Saint Catherine of Siena - 29 April

THE SCHOOL OF LOVE

The most startling moment in Mel Gibson’s film about the Passion of Jesus was when the soldier pierced the side of Christ and, as we are told in St John’s gospel, ‘immediately there came out blood and water’ (19.34). I had always imagined it as a trickle and many artists represent it in that way, but in the film it was a shower, bursting out to wash the faces of those standing at the foot of the cross. It is the saving fountain spoken of in the prophecy of Zechariah (13.1), what the liturgy refers to as ‘the fountain of sacramental life in the Church’ (Preface of the Sacred Heart).

                                                                                                        

The early Dominicans were not afraid of the physical aspects of the passion of Christ. The Order was founded at a time when devotion to the passion was growing strongly. When they prayed their preferred icon or focus was the crucifix. We see this, for example, in a set of illustrations from the 14^th century that show St Dominic at prayer before the crucifix. Many of the frescoes of Fra Angelico at Florence show the blood of Christ flowing from his side in great abundance and pouring down the trunk of the cross to wash and water the earth.

St Catherine of Siena, whose feast we celebrate today, also directed her prayer to Christ crucified and had much to say about the power of his blood. In fact, she says, the ways in which we dispose ourselves physically in relation to the crucifix express different moments or aspects in our relationship with Christ.

We may kneel to kiss his feet, for example. This is the attitude of the creature and sinner, bowing before her Creator and Lord, still living somewhat in fear, anxious about punishment and loss.

Or we may stand to kiss his side, Catherine says. This is the position of one who is growing in love for her Lord, standing now instead of kneeling, kissing his breast rather than his feet, and therefore beginning to enter into the ‘perfect love which casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18). But at this point our love is still ‘interested’, she says, we tend to look to the gifts Christ can give us and not yet simply at the giver of those gifts, Christ himself.

The third stage or aspect is when we reach up to kiss the lips of Christ. Now we can speak about the love of friendship, Catherine says. She even speaks of a union with Christ and with all creation (what the Christian tradition refers to as ‘mystical’ experience). We are no longer servants but friends (John 15.15). We have grown to maturity in the Christian life. No longer do we love God out of a kind of fear. No longer do we love God for what he can do for us or for what he can give us. But we are brought to love God for himself and this is what holiness means.

Catherine teaches us that the school in which we learn these things is prayer, a prayer focused on the cross of Jesus and on the blood flowing from his side. She writes that ‘we learn every virtue in constant and faithful humble prayer’. We learn about ourselves when we pray. This is one of the reasons why it is very difficult to persevere in prayer. It takes us into what Catherine calls ‘the cell of self-knowledge’ and often we do not like what we see there. But prayer is also the place where we meet God and learn how to relate to God and become like God, loving as God has loved us.

St Thomas Aquinas, a century before Catherine, says similar things. In a conference on the Creed he writes that ‘the passion of Christ is sufficient in itself to instruct us completely in our whole life’.

These saints were not suggesting that the purpose of Christian life was to find our way to some personal ‘peak experience’ which would take us inside ourselves and away from others. The Dominicans soon took as one of their mottos ‘to contemplate and to pass on to others the fruits of contemplation’. Maturity in the Christian life brings with it a new sense of responsibility for people and a new sensitivity to the sufferings and needs of the world. Maturity in the Christian life – what St Paul calls ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’ (Ephesians 4.13) – means being compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate (Luke 6.36).

Catherine of Siena is one of the greatest teachers of this wisdom in the history of Christianity. This is why we honour her as a Doctor of the Church.

Easter Week 4 Tuesday

Readings: Acts 11:19-26; Psalm 87; John 10:22-30 

While the first reading is taking us forward, on into the developing life of the Church, the gospel reading seems to take us backwards, to a moment before the death and resurrection of Jesus, when he was still arguing with 'the Jews' about who he was.

