SHE PONDERED ALL THESE THINGS

PRAYER PAUSE

Tuesday 1 January 2019

SHE PONDERED ALL THESE THINGS

Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading.  “As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:16-21)

Reflection.  The birds around my window seem to be extra feverish this New Year’s morning.  Do they too sense that a New Year is a moment to begin again, to start to live in a new way?  Eight days after Christmas we too ponder what it all means; that God “was born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4).  It took 400 years for us to come up with a title for the woman: Mary is the Mother of God, (Council of Ephesus 431).  It takes some pondering for it to sink in that God has bridged the divide between the divine and human.  We are invited to walk across that bridge this New Year in our own “feverish activity” and let the divine light into our own lives.  What does this mean?  Well, it is to ponder each day how I am welcoming the guidance of the Spirit.  Do I allow his “sound of silence” (2 Kings 19:12) to change my way of thinking?

Prayer.  Lord, help us to enter this New Year with joy and hope.  Help us to be attentive to the silence in which you speak to us.  May Mary, your Mother and Mother of all who know you, draw us closer to you. Amen.

AN EARLIER HEAVEN

AN EARLIER HEAVEN

Viewed from a satellite in space, especially at night, an erupting volcano on earth can be clearly visible. Even a bush fire can be seen. If the satellite had a high precision camera it could pick up the smaller fires of families cooking in the open.  And we can imagine a lens that identifies the smallest flicker of flame on earth.  Perhaps we can go further. With the eye of the spirit, we can see (in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins) the world

          …. charged with the grandeur of God.

          It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

This perspective from space can serve as a parable.  There are the people and the events that appear in our headlines and sound bites.  There are also those revealed in the more modest reaches of the social media.  But the majority of people and events are hidden from everyone except the handful immediately concerned.  Yet the tiniest human effort, even if only known to one person – the one who experiences it, does not go unnoticed.

Among the ripples that swirl around Christmas is the family.  Jesus was born into a family.  Despite its unique nature it had all the marks of what we know as family.  Nothing much is spelt out for us but we quickly pick up the intensity of the mother’s care and the prodigious alacrity of Joseph.  True, the few details we are given tell us this is no ordinary family – if our child went missing we would not expect to find her sitting among a bunch of university professors, “listening to them and asking them questions” – but for the most part they led an ordinary life.  They were like any other family in Nazareth, a town – by the way - so unknown it appeared in no contemporary records.    

On the first Sunday after Christmas we celebrate this family and we celebrate our own families, which vary in a spectrum from immensely happy to extremely dysfunctional.  A good family gives us a great start in life but we can survive and surmount a dysfunctional one.  Lots of people have. 

We have this moment to celebrate family – this amazing human institution where we find ourselves in our love for each other, where even our tiniest words and gestures have an impact – and are held by the One created this universe and designed the first family.   “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” (George Bernard Shaw).

30 December 2018                  the Holy Family

Ben Sira 3:2 … 24                   Colossians 3:12-21                  Luke 2:41-52

HE LOOKED FORWARD TO THE CONSOLATION

PRA

Monday 29 October 2018

PRAYPRA                    PRAYER PAUSE

Saturday, 29 December 2018

HE LOOKED FORWARD TO THE CONSOLATION

Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading.  “Simeon was righteous and devout and looked forward to the consolation of Israel.” (Like 2:22-35)

Reflection.  There is intensity in the way Simeon looks at Mary, and Mary returns the look, in the painting of the Presentation in the Temple by Giovanni Bellini (c.1470). Without words, the painting tells us Simeon is aware of the struggle about to begin. “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many.”  The time has come.  From now on there will be division and judgement.  Everyone will have to choose.  There will be suffering and there will be consolation and Mary will experience both as she accompanies her son on his mission.  We place ourselves in this scene and allow ourselves to experience the intense drama. We are part of it.

Prayer.  Lord, help us to know that we are involved in this great struggle for the peace of all people, a peace that searches into our own hearts for the courage to seek justice in all things. Amen.

PRAYER PAUSE

Friday, 28 December 2018. The Holy Innocents

HE HAD ALL THE MALE CHILDREN KILLED

Enter into the stillness of God within.

Reading.  “Herod was furious and had all the male children killed who were two years old or under.” (Matthew 2:13-18)

Reflection.  Mathew builds on the links with the Old Testament: Egypt, the place of slavery, and the slaughter of the Jewish male children by Pharaoh. He does not record that God, seeing all the suffering Jesus was causing from the moment of his birth, regretted the Incarnation.  The scriptures are clear that God knows that this great enterprise of sending his Son into the world is going to cause havoc.  There will be a great price to be paid by Jesus and all those who will be associated with him.  Christmas is a time of great joy.  But it is also a time when we place our struggles within the context of the great plan of God to purify his people so that they may be capable of receiving the life he offers.  

