Dedication of the Lateran Basilica - 9 November

Readings: Ezekiel 47:1-2,8-9,12; Ps 46; 1 Corinthians 3:9c-11,16-17; John 2:13-22

One of the most memorable moments from the papacy of Benedict XVI was his consecration of Gaudi's unfinished basilica in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia. Like many works of genius it remains unfinished, coming up against the limitations to which flesh is heir even while trying to express something of the infinite and the transcendent within those limitations.

One striking thing about this church is its marriage of tradition and novelty. What could be more un-modern than the building of a great 'medieval' Christian church? What could be more modern than the shocking variation on the Gothic which Gaudi's building presents. Perhaps that combination of tradition and novelty says something about the Church itself, the Church as a theological reality, already ancient (the Church from Abel) and always new (bearer of life and freedom). On one side the Church is deeply rooted in traditions of faith and witness, handing on what has been received. There is no institution more conserving. At the same time the Church is constantly called to account by the world, asked to respond to the questions posed by each passing age.

Benedict's visit to Barcelona was a reminder of the place of music, painting, architecture, and the other arts in the life and worship of the Church. These expressions of natural 'spirituality' may all be placed at the service of 'true worship, in spirit and in truth'.

Gaudi's vision for his strange and wonderful church was informed by the book of nature, the book of scripture, and the book of liturgy: so Benedict in his homily that day. This is a rich and mutually illuminating combination. It is what we find in the sacramental life of the Church, which uses the elements of this world, fruits of the earth and work of human hands. It gives those elements new meaning with the application to them of words from the scriptures and the Church's tradition. And the whole is put together to make the 'awe-inspiring rites' of initiation, reconciliation, healing, ordination and marriage. Far from being a museum, Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece is a living church. In this too it says something about the Church as a theological reality: it is alive with sinners and with saints.

Nature brings food and healing, water and fish, leaves and fruit. All of these things decorate the temples of the Christian religion because they all represent Christ and his work - the life he brings, the food he is, the medicine of immortality, the water of life and the heavenly nourishment.

Human hands make bread and wine and they also make buildings. Not surprisingly the Church is often spoken about as a building. The term 'church', which originally referred to an assembly of people summoned for worship, is transferred to the buildings in which those assemblies take place. But it belongs in the first place to the gathering of believers. Christ is the foundation-stone of this living Temple, and the apostles are its master-builders, making a strange and wonderful Temple which is the community of those who believe in Christ. And not just those who happen to be alive today but all who have lived before and belong to this communion, and all who will live after us and will, likewise, belong to the same communion. 'You are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you', as Paul says in today's second reading.

We can perhaps add a fourth book to the ones mentioned by Pope Benedict: the book of history. The great liturgical feasts of the Bible mark not only the seasons of the year according to the book of nature but also the foundational events of salvation history, those moments of liberation and salvation that happened 'once and for all', moments that established and strengthened the people's faith in the Lord, the God of Israel.

So Jesus goes up to Jerusalem because the Passover is near. It is to Jerusalem that he goes up, to the Temple. It is that time of year when the memory of that great event is celebrated liturgically. But he brings the other books with him. 'Zeal for your house will consume me', the evangelist comments. You have made my Father's house - the house of prayer - a house of trade. But destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up: here is the radical innovation, a revelation that now it his body that is the place of sacrifice, the place of prayer, the place of the presence of God and of encounter with God. Ezekiel describes the renewal of nature by the waters flowing from the right side of the Temple. John will speak about the renewal of all creation by the waters flowing from the side of Jesus. Nature and history combine, scripture records, and liturgy celebrates.

At the moment of its happening this remained, for the disciples, strange and wonderful, a bit like Gaudi's basilica. But with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead everything came together - creation, history, scripture, liturgy - and they remembered that he had spoken in this way about his body, the new Temple, and they came to believe the scripture, and the word Jesus had spoken.

Week 32 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Wisdom 6:12-16; Psalm 63 (62); I Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

Human beings seek knowledge: there is nothing strange or startling in that. Aristotle begins his most famous book of philosophy with this declaration: 'all people by nature desire to know'. It is simply natural to the animal we are that we want and need to know many things.

