11 May: Safe at Anchor

Safe at anchor, now at rest,
With the many of our fleet,
But once again we will set sail
Our Saviour Christ to meet.

This verse is inscribed on the grave of William Marsh, one of at least three master mariners in Saint John’s churchyard, Woodbridge, Suffolk. He was in his 80th year, so surely he did not drown at sea, but died safe at anchor in his own house in the town.

One last time he set sail to meet Christ; the One he would have met more than once on the ‘lonely sea and the sky’ of Masefield’s poem, Sea Fever. Or as Psalm 107 has it:

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.

Let’s pray for all seafarers, and thank God for their hard work and the good things they bring us. Let’s remember, too, the port chaplains of Stella Maris, ministering to sailors and their families often far away.

HMS Vale, in the upper photo, saw service with the Swedish Navy before becoming a Royal Navy training vessel and finally a cafe on the River Deben near Woodbridge. There you can sit in peace, watching the birds and the constantly changing light over the water.

14 April: The Call to Love and Serve

A reflection from Father Anthony Charlton on his vocation – and ours.

During these nine days, some of us will be praying a novena of prayer for vocations to the priesthood and religious life, which ends next Sunday; known as Good Shepherd Sunday.

I was ordained as a priest 49 years ago this June. This gives me pause to reflect on how it all began for me. Each of us, through our baptism, is called to a life of love and service. We are each called to have Christ as the centre of our life. For me, I realised that God has asked me share in his life in this particular way as a priest.

When I look back on my young life, growing up on the Clapham Park Estate, I can see how much being part of the local parish of St Bede’s had an important influence on our priorities as a family. I enjoyed my primary school that had just been built. I was a Mass server and my parents, in different ways, were involved in aspects of parish life. My Dad was in the Knights of St Columba and the Guild of the Blessed Sacrament, and my Mum, among other things, made marmalade for our Christmas Fairs and Fêtes.

Also crucial for me was the witness of my parish priest, Father Joe. I do remember being asked, at my interview for the Junior Seminary, why I wanted to be a priest. I said that having the example of Fr Joe and several mission priests that had come to our parish was an attractive advert for priesthood. It was their joy and sense of fun and deep happiness that was infectious. They were deeply human, ordinary, yet showed great love and care. All this encouraged me to open my heart to see if this is what God wanted of me.

Much has changed in the last sixty years in the Catholic Church in this country, influenced as we are by the changing attitudes and demands made of us both politically and socially. There is a temptation to look back to the good old days when things seemed simpler and more straightforward. But more than ever the call for every one of us is the call to love and service and we need nurture that call in our family life, our school life and in our parish life. It is essential that we experience a life of care and prayer, a life of joy and wonder.

Let us pray for vocations among our parish and families so that our young people may hear and experience the call to love and serve in the priesthood and religious life. Amen.

30 December: Hearing the song of angels

William Hilton (died 1396) was from near Southwell where Mrs Turnstone and I recently spent a long weekend. This is from Hilton’s ‘The Song of Angels’.

Our Lord God is an endless being without changing, almighty without failing, supreme
wisdom, light, truth without error or darkness, supreme goodness, love, peace, and sweetness.
Therefore the more that a soul is united, fastened, conformed, and joined to our Lord, the more stable and strong it is, the more wise and clear, good and peaceable, loving and virtuous it is, and so it is more perfect.

Do you think we can invert that second paragraph, thus?

The more stable and strong a soul is, the more wise and clear, good and peaceable, the more perfect; the more it is united, fastened, conformed, and joined to our Lord.

Why did this thought arise? Because we met a cathedral guide who was stable and strong, wise and clear, good and peaceable, loving and virtuous. He made us welcome, showed us the corners of the Minster he loved, unfolded the history of the town in the context of national history; yett, he said, it was not the Christian religion that enthused him, but the history that fascinated him and that he wanted to share.

Do we all have to follow the same star?

The angel with the censer is from York Minster.

