8 April: The Passover Sequence, The Morning.

 

It was still dark when John came,

Tho’ the women had already gone,

With their bowls and their cloths,

Their herbs and oils,

Their spices and ointments.

Busy!

Fit for the King, they said.

John met them on the way,

Hurrying,

Worrying,

Fearful their strength would not move the great stone

Enclosing their Lord.

John came with news of Mary,

Safe,

Protected in his home.

John said, she had kept vigil

All the long hours,

Silent,

Sleepless,

Still.

Taking only a little water.

Waiting ….

Until, as dawn approached

She stood, at last.

Facing the death of the night,

The birth of the day.

John was exhausted,

He too had kept vigil

Beside her.

His charge – his mother.

We made him rest,

Take some food.

And so we sat,

Wordless,

Wondering,

Waiting, together.

Until, the darkness broken by the dawn,

The silence broken by the women.

Returning.

Breathless,

Breathing their unbelievable tale

Of an open, empty tomb,

All tidy and neat,

And of a young man in white

Waiting for them.

He must have been an angel, surely?

He had a message,

From the Lord, he said,

The Lord, Our Lord! would see us soon.

I heard John, beside me, breathe so softly …

“He promised, oh, he promised,

We must go to him, now, now.”

And gathering us like chickens,

we ran to him,

Ran to our Lord.

SPB

Angel from Wreay, Cumbria.

 

 

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7 April: The Passover Sequence IV. The Evening.

Saint Mary, Rye, Sussex.

It was darkness

When Nicodemus finally turned up.

With permissions.

With lights,

With tools,

A ladder,

Men.

Helpers so needed.

We had no strength, were exhausted,

Standing for hours

Waiting,

Watching.

It had all been waiting, these past days,

Our conversations muted.

Just being.

And what he seemed to want.

To be.

To be with us.

The love palpable,

Needing.

See …. they have almost released his hands.

When these Romans do a job,

They do it well.

There is no blood left to flow.

These men,

How delicately they support him.

How silent,

The chink of a tool,

A whisper,

As he is laid upon the ground.

So stony,

So blood-soaked

An execution ground.

See …. they remove those thorns,

No blood.

What possessed them to do that to him?

Why ……..?

So near now to Mary’s feet.

She doesn’t stir.

Watching, absorbed within herself,

Gathering her son,

Her pain,

All he has left to her,

Her sorrow.

See …. they clear as best they may

The detritus of the day

And wrap him in the cloth they brought.

They thought of everything!

We can think of nothing,

Except that he is gone

And the great chasm of loneliness we bear.

She moves as he is borne away,

Takes my arm.

Come home,

It will soon be dawn.

6 April: The Passover Sequence III: The Road.

As soon as we heard the news

We went to her,

To sit with her,

Hold her,

Protect her.

But she did not lament,

Falter.

No tears, her face was set ….

…. her bearing!

Oh that you had seen her!

But the sorrow was deep in her eyes,

In the softness of her voice,

The finality of her hands

To embrace each one.

Then swiftly gathering her shawl

About her head she went …. out,

Out …

To meet her Son.

And we were left, bewildered,

Broken.

We could hear them coming,

Such noise,

Jeering, shouting,

You know what these mobs are like.

While she stood

In the middle of the road, alone,

Waiting!

Three crosses!

And so he came to his Mother,

Eyes, raised from the ground,

For her.

Steadily approaching.

The said he had already fallen twice

And they brought a man to help him.

He could have left them all

And run

To their meeting!

Oh that you had seen them! ….

The soldiers tried …. tried, to move them on.

While they stayed,

And looked,

And knew,

And parted.

She came to us at last.

He walked on,

Alone.

SPB.

Winchester Cathedral.

 

4 April: The Passover Sequence, I. Yesterday.

 

Yesterday we walked with him,

talked with him.

Tho’ he was quiet,

Wanting us there.

So much to tell us,

So much we could not understand.

Yesterday ….

He spoke often of his Father.

How could we know?

– fishermen –

Caught within the rapture of their presence.

Unable to comprehend,

Held by the comfort of their closeness.

For it was, it was, … closeness.

More than himself,

A Son,

Submissive, obedient.

But what love, what love!

It touched us all,

Caught up,

– Tax-collectors –

He told us that he would die,

Leave us

When all within was caught in that love.

What could we do?

Yesterday

We ate with him.

Oh! He wanted that!

We wanted that!

