6 June, Reflections on the Mass II:‘Those Who Sing, Pray Twice’

This is the second of Canon Anthony Charlton’s reflections on the Eucharist. These pilgrims are singing and playing their instruments as they gather at the Abbey of St Maurice in Switzerland for the annual Pilgrimage for the Martyrs of Africa. St Maurice and his Companions were Egyptian Roman soldiers, martyred in what is now St Maurice, but the pilgrimage is timetabled to be near the feast of the Uganda Martyrs, 3rd June.

So here we are, the gathered people of God, and we have responded to the invitation of Jesus to come and celebrate. Jesus has invited us.

Note that the first instruction in the Roman Missal says that the Entrance chant begins as the priest enters with the servers. I know there are some who prefer a ‘quiet Mass’, because they are not keen on singing. The purpose of this chant is to open the celebration, foster unity of all who are gathered, introduce their thoughts to the liturgical season and accompany the procession. The entrance Antiphon can be sung by a choir; or often a hymn is sung, based on a psalm. If there is no singing, the congregation is encouraged to recite the antiphon together.

It is important that singing should be an essential part of each celebration. We use what talent we have to praise and give thanks to God. Singing creates unity, brings about unity. St Augustine said: ‘Those who sing, pray twice.’ The first prayer is the words we use. The second prayer is the extra we add to those words when we express them in song.

When the priest reaches the altar, as a sign of reverence he kisses it. The Altar, says the General instruction of the Roman missal, ‘should occupy a place where it is truly the centre toward which the attention of the whole congregation of the faithful naturally turns.’ These rules are repeated in the Order of Dedication of a Church and an Altar; this ensures that newly-dedicated altars are freestanding, so that the priest may face the congregation (IV:8). The altar is known as the altar of the sacrifice of the cross and the table of thanksgiving. In our church we have retained the old High Altar, because of its artistic merit.

As the priest goes to the chair we have the Penitential Rite, which needs to be simple and brief. It is time to acknowledge our sinfulness. During the pause, one writer suggests that ‘we reflect in silence on our human condition and implore the divine mercy.’ This is different from celebrating the sacrament of Reconciliation. The purpose of the Penitential Rite is to acknowledge our sins in order to enter the celebration with a humble spirit.

The blessing and sprinkling of water may replace the Penitential Act as a reminder of Baptism, and this is especially recommended for the Easter Season.

We then say, or sing, a song of praise that has been sung for over 1500 years: the Gloria. And after this ancient song of praise, the priest introduces the opening prayer, knows as The Collect. All of us, together with the priest, observe a brief silence so that we may be conscious of the fact that we are in God’s presence. The prayer expresses the character of the celebration. The text of the prayer is usually in four parts: an address to God by some title, an acknowledgement of God’s mighty deeds, a petition and a concluding formula.

In this third week of Easter, we pray:

“May your people exult for ever, O God, in renewed youthfulness of spirit, so that, rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption, we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”

Canon Father AnthonyParish Priest

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3 May, Francis on Joseph II: A tender and loving father.

Joseph was a tender and loving father: continuing our reading from Pope Francis’s letter on Saint Joseph, husband of Mary and adoptive father of Jesus.

Joseph saw Jesus grow daily “in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favour” (Luke 2:52). As the Lord had done with Israel, so Joseph did with Jesus: he taught him to walk, taking him by the hand; he was for him like a father who raises an infant to his cheeks, bending down to him and feeding him (cf. Hosea 11:3-4).

In Joseph, Jesus saw the tender love of God: “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him” (Psalm 103:13).

In the synagogue, during the praying of the Psalms, Joseph would surely have heard again and again that the God of Israel is a God of tender love,[11] who is good to all, whose “compassion is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9).

Tenderness is the best way to touch the frailty within us. Pointing fingers and judging others are frequently signs of an inability to accept our own weaknesses, our own frailty. Only tender love will save us from the snares of the accuser (cf. Revelation 12:10). That is why it is so important to encounter God’s mercy, especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we experience his truth and tenderness. Paradoxically, the evil one can also speak the truth to us, yet he does so only to condemn us. We know that God’s truth does not condemn, but instead welcomes, embraces, sustains and forgives us. That truth always presents itself to us like the merciful father in Jesus’ parable (cf. Luke 15:11-32). It comes out to meet us, restores our dignity, sets us back on our feet and rejoices for us, for, as the father says: “This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (v. 24).

