OF BIRDS AND BRICKS

OF BIRDS AND BRICKS

I take the marker lodged in my book for the last Sunday of year C and move it to the first Sunday of year A. In the gesture of a moment I have wiped out three years! I begin again the journey through the 156 Sundays of our triennial cycle. The good things I have done these past three years are all mixed up with the bad, the seeds with the weeds. What goes around comes around – but each time it is different.

We often give thanks for the gift of life. ‘Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven’ (Wordsworth). The gift means we have time and space to do things. Yet Pope Francis tells us that between these two – time and space - there is a tension (The Joy of the Gospel, #222). We want to get things done, to have something to show for our efforts, but we often find we have limited success. We say we need more time. Francis says we are called to ‘work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results’.

We are like the bricklayer whose task is to lay now one brick, now another. He does not see the finished building. His task is only the here and now; to use the time he has to do as good a job as he can.

In NE Turkey there is an area of wetland which is a haven for birds migrating from north to south and from east to west. It sings with insect life and of course they are the birds’ food.  A Turkish American ornithologist visits these lands every year to monitor them and to study the huge number of birds that pass through. But now, he says, there is a threat.  The Turkish government wants to build a huge dam in the area and, if they do, it will at a stroke wipe out this sanctuary for the birds.

So this Turkish man is working hard to inform the public and the government of the impending disaster.  He is trying to set in motion processes that will eventually save the wetlands.  We now know that you cannot harm one area of nature without harming the whole.  We can easily imagine people being impatient with the idea of birds holding up human progress.  But today we are educated enough about climate change to know that a huge dam may solve an immediate problem but it may well also set in motion an irremediable catastrophe.

Perhaps this is an example of what Pope Francis means: the preference we unreflectively have to ‘get things done’ without being prepared for the longer process of examining the implications and making the right choices, choices that will only be appreciated by people yet unborn.

Year A of Advent kicks off with the message ‘Stay awake’. In the next three years there are many ways in which we are called to be awake.

1 December 2019                    Advent Sunday 1 A

Isaiah 2:1-5                              Romans 13:11-14                    Matthew 24:37-44     

THIS IS THE DAY

THIS IS THE DAY

On 17 April 1980, we made our way to Rufaro Stadium to witness the birth of Zimbabwe as a free nation. It was a day many had yearned for, suffered for and died for. At midnight the flag was raised.  It was a still night with no breeze to shake out its many colours; so it hung there limp as though uncertain of what it was supposed to do.  When the prayer and the brief speeches were over there was a frightening crush as people crowded the exits to get home.

It was a day of joy and hope for the future.  Real excitement was everywhere and we rode a crest of good will among the nations. Foreign governments trod on one another in the rush to come to help and old enmities were buried in the flow of words about turning swords into plough shares.  But it was hard to hold on to the good will and joyful feelings.  We wondered just how all this promise could be fulfilled.

The poet, T.S. Eliot, once wrote, ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’.  Well, that day in 1980 was ‘reality’! Perhaps it was in a sense ‘unbearable’ in that it carried so much responsibility to fulfil the dreams and hopes of all the people of the new country.  Let’s not dwell on how it all soon began to go wrong and how here we are forty years on as far away as ever – at least for most citizens - from seeing those dreams realised.

Instead, we could think of this day in which we now live and how capable are we of living the promise it carries. We were unable to ‘bear’ our responsibilities then. Can we begin to do so now? When Jesus came to ‘dwell among us’ he announced that ‘the time is fulfilled’ (Mark 1:15), ‘today, even as you are listening’ (Luke 4:21). But they could not bear that reality.  It was too much and their response was to try to get rid of him.

Yet Jesus kept repeating the promise, ‘Blessed are the eyes that see what you see and hear what you hear’ (Luke 10:23). They could not bear it. It involved too much of a commitment. They would have to follow him in his confrontation with evil that would lead to Calvary. They weren’t ready for that. There was no way the fruits of 1980 could just be plucked from a tree.  All that day did was to open the way. Some followed it. Many didn’t. And now here we are, forty years on, wondering will we ever fulfil our dreams?

Malachy is pessimistic. ‘The day is coming now, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and the evil doers will be like stubble’ (3:19). It doesn’t have to be like that.  We just have to face the reality and take up our task. ‘My yoke is easy’ (Matthew 11:30). It is quite bearable after all.   

