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.

Week 25 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11; Psalm 90; Luke 9:7-9

At the end of some readings from the Bible it can feel very strange to say 'this is the Word of the Lord / thanks be to God'. Today's first reading is an example, the famous 'vanity of vanities' passage at the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth). What is the point? Where is it all going? Days come and go, months and years, there is nothing new under the sun, we wear ourselves out, have nothing to show for it, and in a hundred years time what difference will it have made?

The monastic tradition in Christianity has given us reflections on the seven or eight deadly sins or principal vices among which we find sloth or acedia, a kind of listlessness in which everything seems pointless and meaningless. Evagrius of Pontus is one of the monastic teachers who writes about these sins or vices which he calls 'thinkings', or 'thoughts'. Logismoi is his Greek term, we would perhaps use the term 'fantasies'. They refer to things we find insinuating themselves into our minds, mixtures of thought and feeling that distract, disturb, darken, and fragment. From different directions they take away our serenity and peacefulness. With acedia specifically we lose a sense of purpose and energy, things come to seem pointless.

The sun plays an important role in all this. Ecclesiastes speaks of human toil and effort under the sun. The sun rises and sets as day unendingly follows day. Is there anything new under the sun? Acedia was also called 'the noonday devil', noon being the time when the sun is at its highest and hottest, the time of day when this problem is most acute. But Evagrius says the problems start at 10.00am and goes on until 2.00pm! The monk looks out his window, wondering whether the sun is moving at all. When will it be 3.00pm? Perhaps there was food, or a break, at 3.00pm. Or perhaps it was just that the heat of the sun has eased by then.

Anybody who has lived through a Roman summer will have some idea of the effect of intense heat day after day. There is a story of a Scottish Cardinal who claimed that it was impossible to commit a sin when the scirocco was blowing in Rome, the hot wind from the Sahara, on the grounds that nobody could think straight in such conditions.

So what is the solution to acedia? It is not clear that the spiritual masters who wrote about it - Evagrius, Cassian, Gregory the Great, Isidore, Aquinas - have any easy solution. Perhaps it is enough good news to know that this human experience is recognised and acknowledged in the Bible and in Christian traditions of spirituality. Whatever its roots - physical, emotional, intellectual - it seems to be a universal and perennial human experience.

One solution is to bring ourselves, again and again, into our present reality and to remind ourselves that the life of the Spirit is flowing in us for the 'here and now', with these actual people, and through these actual responsibilities. Acedia will tell us that we would be happier if things were different (so we re-arrange the furniture in the room), or if we knew more (so we buy yet another book on the spiritual life), or if we lived with different people (so we think about living in another community or perhaps we should have married a different person), or if we lived at a different time (so we fantasise about living in other countries at other times). But our faith is incarnational, about here and now, and these people, and these responsibilities which are mine today. We are to find meaning - and a meaning deeper than all our imaginings - in the experiences that are ours today: this is what faith assures us. Sometimes we 'feel' this re-assurance, have a lively sense of it, but often we don't, in which case we keep going, placing our trust in the One in whom we believed and continuing to serve Him as best we can.

It is good to know that this experience is recognised and acknowledged in the Bible, in the liturgy of the Church and in our traditions of spirituality. Thomas Aquinas adds a thought of his own about acedia: it is called the noon-day devil, he says, because the mid-point of any work is a difficult moment. It is as if every important human undertaking will encounter a moment of 'mid-life crisis'. Is it too late to turn back? The end is not yet in sight. Was it a mistake to begin in the first place? Like Peter walking on the water we need to keep our eyes on the One who is calling us, the End of our journey. Whether we are afflicted by doubt or oppressed by acedia, keep looking to him, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, the sun of justice who assigns us our daily tasks in the service of his kingdom.

Week 25 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Proverbs 30:5-9; Psalm 119; Luke 9:1-6

The readings speak of two different kinds of trust in God. The reading from Proverbs asks God to arrange the circumstances so that I will not be faced with the temptations that come from being either rich or poor. If I am rich I may forget God, if I am poor I may curse God. It is one way of trusting in God, to believe that he will arrange things so that I am protected from such temptations. If he takes care of the circumstances, I will be able to manage, I will live well.

The other kind of trust is clear in the gospel reading. The Twelve are 'entrusted' with authority and power to teach and heal. They are to be grown up children of God, responsible and taking initiatives. They are not now to be dependent on God to arrange congenial circumstances for them. Rather do they trust God to give them a share of His Spirit so that they will be able to engage appropriately with whatever circumstances they encounter.

They are to be co-workers, sharing in the Lord's ministry of teaching, healing and casting out demons. They are not guaranteed favourable circumstances. Their dependence and trust in God is deeper. It is internal rather than external, to do with what they are becoming in their hearts and minds rather than with the external situations and relationships in which they find themselves.

Saint Paul speaks very well of this second kind of trust in his letter to the Philippians: 'I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me' (4:11-13).