“… with desire…”

He spoke of his Father

Intimate …

With us, wondering men,

Not knowing how we should respond.

Embraced in such love.

I mean, people do not love like that,

Do they?

Such foreboding

As if this was the last time.

And it was.

He told us

But we didn’t understand.

So we walked in the quietness of the evening,

Walked with him …

what words can tell you?

If there were tears they did not flow,

Instead we, all of us,

Bore the weight of his leaving.

We came to the garden, deserted,

Full of dark shadows,

The lingering scent of thesun-filled day.

He went on alone to speak with his Father.

We were left,

Working men,

Fishermen,

Chosen by the Son of God,

His brothers,

Each weighed down by his own self’s grief.

We slept.

He came back to us and found us sleeping,

Such gentle reproach …

‘Could you not …

Even one hour … ?’

And once again

Our hearts’ heaviness

Forbade his comfort.

His friends!

One of the others said later,

An angel had come to him.

I did not see.

I was asleep.

Ashamed.

But when he stood

Facing the mob in their torchlight

His features were beaded with blood.

We could have fallen back into the shadows,

And we did,

We could have run,

And we did.

We could leave him

And we did.

But that Love!

Who are you?

Who are we?

So we fell back into the shadows.

And he went on, alone,

With the mob.

19 March: Stations of the Cross II: Jesus takes up his Cross

SECOND STATION
JESUS TAKES UP HIS CROSS

Luke tells us the young man was one of the aristocracy. He would have been well known to Herod and the High Priestly Families, and able to gain entry anywhere in Jerusalem, including the Roman fort. Luke tells the story in Chapter 18, 18-23

---

I know this man; He is a good man, a good man.

He seemed to have something, to know something, something I could never quite get hold of. Something I could not understand.

I kept the law as well as anyone — God knows I tried to live by the rules. I should have been happy, knowing I was doing what God wanted but happiness was always just out of reach.

The Kingdom of God, Jesus said, is among you; it is close at hand, it belongs to the children. If you want to get there welcome the Kingdom like a child. Sell everything, give the money to the poor and follow me.

Follow him? Now?

---

Let us pray :

Lord, show us what we need to throw away to be able to take up our cross and follow you — now. Show us that you are at hand when life is difficult. Lord in your mercy.

Brocagh School, Glenfarne, Leitrim, c1969.

27 February: Judgement III

Father Daniel concludes his reflections on Judgement by looking at grace as the force of love. On the eve of Passover, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet; Fr Daniel reminds us of another favourite saint, Thérèse, who so faithfully loved a particular sister in her community. Thank you for these reflections, Daniel!

To love those who in some way repel me is not possible without grace, without the love of God. It is all about the decision to love. Once I make the decision to love them, to feel the awkwardness and do it anyway, I am drawing strength from Jesus mysteriously present in that person. Jesus who is King of the Universe yet stooped to wash the feet of the Twelve, who hides Himself in the Host and Chalice, at the mercy of our reverence (or otherwise).

In the convent with Saint Thérèse, there was one sister whom she found most difficult to live with, and who constantly criticized her. – The reality of community life! Yet, at the investigations for her beatification, this sister truly considered herself the favourite of Thérèse …

Famously, Saint Thérèse wrote: “I will love Jesus more than He has ever been loved before on earth!” – and she did! And ALL in hidden acts of love, searching for Jesus where on the surface he appeared to be absent….

Next time you are at Mass and preparing to offer to Almighty God with thanks the sacrifice of love – the death of His Son – and to receive Him hidden in the Host, let us each ask ourselves: am I aware enough of my own poverty and wretchedness to look for it in others – and to love the Christ hidden there?

At the first death, when we make our own unique passage from this life to the next (should that happen before He comes again), the Just Judge will ask us the same question He asked Peter, standing on the shore of the lake all those centuries ago:

Do you love me?

November 2, Jesus Beyond Dogma II: ii- Jesus Knew the Way

All of us search for moral truth – and we find ourselves in agreement with folk of other faiths on values like peace with justice, truth and honesty, with respect for human life and above all – the primacy of love.

Jesus came as one who appeared to know the way to all this; and the Resurrection told them he had succeeded. Relief and excitement followed – he’s found the way out! This is the Good News – the Lord is risen! Jesus has entered the new life where death and sin are not there; and he offers the same invitation to all – come and see.