1 August: a theology of the Body, IV.

Now, notions of what it is to be a human, and so a sexual, being are in flux. What is taken for granted today may be rejected tomorrow. Anyone who stakes much on passing theories risks being terribly hurt. We need deep roots. Let us, then, try to appropriate the fundamental principles of Christian anthropology while reaching out in friendship, with respect, to those who feel estranged by them. We owe it to the Lord, to ourselves, and to our world, to give an account of what we believe, and of why we believe it to be true.

Many are perplexed by traditional Christian teaching on sexuality. To such we offer a word of friendly counsel. First: try to acquaint yourself with Christ’s call and promise, to know him better through the Scriptures and in prayer, through the liturgy and study of the Church’s full teaching, not just of snippets here and there. Take part in the Church’s life. The horizon of the questions with which you set out will be enlarged in this way, as will your mind and heart. Secondly, consider the limitations of a purely secular discourse on sexuality. It needs to be enriched. We need adequate terms to speak of these important things. We shall have a precious contribution to make if we recover the sacramental nature of sexuality in God’s plan, the beauty of Christian chastity, and the joy of friendship, which lets us see that great, freeing intimacy can be found also in non-sexual relationships. 

The point of the Church’s teaching is not to curtail love but to enable it. At the end of its prologue, our 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church repeats a passage from The Roman Catechism of 1566: ‘The whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope or for action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love.’ By this love the world was made, our nature formed. This love was made manifest in Christ’s example, teaching, saving passion, and death. It is vindicated in his glorious resurrection, which we shall celebrate with joy during the fifty days of Easter. May our Catholic community, so many-faceted and colourful, bear witness to this love in truth.

+Czeslaw Kozon, København — Praeses
+Anders Cardinal Arborelius OCD, Stockholm
+Peter Bürcher, Em. Reykjavik
+Bernt Eidsvig CanReg, Oslo
+Berislav Grgić, Tromsø
P Marco Pasinato, Ap.Adm. Helsinki
+David Tencer OFMCap, Reykjavik
+Erik Varden OCSO, Trondheim

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31 July: a theology of the body III

The integration within ourselves of masculine and feminine characteristics can be hard. The Church recognises this. She wishes to embrace and console all who experience hardship. /

As your bishops we stress this: we are here for everyone, to accompany all. The yearning for love and the search for sexual wholeness touch human beings intimately. In this area we are vulnerable. Patience is called for on the path towards wholeness, and joy in every forward step. A quantum leap is made, for example, in progress from promiscuity to fidelity, whether or not the faithful relationship fully corresponds to the objective order of a nuptial union sacramentally blessed. Every search for integrity is worthy of respect, deserving of encouragement. Growth in wisdom and virtue is organic. It happens gradually. At the same time growth, to be fruitful, must proceed towards a goal. Our mission and task as bishops is to point towards the peaceful, life-giving path of Christ’s commandments, narrow at the outset but growing broader as we advance. We would let you down if we offered less; we were not ordained to preach little notions of our own. 

In the Church’s hospitable fellowship, there is room for all. The Church, says an ancient text, is ‘the mercy of God descending on mankind’. This mercy excludes no one. But it sets a high ideal. The ideal is spelt out in the commandments, which help us grow out of too narrow notions of self. We are called to become new women and men. In all of us there are elements of chaos that need to be ordered. Sacramental communion presupposes coherently lived consent to the terms of the covenant sealed in Christ’s Blood. It may happen that circumstances make a Catholic unable, for a time, to receive the sacraments. He or she does not therefore cease to be a member of the Church. Experience of internal exile embraced in faith can lead to a deeper sense of belonging. Exiles often turn out that way in Scripture. Each of us has an exodus journey to make, but we do not walk alone.  

At times of trial, too, the sign of God’s first covenant surrounds us. It calls us to seek the sense of our existence, not in fragments of the rainbow’s light, but in the divine source of the full, gorgeous spectrum, which is of God and calls us to be God-like. As disciples of Christ, who is God’s Image (Col 1.15), we cannot reduce the sign of the rainbow to less than the life-giving compact between the Creator and creation. God has bestowed on us ‘great and precious promises, so that through them [we] may share in the divine nature’ (2 Pet 1.4). God’s image imprinted on our being calls out for sanctification in Christ. Any account of human desire that sets the bar lower than this is inadequate from a Christian point of view. 

