guards who swapped the truth they knew for a convenient, advantageous lie. In today's gospel, the choice is no longer about whether we want to be a disciple; rather, it is about what kind of disciple we are willing to be.

The point is that these disciples are going away from Jerusalem, the city of the Most High. Maybe they had business to attend to ("I have married a wife and cannot come"?) Or maybe they were simply escaping the still charged atmosphere of a city where Jesus had just been put to death. The reality is they were deliberately driving themselves away from the conflict. They were agitated.  And because they were agitated, they could not understand what had just happened in Jerusalem. It is not just that we need to be patient with events. We need to be patient with ourselves. We need to have enough humility to recognise when we have kicked up the silt at the bottom of our hearts. And then, we need to be still and wait for the waters to clear.

But sometimes, just sometimes, we might have the extraordinary grace granted to these disciples of having the Lord enlighten us. Why did they not recognise Him? Some say the Risen Lord looked different, and so even His friends did not know Him. St Mark says He appeared "under another form" to two disciples, but the meaning of this is not entirely clear. I think we can be allowed to believe that the barrier to recognition lay not entirely on His side but on theirs. It was not that He looked different; it was that they did not recognise the Lord as He was. It was necessary for them to lose their notions of what the Lord was like, in order to learn to know the Lord who really is. 

Because for all their knowledge, they had no understanding. They knew the faith, but their minds were full of self justifying rationalisations. For all that they were disciples, they were on their way out of Jerusalem, like the first Bishop of Rome, who years later, as he fled the city of Rome, would see a vision of Christ going towards the imperial capital: "Quo vadis?" Peter asks Him (where are you going?). "I am going to Rome to be crucified," replies the Lord. Like the disciples in Emmaus,  Peter turned around and went back to resume his calling.

Why do we leave Jerusalem for Emmaus? What possible reason do we brandish to justify leaving the storm of the present moment for our oh so necessary occupations elsewhere? It is not that in our lives we must only attend to the Lord; we all have other duties. But unless we fill those duties with the Lord, we will inevitably flee from the one thing necessary.

Let us always carry Jerusalem with us in our hearts where the Risen One dwells. Otherwise, the road to Emmaus will not stop there.