Barnabas is the key figure in the development of the Church at Antioch. He is trusted by the community at Jerusalem to go to Antioch and to see how the integration of 'the Greeks' is going there. It seems that some of the first preachers restricted their preaching to Jews while others were open to Gentiles also. Such openness seems to have been the strength of the community at Antioch. Barnabas sees for himself that God is giving grace there. 

More than that, he is moved by what he now sees at Antioch to go looking for Saul, who some time before had retreated to Tarsus, his home town. Saul seems to have lived a quiet life there for a number of years. His biographers propose that he spent the time in prayer and study: Tarsus was an important academic centre.

In the meantime, according to Acts 9-11, Peter and the Jerusalem community were learning important lessons about the universal mission of the Church: that God shows no partiality, that the Gentiles also were receiving the word of God, that the gift of the Holy Spirit was being poured out even on the Gentiles. The apostles were seeing these things, interpreting and discerning them under the guidance of the same Spirit.

At Antioch Barnabas puts the pieces together: the time is ripe to bring Saul back into the story. You will remember that Saul's preaching at Damascus and Jerusalem had provoked anger and opposition in both places, with Jews in one and Hellenists in the other. So he went to Tarsus and things calmed down.

But Barnabas, a good man filled with the Holy Spirit and faith, and also, it seems, a man of exceptional intuition and prudence, recognised Saul's gift, was even perhaps given an insight into the mission he was to have as 'Saint Paul'. He brought Saul back and they worked together in Antioch for a year before undertaking a missionary journey across Asia Minor. Together they built up the community of people who were now, for the first time, called Christians. It is one reason why some regard Saul/Paul as the founder of the religion that came to be known as 'Christianity'.

The gospel reading today is sombre by contrast. 'You do not believe because you are no sheep of mine', Jesus says to the Jews who are questioning him. His words and the signs he has worked in the Father's name should have been enough to convince them. 'Tell us plainly', they say. 'I have told you', he says, 'and my works confirm it'. It seems they do not believe because they do not belong to Jesus' flock. We might have wished it the other way round: you do not belong to my flock because you do not believe. So believe and belong. But as Jesus expresses it, it seems more like his choice than theirs: if you belonged to my flock you would believe. But you do not belong and so you do not believe.

Is their situation irreversible?  So much of the gospel and the rest of the New Testament tells us that it cannot be so. So how do we come to belong to Jesus' flock so that we might believe his words and his works? We must listen to his voice and follow him: this is the message of Jesus in the gospel reading. This is how to belong to him and come to believe. We must pray for God's grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit, listen to his voice in that way: this is the message of the first reading. It is the Holy Spirit, working through the words and works of preachers and witnesses, who builds up the Church in every generation, forming good men and women to belong to the Lord's flock, whose faith will entitle them to be called 'Christians'.

Easter Week 4 Monday

Readings: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 42; John 10:11-18

A religion of sheep led by a lamb - it doesn't sound like a promising project in a macho world that is more often than not cruel, cynical and violent. And so it proved as we read about the difficulties faced by the first Christian believers, their rejection and expulsion from the synagogues, the sporadic violence against them and then their outright persecution.

In spite of all that the Christian faith took root and flourished. It flourished geographically: we have been reading the Acts of the Apostles which traces this geographical spread of the faith from Jerusalem, through Samaria, on through Asia Minor, into Europe, and eventually to Rome, centre of the world at the time. It seems that the first Christian communities would have been quite small but still it is impressive that so many of them were founded in the first decades after the Resurrection of the Lord.

So it was not through conquest or imposition by civil authorities that the faith spread. It was not any secular, still less military, arm supporting the preaching. (We might think of the conquest of the Americas as an example of the latter.) Au contraire, we might say, for this religion of sheep led by a lamb.

So what was its power? Can it be explained only by the fact that this project was God's project and that God's purpose is not to be frustrated? It might also - on a human level - be explained by what this new religion offered: salvation from sin, freedom from oppression, victory over death. It is about life, a fulness of life, and that fulness of life in eternity: eternal life.