When those first disciples proclaimed Jesus is Lord, they were saying they had witnessed the moment when all this became clear. They had seen him suffer and die, they had been there at his burial – but now he is here, fully alive. What was reassuring was he seemed to be simultaneously dead and fully alive – he carried the marks of death yet was fully alive – death had been stripped of its power to frighten. The Son of God “loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). By suffering for us He not only provided us with an example for our imitation, (cf. 1 Peter 2:21; Matthew 16:24; Luke 14:27) He blazed a trail, and if we follow it, life and death are made holy and take on a new meaning. (GS.22)¹

To believe Jesus is Lord means that life is no longer hovering on the brink of absurdity. No goodness is wasted and there is no ultimate defeat of human values. They are the building blocks for making all things new, to be transformed, as was the peak of human endeavour, in the Resurrection. This is what makes Christianity unchangingly always new, he has found the way through – the Lord is risen! What they were saying was some of them had seen him, walked and talked with him. Yahweh had kept his promise in this one man, who was saying to everyone – come and see.

This is telling us that the deaths of people like Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero… are only tragic in the way Calvary is tragic. With Easter morning death has lost its sting. The Resurrection reveals the divine intention with regard to everything that is good, anything that reflects the full human response to God is doing the Father’s will – i.e. creating the kind of world of the Messianic promises: peace with justice; coming to the help of the poor and powerless; universal fraternity and the freedom to worship the one God in whatever way is appropriate.

AMcC

1Gaudium et Spes – Joy and Hope – is the Second Vatican Council’s Document on the Church in the Modern World. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.

24 October, May we find Christ walking with us: I, On the (iron) road.

 

 

This phrase from one of Friar Chris’s bidding prayers stayed with me. He had been preaching on the disciples on the way to Emmaus, but my mind switched to everyday scenes. Christ is walking with us, if we care to open our eyes.

You can find Fr Chris’s homily from this link: Chris.s.emmaus.2017

Every week I travel by train and have time to observe the esprit de corps among the railway workers. Thanks to computerised rosters, two men or women may not work together very often, but still they have to rely on each other. Day by day I hear the same affectionate banter that you can discern in Jesus’ calling Peter ‘the Rock’, or James and John his ‘Sons of Thunder’.

There are greetings for regular travellers, often by name. ‘Morning Will!’ It has been known for news of my son to reach me through his railwayman friend rather than direct from the horse’s mouth.

It’s impressive to see how railway people take care of disabled travellers. Ramps for wheelchairs, an arm for a blind traveller, escorts for a frail old person between platforms or to the taxi rank.

I know I’ve made these points before, but they are worth repeating. And there are other traveller’s joys to be had from the cheerful chap in the motorway toll booth, the staff in the café or the transport enthusiast bursting to share his customised car with the people at the next table. Let’s open our eyes, open our ears and open our hearts to the Christ we do not at first recognise.

September 13. ‘Jesus beyond Dogma’, XI: Forgiveness is a nonsense word if …

Forgiveness is a nonsense word for anyone unaware of being an oppressor. The risen Lord, with the 5 wounds – at once dead and alive – shows that we cannot obliterate or remove what we have done. God is faithful to himself as Creator and will destroy nothing created, but through the risen Lord restores all things to us again, giving us the second chance – to say yes where we formerly said no. This reality of God to keep the past open gets rid of our delusion that oppressive violence has the last say.

God identifies with the victim through his incarnate reality as pure victim – a mature human being who owns no violence, nor seeks revenge, this union of victim and Father – who knows no death – now becomes our memory and our salvation through the Resurrection. Before ever we become conscious of it we are swallowed up by a world saturated with oppressive victimising.

God is the presence to which all reality is present, giving back our memories of our oppressive living because my whole self is in need of redemption, including my past. My self as it is now is what my past is presently doing. It is not acting, deciding independently of where I have been. I am not just a product of my past, I have the ability through memory and reflection to be prompted to transcend – to take another way. While my past is unalterable – it has happened; how can this set me free?

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment of all that you have done and been; the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill-done and done to others’ harm; which once you took for exercise of virtue – T.S. Eliot: Little Gidding II.

Forgiveness cannot be abstract – it brings freedom and the recovery of my past in hope. It is seeing the victim as saviour that is crucial. But how does it work? Every saint has a past, and every sinner a future.

The disciples’ first faith in Jesus had to be transformed – when they met him they left their nets and followed him – after Calvary they went back to their nets, as if Jesus had never happened. It is the stranger on the shore – Jesus as he is, not as they think him to be, who shows the way to real living. He is preparing food, he doesn’t need the fish they’ve brought, but invites them to bring it and share – and it is in the sharing that they recognise him.