Our quest for knowledge takes us beyond the immediate needs we share with other animals, where to find food and how to construct dwellings, where to find company and how to understand our environment. Realities such as power and control feed our desire for knowledge. But characteristically human capacities such as art, poetry and music, also feed that desire. We see both already in the most 'primitive' humans and both continue to operate in the most developed human beings (as we like to think of ourselves). We are led by our curiosity, by our desire and hunger for knowledge, into all the realms of science and philosophy, politics and art, games and religion, poetry and music, technology and symbolism.

Today's first reading is just one of many texts in the Bible that speak of our desire for knowledge. There are many such wonderful texts, in Proverbs and Sirach, in Wisdom and in the Psalms, which list the many areas of life in which the fruits of this desire are to be seen. More than knowledge, what we desire is wisdom: once again the philosophers and the Bible agree on this. Wisdom is right understanding and good judgement. It is knowledge which is also always moral and spiritual, not just information, cold knowledge as it were, but an understanding that remains always human. It means we think about things always in their richest possible human setting, about their meaning for us and for our life, about their contribution to a common good of humanity as well as to the happiness and fulfilment of individuals.

But here is something remarkable, strange and startling, which comes to us only through God's revelation in the Bible: not only do we seek wisdom, but Wisdom seeks us. We do not find this in the Greek or in the other rich traditions of wisdom-seeking. Not only do we seek the understanding of truth that we call wisdom, since Truth, Understanding and Wisdom, all give themselves to us if we go about it in the right way. But more than that, 'she (Wisdom) makes her rounds, seeking those worthy of her'. 'She graciously appears to them in the ways and meets them with all solicitude'. She 'hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire'.

What the Gospels, and the New Testament generally, add to this is an identification of this divine Wisdom with Jesus, the eternal Word or Intelligence of God. He has come to seek and to save what was lost, to enlighten all who sit in darkness, to guide all who wander on foolish ways, to nourish the hearts and minds of all who thirst for the wine of understanding and hunger for the bread of knowledge.

There is then a strange contrast between Wisdom as she is portrayed in the first reading, Jesus as he is spoken of in the second reading, and the bridegroom in the gospel parable - arriving late, excluding those foolish enough not to have anticipated his late arrival, refusing to admit them to the wedding feast. The focus of the parable cannot be the character of the bridegroom. Rather the kingdom of heaven is like his sudden arrival, at an unexpected time, and the wisdom asked of us is that of being awake, still alert, watching for his coming.

We could perhaps re-phrase it like this: keep your desire strong; keep your search going; do not allow your curiosity or your thirst for knowledge, understanding and wisdom, to weaken. These things are on their way to you even if they are, as it seems, delayed in coming. The oil in your lamps is this natural desire for wisdom, for the presence of Jesus, and for a life that is wholesome and holy. That will be yours, because it is not only you who are seeking it, it is also seeking you. Wisdom is calling you. She is the 'hound of heaven' tracking you, and longing to sit at table with you. She wants to share her riches with you so as to fulfil at last, and beyond your wildest dreams, your desire for knowledge, your hunger to understand, your longing to see.

All you or I have to do is to stay awake. In other words attend to your desire so as to keep it strong. The bridegroom is coming. May he give us this simple gift: the wisdom to be in the right place at the right time when he appears.

Week 31 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Philippians 2:12-18; Ps 26; Luke 14:25-33

Preachers and translators pull back from the word 'hate' in today's gospel reading. It is sometimes rendered 'prefer to me' or 'more than me'. But Jesus as recorded by St Luke is more radical and uncompromising on this necessary detachment if people are to follow him, than he is on the dangers of riches. In fact they are two aspects of the same thing. In spite of the tenderness and compassion of Jesus as we get to know him in Luke's gospel, there are these radical warnings as well, about riches, and about the need to hate even your own life if you want to follow him.

Jesus is not a purveyor of middle class values although he has sometimes been turned into that. He is not here to endorse the world as it is understood by those who are following him. He is strange and different. His call is not to us to find a place for him in our world - fit him in somehow alongside the other relationships and activities in which we are involved. His call is to us to follow him into his world where he has found a place for us. The call is not to squeeze him and his message into our world and what is acceptable to it - although, again, this is often what has been done. He calls us to follow him into his strange, new world.

