The Guardian Angels - 2 October

Readings: Exodus 23:20-23; Psalm 91; Matthew 18:1-5,10

It is clear from the readings and prayers these days, for the feast of the archangels and for today's feast, that the Christian tradition is more confident about what angels do than about what kind of being they are, clearer about the services they provide than about their nature. They are creatures who teach, guide and protect other creatures.

In doing these things they are agents of the providence of God, bringing that providence to bear in every nook and corner of the creation. We might, reasonably, think that God will be more concerned about what is happening to people in Ukraine and the Middle East than about someone's ingrown toenail. It seems obscene even to be making such a comparison.

Yet Jesus teaches us that every hair on our head is counted. Are we to take it seriously? There is a temptation to push God's providence back, away from very particular and concrete things, to a more general, universal level. But nothing that happens to his children falls outside God's care. Anything that forms part of the progress or distress of the world falls within the scope of God's interest. We are tempted to despise the 'little ones', the things that seem trivial and unimportant in the grander scheme of things. But these feasts of the angels remind us that God's providence reaches everywhere. Nothing that affects his children or is of interest to them is too small to be regarded as beneath God's dignity. The feast of the guardian angels reminds us of this fact.

In the tradition also the term 'angel' is sometimes used to refer to a human being who carries out one of the angelic services of teaching, guiding or protecting on behalf of another human being. I presume we have all been told, from time to time, 'you're an angel, thank you for that'. Here is something even more wonderful about God's providence: as well as making creatures to be provided for, God has made some creatures capable of providing for others, teaching, guiding and protecting them, and so sharing in His care for creation. Think of parents in the first place, archangels.

So wherever we experience these kindnesses - being taught, being guided, being protected - we are being cared for by angels and, in them, by God who is steadfast love and faithfulness.

Saint Therese of Lisieux - 1 October

Some Notes on the Life and Spiritual Teaching of St Therese

Suggested readings for her memorial: Isaiah 66.10-14; Psalm 131; Matthew 18.1-4

She was born on 2 January 1873 and entered Carmel on 9 April 1888, at the age of 15. She made her profession on 8 September 1890 but died on 30 September 1897, at the age of 24. The account of her life, Story of a Soul, written at the insistence of her (blood) sisters in Carmel, became known across the world with astonishing speed, and devotion to her grew just as quickly. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI on 17 May 1925 – had she lived she would have been only 52 that year! – and was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II on 19 October 1997.  She had already been recognised as patroness of all the missionary activity of the Church.

She came from an unusual family. Her parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, were canonized together by Pope Francis in 2015. Thérèse was the youngest of their nine children, only five of whom lived to adulthood. But all five surviving daughters became nuns, four of them in the Carmel in Lisieux and one in the congregation of the Visitation. Thérèse’s education was modest, although she was clearly very intelligent.

Her spiritual teaching, though simple, is profound and radical. She lived a life of prayer, solitude, sacrifice and concern for the mission of the Church. Her ‘little way’ requires detachment in order to give oneself to charity in the smallest details of life: the ordinary becomes extraordinary when it is done out of love. She wondered what her role in the Church could be and decided that it was to be the heart of the Church, simply to love. So, her spirituality is centred on friendship with Jesus and faith in him with a humble but unshakeable confidence. It means trusting in God’s providence and in the merciful love of God. Although simple, and sometimes expressed in terms that can seem a bit too sweet to be real, Thérèse’s teaching is based principally on her reading of the New Testament and of John of the Cross. The Paschal Mystery, the passion, death and resurrection of Christ, is central for her and the task is to see this mystery at work in each person’s life. To live the Gospel authentically is to base our lives on this mystery. If we do so we will want to express Christ’s love to others through prayer and acts of charity.

