THE GREAT RESPONSE

THE GREAT RESPONSE

I was thinking of the response of the shepherds, ‘let us go to Bethlehem and see’ (Luke 2:15) and it struck me that no sooner was Jesus born than people started to react to him. The Jews had reacted long ago, drawn by the promise they dimly sensed, ‘let us come into his presence’ (Ps. 95). And the pagans too felt the Jews had something to offer: ‘The citizens of many cities will say, we must certainly go to entreat Yahweh’s favour … and they will take a Jew by the sleeve and say we want to go with you’ (Zech. 8:20-3).

So there was a movement towards the divine in ancient times even if it was obscurely understood. Later the response was to have a sharper edge. Jesus said, ‘let us go to our friend Lazarus’ and Thomas added, maybe with a touch of desperation, ‘Let us also go and die with him’ (John 11:11-16).  And then we arrive at Jesus’ blunt invitation to accompany him to Gethsemane, ‘Come now, let us go!’(John 14:31).  

So the human heart is aching.  Yet its aching is often unfocused.  I want but I am not quite sure what I want.  ‘Everyone was trying to touch him’ (Luke 6:19) but why? And this continues today. There are rich pickings on You Tube where you can listen, for example, to Richard Rohr or Rupert Spira – each in his own way clearing the ground so that we can focus our desire. 

Many who embark on this search do not sense that they are helped by the Church. This is a pity because it is hard to search alone and the churches, for all their shortcomings, provide community, interpretation of the word and visible signs with life-giving effects.

But we have a problem of connecting.  The different Christian traditions want to help people make their response to God yet it often seems they fail to meet people where they really are. It seems this is always the problem.  Culture is always one step ahead of religion.

‘Let us go to Bethlehem!’  How on earth are we going to understand what happened there and how are we going to respond to it?  As we enter 2020 we may feel overwhelmed with our failure to respond.  The mess we are in just seems too big.  Pope Francis, in his Christmas message, tells us not to lose heart. Each person is called to respond as best they can.  We cannot look to our government to respond, or the United Nations. They may – eventually – or they may not.  What we can do is personal and individual. We take a tough look at our spontaneous responses.  Where are they taking us?   

29 December 2019      The Holy Family

Sir 3:2-6, 12-14                       Col. 3:12-21                Matt 2:13-15, 19-23

THE CENTURY OF THE GREAT TEST

THE CENTURY OF THE GREAT TEST

113 people from a variety of professions gathered recently in Barcelona to ‘maintain a dialogue between faith and the struggle for a fairer world’. Meeting under the title, ‘Facing the Century of the Great Test’ they ‘dreamed of a different course for civilisation, which would seek other goals and foster other values; welcoming the stranger, taking care of the weak, making peace with nature, accepting ourselves as the vulnerable mortal beings that we are’.

The key phrase here is ‘faith and the struggle’. In the struggle for a better world, one which faces these four issues of the stranger, the weak, nature and ourselves, we either leave it to others because we don’t want to be involved, or we decide to become engaged at the level we can manage. That level is defined by where we find ourselves and the opportunities open to us. It is also defined by the energy we can draw on.

For the one who believes that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to share in this struggle and open the way for them to be fully engaged – ‘I am sending you out  … I am with you always’ – there is reason to rejoice at Christmas and draw new energy from this ‘with you’, this ‘Emmanuel’. The companionship Jesus invites us to stretches beyond a neat ‘strategic plan’ or ‘manageable objective.’  We cannot be guided by a desire to see results but only by a desire to set in motion a process that is sound. The foundations of my house may be hidden but if the house stands though storms and cyclones it becomes obvious that they are solid.

And the way Jesus lays out is one that stretches us beyond our reach.  We cannot see the future.  We have no ‘proof’ we will succeed. ‘Blessed is she who believed the promise made to her’. Mary asked for no guarantee.  She had no idea how things would work out.  All she knew was that she had been called to a task that seemed impossible. She trusted that the one who called her knew what he was doing.  It was not necessary for her to know more for now.      

We are being called to respond to the choices before us in this ‘Century of the Great Test’ as our age has been called.  We face options never before imagined. Fires, floods and drought are affecting the lives of millions each year and the millions will soon be billions.  Those international agencies that offer food to the hungry and shelter to the homeless are stretched to previously unimagined limits. Extraordinary imagination and courage will now be needed if we are to save our planet from becoming uninhabitable.

Many deny there is a problem or they say it is exaggerated.  But the scientists, who go to great trouble to gather their evidence, hammer us day by day with new and alarming facts. In our own part of the world the water pouring over the Victoria Falls is now reduced to a trickle. Surely that should alarm us as we think of what it means.