Prayer.  Lord, as we mourn the death of the innocent children in Yemen, Syria and other places, help us to understand your plan and labour that children everywhere may have a better life. Amen.

CHRISTMAS

CHRISTMAS

I showed my visitor ticket to the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town at the barrier. When it was returned it was stamped in bold red letters: REDEEMED.  One day I will show my permanent resident ticket at another barrier and I hope it will be similarly stamped.  I have been thinking of religious language straying into, and finding a home in, normal converse and this is an example. Redeemed?

Christmas is like the rings of Saturn.  On its periphery there is the shopping and the tinsel.  Moving inwards, on the next ring there are the staff parties and the pantomimes.  Moving further in there are the family get-togethers and the sharing of presents.  And deeper in are the Christmas themes – enjoying Handel’s Messiah or King’s College carols. And finally there is the planet itself: here, an image of Christmas, the birth of the Redeemer.  A small percentage of humanity stop in homage at that manger in a small provincial town a long while ago.

They know that something extraordinary happened. The four and a half billion years of the universe had been leading up to this moment.  The beautiful reality of life had grown and developed and was seen in many species of animal and plant.  Even the mountains and hills, the sea and sky, heat and cold – all were a celebration, a symphony, of this experience we call life.  Then came the time when life gave birth to choice and that is when things started to go wrong.

Good choices were made but so were bad ones and the latter clogged the ways of the former. The peak of life, the human person, was stuck in the swamp of their own choices.  Their advance, their development, stalled and there seemed no remedy.  But, at the same time, the human person was aware of their longing to break the bonds that held them, while being equally aware it was beyond their power to do so. 

There had to be a way forward.  It was written in their bones: life had to achieve its goal.  But it needed the author of life to intervene.  He was divine but he chose to become human to lift his brothers and sisters out of the swamp.  He was born in that manger and grew to contest those bonds.  It was a battle and he seemed to lose it for he too was buried in the swamp.  He shared everything of human life, even its end. But there was one thing different.  He wasn’t just a human; he was a divine human.  That made all the difference.  The swamp could not hold him; he escaped its grip and in doing so he opened the way for life to resume the task of advancing. And this time there would be no limit.  This time the divine human showed the way to move beyond the limits and enter a world that would satisfy, not just the confused longings of their limited feelings and imagination, but a totally new reality they could not even dream of. They would be ‘redeemed.’

25 December 2018      

PUSHING OUT THE BOUNDARIES

PUSHING OUT THE BOUNDARIES

I joined a score of geriatric white hill walkers recently on the Cape peninsula and was happy to discover I could keep up.  The scenery was magnificent with the Atlantic on one side and the Indian Ocean on the other.  To my initial irritation my companions kept stopping, not to wonder at the distant scene but to gaze earnestly at the tiny plants about our feet.  Purple, blue and dazzling white flowers were everywhere among the predominant scrub.  But the prize find was a Schizaea Pectinata, otherwise called a toothbrush fern. The fronds of this tiny plant are packed together and the plant itself is rarely noticed.

Ferns do not flower and there was no particular attraction in this small hidden inhabitant of the wild.  So why the excitement?  Each one who stopped to look has an answer.  For me the excitement was that we actually stopped to look. We did not pass by oblivious.  I only knew one of the people on that walk but I doubt if many of them would describe themselves as spiritual, still less religious.  Yet the act of stopping, looking and valuing something seemingly insignificant is an act on the threshold of reverence.

The words that we often associate with religion – worship, adoration, sacred, martyr and so forth – are finding their way into ordinary converse.  They are no longer the exclusive property of religion.  The boundary between religious language and everyday experience is blurring.  For example, while we still have many we call martyrs today who have died for their faith, we have many - perhaps many more – who have died for the truth.  I am thinking particularly of the 71 journalists killed in 2017 for reporting what they witnessed.

These people showed extraordinary courage in investigating events and then reporting on them.  Their work took them into highly dangerous situations and they were prepared to risk their lives to tell the world what they saw and heard.  And the world is a better place for knowing the truth.  Journalists are particular about what they observe.  They too look at details. Often they will start their report with the story of one person: a Syrian widow who is grieving at the death of her child or the body of a migrant child washed up on a Greek beach.  Details move us where generalizations pass us by.  The gospels are full of individuals; Bartimaeus, Zaccheus and the woman at the well.  Stories of people tell us about ourselves.  Observing plants and animals tell us about our planet, our only home.  We need both.

16 December 2018