For Thérèse to grow towards perfection in holiness means to have confidence in God and to learn that the Lord uses even our faults and weakness to perfect us in compassion and humility. It means allowing ourselves to be purified in faith, hope and love, giving up the ways in which we want to have Easter without Good Friday. She teaches us also that the spiritual life is not a matter of knowing things but of experiencing things, particularly suffering and temptation through which the necessary purification takes place. Certainly, the Christian life and the charity of Christ are about joy, peace and love, but they include also suffering the Cross and so gaining the hope of eternal life. She does speak on one occasion of an experience of union with God, of being on fire with love, but says it happened only once, that it passed quickly and that afterwards she fell back into her ‘habitual state of dryness’.

She follows John of the Cross in seeing the spiritual life as an exodus-journey out of spiritual bondage to true knowledge of God and ourselves, and so to freedom. Our search for union with God, the ‘better love’, must be firm, unrelenting and enthusiastic, a desire for Christ that is greater than all other desires. It is not known whether she read de Caussade’s Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence but she presents her ‘little way’ in terms that are reminiscent of that work – spiritual childhood, confidence, and complete self-abandonment to God’s care. She knew The Imitation of Christ and seems to have been much influenced as a young girl by a book written by Father Charles Arminjon entitled The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life. 

Through prayerful self-reflection on her spiritual journey, Thérèse came to know the depth of her self-centeredness, the extent of her God-inspired desires, and the role and significance of her thoughts, acts, and feelings in her spiritual life. She had a great confidence in her ability to be honest with herself and an enormous intuitive capacity about the ways of human and divine love. Under the microscope of prayer, in her self-awareness, she came to learn universal truths about love: how love originates, how it is nourished or blocked, and how it grows. Her life thus became a microcosm of love, her teaching a school of love.

Although she belongs to a distinctive social and religious context, it is this ‘breakthrough’ to universal truths about love that explains her immediate and universal appeal. She famously said that she wanted to spend her heaven doing good on earth, and this also encouraged many people to pray to her. Her ‘little way’ is for ‘little ones’, people who believe they have not received any extraordinary graces or spiritual gifts – it is enough, she says, to be faithful to the duties of one’s state in life, to have love alone as one’s motivation, and to cultivate trust in the heavenly Father. Too little to climb any mountain or staircase in order to reach God, she speaks instead of Jesus providing an elevator to bring her up to himself. Among those for whom Thérèse was their favourite saint is Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who valued Thérèse for teaching that what is crucial for our salvation is doing small things with love and faith.

The notion of spiritual childhood was already a theme in the French school of spirituality in the seventeenth century, re-appears from time to time in later French Catholic spirituality, and reaches its supreme expression in the little way of Thérèse. It continued as a theme in French Catholic writing with the poet Charles Péguy (1873-1914) and the novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948). Some might fear that a kind of anti-intellectualism, seen already in how the Curé d’Ars was appreciated, was further strengthened by the promotion of Thérèse’s life with this emphasis on spiritual childhood and the little way. Was the Church itself running the risk of strengthening the idea, coming from the Enlightenment, that faith is somehow irrational, or that it has greater merit the less rational or intellectual support it has? The decision to declare Thérèse of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church was not without controversy. In canonising her, Pope Pius XI had already said that her spirituality was an expression of the fundamental teaching of the gospel and in declaring her a Doctor of the Church Pope John Paul II explained how her ‘little way’ actually encapsulates the central mysteries of the faith:

The core of her message is actually the mystery itself of God-Love, of the Triune God, infinitely perfect in himself. If genuine Christian spiritual experience should conform to the revealed truths in which God communicates himself and the mystery of his will (cf. Dei Verbum, n. 2), it must be said that Thérèse experienced divine revelation, going so far as to contemplate the fundamental truths of our faith united in the mystery of Trinitarian life. At the summit, as the source and goal, is the merciful love of the three Divine Persons, as she expresses it, especially in her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. At the root, on the subject's part, is the experience of being the Father's adoptive children in Jesus; this is the most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood, that is, the experience of divine filiation, under the movement of the Holy Spirit. At the root again, and standing before us, is our neighbour, others, for whose salvation we must collaborate with and in Jesus, with the same merciful love as his. Through spiritual childhood one experiences that everything comes from God, returns to him and abides in him, for the salvation of all, in a mystery of merciful love. Such is the doctrinal message taught and lived by this Saint (19 Oct 1997).