The message of Christmas comes to us year by year with gathering force. Can we open ourselves to new perspectives?  Can we change? Can we imagine ‘a different course’ for our civilisation? One where tenderness and compassion replace the pursuit of wealth and power? That is ‘the Great Test’. We cannot contract this test out to others - our leaders of states and managers of industry.  It is theirs, but we know it is also for each of us.

Nature itself beckons us. In the northern hemisphere Christmas comes at a barren time of the year. John Milton wrote 400 years ago.

Nature in awe of Him

Had doff’d her gaudy trim,

With her great Master so to sympathise

In our southern hemisphere it is the opposite; crops are planted and the earth is green with hope. Nature offers us a time of barrenness and a time of plenty. Which will we choose?

Christmas 2019   

  

HOPE, IN THE RIGHT WAY

HOPE, IN THE RIGHT WAY

Does it make sense to speak of hope? People struggle every day just to survive. How can they possibly lend their ears to a message of hope? It seems insulting to tell them time after time that things will get better, when manifestly there is no sign of improvement.

In the Christian perspective Advent is the season of hope. Nearly every day we hear the words of Isaiah on this. This Sunday we read,

            Let the wilderness and the dry lands exult,

let the wasteland rejoice and bloom,

let it bring forth flowers like the jonquil,

let it rejoice and sing for joy.

What possible consolation is a mother to draw from this when her every waking hour is spent struggling to provide for her children?

Yet the Church insists on her message of hope. She has come to know that there is something fundamentally human in reaching out in hope even when there is no evidence that hope is justified. This was the situation of Israel in Egypt in the days of Moses and in modern times it was the situation in South Africa in the darkest days of apartheid.

Viktor Frankl, imprisoned in the ‘death camp’ of Auschwitz in World War II was stumbling to work under guard one icy winter morning when his wife (imprisoned in another camp) came into his mind. ‘Real or not her look was then more luminous than the sun … and I saw the truth … that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire … and I understood how a man who has nothing left in the world may still know bliss, … his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, (and so) man can achieve fulfilment’.

By quoting Frankl I am not suggesting we should simply smile and bear our suffering s with resignation. No! It is more a matter of changing our attitude and letting our spirit reach beyond the present trials to the fulfilment that will come. Karl Marx accused Christians of teaching resignation in present sufferings in the hope of future happiness. That is decidedly not what we mean by Christian hope.

Twelve years ago Pope Benedict wrote a letter (Spe Salvi) on that little word ‘hope’. He spoke about hope as ‘knowing how to wait’.  We can wait passively, just sitting there ‘hoping for the best’. That is not true hope. The pope speaks of an active hope where we strain forward with ‘all our heart, all our mind and all our strength’ for the thing we long for. 

Also, Benedict warns against an individualistic hope where a person thinks ‘he is a chosen one! In his blessedness he passes through the battlefields with a rose in his hand’! (Henri de Lubac). That also is not true hope.  We are not ‘saved’ alone.  We belong to the family of humanity and my hope embraces all people. As Nelson Mandela used to say, ‘I cannot be free unless all are free’.  St Bernard of Clairvaux told us, Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis, God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with. So, in a sense, God is incomplete until we are all complete.

Finally, we cannot place our hope in investment, technology, ‘correct’ politics or economics. Without a conversion of heart no amount of fixing the system will lead to our hopes being realised. ‘It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love’. (Benedict XVI) 

15 December 2019      Advent Sunday 3 A

Isaiah 35:1-6, 10          James 5:7-10                           Matthew 11:2-11

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

CONSERVATION IS A LUXURY …

CONSERVATION IS A LUXURY …

On arrival in 1905, Fr Joseph Moreau, the first Jesuit to settle in Zambia, defended his insistence on farming before preaching by saying, ‘a hungry stomach has no ears’.  He brought a bible but he also brought a plough.  I heard a modern version of these words this past week, again in Zambia, relating to our efforts to promote the use of sources of energy that do not lead to global warming: ‘Conservation is a luxury when you can’t feed your children’.

This powerful pause for thought arose in connection with a formerly protected forest, close to Lusaka, which is now being pillaged by developers – and by charcoal burners. The forceful and scientifically supported arguments, warning of looming catastrophe, carry little weight if a poor man cannot put food on the family table.

Governments have a problem.  Many of them genuinely want to address the issue but first they have to educate people about the urgency of acting now.  And if they are able to convince them they have to provide alternative sources of energy which are ‘green’.  But they also have to work in solidarity with other governments otherwise those lagging behind will drag the others down.