The shepherd of Israel who calls his own sheep by name and leads them out has been revealed as the shepherd of all humanity. The springs of living water opened up in the heart of the world are flowing for all people. The happiness and fulfillment and flourishing that they promised is offered freely to everybody. The election or preference of the Hebrews is extended to the Gentiles. The proferred gift of eternal life is for all.

This is what attracted people to the new faith. It is what explains how in spite of everything they were enduring the apostles were always filled with joy.

Easter Week 4 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 22(23); 1 Peter 2:20b-25; John 10:1-10

In the summer holidays of 1270, Thomas Aquinas finally got round to answering a query he had received a few months earlier from James of Tonengo. The two had become friends at Orvieto some years earlier when James was a chaplain at the papal court there and Thomas was the lector or teacher at the Dominican priory. Thomas had since returned to Paris and James had left the papal service and was now a canon of the diocese of Vercelli.

James’s question to Thomas was about the morality of casting lots as a way of making decisions about important matters, specifically about appointments to high office in the Church. The summer of 1270 marked the midpoint of the longest interregnum in the history of the papacy. Pope Clement IV had died in November 1268 but his successor, Gregory X, was not elected until almost three years later, his pontificate beginning in September 1271. In fact it was this three-year vacancy that led Gregory X, when he was elected, to institute the conclave as we now know it. The three-year delay had disturbed and unsettled everybody, leading the civil authorities at Viterbo firstly to lock the cardinals in, then to take the roof off the church where they were meeting, and finally to starve them slowly until they reached a decision.

James’s question to Thomas about casting lots as a way of making decisions was related to this interregnum. It was not a question about a breakthrough in the conclave itself, however, but about the appointment of a bishop in Vercelli. The canons were unable to agree who it should be, there was no Pope and would not be a Pope for a further 15 months, and so James is wondering about the option of casting lots as a way of coming to a decision. It might even have been thought that this would be a way of leaving more space for the Holy Spirit to make his mind known about the matter. We might be tempted to think that there is something in this: if human thoughts and desires and fears and preferences, all that goes under the name ‘politics’, were to be removed from the situation and the decision left entirely to God, would it not be better for everybody?

Even with 115 or 120 men voting nowadays to choose a new Pope we believe, of course, that it is God who is choosing the Pope. This may sound a bit startling, particularly in the days running up to a papal election, but on Good Friday each year, when we gather for the liturgy, we pray to God asking him to ‘protect the Pope you have chosen for us’. We know that Matthias was chosen to take the place of Judas and that it was by the casting of lots that he was elected. Would this not be a safer way of doing it still rather than leaving it to the uncertain politics of a group of interested human beings?

Thomas Aquinas, in his response to James of Tonengo, composed a short but very dense and nuanced treatise on the morality of casting lots, on what we might call alternative ways of finding out things that are hidden and of making decisions about the future. Casting lots as an alternative to making decisions may be acceptable in some circumstances, Thomas says, most of them minor, although he allows that the choosing of civil leaders could on occasion be done in this way. What he will not allow in any circumstances is the choosing of Church leaders by the casting of lots.

Far from believing that this would leave more room for the Holy Spirit to work, Thomas believes precisely the opposite. Where a decision is to be made by divine inspiration, he says, it is an insult to the Holy Spirit to withdraw that decision from human thinking and choosing. We believe that the Holy Spirit has come on the Church, Thomas says, something that had not yet happened when the Apostles cast lots to choose Matthias. The Holy Spirit instructs human sense to judge rightly, according to Saint Paul, so that the working of the Spirit in the Church is not apart from human beings but is within them, through their intelligence and their free judgements.

He quotes St Ambrose of Milan who says that one elected by lot is not contained within the responsibility of human judgement. So it is important that human beings accept responsibility for these key decisions and that the one who is elected knows that his election is within such responsibility. It is the concordia, the consensus we might say, of colleges of human beings that ought to produce Church leaders. (One might wonder in passing if this means that not only bishops of Rome but bishops elsewhere ought not to be chosen in some comparable forum as the conclave.)