Luke's gospel is the gospel of great reversals: hate those you are inclined to love; love those you are inclined to hate; first last, last first; humble exalted, exalted humbled; rich man and Lazarus; Pharisee and publican; elder brother and prodigal son. How can one be his disciple, then? It seems too difficult, too paradoxical, even a bit weird. How is one to anticipate the cost of following him, as the man does who wants to build a tower? How prepare sensibly to follow him, as the man does who decides to go out to battle? What he teaches us about the tower-builder and the war-maker is that they make preparations that are 'only sensible' if that is the kind of thing they want to do. In the case of following Jesus, what is 'only sensible' if we are preparing to follow him? Here is what you must do, he says: renoucne all you have, bear your own cross, hate what you are inclined to love, even your own life.

One thing is very clear here, in chapter 14 of St Luke's gospel. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to suffer and to die. He is to be rejected by our world which cannot find a place for him, which finds his message too strange, too difficult, too puzzling. There are still 'great crowds' following him but this is not going to continue for much longer. We will spit him out. But that spitting out of Jesus by the world opens the way for the greatest reversal of all, the resurrection. Things are well and truly broken open, the world is turned upside down and inside out.

We are called to follow him into that mystery of the Great Reversal, the mystery of his death and resurrection. In being baptised, declaring ourselves Christian, we have taken it as the pattern of our lives, the criterion by which we will evaluate everything about ourselves, our experiences, our intentions, our motives, our relationships, our actions. Participating in the Eucharist means allowing this mystery of the Great Reversal to enter more deeply into us, tasting already (along with our fathers and mothers, wives and children, brothers and sisters, who share our faith) the gifts of the new world that is coming.

Inevitably we domesticate Jesus, turning him into a harmless pupply, a moralist at our disposal. Just as we domesticate God. His talk of hatred in today's gospel serves then to keep us awake, alert, uncertain, watching out for our God who is wild and free, ever new and creative in His infinite Love.

St Martin de Porres - 3 November

SON OF AN UNKNOWN FATHER

Foreword to Sr Maeve McMahon’s biography of St Martin de Porres

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At his canonization in May 1962, Saint Martin de Porres was presented to the world by Pope John XXIII as exemplifying what he, the Pope, desired for the Second Vatican Council, due to open a few months later. What we want from the council, he said, is a new incentive to members of the Church to live a better life, a life of greater holiness and virtue. The Council was to inaugurate a spiritual renewal in the first place, and in choosing to canonize Martin when he did, Pope John was holding him up as an example, a teacher and a guide for the Council’s work.

Far from his own time and place, then, this humble mixed-race man, was recognised not just as a hero of the Christian way but as a hero for our times too. He lived the great commandment – love God, love your neighbour – in a heroic way: that was the simple and profound ‘secret’ of his holiness.

During his lifetime Martin de Porres won the hearts of all who knew him, whatever their race, origin or social position. Personally he had to negotiate some of the deepest prejudices with which the human race lives: racial, social, cultural. Sixty years after his canonization, Martin still helps us in responding to the great challenges the world continues to face. Racism, for example, in regard to which Martin has always been a particular comfort to those who suffer under it and a particular challenge to those who would promote it. As a lover of animals and a man close to nature, using its resources to bring healing to the sick, he stands with Francis of Assisi as a champion in the care of creation. As a man of many cultures he shows us how to live inter-culturally, allowing the simple teaching of the Gospel to strengthen our appreciation of diversity and our recognition of equality among all human beings. Pope Francis, the first pope from Latin America, knows well the history of marginalization and exclusion that has marked the experience of the people of that continent. But he also knows well how holiness lived at the peripheries and on the margins, the kind of holiness Martin represents, will transform the whole Church as Martin helped to transform the Church in Peru during his lifetime.

Martin’s wisdom – ‘he is a learned man’, one of his Dominican confreres said about him – flowed from his faith, his love for God, and the particular graces that God gave him. His response in every situation came directly from his lifelong friendship with God, creator of all and saviour of all. Martin saw everybody and everything in that theological light. Like Jesus, whom he loved with his whole heart from his earliest years, he wanted to be a bearer of love and a maker of peace in the violent world in which he found himself.

Learning from Martin, then, why would we ever make distinctions that exclude or oppress others? Why would we ever fail to welcome strangers, feed the hungry, visit the sick? Why would we ever fail to appreciate the variety in all that God has made since, in seeing it all, God found it to be ‘very good’?

Sister Maeve McMahon now follows up her lovely life of Saint Dominic, published some years ago, with this fresh and energetic retelling of the life of Saint Martin de Porres. For the reasons already given Martin is very much a saint for our times and Sister Maeve’s account of his life – simple and inspiring, in places surprising and thought-provoking – will help a new generation to know, to love, and to be challenged by this great man, Martin of Charity. We read that he was able to enter even where doors were locked. May this account of his life nourish minds and open hearts so that, for a new generation, Martin will be a leader, a teacher and a guide in the way of holiness.