All the science is available.  What is lacking is the will. In his letter on ‘Care for our Common Home’ (Laudato Si’), Pope Francis analyses the human roots of the ecological crisis. ‘A certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us’ (#101).  He describes this in detail but ends on a positive note; ‘there is reason to hope that humanity at the dawn of the twenty first century will be remembered for bravely shouldering its responsibilities’ (#165). This will happen if we heed the call for ‘a selfless ecological commitment’ which can show itself even in ‘little daily actions’ such as where ‘a person who could afford to spend and consume more heating regularly uses less and wears warmer clothes’. This may seem a small thing but it shows ‘the kind of conviction and attitude which help to protect the environment.’ (#211)    

So the only problem we really have is a moral one: are we willing to act wisely now so that we save our common home for our descendants? When the Pharisee and the tax collector went to the temple, the former saw no need to ask himself questions about his way of life.  The tax collector, on the other hand, was conscious of his failure to live up to what his heart told him was the right way to live. Jesus praised him for his awareness and honesty.  The man knew he could not make it on his own.

The ecological crisis we face today calls us to realise that we are not so smart after all.  We need help to make the right decisions and carry them through. And the One who made our planet in the first place is ready and willing to provide that help.   

27 October 2019                     Sunday 30 C

Sira 35:12…18                        2 Timothy 4: 6…18                 Luke 18: 9-14

I’M ALRIGHT, JACK

I’M ALRIGHT, JACK

This saying used to be, perhaps still is, current to describe a person who is self-satisfied with their lot.  They have a job, a house, a car, an insurance policy and a pension waiting for them. It implies that they have taken care of themselves and feel no responsibility for anyone else. Others should do as they have done. End of story.

We know well that this is an untenable attitude of anyone who has an ounce of thirst for justice in our world.  We cannot be truly content if others are suffering. Nelson Mandela once said, ‘no one is free if all are not free’. Pope John XXIII decried, years ago, ‘prophets of doom’ – people who saw no way out of the mess as the future of the world seemed so bleak. At that time – the early sixties – the threat of nuclear war hung over us.

Sixty years on we are still there on our planet and the threat of nuclear war has receded.  But we have new worries while at the same time we have our share of those who say, ‘we’re alright, Jack’. Our biggest worries centre round global warming and the number of people in powerful positions who refuse to do anything about it. Their refusal is based on their sense of being ‘alright’ and they have no wish to make any decision that might threaten how they see themselves.

So when, for example, it is written, as it was in last week’s Zimbabwean,

‘as drought grips the region, the flow on the Zambezi river has dwindled to a third of what it was a year ago, limiting power generation’

they pay no attention or they shrug it off as ‘fake news’. Having crossed the Zambezi several times in the last year I have seen the water level drop and even as a layman in the world of meteorological science I can sense the creeping catastrophe.

This October does not feel like October as we have known it. There are cold winds and none of the oppressive heat that used to signal the approach of rain. So we already have a drought with all its multiple consequences for food and farmers. Yet there are many among us who persist in saying, ‘I’m alright.’

In today’s gospel Jesus tells a story of a widow who is persistent in demanding justice from a careless judge who has no respect for anyone. In the end he gives her what she wants, not because it is his duty but because he fears she will ‘box his ears’. (This is the meaning of the Greek word used).

It we are to make progress in halting and reversing global warming we need people like that widows who are not afraid to box a few ears.       

20 October 2o19                  Sunday 29 C

Exodus 17:8-13                     2 Timothy 3: 14-4:2                                    Luke 18:1-8

PLACES OF ENCOUNTER

PLACES OF ENCOUNTER

This Sunday, 13 October, John Henry Cardinal Newman will be declared a Saint by Pope Francis in Rome and among the thousands who will witness the event will be Charles, Prince of Wales.  The prince writes these words in the Times, ‘Newman could advocate without accusation, could disagree without disrespect and perhaps most of all could see differences as places of encounter rather than exclusion’.  He had an inquiring mind and was always ready to listen and to weigh what others said.

Charles has written a beautiful tribute to a great man. Newman grappled all his life – he was 89 when he died - with pressing issues of education and faith.  He had the intellectual ability to think through – and to pray through – questions that emerged in a century where reason and science posed serious challenges to long-held beliefs. Outstanding among his contributions was his assertion about the development of doctrine and the place of the laity in the Church. The essentials of doctrine do not change but the way they are expressed can undergo evolution and development.