Her experience of the ‘dark night’ of faith, when the joy of faith was completely absent even as she persevered in that darkness, continued through her last months, and her sisters were keen to censor references to this in the official version of her life. But it is actually something that speaks to contemporary people who wonder where God is to be found or experienced today and for whom faith can often be simply a matter of wanting to believe and continuing to love. This is what Thérèse encourages – go on believing, or at least go on wanting to believe, but always carry out the works of faith and, above all and always, the works of love, no matter how simple or ordinary they are.

Feast of Saint Jerome - 30 September

Saint Jerome

 

If Jerome had lived after the 12^th century, when a formal process for canonization was introduced, he might never have been regarded as a saint. He was irascible, rude and intemperate in his language, and his menagerie of women friends would surely raise eyebrows. He would hardly have passed the test of living the moral virtues heroically (patience? gentleness? prudence?).

It is true for others of the early centuries also, honoured in the Church as saints but tough cookies and not necessarily nice people. Think of the stubbornness and cunning of Saint Athanasius, for example, or the single-minded, even cruel, defence of what he judged to be the truth on the part of Cyril of Alexandria.

One of the reasons such saints are puzzling is because we tend to go at the gospels with a romantic, perhaps still Victorian, picture, of Jesus as simply ‘gentle, meek and mild’. Well we are in for a bit of a shock if we manage to read the gospels attentively, because more often he is not like that at all. When we think of his many strange sayings and his unpredictable reactions, Jesus of Nazareth seems to have been a much stranger person than we might have been comfortable with had we met him during his lifetime on this earth.

In the gospels, for example, he is the one who has most to say about hell. This comes as a bit of a surprise, especially if we like to see John the Baptist as the preacher of judgement who fades away with the coming of Jesus, the preacher of love. This just won’t work because we hear far more about judgement and hell from Jesus than we do from anybody else in the New Testament. We hear more about love from him also but the two are not exclusive: in fact they go together.

If our account of the gospel becomes too sweet, too inoffensive, then of course it becomes incredible, something for children and not for adults who must live in a world of betrayal and injustice, cleverness and deception, indifference, violence and fear. Something really is at stake in our decisions about justice and honesty, about generosity and truth. Something really is at stake in the defence of orthodoxy in which so many of the Fathers of the Church were engaged, and for the sake of which they accepted persecution, exile, and even death.

To stay on the way of Jesus is to stay on the way that leads to life. To stray from the way of Jesus is to taste the bitterness of death and gives us a glimpse of hell, the opposite of love. When we watch the TV news, and hear what is happening to people around the world, how can we deny that human beings continue to construct hell for others? And who can ultimately save us from that if not the one whose Word is a two-edged sword, love and mercy on one side, truth and integrity on the other? And who are the servants of that Word except the ones who preach it effectively, in season and out of season, welcome or unwelcome? Of course it is a message of love, reconciliation and joy, but these desirable things can only be effectively established where there is justice, truth and repentance.

The abrasiveness of saints like Jerome remind us that the Word is a thorn in our side, a stone in our shoe, the pricking of our conscience, a call to turn and repent.

Feast of the Archangels -- 29 September

Readings: Daniel 7:9-10 /Revelation 12:7-12; Psalm 138; John 1:47-51

Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It is a question often asked and people like to entertain the idea that there might be. Most science fiction depends on a positive answer to the question.

The Bible and the Christian tradition (as well as many other religious traditions) also give a positive answer to the question: yes, there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We may take 'elsewhere' to mean geography: there might be other planets, other galaxies, in which other creatures with intelligence will be found. The Bible gives us no clear answer about this. But if 'elsewhere' means metaphysics, then the Bible's answer is very clear: there are other intelligent creatures, on other levels of being, apart from those we know about through sensation.