I realise that I have not said anything about today’s readings on the Good Shepherd or about the fact that today is Vocations Sunday. On the other hand I believe that these comments of Aquinas about the casting of lots are directly relevant to both themes. What he says about the marriage of human spirits and the Holy Spirit in the making of key decisions, is exactly what he will say about the marriage of human spirits and the Holy Spirit in the following of Christ. The Holy Spirit makes us act freely he says in a paradoxical phrase, whenever we are seeking truth, practising good, discerning a vocation.

It is tempting to think that life would be easier if we could find magical ways of manipulating God, ways of seducing him into revealing his will and even making our decisions for us. Perhaps we could decide on a language, or a ritual, or a set of signs in which we could then invite God to make his will known. But God wants us to grow up and to become his adult children in Christ. As the adopted children of God, the sheep he calls by name, one by one, we live by the Holy Spirit of God. That is the deepest reality in us. Paul says that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God so that in our thinking, desiring, fearing and preferring the Holy Spirit too is at work.

The key difference between a secular consensus about something and a spiritual one is that the human beings involved in seeking the spiritual one pray. The deacons in Acts 6 are chosen, not by lot but after prayer. The decisions of the so-called council at Jerusalem in Acts 15 are made after prayer so the apostles can make the (apparently) outrageous claim that ‘it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to ourselves’.

How do we hear the call of Christ? We hear it through our human experience. How do we recognise that what we are hearing is the call of Christ? We recognise it if we have become attuned to the voice of Christ in prayer. How do we know that what is happening is not just the outcome of human thinking and deciding? Well it has to be the outcome of human thinking and deciding. What makes it spiritual, we believe, is the prayer which surrounds it and sustains it and which, allowing also for sin of course, ensures that the human beings who are thinking and choosing are open to outcomes that might surprise even themselves.

The first reading teaches us that the listeners to the Spirit-filled Peter are suddenly cut to the quick but that he takes a long time and many arguments to convince them. Both are true in the world of the Spirit where human effort is long and can seem unfulfilling but, to the eyes of faith, all is happening speedily, by the gift of the Spirit, and according to God’s wise government of the Church.

Saint Mark - 25 April

Readings: 1 Peter 5:5b-14; Psalm 89; Mark 16:15-20

There is a striking phrase about preaching in today's Office of Readings. Because the wisdom of the world has not helped people to find their way to God, it says, God decided to use 'that foolish thing, our preaching' as a way of bringing people to salvation.

Our preaching is foolish for many reasons. There is our ignorance and our sinfulness, with which we are all too familiar, and which are permanent obstacles to any understanding and to any effort at teaching others.

Both Mass readings speak about demons and devils abroad in the world. When we reflect on the apparent power of these demons then the foolishness of what we are trying to do is further highlighted. The first reading speaks of the devil prowling round like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. If such a beast were in the house we would be well aware of his presence. And often the demons are noisy and boisterous. They shout and make a fuss. 'Jesus', they shout, 'what have you got to do with us?' It means that some demons are easily identified even if we are not quite sure how to handle them. Their noisy presence is undeniable and we are rightly afraid of their violence.

Other demons act more quietly, more subtly. The gospel reading speaks of disciples picking up snakes and drinking poison, as well as casting out demons and speaking in tongues. Snakes and poison work silently but they are as deadly, perhaps more deadly, than the noisy demons. They can be more difficult to recognise, in time to take action against them.

So we face into the world ignorant and sinful, and we face into a world that is often cleverer and more well informed than we are. We do so knowing that both we and the world are afflicted and struggling with demons of different kinds.

The monastic tradition identified seven major demons and recognised also that the noisier ones are more easily seen. Think of lust, for example, or gluttony, or anger. They are honest vices, we can say, they come out into the open. It does not mean they are easy to manage but at least we know where we stand.