All Souls -- 2 November

DEATH AND RESURRECTION

 

There is a tendency these days to sentimentalise death, to act and speak as if it were no big thing, just a ‘passing on’ or a ‘passing away’, a move into ‘the next room’ or an easy translation to ‘a better place’. There is often much laughter, especially at Irish funerals, teasing one another about what the dead person might be doing or thinking, having a pint of Guinness or watching the Cheltenham Gold Cup, for example.

All this is a way of comforting one another in difficult times. But it might also be a way of denying the full reality of what has happened. Popular films sometimes do this by having the ‘spirit’ of a person hovering over the places where they lived and telling us the story of the days and weeks that preceded their ‘passing’. As if they had not really died.

Some might think it a Christian thing to think about death in these terms, to speak of death as no big deal. Is it not one of the main beliefs of Christianity, our belief in an 'afterlife'? Is it not the high point of the comfort that religion is supposed to offer, this confidence about what happens after death?

In one sense death is a natural end to the life of the human animal and can be, very often, a happy release. But in another sense death is an unnatural experience because we are spiritual creatures who already sense something of eternity in ourselves. Our experiences of knowledge and love have something of the eternal about them, as philosophers and poets have often seen, and recounted. Death is an insult to something we sense about ourselves, an affront and a scandal.

And many people cannot enter into the levity, the false comfort, because they find the absence of someone they have loved unbearably sad. There is a terrible poignancy in being reminded of them, realising they are not in their accustomed place. Widowed men and women, orphaned children, bereaved parents, often have to bear privately the intense pain of feeling that a part of their own bodies has been taken away, a gap has been opened that can never again be filled, a wound has been inflicted for which there is no healing. They don’t want to go on and on about it ... and people wonder why they are not getting over it.

Faith in the resurrection of the body is a statement about God more than about ourselves or about stages of human existence. This is because faith, as Christians understand it, always has God as its direct concern. This is one reason for calling it a theological virtue. It means that whatever falls within the reach of faith does so only because it has something to do with God, it teaches us something about God.

Faith in the resurrection of the body is an aspect of faith in God the Holy Spirit, whom in the Creed we call 'the Lord, the giver of life’. The Latin term is beautiful: the Spirit is vivificantem, the vivifier. The God in whom we believe is Creator and Lord of all things, God of the living and not of the dead. The God in whom we believe wants life not death. God causes the wilderness to blossom and the barren womb to bear fruit.

The God in whom we believe is the Father who raised his Son Jesus from the dead and exalted Him in the Spirit to his own right hand. The Father allowed his only Son to enter the kingdom of the dead, to dwell amongst the dead and to rise from there. ‘I was dead’, Christ says, ‘but now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of hell’.

Our faith and hope are about God, what God is like, where God is in human experience, who it is God has promised to be for His people. For those who believe in God, the awful journey into loss, decline, and death is one Jesus has travelled before us, one through which we travel with Jesus, one from which all who belong to Jesus will be raised, as he was, by the power of God.

Our faith is not in an 'afterlife' but rather in the 'future life', 'the life of the world to come' as we say in the creed. It is not just a continuation of what we experience now but rather a new life which we might glimpse already from time to time, in our experiences of love particularly, but whose full reality we cannot imagine.

 

Rather than turning death into ‘no big thing’, Christian faith in the resurrection of the body enables us to face death in all its reality and sadness. Rather than pretending that death is not terrible and sad, Christian hope in the resurrection of the body looks that horror and sadness squarely in the face. Our faith and our hope is that God, who is with us in dying, rescues us from the kingdom of the dead to bring us into his own eternal life.

To believe in the resurrection of the body, then, is to believe something about God. It is to affirm that God is the God of life. It is also to say something about the reach of our hope. Founded on God's power, and on what God has already done in raising Jesus from death, our hope stretches ‘from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven’.

All Saints -- 1 November

Readings: Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14; Psalm 24; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

People are still unsettled by the gaps in the year: the move from winter into spring, new year, mid-summer, mid-winter. Where the seasons change not only can we expect colds and small ailments but other uncertainties also. What about darkness, storms and snow? Are we prepared for the time ahead? Many customs survive that mark the crossing of these gaps and the negotiation of these uncertainties. The gaps need to be filled, the bridges crossed, one part of the year linked with the next, perhaps spirits need placating. In the face of such moments of fear and threat, people often cope by making lots of noise, lighting fires, and dressing up, mimicking the spirits to frighten them off before they can frighten us.