There is much nostalgia for an enchanted world, testified to by the great quantity of books and films about other beings and other possibilities of being. It is a nostalgia for the angels, we can say, an implicit recognition that the beauty and power of God are infinite and so there is no end to the number and kind of creatures that might reflect that beauty and power. Recent centures in the West have seen the spiritual landscape denuded and depopulated, often reduced to the human being either alone with his 'spirituality' or seeking to relate, however uncertainly, with God. The feast of the archangels recalls us to something much richer, more interesting, and more profound.

The angels help us to know where we are in the universe, they help us to find and to know our place. Raphael does this most explicitly, guiding the young Tobias along his way, so that he finds love and joy through his trust and faith in God. Gabriel too gives guidance, explaining to Zechariah and to Mary the missions God has for each of them. Michael is the protector of God's people, the guardian of the boundaries of their worlds, leader of the heavenly armies. It is why so many strategic points are dedicated to Michael, Skellig Michael in Kerry, for example, or Mont Saint Michel, to name just two.

It can be argued that one of the great weaknesses of modern thought is its narrow understanding of the human being, a kind of 'angelism' for which the human being is 'a soul in a body'. The human being came to be defined in terms of his rationality over against nature, even the nature that is closest to him, his own body. Here is another way in which the angels help us to know who we are. We are not pure intelligences and we are not the brightest of God's creatures. We are rational animals created in the image of God. But the image of God in us, Aquinas says, is fuller than it is in the angels precisely because we are rational animals and not trapped angels. As animals we reproduce, reflecting God's generativity in which the Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit from the Father and the Son. As animals we are composite creatures with a soul that animates every part of the body and not just some special places. This fact about us reflects the presence of God in His creation everywhere and not just in some special places.

All we know about the angels is in reference to the mystery of Christ and human salvation. It is likely that there is lots more about angels, and perhaps about other creatures also, of which we are completely ignorant. We know about them to the extent that they are involved with us and with our salvation. So they are messengers, as Gregory the Great says, even preachers, as Augustine says, carrying to us something of the light and intelligence of God. However it is Christ who is the head of the angels as he is the head of human beings, made lower than the angels in becoming human but raised higher in being given the name that is above every other name. We call Mary, his mother, Queen of the Angels. These mighty beings serve human needs.

All is towards Christ, the Lamb who stands at the centre of the great visions of the Apocalypse. He is the Son of Man on whom the angels ascend and descend. The elders, the living creatures, the angels gathered for the festival, everything on earth, under the earth, and above the earth: all is through him and for him. When Israel's prayer is answered (Isaiah 63-64), and the Lord does rend the heavens to come down, His presence is revealed not just in chains of angels uniting heaven and earth but in the coming of the Eternal Son who is also the firstborn of all creation and the firstborn from the dead.

Week 26 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Ezekiel 18:25-28; Psalm 25; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32

The answer to Jesus’ question seems obvious: the one who did the Father’s will was the first son. Although at first he said he would not do it, he did it and the Father will clearly be more pleased with a son who says he won’t but then does rather than with a son who says he will but then does not.

It is the common teaching of Jesus elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel and throughout the New Testament. ‘Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven’ (Matt 7:21). He is the one who builds his house on rock, hearing the words of Jesus and doing them. The foolish person also hears the words of Jesus but does not do them (Matt 7:24,26). Whoever does the will of his Father is, says Jesus, his brother and sister and mother (Matt 12:50).

James in his letter tells us to be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving ourselves (James 1.22). Paul talks about faith working through love as the essential activity of the Christian (Gal 5:6) and John in his first letter says that our love must not be simply in word and speech but in truth and in actions (I Jn 3:18).

So that’s all very clear – hypocrisy is a bad thing. Our thoughts and words must be consistent with our actions but if we have to choose between them then it is our actions that are most important. A follower of Christ is seen in how people act not in what they think or say. The saints are those who have ‘done love’ rather than simply admired it or preached it.

In the context of today’s liturgy, of course, the gospel parable is set in a slightly different context. The first reading allows for the possibility of people moving in and out of doing the Father’s will. The one who is a sinner can change to become law-abiding and honest. But the one who is law-abiding and honest can renounce his integrity to become a sinner. God is perfectly just, Ezekiel says, and will treat us according to where we have positioned ourselves: the sinner will die and the honest person will live.