He is calling now as he did then – in between is their history of betrayal. His 3 fold questioning of Peter has found many interpretations, but to see it as highlighting Peter’s 3 fold disowning is to miss the whole point. Peter cannot be free without recovering his past, if he is to be the Peter Jesus sees, and no longer the hesitant and fearful Simon. Recalling memory in this positive way is very different from being made to remember what you’ve done.

Matthew’s Gospel sends them back to Galilee, and from there be sent to the whole world – not to return to fishing – I will make you a fisher of men – it is a promise kept. They go back to their origins to emerge in a new way, as Jesus told Nicodemus. They had started as men of hope and found themselves abandoning and betraying. In seeing this in the light of Jesus risen they experience forgiveness and find themselves trusted again. This highlights conversion as being for the whole self, and not simply starting afresh and trying to do better. Peter realises that his betrayal does not cause God to betray.

But simply recovering my past is not, in itself, an experience of Grace – it can haunt and dismay me. When done in the context of Resurrection there is a new perspective. The Lord who has come back risen still wants me as I am and my love. Simon, do you love me is asked in the context of all that he has done and is an invitation to carry on growing. The recovery of pardoned memory is crucial for moving forward in hope. There is nothing about me that God finds unacceptable, including my sin; since God is faithful to me no matter what.

Before the risen Jesus can be preached to the City that killed him, he needs to be back with those dearest to him, and show their part in his death – they had the greatest hope and so the greatest disillusion. They need to see their part in the violence of his death but within the context of the pure victim – back with them and desiring their company. This didn’t just bring a re-think to the Apostles – they are being evangelised by the pure victim risen, betrayed but never betraying. My connection with him led him to the cross, not so his connection with me. To know the reality of my untruthful living, and not be intimidated by it through the Resurrection, is memory restored in hope.

He promised that the Spirit would lead us into all truth, and make clear everything Jesus had said – we are being given both a past and a future in an entirely new way. Forgiveness means seeing the victim as saviour and what I can become as a consequence.

AMcC

September 6. ‘Jesus beyond Dogma’, 4: Creation and Christ

We have God totally alive, without violence or death; who has revealed himself as loving humanity so much as to give himself to us so that what is God’s life can be ours for the receiving – to live outside and beyond the culture of death – even now. But he reveals something else as well – God is Creator-God.

We have become accustomed to speak of creation and salvation as two separate realities: first there was creation which happened at the beginning; then the fall from grace in which we fell, needing someone to lift us out; God sent Jesus to save the situation. Looking at this model, it doesn’t look as though Jesus has made much difference; so we struggle and wait hoping finally that we’ll get the visa.

This model does nothing to encourage people to take seriously what they might do to improve things for themselves and others – other than treating symptoms by works of charity and overlooking the cause; seeing Christianity as promoting social progress. The problem with creation-fall-redemption-heaven model is not between redemption and heaven, but in the relationship between creation and heaven. There is a very big difference between a factory that makes cars and a garage that repairs them. If creation and redemption are two different realities it makes it difficult to see a relationship between Creator and Redeemer – in this scenario it’s not clear what God has to do with Jesus.

The Apostolic witness tells us there is a clear relationship, and that to say that God so loved the world that he sent is Son is not sufficient. This certainly reveals God as love but doesn’t show how that love has anything to do with creation. The hints we get from the apostolic group that there is something more are to be found in New Testament passages about the pre-existence of Christ, most notably –

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made – John.1.1-3.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power – Hebrews 1.1-3.

Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live – 1Corinthians 8.6.

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross – Colossians 1.13-20.

We must ask: what was it that enabled the apostolic group to see this, to link creation and salvation in such a way that they come to be seen as the same thing? They weren’t asking questions, they were affirming something they already knew, from the Jesus they knew, that he was in some way involved in creation.

It seems that the Resurrection not only changed their perception of God by removing any remnant of violence, allowing God to be understood as total love, but it also brought a change in perception of God Creator. Jesus didn’t just add salvation to the already existing Jewish understanding of God Creator. The human perception of God as Creator is not a simple concept. There are many accounts of gods creating and Genesis seems to suggest creation not from nothing but from a chaos needing to be ordered. This means that God is responsible not so much for creating everything out of nothing as for producing the order of the world. One of the things the Resurrection actually did was to separate God from any link with the order of this world, which has become a violent order based on death.

A McC