Halloween takes us from autumn into winter, and continues to gather many such rituals to itself. The fact that in the northern hemisphere we are moving from light into darkness makes this transition more frightening than most. In the Christian calendar we celebrate All Saints and All Souls on the first two days of November. The saints are the men and women who stand in the gaps of the year, who fill gaps, build bridges, keep things going. When I was a novice I remember a prior thanking a departing brother for 'filling a gap'. It seems there was not much to say about his preaching or the other things he was involved in, his great contribution had been to fill a gap. It did not seem much at the time and was even amusing since the departing brother was quite portly. But perhaps filling a gap is a more profound, more important role than it seems at first.

Christ is the one who fills the most threatening of gaps. A new Moses, he stands in the breach (Ps 106:23; Amos 7:7) that alienates human beings most fundamentally from God. He is the just one who stands in the gap on behalf of the people (Ezekiel 22:30; 13:5), the mediator who negotiates on their behalf, the one who secures the wall of the city. Crucified on a hill just outside the city wall, his body points in every direction. He is the still point of the turning world, the rejected stone that has become the foundation stone, the one who enters into the deepest darkness of the great gap of death and causes light to shine there. He stands at the gate, a crucified hero, saviour of his people, the breach-mender.

At All Saints we celebrate all those people, especially the ones who have not become famous, who have filled gaps with the love of Christ. We all know two, or five, or eight such people, not known perhaps to any other of our friends. So already that is a lot of good people who in small, ordinary, but very important ways have done this: by helping the poor, teaching the ignorant, comforting the sorrowful, helping sinners to be reconciled, encouraging the downcast, forgiving injuries, visiting the sick and imprisoned, and so on. These are all significant gaps which are filled by friendship and love. The saints are those who bring hope where there is despair, light where there is darkness, pardon where there is injury, and love where there is hatred.

The saints are those marked with the sign of the cross, the sign of the just man standing in the gap. They are the poor in spirit and the pure in heart, hungering and thirsting for justice. They weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, They show mercy and they make peace. Understood in these ways there is nothing better that we can say about those who have gone before us: the good and holy people we have known filled gaps, and filled them with faith and hope and love.

Week 30 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Philippians 1.18b-26; Psalm 41/42; Luke 14.1,7-11

The teaching of Jesus is not just a piece of social etiquette such as we find in parts of the wisdom literature: better to take a humbler place with the possibility of being promoted than to take a higher place with the possibility of being demoted (and the embarassment that would go with it). When he speaks about a 'wedding banquet' he is always speaking about the wedding feast in the kingdom that is coming. Who is entitled to be there? What is the basis of that entitlement? Where does the invitation come from? And how are people to be ranked at the wedding feast of the kingdom? Is anyone more important than anyone else? It seems that the answer is 'no'

People are looking closely at each other. This happens at wedding banquets. People have keen eyes for each other, to see old friends and family members, but also to see who is more 'in', to see what the fashion and style is: it is very good to have been invited in the first place and yet we wonder whether others are preferred to us in some way. Who does not think about their place when they see what the seating arrangment is?

Here though we must look first at the host. Of what kind or character is the host? And who is likely to be the more important in his kingdom. In Jesus' parables, the host is often the Heavenly Father who is always gracious and generous, kind to the ungrateful and to the wicked. Saint Paul often talks about this, from his personal experience, and he does so again in the first reading today. He is open to whatever the Spirit of God wants to do with him - to depart and be with Christ or to remain and continue to serve Christ in his neighbour. 

So today's readings are about humility and about grace. The humble person compares himself not with his fellow guests or even with an idea of what he thinks of himself. The humble person compares himself only with Christ, thereby knowing his own greatness and his own nothingness. This is, once again, what Paul does, keeping his focus exclusively on Christ, and encouraging his readers to boast only of Christ and of what he is doing in them.

The invitation to the heavenly banquet is a matter of grace, not entitlement. If you manage to live with a humility and generosity comparable to that of Christ you are already living the life of the resurrection. Those who live humbly and in true charity are already guests at the banquet, they are already citizens of the kingdom of heaven.