He made a detailed study of the Arian controversy in the fourth century. The priest Arius held that Jesus, Son of the Father, could not be equal to the Father and so was subordinate to him. This view had serious implications for our understanding of ‘salvation’.  If Jesus is not God then we are left high and dry. No man could do what he did and does for us.  The Council of Nicea, in 325, condemned Arius and affirmed the absolute equality of Father and Son. But opinion remained divided and the Christian emperors of the period oscillated between Nicea and Arius and the bishops were inclined to follow their lead. It was “a time when the fidelity of the laity had ensured the Church’s continuance ‘when the body of the bishops failed in their confession of the faith’.”  Newman believed therefore that the Church was healthiest when able to encourage people to an intelligent grasp of the faith, and weakest when only requiring of them an ‘implicit faith in her word, which in the educated classes will terminate in indifference and in the poorer in superstition’.” [1]   

Perhaps this gives us a taste of the sort of man Newman was and the point of making him a saint is to make him more widely known and his contribution to faith and culture more easily accessible. It is not just the dictators of our age but even the duly elected leaders who govern our lives who could learn about ‘places of encounter’ in contrast to ‘places of exclusion’. We still live with too many walls – both physical and mental – that exclude others and so hold us back from welcoming those who are different and benefitting from the meeting.

13 October 2019                     Sunday 28 C

2 Kings 5:14-17                      2 Timothy 2:8-13                    Luke 17:11-19

---

[1] Dermot Mansfield SJ, with quotes from Newman, Heart Speaks to Heart, Veritas  p 127

HOW LONG, LORD?

HOW LONG, LORD?

How long, Lord, am I to cry for help

While you will not listen;

To cry, ‘Oppression!’ in your ear

And you will not save?

                             Habakkuk 1:2

A visitor to Zimbabwe, coming from the airport, will notice solar-powered street lamps lining the new dual carriageway and they will be impressed.  But they will also notice that some of them have been felled like trees and lie forlorn at the side of the road, their solar panels removed. The image conjures up rhinos abandoned in the bush with their horns sawn off.

The visitor will pause to sympathise with those who laboured to beautify the road of welcome to the country, even as they labour to understand why people would want to sabotage the assets of the country for immediate gain. I puzzled over his question some years ago when I was directly involved in dealing with trying to guard the transformers in our area which were being drained of their special oil.

Our visitor may come from a country where the infrastructure works well and there is less temptation to raid public property for private profit.  But the one who steals the solar panels may reason; ‘some are benefiting from the assets of the country by stealing left, right and centre and why shouldn’t I?’

I have heard two other reports recently of ‘helping oneself’ without regard for the common good, though I cannot verify them. One was about people diverting money meant for the cyclone victims to their own pockets and the other about those who block medicines coming from India and other countries that are much more affordable than those carrying the international brand labels. The medication is exactly the same but it is produced under licence – a generous gesture? - in developing countries.

‘It is of the nature of sin that its effects are never confined within the individual, but reach into the tissues of human society.’[1] Once we allow corruption to enter our country it will take root and prosper from the highest to the lowest. ‘Why should I not do it?  Everyone else does’.

‘How long, O Lord, …?’ Habakkuk expresses the frustration of waiting for some relief from this pervasive influence which affects our social, economic and political life. Well, the answer must be: as long as it takes for us to wake up and, not only cry to the Lord for help, but do something about it ourselves.  Jesus cannot impose integrity on us.  We have to want it and act. Then the Lord will bless us and crown our efforts.

6 October 2019                       Sunday 27 C

Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4            2 Timothy 1:6 … 14                Luke 17:5-10

---

[1] Michael Ivens, SJ, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises, Gracewing 1998, p 52

THEY WILL TAKE THE JEW BY THE SLEEVE

THEY WILL TAKE THE JEW BY THE SLEEVE.  Zechariah 8:20-23

October 1, 2019. St Theresa of Lisieux (Ruva Diki) (+1897)

‘In those days ten men of nations of every language will take the Jew by the sleeve and say, “We want to go with you, since we have learnt that God is with you”.’ Currently, our daily first readings are on the theme of the rebuilding of the temple and the promise of the new Israel. There is joy in this reading from Zechariah as the prophet glimpses the fulfilment of the long process of preparing for the coming of the Lord and the ‘glory of Israel’. The image is of an elder brother or sister leading their younger sibling to their first day at school. The gospel for today, on the other hand, tells us of Jesus ‘resolutely’ taking the road to Jerusalem with his disciples. His journey will lead to his suffering and death. The people they meet, and the disciples too, are either confused or unwelcoming.    

A DEPORTATION

A DEPORTATION

As we entered the plane there was a disturbance. A man was crying out in a loud voice; ‘I’ve been here sixteen years. Hello! Hello! No! No! I will do anything!’ And so it went on for twenty, thirty, fifty minutes. He was being deported and this was his final protest. The plane was delayed almost an hour and the authorities seemed at a loss as to what to do.  Eventually they relented and he was taken off the plane.  He immediately calmed down and turned towards us and thanked us for our patience.