17 November 2019                 Sunday 33 C

Malachy 3:19-20                     2 Thessalonians 3:7-12                        Luke 21:5-19      

A TASTE OF GLORY

A TASTE OF GLORY

There are many reasons to celebrate the victory of South Africa in the Rugby World Cup in Japan. Rugby was the game of the whites in South Africa before Freedom Day in 1994 and now it has been transformed into something the whole country can relate to. Also, the euphoria following the win on October 2 echoed those scenes in 1994 when the country celebrated the end of the old divided world and the beginning of a new united country.  Many words, most famously those of Captain Siya Kolisi, express the hope that this event will bring the country together anew. Many South Africans, aware of the tensions arising from the unfulfilled dreams of a quarter of a century ago, fervently hope so.

These thoughts express the release of joy the victory brought but we can also celebrate the sheer quality of the game itself. It was ‘awesome’ – this time the word is appropriate – to watch the South African defence in the last quarter of the first half. The English mounted fierce attacks time and time again and for ten unrelenting minutes were within a few feet of the score line.  But the Boks stood their ground in a dazzling display of defence.  My mind strayed to the Battle of Waterloo when the French repeatedly assailed the British lines but could not break them!

What thrills us is to see people stretch themselves to the limit.  You could see they gave everything and were struggling for breath when there was a pause in the game. We long to give all of ourselves in life and in love. And it is agony to keep falling short. It is the sorrow of being human, as the fourteenth century author of the Cloud of Unknowing tells us.

Perhaps what we are really celebrating in this victory is to glimpse what human beings are capable of. That is the message of Jesus. Each of us is capable of greatness.  ‘You will see greater things than this’. It will show itself in a multitude of different ways.  For some it will be on the sports field. For others it will be in a hospital bed where a person reaches beyond the pain and the frailty and suffers ‘in the right way’. Viktor Frankl, who endured the concentration camps in World War II wrote:

I understood how a man who has nothing left in the world may still know bliss … In utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, man can achieve fulfilment.

So, thank you Siya Kolisi and your team, you have shared with us a precious taste of glory.  May we relish it!

10 November 2019                  Sunday 32 C

2 Maccabees 7:1…14              2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5                     Luke 20;27-38

TRAGEDY ON A TRAIN

TRAGEDY ON A TRAIN

It was a long train journey from Karachi in the south of Pakistan to Rawalpindi in the north and the family had their supplies, even their own gas stove. But somehow, in the process of cooking, a fire started and quickly spread to the whole carriage and 73 people were burnt to death or suffocated in the flames or died jumping from the moving train.

It is so easy to imagine. If you are careful there should be no problem. When Shackleton and the men he was with in a small boat in the Antarctic waters one hundred year ago, made their epic journey to South Georgia, they cooked their food on a similar stove in the tossing sea. But the trouble is ‘human error’ – that old bogey that brings down super airliners and sinks mighty ships like the Titanic. 

More and more health and safety rules and laws crowd our statute books and job descriptions but at the end of the day it is down to the individual person; does he or she pay attention to what they are doing and take every possible step to avoid failure. Even if they do, and there is the best will in the world, there will still be room for mistakes.

Robert Browning puts it this way:

Our interest is on the dangerous side of things

            The honest thief, the tender murderer,

the superstitious atheist.         

The superstitious atheist, demirep

that loves and saves her soul in new French books.  

People love to take risks.  They sense it is a human thing to do. To live ‘safely’ is not to live at all. Explore the boundaries!  A child instinctively tests the limits of the rules and goes beyond them. The saints are often among the broken and the battered.

In the Catholic tradition we make official saints whose lives and love have been outstanding.  But they are the tiniest fraction of the saints. There are millions who have tried and failed, have risked and lost, have struggled only to end their days in a cell for the condemned.  And in that same tradition we have a day each year, November 1, when we honour them. Among them are our relatives and friends. We remember them and go, in our imagination, to where they are – waiting for us.

Meanwhile we continue our risky way, hoping we will not endanger the lives of those around us, ever conscious that is precisely what we may often, unknowingly, do.

November 1                             All Saints Day

Revelations 7:2 …11               1 John 3:1-3                            Matthew 5:1-12