3 June: Our devout, noble undertaking.

Procession with Music and dancing, St Maurice, Switzerland, Uganda Martyrs pilgrimage. Today is their feast.

from a homily of Bishop Erik Vardy for Pentecost 2023.

…

The Church is a mixed-voice choir. What shows Christ present in her is the miracle that all these voices are tuned to symphony.

There is a variety of gifts, but one Spirit; all sorts of service, but one Lord; different manifestations of power, but one good purpose. Unity is, in the Church, a criterion of authenticity. When the Church is truly herself, a single sublime Keynote resounds through all her different voices. Jan van Ruusbroec liked to speak of Christ as the Church’s Cantor. We can, I think, go further and say that he is the Keynote. He, the Word by whom all things were made, is the unifying principle of the universe. Likewise he is, at the level of the Church, the foundion of all harmony. To be a Christian is to grow towards perfect pitch …

To speak about communion is easy and pleasant. To live out communion, to deliver oneself to it, is very demanding. To live as a member of Christ’s Body is to breathe the Spirit of Jesus, who emptied himself unto death, giving his life for his friends. We talk a lot about synodality these days. It is an excellent term, but we need to understand it correctly. The Tower of Babel was preeminently a synodal undertaking, though self-destructive, which is why the Lord undermined it. To be on the road together is a fine thing, but what really matters is where one is bound and whose lead one follows. Anyone who claims to be a bearer of the Spirit, and thus to abide in Christ, ‘must walk just as he walked’ (1 John 2.6). Else he or she is a fraud.

Any new melody must harmonise with the Keynote that is from everlasting, otherwise it is but a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal  (1 Corinthians 13.1). Today the Lord gives us his Spirit by which he would renew the face of the earth.

May we, then, be renewed as human beings and become true Christians, messengers of Christ’s hope to the world. And may our devout, noble undertaking find credible expression in our lives. Amen.

18 March: Lenten Pilgrimage XIII, In the same boat.

A few weeks ago I heard a bishop’s letter describing how people have not returned to Mass since the end of the pandemic. We can all think of reasons why this should be, but should I stay or should I go? Despite all, I stay, even if my feelings of exasperation are not infrequent. But read on; there are good reasons to stay on board.

The other day a friend shared these words from a song by Robert Lebel which keeps her steadfast in her mission as a hospital chaplain in these troubled times: ‘How many they are, the blessed, the ones no-one ever talks about … how many they are, these nobodies, these blessed everyday people.’

Yes, there are many women and men who help us to believe that Christ has not abandoned his Church. Let us not leave them to fall by giving in to the temptation to abandon ship during the storm. To do that would be to abandon the poor as well.

Dominique Greiner, Croire-La Croix, 12 November 2022

You can find the text of the song in French, and a YouTube recording here.

Image from Saint David’s Cathedral.

Faith is never about myself alone, but about those around us:

Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Matthew 25:44

7 February: Pope Benedict’s Angelus IV.

Pope Leo XIII

There is a tradition for the Pope to greet pilgrims at Angelus time, around midday, and share a few thoughts, often on the readings for the day. We are glad to offer a selection from Pope Benedict XVI’s reflections, aimed at a general audience rather than academic theologians. Sometimes there are interesting asides addressed to particular groups of pilgrims, showing Benedict’s human side. Another from the Papal Residence at Castel Gandolfo, rarely visited by Pope Francis, dated 5 September 2010

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

First I would like to apologize for arriving late! I have just returned from Carpineto Romano where, 200 years ago, Pope Leo XIII, Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, was born. I thank the Lord for having been able to celebrate the Eucharist with his fellow citizens on this important anniversary. I now wish briefly to present my Message published a few days ago addressed to the young people of the world for the 26th World Youth Day that will be taking place in Madrid in a little less than a year.