Even through Joseph’s fears, God’s will, his history and his plan were at work. Joseph, then, teaches us that faith in God includes believing that he can work even through our fears, our frailties and our weaknesses. He also teaches us that amid the tempests of life, we must never be afraid to let the Lord steer our course. At times, we want to be in complete control, yet God always sees the bigger picture.

_____________________________________________

Bishop John Jukes OFM used to talk to children about baby Jesus’s fingernails – he needed them trimming just as they did, and perhaps needed some persuasion for one of their parents to be able to perform this service. A tender parent, like Joseph and Mary, will eventually be able to cut their child’s nails without fuss, and later, teach the little one to trim their own nails.

The Holy Family with Saint Francis, image from C.D.

1 February: An impossible situation

It will soon be a year since the war began in Ukraine. Here is an article from Missio.org.uk describing some of the ways in which the Church supports refugees in the surrounding countries of Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

UKRAINE UPDATE

In Romania, local parishioners are doing what they can to provide mattresses, bedsheets, pillows, and food, as well as nappies and basic sanitary items.

The National Director for Missio in Romania, Fr Eugen, shared: ‘I recently received two young women with a child. They told me very simply: “We want to stay the three of us in the same room; we do not have any food; we do not have any money; we want to stay until we find a job and get some money to be able to rent a room and to get the basic things for living”. I try to provide what they need, and I also pray for them to get a job to be able to live independently.

‘I try to understand their souls: to understand how hard it is to daily depend on the compassion of others for an undetermined time, to start life from zero and with the family split by the war. May God have compassion on them’.

John* is a Ukrainian currently residing in a Catholic parish house in Romania. When the war broke out in February, John was working overseas. He knows that the government has banned all men aged 18-60 from leaving the country, and fears that he will be forced to join the Ukrainian military if he was to return home. The conflict continues to rage, but John does not want to fight, saying: ‘I don’t want to kill or be killed’. If John was to return now, he fears that he will possibly be arrested, jailed, fined and penalised by having his citizenship stripped. He explained that the conflict is multifaceted; there are political, historical, economic, cultural and social complexities that make a ceasefire almost impossible. He indicated that what we see in the media and the reality of the situation are very different.

‘We don’t know when the war will be stopping. It is very dangerous for everybody… I ask all of the world, for help to stop this war. We need to stop this war so everybody can go back home’.

John is almost completely dependant on the charity of our global Church: ‘I am very grateful to Fr Eugen because he found us this place – to come here and to live here. Not only me, but other Ukrainian refugees have been able to live here. All of us are very, very grateful to the Catholic Church as they have helped us very much, regardless of religion or denomination to which we belong. Really, we cannot forget this experience, this help that we got from the Catholic Church’.

The Catholic Church in Romania and surrounding countries continues to provide accommodation, food and emergency packages containing essential toiletries to those who have arrived with nothing. Trauma counselling, education and employment are also being provided, where possible.

Please continue to pray for peace in Ukraine.

*John’s name has been changed to protect his identity

24 January: Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, VII.

Photo: Mazur/cbcew.org.uk

As we join with other Christians around the world for the Week of Prayer we pray that our hearts will be open to see and hear the many ways in which racism continues to destroy lives, and to discern the steps we can take as individuals and communities to heal the hurts and build a better future for everyone.

Day 7 Agency

Matthew 5:1–8 
Job 5:1-16

Commentary

Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes begins with Jesus seeing the crowds. In that crowd he must have seen those who were peacemakers, the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, men and women who mourned, and those who hungered for justice. In the Beatitudes Jesus not only names people’s struggles, he names what they will be: the children of God and inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Howard Thurman, African American theologian and spiritual advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed, “the religion that Jesus lived produced the kind of life for Him that identifies with the downtrodden, outcast, broken, and disinherited of the world.” Yet, Thurman also believed that, “It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed – this, despite the gospel.”

If we listen hard enough, we will hear a diversity of voices crying out under the weight of oppression. Action is needed today to bring love, hope, justice and liberation for us and others in the future. Oppression of any kind demands that each of us chooses to engage in order to eradicate the injustice(s) that break our hearts open.

In prayer we align our hearts with the heart of God, to love what God loves and to love as God loves. Prayer with integrity therefore aligns and unites us – beyond our divisions – to love what, whom and how God loves, and to express this love in our actions.

Let us all work together with God in our hope and commitment to shut injustice’s mouth and eradicate oppression in all areas of our society.

