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