The subtler demons like pride and envy are much more difficult to manage, even sometimes to acknowledge, but their consequences for ourselves and for any living together can be much more serious than anything the honest vices can do.

Where does it leave us? Well both readings also speak today of the Lord confirming the preaching of the disciples. In the first reading we are told the Lord will strengthen, confirm and support us. And the gospel reading tells us that the Lord worked with the preachers of the gospel, confirming their words by signs.

In a seminar I lead on the history and spirituality of preaching one of the big questions that emerges is this: what are the signs that would confirm our preaching? Obviously unusual phenomena like those listed at the end of Mark 16 might work in that way. But the readings point us in another direction. They point us towards humility, patience and charity. Here is the most effective sign of the way of life that we preach. Where a Christian community is living in humility, patience and charity, we have the most convincing sign that here are people who practise what they preach, who believe what they say, who witness to the fact that the Lord is risen and is with them to support, strengthen and confirm.

The preachers of the gospel take on the world with that foolish thing, their preaching. They do it, obviously, not because of anything they find in themselves capable of overcoming the demons that gather round. They do it on the strength of their faith that the Lord is forever with them, and that he will confirm their words with signs, sometimes with strange and unusual events, more often than not through the witness of a community living the life of His Spirit.

Easter Week 3 Friday

Readings: Acts 9.1-20; Psalm 117; John 6.52-59

For the first half of his life he was Saul and for the second part Paul. He became the apostle to the Gentiles, the founder of Churches, a travelling preacher and a writer of letters. At the end he witnessed to Christ by shedding his blood as a martyr for the faith at Rome. January 25th is the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, the moment he ceased to be Saul and became Paul. By God’s grace he was destined to be one of the greatest saints of the Church, a man whose life and writings continue to nourish the faith of millions.

Paul describes himself as ‘one untimely born’ (1 Corinthians 15), brought to birth as ‘the last and least’ of the apostles, those privileged to encounter the risen Lord. His life before that moment – his life as ‘Saul’, culminating in his persecution of the Church of God – does not count any more.

It is true that in 2 Corinthians 11, Philippians 3, and Romans 11 Paul gives us a lot of information about his life and times, about his ancestry and education, and about the events of his life before and after his conversion. The Acts of the Apostles fills in many gaps and there is more to be gleaned from other letters of the New Testament.

But if we are to take his own words seriously, then the significant life of Paul the Apostle is his preaching of the gospel and his establishment of churches. His life in Christ is the life that counts. There is nothing before or around that that is worthy of much attention. This is because for him ‘to live is Christ’ (Philippians 1.21) so that ‘it is no longer Paul who lives but Christ who lives in him’ (Galatians 2.20). The fate of Paul is now completely entwined with the fate of Christ and of his Body, the Church.

Paul belongs to the line of Israel’s prophets for whom a vision and vocation inaugurate a new life. Isaiah, for example, saw God’s glory in the temple at Jerusalem, felt his own unworthiness, had his lips burned clean with fire, and then entrusted himself to the grace that made him the bearer of God’s word (Isaiah 6). Amos the keeper of sycamore trees is also turned into a prophet (Amos 7). Jeremiah is called in spite of his feeling that he is too young for the responsibilities involved (Jeremiah 1).

We can use the words of Isaiah, describing the effects of God’s presence in the temple, to say that Paul’s experience of untimely birth meant the shaking of his foundations and the filling of his house with smoke. He was confused and blinded for some time until a representative of the Church, Ananias, came as the instrument of God’s Spirit and guided him to his new birth (Acts 9). Then in baptism, as he has taught the whole Church, Paul became a new creation (2 Corinthians 5.17).

And so his life begins. We cannot doubt that Paul’s personal experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus and in the days that followed deserves all the attention that has been lavished on it. The Acts of the Apostles tells the story three times. (Artists tend to paint the scene with Paul falling from a horse but in none of these accounts is there any reference to a horse!) His teaching and the energy with which he travelled back and forth across the Roman Empire were the result of that moment in which Paul met Jesus and was forever overwhelmed.