Reflection

I see you there,
You – blessed ones,
You – poor in spirit,
You – mourners, meek ones and merciful ones.
I hear your stomachs rumble with hunger. 
Is righteousness enough to satisfy your thirst,
like rain upon the earth?
You have had your fill of the schemes of crafty ones,
been force fed so-called wisdom by the wily.
With pure and undivided hearts
you train your eyes upon God’s cause – 
to lift high the perceived lowly,
to bring to safety any who are in danger of being trampled by pride-filled footsteps of trespassers,
or stabbed by weaponised words hell-bent on cutting down and dehumanising.
Shut the mouth of injustice, God,
tear down the strongholds of the power-hungry
and give us the desire and the strength
to rebuild a realm
where all who are wounded are brought comfort,
where the inheritance is shared by all,
where swords and shields are beaten
into tools for sowing peace and reconciliation,
where healing abounds
and mouths open to sing stories of shared blessing and hope.

Prayer

God of justice,
Empower us to be agents of your grace and mercy.
Bless us with the courage to relinquish our power.
Bless us with the humility to stand with the oppressed.
Bless us with the integrity to love our neighbours 
as we ourselves would seek to be loved.

Questions

Can you think of a time when you felt powerless? How would you have liked others to respond?

Think about the ways you might have influence in your local community? How might you use that influence to help those who feel powerless?

Around the world whole communities find themselves powerless as a result of corruption and exploitation. How might the choices we make in our daily lives impact these situations?

23 October: Liberty the right of every human.

Oscar Murillo’s dehumanised migrant workers.

Yesterday we witnessed child labour in XIX Century England, but exploitation is still with us. I read recently that Garment Workers in England are still receiving no more than a fraction of the National Minimum Wage, legally established since 1999, and exploitation is rife elsewhere in the fashion industry world-wide. Here is John Wesley on slavery and justice. His first sentence sets out with great clarity why slavery is evil. Following on from that realisation, there should be action: give liberty to whom liberty is due … every child of man. The prayer that follows is also a homily that every one of us should reflect upon, for slavery, or near slavery, still exists in different forms and we all benefit from poor people’s suffering.

Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature.

   If, therefore, you have any regard to justice, (to say nothing of mercy, nor the revealed law of God,) render unto all their due. Give liberty to whom liberty is due, that is, to every child of man, to every partaker of human nature. Let none serve you but by his own act and deed, by his own voluntary choice. Away with all whips, all chains, all compulsion! Be gentle toward all men; and see that you invariably do unto every one as you would he should do unto you.

O thou God of love, 
thou who art loving to every man, and whose mercy is over all thy works; 
thou who art the Father of the spirits of all flesh, and who art rich in mercy unto all; 
thou who hast mingled of one blood all the nations upon earth; 
have compassion upon these outcasts of men, who are trodden down as dung upon the earth! 
Arise, and help these that have no helper, whose blood is spilt upon the ground like water! 
Are not these also the work of thine own hands, the purchase of thy Son's blood? 
Stir them up to cry unto thee in the land of their captivity; and let their complaint come up before thee; 
let it enter into thy ears! 
Make even those that lead them away captive to pity them, 
and turn their captivity as the rivers in the south. 
O burst thou all their chains in sunder; more especially the chains of their sins! 
Thou Saviour of all, make them free, that they may be free indeed!

21 July: Another view of eternity.

Yesterday we advocated butterfly’s days: no set agenda, no targets, no business, no busy-ness. Today we open the Book of Common Prayer to read a collect that is complementary to Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘The Butterfly’s Day’. It makes explicit that we are passing through this life, and need God’s guidance and rule to survive passing through things temporal, but we can keep a hold on things eternal with Our Father’s mercy.

Our picture from Saint David’s Cathedral invites us to be still – Emily might say ‘idle’. And knowing that Our Father is God will follow; we will be given a hold on things eternal

O God, the protector of all who trust in you,
without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy:
increase and multiply upon us your mercy;
that with you as our ruler and guide 
we may so pass through things temporal 
that we lose not our hold on things eternal; 
grant this, heavenly Father, 
for our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, 
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

17 July: Calamities in Sussex

The forest can reclaim industrial land.

Here is E.V. Lucas in the Sussex woodlands more than a century ago. The iron trade moved North as iron and coal mining techniques evolved during the Industrial Revolution. But he cites Thomas Fuller’s question as to which use of iron was the more harmful – guns or the printing press? Fuller lived in the XVII Century and witnessed the Civil War. I doubt he would maintain today that fewer lives were lost to guns than the sword. Let us pray for the beating of all weapons into instruments of peace, and for a continuing change of heart towards our sisters and brothers and our earthly home. Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury was a part-time iron worker.