I am sure his problems are not over but at least he won that round.  I admired his courage in making such a vigorous non-violent protest and I also noted the respect of the officials. In no way were they rough with him. But they clearly did not know what to do.

I had a long plane journey to reflect on migration and our modern inability to open our doors to strangers. This is not the place to enter into a thorough discussion of this complex issue. Moving from one place to another has been normal since the days our ancestors moved out of Africa to populate the earth.  America is the creation of a stream of migrants who travelled - freely or forcibly - from Europe and Africa from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Barak Obama’s father arrived there relatively recently – as did Donald Trump’s mother. It is beyond dispute that migrants benefit their adopted countries. 

But there is a growing perception that migration must now be radically reduced. There is suddenly a great fear that we have too many migrants and they will disturb our way of life if we welcome all who want to come.   Imagine a world where all borders are abolished!  Impossible? It is not a fantasy: it has happened among the 27 countries of the European Union. It has caused strains but it has worked. We are straining towards greater integration all over our planet.

There was an impenetrable ‘border’ between the rich man and Lazarus in Luke’s gospel (chapter 16) and the story Jesus tells bodes ill for the man who ignores the poverty at his door. In fact Jesus tells us elsewhere that when we are having a feast we are to invite the poor and those who cannot reciprocate (Luke 14:12).       

Yes, it is complex and it will not be easy to find a way forward. But the migrant – the man on the plane or the mother and child in a boat on the sea – challenge us to look at our attitudes. Can we imagine a different world than the one we have now? It would be a world where the good things of the earth are shared equitably and where justice becomes a universal passion.1

29 September 2019     Sunday 26 C

Amos 6:1, 4-7             Timothy 6:11-16         Luke 16:19-31

DRESSED FOR ACTION

DRESSED FOR ACTION

I feel sorry for the soldiers patrolling the streets of Srinagar. They have to enforce their government’s will against the will of the people who are furious and frustrated.  ‘If I raise the Indian flag voluntarily that is integration’, one of them said, ‘but forcing me to do it is sheer occupation.  We are back in the middle ages when kings invaded and made the people bow to their will’.

So I pity the soldiers who will have to be alert to survive the hatred and hostility.  Why should it be like this in 2019?  We should be alert to things more worthy of our energy: how to welcome new life, for example. New life means daring to grasp a moment of growth as it comes. ‘Be like people dressed for action and have your lamps lit’ our gospel for Sunday tells us.

Edith Stein was Jewish and born in Germany in 1891.  She grew up a devout Jew and was always proud of her identity and heritage.  She was bright and soon soared in the academic world and worked with renowned philosophers like Edmund Husserl. But she was alert and open to life in the spirit.  She read Teresa of Avila and was so touched by her that she became a Catholic Christian. She pursued her studies and became a teacher but lost her job when Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws came into effect.

She became a Carmelite sister and took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. As the gathering storm against the Jews gathered force her community moved her out of the country to the Netherlands. Then the Dutch bishops issued a pastoral letter condemning the Nazi policies and they responded by rounding up the Jews and sending them to the death camps. Offered an escape route Edith refused saying to leave her fellow Jews would be for her ‘annihilation’. With hundreds of others she was killed in the gas chambers on 9 August 1942, aged 50.

Edith Stein was aware that she would die.  She had spent her whole life alert to all the influences that flooded in on her and had responded. She is renowned for her writings but even more so for her courage and faith and she was canonised by John Paul II just before the turn of the century.  I mention her because she is an example of the kind of alertness that moves and draws us. She sought the fullness that life offers.

I fear for the soldiers of Srinagar. All they can be alert to is holding on to life itself. For them as of now there is no room for anything more nourishing.  

11 August 2019                  Sunday 19 C

Wisdom 18:6-9                  Hebrews 11:1…19                            Luke 12:32-48

I WILL BUILD BIGGER ONES

I WILL BUILD BIGGER ONES

‘I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones’. The farmer had a good year and his ambitions soared. But he wasn’t able to handle success. He started to focus on ‘bigger and better’ only. He ignored any other consideration. He cleared room in the Amazon forests without thinking of the effects.

In other words, he thought only of himself. He became greedy. An adage of the socialist movement is, ‘the world can provide for people’s needs, but not for their greed’. I am old enough to have witnessed the surge of Communism in the nineteen forties and fifties and how it was contained in the sixties, the surge of nuclear weapons – the ‘arms race’ - in the seventies and how it was restrained in the eighties, the surge of multinational corporations in the eighties and nineties and how it was tamed in recent decades. But I am deeply worried about the present surge of ‘progress’ which is destroying our planet.