What did Saint Paul then do all day? He tells us that he burned himself out in his anxiety and care for the churches. There are hints that he continued to earn a living through his trade of tent making (1 Corinthians 9). But this would have been a tedious distraction from his heart’s passion, which was to preach the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord, to become all things to all people that he might somehow win some of them. He preached to Jews and Greeks, to tradesmen and philosophers, to prison guards and political leaders, to men and women.

As an instrument of the Spirit he achieved remarkable things. He established and strengthened Christian communities in many places. He brought the gospel to Europe. He ended his life by dying a martyr’s death in Rome. He was privileged to follow Christ in more than a figurative sense. With his physical blood Paul completed the outpouring of his heart’s passion, his love for Christ, that love from God that had been poured into his heart by the Holy Spirit. He lived always in faith and love, never for a moment forgetting the grace of God working in him in spite of many difficulties and personal weaknesses.

Saint Paul is one of the best-known personalities of the ancient world who continues to teach and inspire millions of disciples of Jesus. On January 25 we recall the wonderful things God did through him. Let us, in Paul’s own words, ‘give thanks to God who gave him the victory through our Lord, Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15.57).

Easter Week 3 Thursday

Readings: Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 66; John 6:44-51

The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are two parts of the same work, interrupted in our Bibles by the Gospel of John. So in fact, in this great two part work, the account of Stephen's death comes just eight chapters after the account of Jesus' death. We have seen how the trial and execution of Stephen mirror in so many ways the experience of Jesus. Similarly just eight chapters after the account of Jesus' appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus comes the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch whom he ends up baptising.

Similarly there are striking similarities between the events recorded in Luke 24 and those recounted in Acts 8. The protagonists are on the road away from Jerusalem. In each case we find a person or persons musing about God's dealings with the world. In each case we find a person or persons puzzled, to say the least, by the 'suffering servant'. He and they are wondering who this figure might be, what God could possibly be doing through him, The two disciples on the road to Emmaus thought he would be the one to redeem Israel. The Ethiopian is completely at a loss.

In each case the traveller or travellers are joined by a stranger who, beginning from a text, 'explains' the suffering of the Christ for them. In Luke 24 and Acts 8 we have a liturgy of the word leading to the celebration of a sacrament. In the gospel it is the breaking of bread, the moment in which the two disciples recognise Jesus, just as he is taken from them. In Acts it is the baptism of the Ethiopian - 'what is to prevent me being baptised?' (which has the ring of a question from an early Christian liturgy). The two sacraments are the ways in which those who have come to believe may participate in the paschal mystery of Christ, identify with it and make it their own. Baptism is the sacrament in which faith in that mystery is first bestowed, just as it conforms the baptised person to Christ in his dying and rising from the dead. And just as Jesus disappears in the moment in which he is recognised so Philip disappears after the baptism and the Ethiopian sees him no more.

Applying all this to our own experience we can say at least this much: that our liturgies and sacramental celebrations are similarly structured. There is a liturgy of the word followed by a celebration of the sacrament. We too need the riches of the scriptures to be opened up for us just as we need our hearts, minds and eyes to be opened to the presence of Christ with us. Just as for these first believers, the suffering of the Christ remains at the heart of things: 'was it not written that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?' Had he not said (today's gospel reading) that the bread he would give would be his flesh, for the life of the world?

We continue to need help, whatever the direction in which we are travelling, whatever our perplexity or puzzlement. We have not yet entered fully into the mystery of the cross which remains a stumbling block and a folly. But whatever road we are on, whatever questioning we have, however far we might be from the destination, the Spirit seeks us out. He will find ways to assure us of the presence of Christ, help us to understand the mystery of His love, lead us to a deeper experience of the mysteries we celebrate in our liturgies and which we seek to live out in our lives.