St. Leonard’s Forest, and all the forests on this the forest ridge of Sussex, were of course maintained to supply wood with which to feed the furnaces of the iron masters—just as the overflow of these ponds was trained to move the machinery of the hammers for the breaking of the iron stone. The enormous consumption of wood in the iron foundries was a calamity seriously viewed by many observers, among them Michael Drayton who was, however, distressed less as a political economist than as the friend of the wood nymphs driven by the encroaching and devastating foundrymen from their native sanctuaries to the inhospitable Downs.

Jove's oak, the warlike ash, veined elm, the softer beech, 
Short hazel, maple plain, light asp, the bending wych, 
Tough holly, and smooth birch, must altogether burn; 
What should the builder serve, supplies the forger's turn, 
When under public good, base private gain takes hold, 
And we, poor woful woods, to ruin lastly sold. 

Under the heading of Sussex manufactures, Thomas Fuller writes, in the Worthies, of great guns:— “It is almost incredible how many are made of the Iron in this County.

A Monke of Mentz (some three hundred years since) is generally reputed the first Founder of them. Surely ingenuity may seem transpos’d, and to have cross’d her hands, when about the same time a Souldier found out Printing; and it is questionable which of the two Inventions hath done more good, or more harm. As for Guns, it cannot be denied, that though most behold them as Instruments of cruelty; partly, because subjecting valour to chance; partly, because Guns give no quarter (which the Sword sometimes doth); yet it will appear that, since their invention, Victory hath not stood so long a Neuter, and hath been determined with the loss of fewer lives.

from Highways and Byways in Sussex by E. V. Lucas

2 July: The Good Shepherd

St Mildred’s, Canterbury.

One of the classic Victorian hymns that still speaks to us today.

Souls of men! why will ye scatter 
Like a crowd of frightened sheep?
Foolish hearts! why will ye wander
From a love so true and deep?

Was there ever kindest shepherd
Half so gentle, half so sweet,
As the Saviour who would have us
Come and gather round his feet?

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice
Which is more than liberty.

There is welcome for the sinner,
And more graces for the good;
There is mercy with the Saviour;
There is healing in his blood.

But we make his love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we lose the tender shepherd
In the judge upon the throne.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of man’s mind;
And the heart of the eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

FW Faber

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice.

John 10;27.

11 February: What is amiss, let us amend.

A queue for covid vaccinations at Lichfield Cathedral. TB.

Feb. 11, 1784.

TO MRS. LUCY PORTER, IN LICHFIELD.

MY DEAREST LOVE,

I have been extremely ill of an asthma and dropsy, but received, by the mercy of GOD, sudden and unexpected relief last Thursday, by the discharge of twenty pints of water[11 litres]. Whether I shall continue free, or shall fill again, cannot be told. Pray for me.

Death, my dear, is very dreadful; let us think nothing worth our care but how to prepare for it: what we know amiss in ourselves let us make haste to amend, and put our trust in the mercy of GOD, and the intercession of our Saviour.

I am, dear Madam,

Your most humble servant,

SAM. JOHNSON.

Life of Johnson, Volume 4 1780-1784″ by James Boswell.

Lucy Porter was Johnson’s stepdaughter; he had married her widowed mother but she had died after just a few years. Although he lived and worked in London – the man who is tired of London is tired of life is his saying – he kept in touch with family and friends in Lichfield, his home town, including Lucy. At the time of writing he was an old man and sick; dropsy is now called oedema, a swelling of soft tissue especially in the legs, and may be an indication of heart failure – so carrying 11 kilos of extra weight in fluid was not good. Johnson does not say how his relief was brought about.

But his heartfelt love for his stepdaughter shines through, as well as his apprehension of death and judgement.

What is amiss, let us amend.

Amen to that!

January 2, Tagore XVI: My day is done.

My day is done,

and I am like a boat drawn on the beach,

listening to the dance-music of the tide in the evening.

from “Stray Birds” by Rabindranath Tagore

And very gentle music it was, this winter’s evening in Margate. At the turn of the year, let’s pray that we may enjoy such evenings in this life, with a warm home to return to.

And may He support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last.

Amen.

John Henry Cardinal Newman

Apologies that the Tagore’s numbering has got out of sequence.