An obvious question though is: when have we positioned ourselves definitively. The text of Ezekiel itself encourages us to think that we can be rescued from sin just as we might lose our integrity and fall into sin. For the New Testament, to have received the gift of the Spirit is to be definitively on the side of Christ, to have been baptised is to have been born again to a new life having died once and for all to sin.

But we know from our own experience – and Christian tradition has acknowledged it – that people do fall away even into serious sin and then, by God’s grace, are drawn back, become contrite and are reconciled to the Church. Not that we can be baptised all over again but the Church has the sacrament of reconciliation. That sacrament is a restoration of the new life of baptism in the one who has squandered it.

Traditionally death has been regarded as the moment when a person is definitively positioned in relation to God’s will, is fixed either as a sinner or as a person of integrity. The older ones among us will remember stories of very good people who commit one mortal sin and are then killed by a bus and it’s off to hell with them for all eternity. That always seemed a bit too simple, as if God had no memory and no understanding of human fickleness. And of course there is a lot more about this in the tradition. Most recently Edith Stein – Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – has written about God’s infinite patience and how it will find a way, respecting human freedom, to outwit the stubborn human will and seduce us (as Jeremiah would say) into the love of God which is what we’ve really wanted all along in spite of ourselves.

And there is also that great second reading from the Letter to the Philippians. We are to have the same mind as Christ Jesus, literally we are to be mindful in the way he was or we are to be practically wise in the way he was. This is what the term used means referring not so much to the mind of Christ as to his mindfulness, his way of being in relation to the Father.

What is being held up to us here is an even more radical possibility where the distinction between what I want and what the Father wants dissolves, or at least is of no further significance. So the gap between saying I will do it and actually doing it disappears and we have the possibility of a third son, the one who both says and does the Father’s will. This is perfectly found, of course, only in Jesus whom we believe to be without sin. Sin continues to distract and disturb us. Sin maintains the gap between our saying and our doing. But our destination is to have the same mindfulness as Jesus: it is where the Spirit is leading us.

The Spirit is the Spirit of love and to become involved in the love of God is to be on a road that will take us to the place where our will is emptied of its own desires … or better put our will has as its fundamental desire simply the will of the Father whom we love so that we do not need to be told ‘do this’ or ‘do that’ but we are taught interiorly by the prompting of the Spirit. ‘You do not need anyone to teach you’, John says in his first letter (2:27). ‘They will all know me and no longer shall each man teach his neighbour and each his brother’, God says through Jeremiah, in what he says about the new covenant (31:31).

This following of Christ is not a magical thing, however, because it involves what Paul calls ‘the labour of love’. We see that labour most dramatically in the agony in the garden, where the Son is wrestling with what the Father’s will demands of him. ‘Let this cup pass me by’ is what the Son wants. ‘Let your will not mine be done’ is also what the Son wants. This is his deepest desire, to do what the Father wants, to bring his human will into line with the will of the Father and to cross that most difficult of gaps between knowing what is good and assenting to it, and being able actually to carry it out, to see it through.

We have the consolation of his struggle and his example. We have the help of the Holy Spirit, the love of God that has been poured into our hearts to make us the loving children of God also.

You can listen to this homily being preached here.

Week 25 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Ecclesiastes 11.9-12.8; Psalm 90; Luke 9.43b-45

There's one verse in Mark's Gospel, chapter 10, verse 32, which summarises what Luke says here, over a longer passage. The disciples were astonished, and those who followed him were afraid. The disciples are those who followed him, and those who followed him are the disciples, and they are both astonished and afraid.

There's an emotional rollercoaster which they experience in trying to stay with Jesus. One moment they're full of admiration, full of amazement, full of wonder at what he does. The next moment they're afraid, they're silent because of what he says.

They find his deeds amazing, they find his words disturbing. But Jesus says to them, these words must sink into your ears, it's a strange saying. Another translation has it, you must have them constantly in mind.