‘Record-breaking’ temperatures are recorded day after day. The ice caps are melting and methane gas is released at levels never reached before. The Secretary General of the United Nations says ‘the will to tackle the crisis is fading’. We are like people on the Titanic who see the danger ahead but do not change course.

When Jesus gives us the parable of the greedy farmer who thinks nothing of the future – least of all that he might die that night – he observes, ‘a person’s life is not made secure by what he owns’ and he says ‘beware of avarice of any kind’.  And elsewhere, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.

How can we change our way of thinking? The advertisers want us to buy newer and better gadgets all the time. People do not even think of repairing fixtures, machines, plumbing etc. It is too complicated and time consuming. Throw it away and buy a new one.    

You, who are reading this, have heard all this many times.  But our gospel today does ask why we are ‘so slow to believe’? All the evidence is mounting up and we – well, a powerful number of us - still carry on creating the conditions that are inexorably destroying us.  We are like smokers who say, ‘you have to die of something’.  That is hardly good enough.  It is not me, as an individual, who is dying: it is everyone on the planet. And we are destroying our – that is, the generations that will follow us - future too.

Can we contain, restrain, tame this thing? It is the question.

4 August 2019                                                    Sunday 18 C

Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) 1:2, 2:21-23         Colossians 3:1-5,9-11                      Luke 12:13-21

  

SEARCH AND YOU WILL FIND

SEARCH AND YOU WILL FIND

Can you teach a fish to swim?  Can you teach persistence to people who have persisted for years through the winding vicissitudes of Zimbabwean life? Persistence is the message running through the story of Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.  It is also the message running through the description of the friend who comes to his neighbour in the night to borrow three loaves. ‘If the man does not get up for friendship’s sake, persistence will be enough to make him get up and give his friend all he needs’.

But there is a difference. Zimbabwean persistence is that resilient type which goes on adapting to new situations; if there is no power, buy a generator; if you cannot afford one, buy a candle and joke about it all the way to the shop.

Jesus’ parable of persistence is about a man who pesters his neighbour until he is given what he wants. The neighbour doesn’t owe the man anything and his first reaction is, ‘Go away and leave me alone’.  But the man doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.  Jesus favours that type of persistence – not the passive accepting kind which simply adapts to each new situation. He uses it as a model for prayer: ‘search and you will find, ask and you will get, knock and they will open the door’.

This type of prayer breaks through like a chick bursting through the egg which gave it life but has now become a prison. We know it is through breaking the bonds that contain us that we become a free people.  If we continually adapt without searching, asking questions and knocking on doors, we remain slaves in our own home.

Last week we celebrated SS Joachim and Anne, grandparents of Jesus.  The first reading starts, ‘Let us praise illustrious men’.  The author lists his choice. Who would be on my list? Ghandi, Mandela and Churchill would be near the top but there would be many others known only to me and a few others. Churchill was famous in his time and had ‘the largest funeral in history’ but many today know little about him. I have discovered recently that he had a string of disappointments in his life and suffered from depression which he called his ‘Black Dog’. Even when he became leader of Britain at the age of 65 he had terrible crises to deal with as Britain alone could not defeat Hitler however bravely they fought. He persisted, tackling each challenge as it came with calculation, determination – and humour. He stretched what it is to be human to unimaginable lengths.

28 July 2019                        Sunday 17 C

Genesis 18:20-32              Colossians 2:12-14                           Luke 11:1-13  

     

PEELING AN ORANGE

The late Jean Vanier, the founder of l’Arche communities, used to tell the story of giving a retreat to the bishops of New Zealand. He spoke about his community of people living with intellectual disabilities and described how sometimes the joy bubbled over.  They once had a meal and there were oranges. After devouring the oranges, the people with disabilities started throwing the peal at one another.  The bishops laughed but then at supper that day in the retreat there were oranges! Need I go on?

I heard that the incident was re-enacted at Jean’s funeral in May in France! Oranges need their peel up to the time when they are eaten but then the peel is discarded as waste. The peel starts green but then ripens to gold. It is the protective covering of the fruit which has to mature until one day it gives us the vitamins of life. If the peel is pierced by an insect or other ‘enemy’ it rots.

Jesus didn’t often explain his parables.  He wanted people to tease them out themselves. But I cannot resist saying a word about this one. In our youth, hopefully, we live in a secure environment and we have our precious beliefs and view of the world. If someone comes and punctures that view we can begin to ‘rot’ inside.  We need our ‘peel’ for a long time – even a life time.