The theme I have chosen for this Message uses an expression from St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians: “Planted and built up in Jesus Christ, firm in the faith” (2: 7). It is definitely a proposal that goes against the tide! Indeed who today suggests to young people that they be “rooted” and “firm”? Rather uncertainty, mobility and volubility are extolled… all aspects that reflect a culture unsure about basic values, about the principles on whose basis to direct and regulate life. In fact, because of my experience and the contacts I have with youth I know well that every generation, indeed, every individual person, is called to take anew the path of the discovery of life’s meaning. And it is for this very reason that I chose to propose again a Message in the biblical style that evokes the images of a tree and a house. A young person, in fact, is like a growing tree: to develop healthily it needs deep roots which when stormy gales come will keep it firmly planted in the ground. The image of the building under construction also recalls the need for good foundations so that the house will be solid and safe.

And this is the heart of the Message: it is inherent in the words “in Christ” and “in the faith”. The full maturity of the person, his or her inner stability, are founded in the relationship with God, a relationship that passes through an encounter with Jesus Christ. A relationship of deep trust, of authentic friendship with Jesus, can give a young person what he or she needs to face life: serenity and interior enlightenment, an aptitude for thinking positively, broadmindedness with regard to others, the readiness to pay in person for goodness, justice and truth. One last and very important aspect: in order to become a believer a young person is supported by the faith of the Church; if no one is an island, neither is the Christian who discovers in the Church the beauty of faith shared with others in brotherhood and in the service of charity.

My Message to young people is dated 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. May the light of Christ’s Face shine in the heart of every young person! And may the Virgin Mary accompany and protect communities and youth groups towards the important Meeting in Madrid in 2011.

---

After the Angelus:

I address a special Greeting to the community of Castel Gandolfo which is celebrating today the feast of its Patron, St Sebastian, and I willingly extend it to the delegation that has come from Châteauneuf du Pape. I wish you all a good Sunday.

23 December: Cracking the Cathedral Code!

Stop there for a moment! Look at what’s in front of you. This is the quire or choir altar in Canterbury Cathedral.

• It’s decked in purple, code for repentance and waiting. We’ve been waiting for Christmas, we’ve been repenting, trying to change our ways to be ready to meet Jesus.
• There are four Greek letters, embroidered in gold. Gold for a King. It was one of the gifts brought by the wise men.
• Ά and ω are the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet. Code for Jesus is before all and comes after all.
• The two other letters, ϗ and ρ, or Chi and Ro tend to get mixed together in different geometrical ways. This is because they represent the first two letters of Kristos, Greek for Christ. Artistic licence turns the chi into different shaped crosses, to represent the Cross of Christ.
• (Sometimes we see ICXC, where the ‘I’ is a Greek ‘J’; ‘C’, is ‘S’; ‘X’ is ‘K’ or ‘Ch’; the early Christians liked this sort of code)
• So the altar frontal tells us to wait for Jesus the king, the first and last.
• On the altar are a crucifix and candles. Christ, risen from death, is the light of the world.
• and there is a Christmas tree. Remember how God called to Moses from the burning bush? You stand on Holy Ground, Moses was told. And so do we.
• At the back, behind the altar, is the chair of Saint Augustine on which Archbishops are seated on their appointment. We stand on Holy Ground. The chair is code for the Communion of Saints, the faith handed down by the shepherds since 597 when Augustine came to Canterbury.

So, call it praying or thinking or day-dreaming, I had a few good minutes in the Cathedral that morning!

4 December, Advent Light V: In the beginning.

It’s a while since we heard from Fr James Kurzynski, the astronomer and parish priest, scientist and theologian. He’s been reading Pope Benedict and reflects on his reading in this article.

This extract is from the beginning; do follow the link for a most interesting lead.

Reflecting on Genesis 1:20-24, Benedict XVI (writing then as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) begins with a beautiful summary of two, core realisations about the Creation narratives and the Church’s authentic understanding of them.*

We can sum up the first in this way: As Christians we read Holy Scripture with Christ. He is our guide all the way through it. He indicates to us in reliable fashion what an image is and where the real, enduring content of a biblical expression may be found. At the same time he is freedom from a false slavery to literalism and a guarantee of the solid, realistic truth of the Bible, which does not dissipate into a cloud of pious pleasantries but remains the sure ground upon which we can stand. Our second realisation was this: Faith in creation is reasonable. Even if reason itself cannot perhaps give an account of it, it searches in faith and finds there the answer that it had been looking for.

*In the Beginning.: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Eerdmans New York, 1995, p21.