Jesus is alerting us to something we know from experience, that there are different levels of hearing. We can hear things at many different levels. Physically we might hear what a person is saying to us, but in our hearts and in our lives, somewhere deeper down, we decide we don't want to hear what we have just heard.

We don't want to allow that truth in. We choose very often not to understand. Fear of the truth, or the implications of the truth, or the demands of the truth, will often prevent us from asking more, from saying, what is it you just said? Is there more that needs to be said about what you have just said? It is a fear of the truth, a fear of the consequences and demands of the truth, which will in many circumstances, enable us to turn a deaf ear, shut down, to shut down our hearing, so that even though we hear things physically, we do not hear them in our hearts, or in our minds, or in our lives.

It seems to me that a sure sign that this is where the disciples are, in this passage of Luke, is there when we read on, next day an argument broke out among them about who was the greatest. It's a classic kind of deflection of emotional energy and attention onto something else, having decided that they do not want to hear what Jesus is saying to them, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of men. Their energy goes elsewhere, and they start fighting with each other.

Our journey of discipleship will presumably be like that. We will move around between amazement on the one hand, fear on the other, and then confusion, as we find ourselves unable to allow the truth of Jesus' words to sink into our ears, to be constantly in our minds, to find a home in our hearts. Perfect love casts out fear, we're told in the first letter of St. John.

Perfect love casts out fear, and then we can receive the truth. When we are free from fear, we can receive the truth and allow his words to sink into our ears, into our hearts, and into our lives. Perfect love allows us to accept the consequences and the demands of the truth.

But for most of us, that's a destination yet to be attained, a goal towards which we try to move and pray that someday, with God's grace, we will be there. We try to persevere, growing in courage as we go along, allowing the words of Jesus to make their home in us. It is easy from time to time to be amazed and to wonder at his deeds.

It is much more difficult, much more disturbing, much more demanding to allow the words of Jesus to sink into our ears, to find their way into our minds and into our hearts, to find their way into our lives. It is only with the help of his grace that such a thing is possible, that we can grow into that perfect love which casts out fear and so enables us to receive and to rejoice in the truth. And to live from that truth, the truth of his words, which have come to dwell in us.

Week 25 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11; Psalm 144; Luke 9:18-22

As so often in St Luke's gospel Jesus is at prayer before making a key decision or asking a decisive question. Here it is the familiar question, 'who do you say that I am'? Coming as it does directly from the heart of his prayer (in solitude, with the disciples) it seems that this must also have been his prayer's content. Many human beings all over the world are probably doing this right now, praying to God about their vocation: who am I? what is it you want me to do? who is it you want me to be?

In his humanity Jesus also prays about this question. The issue had arisen already in his experience of the temptations (Luke 4): in fact those temptations can be understood as pervading the whole of his public ministry, questions about who he is and what his mission is, questions he put to his disciples, having first, presumably, put them to himself and to the Father in prayer.

He seems embarrassed by the response of Peter, rebuking the disciples and commanding them to tell this to no one. 'The Christ of God' is Peter's answer but Jesus continues by speaking about 'the Son of Man who must suffer many things, be rejected, killed and be raised'. It must be that it is a matter of the right time, or, to be more precise, of the wrong time. What is the problem? He is engaged in teaching them something very delicate as he appropriates for himself the teaching he is sharing with them. What kind of Christ is he to be? When is the right time for speaking more explicitly and more publicly about the answer that is emerging? Not now, it seems, not for the moment.

Human wisdom and prudence are often seen in good timing: what to do or say can be clear, the challenge is to find the right time, the right set of circumstances, in which to say or do it. For teaching the wisdom of the cross, the hard paradoxical wisdom of the gospel, when is the time right and when are the circumstances favourable? We might say never, it will always be challenging to teach that wisdom. Or we might say 'the fulness of time' is the right time for teaching this wisdom, a kairos moment in the life of each individual, a moment of grace and understanding, when the knowledge of the cross can be received not just as reasonable and intelligible, but as desirable and infinitely wise.