But there comes a time when that peel has to be torn off and we are exposed in our nakedness and vulnerability.  This can be a frightening time but it is also a time of enjoying the fruit. Luke is the only one who tells us about when Jesus visited the house of Martha and Mary. Martha clings to her peel and cannot understand why Mary is content to let hers go.

Often our Church does not give a good witness in discarding its peel.  We cling to it – structure, ritual, rules, tradition – and the world does not see the fruit of the gospel. It is hidden behind the peel. Perhaps it is time to rejoice and start throwing the peel around! With all our low self-image as a Church these days, with scandals galore, there is a silent hidden growth in maturity deep down in the lives of many people – not necessarily all baptised Christians, for the leaven of the gospel reaches beyond the confines of baptism.

In a few weeks the cause of John Bradburne of Mutemwa, will be formally launched in Zimbabwe and England.  John once finished a letter to his great friend, John Dove:

Pray on for my sanctification because it would encourage so many souls if such a wreckage might come to canonisation…

None of us discards our peel easily. We are caught between a desire for self-preservation and the desire to be courageous and generous.  We may indeed see ourselves as ‘wreckage’. We live a precarious and provisional existence until eventually all is peeled away.  That will be the moment to really throw the peel around.

21 July 2019                        Sunday16 C

Genesis 18:1-10                  Colossians 1:24-28                           Luke 10:38-42

Matthew quotes Isaiah in chapter 12 about the crushed reed and the smouldering wick

COME, BE MY LIGHT

COME, BE MY LIGHT

Mother Teresa of Calcutta is a name many have heard but may know only the barest details about. Born in Albania in 1910 she died in 1997 little more than twenty years ago. The story of her life, viewed through her letters[1], has come my way and makes for astonishing reading.

Born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu, she joined the Loreto (Mary Ward) sisters, in Dublin in 1928 and soon found her way to India. For eighteen years she followed the normal course of training and became a teacher at St Mary’s School for girls in Calcutta. Then on the 10^th September 1946, on a train going to Darjeeling, she had an experience which she could never put into words. It was a direct call from God – ‘a call within a call’ – to give up her life in Loreto and ‘go into the slums and serve the poorest of the poor’. She could not doubt this call but it took her months to convince the bishop and her own superiors of its genuineness. On 6 January 1948 the bishop finally felt satisfied and from that day on he gave her his full support. Still she had to wait for the final answer from Rome and it was 17^th August 1948 when she finally set out alone to begin her work among the poorest in Calcutta.

The work quickly grew and young women came to join her and they started houses in different parts of India and beyond.  They lived simply, desiring to share the lives of the poor and wore an Indian saree. By 1986 they had 350 houses in 77 countries.

So much for what people could see on the ground.  Wherever Mother Teresa went she radiated a great joy and confidence in God. But only a handful of people, the letters now reveal, had any idea what she was really living.  They could see the smile and joy but within Mother Teresa was in continual agony from the time she started her work in 1948 until her death in 1997, virtually fifty years.  She had asked to have her letters destroyed but the recipients realised that they were a precious testimony to what she was really living. And it takes a big effort on our part to grasp what was happening. She had offered Jesus everything and in response he invited her to share his agony in the garden and his abandonment on the cross. At one point she wrote:

The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbour who lives at the roadside assaulted by exploitation, corruption, poverty and disease’. Jesus asked Teresa to share in the experience of the poor, who were so rejected and assaulted, by experiencing ‘rejection’ by him, although it was impossible for Jesus to reject her. Her ‘darkness’ was a way in which she completely identified with the poor.

‘His Father’ Teresa wrote later to her sisters, ‘did not claim Jesus as His beloved Son (at Gethsemane) as he did at the Baptism and at the Transfiguration. Why?  Because God cannot accept sin and Jesus had taken on sin – He had become sin … when you accept the vows you accept the same fate as Jesus’, that is, the sense of rejection by God; ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ Jesus committed no sin but he took on the consequences of sin. The poor are often innocent victims and Teresa became one of them. She did not simply do things for them.

This is not to say that there was anything false or forced in her smile and the joy she radiated.  It was just that it came from deep within and was not something she ‘felt’ on the surface. The three readings this Sunday form a sandwich! The two pieces of ‘bread’ on the outside are joyful readings from Isaiah and Luke. But the meat of the sandwich is the reading from Galatians; ‘the only thing I can boast about is the cross of our Lord Jesus.’

7 July 2019          Sunday 14 C

Isaiah 66:10-14    Galatians 6:14-18          Luke 10:1-12,17-20

     

---

[1] Mother Teresa, Come Be my Light, Ed..Brian Kolodiejchuk, Image Books, 2007

HE WHO VEINS VIOLETS

HE WHO VEINS VIOLETS

Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more) …

I suppose we often ask why it is so difficult to create a ‘normal’ society in Zimbabwe.  People wait patiently for years, longing for the simple things of life; shelter, food, work to enable them to send their children to school, stable money and power to light their homes and help them cook. Why is it so hard to achieve such things? Since the country has all the means of providing them the answer has to be that we don’t want to make them accessible to all but the few.

I say ‘we’ in the broad sense of our society as a whole.  There are many individuals and groups who want these basic things but our country does not want them. If it did we would have them. A country is like an individual; courageous, generous, compassionate at times and at other times selfish, inward looking and careless about others. We like to believe the best about ourselves and rightly so but the best does not come without a struggle.

How we would love to have leaders who were generous, self-sacrificing and focused on the good of the country and the continent.  Then we could all sit back and leave it to them and enjoy our life.  But we do not have that situation and we are not likely to have it until we want it.  By wanting it I mean that real commitment to a way of life throughout society which shows courage, integrity and compassion. If we were committed to these things the country would soon change.

I believe it is changing – slowly.  We will get there.  I came across the poem I quote above in which Gerard Manley Hopkins speaks of a Jesuit brother who was a ‘doorkeeper’ – receptionist – in a college in Spain for over forty years, four hundred years ago.  All he did was answer the door.  But the life he built around that simple daily activity – welcoming people, counselling students, helping the poor and just being available to everybody – meant that slowly he himself became a great man and the time came when he was canonised by the Catholic Church.

Hopkins talks of God’s work of hewing mountains and continents but also of ‘veining violets’! These tiny flowers have the most beautiful colour and the image is of the slow evolution of nature over time that eventually produces the masterpiece: a simple purple flower.   God is working in us and in our society, pouring life into its veins, our veins, and the time will come when we will see the beauty of it.  The difference is the violet didn’t have to do anything to achieve its perfection.  But we do.

30 June 2019               Sunday 13 C

I Kings 19:18-21          Galatians 5:1, 13-18                Luke 9: 51-62   

THE COURAGE OF JOSHUA WONG

THE COURAGE OF JOSHUA WONG

I am shaken when I read of the courage of some young people.  They cross the threshold of fear with seeming ease. Joshua Wong is 22 and has become a voice and a symbol of the resistance in Hong Kong to the encroachment of China on the precious liberties secured by the territory when it was handed back by Britain to China in 1997 after 150 years of colonial occupation. Where can we, many of us hardened by years of complicity in injustice, find the courage to give something that will make a difference?

One day, when there was a large crowd listening, Jesus was speaking of the kingdom of God. The day drew on and the disciples advised him to give them a break and send them away to look for food and shelter as ‘this is a deserted place’.  It was the obvious thing to do and shifted the burden of poor planning away from them and onto the people. But Jesus shook them by saying, ‘You give them something to eat!’ ‘What! Us? We have nothing but a few loaves and a couple of fish.’

We know what happened next but the point is surely that they had to do something.  They had to begin.  Where it would lead they did not know.  And that is true for us.  We like to see our way clear from the start.  We don’t like leaving things open.  But leaving things open is precisely what we have to do if we are to have courage: we have to set out even if, like Abraham, we don’t know where we are going. The Our Father contains the line, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. Sure, this means give us the basic needs we have for survival and growth.  But it also means give us what we need even if we do not yet know what it is we need.

The ancient feast of Corpus Christi was given to us as a moment, long after we have celebrated Holy Thursday and the Passion, to reflect on what Jesus did that night when he took some bread and some wine into his hands. He did not take water because water is not ‘made by hands’.  He took things we make and raised them up so that they became transformed into himself, and himself crucified. It is important we do not think of this as some sort of symbolic act which one interpretation of the word ‘memorial’ might suggest. We see many statues put up ‘in memory’ of famous people.  These are strictly there to remind us of past heroes.  But Jesus is not a past hero. He is our living God revealed to us and, in an action of supreme self-giving, sharing his divine life with us daily.

Food and drink nourish us in ways that only medical science can monitor. The rest of us just get on with life and discover we grow – and age. But this food and drink, this bread and wine, transforms us in terms of our whole humanity – body and spirit.  If we can bring our ‘something’ to this encounter we will find ourselves changed and we will be able to show the courage of people like Joshua Wong.

23 June 2019                           Corpus Christi

Genesis 14:18-20                    I Corinthians 11:23-26                        Luke 9:11-17