WHERE THE DIVIDING LINE RUNS

 

WHERE THE DIVIDING LINE RUNS

The story of the Pharisee and the tax collector is one more of those simple parables told by Jesus which has an obvious meaning - and a not so obvious one. Here the person who feels secure in their position and way of life, ‘despises everyone else.’ It is obvious this is one more scene of division between those who have and those who do not have, between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor – the very kind of divide Jesus came to remove.

When we draw out the story from its original stark setting, it is less obvious where the dividing line runs. Is it so clear who are the rich and who are the poor? Who live comfortable lives and who precarious ones? Augustine gives us some poignant words about what he gradually came to understand:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you! For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside and, in my ugliness, fell upon those lovely things that you have made. You were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things, yet had they not been in you, they would not have been at all …

Every person is a mixture! We are all Pharisees and tax collectors! We are conscious of how much we rely upon ‘those lovely things’. Yet we are drawn, pulled, pursued, by that inner voice that will not leave us alone. We are ‘kept from you by those things’. Our struggle is always going to be to ‘pierce the clouds’ as Ben Sira puts it. ‘You were with me and I was not with you.’ God is always ‘with us’. Our problem is that we are not with God.

‘Give us this day our daily bread!’ Our daily bread has to be our permanent attention to the inner struggle to be ‘with God’. To see things with the eyes of God, to sense the Spirit moving across our waters, our consciousness, and to courageously follow the Way. This is behind the wisdom of the ancients about ‘examining our lives’ so highlighted in Christian times and emphasised – popularized? – by Ignatius of Loyola. (i) Be grateful for all ‘those lovely things’. (ii) Expand your horizons. Review. Where is God in my day? (iii) What to do?

23 Oct 2022                Sunday 30C                Sir 35: 12-18     2 Tim 4:6-18        Lk 18: 9-14

THERE IS NO CIVIL SOCIETY

 

THERE IS NO CIVIL SOCIETY

 

Russia's problem is our system. A system was created here that created such a person [Putin]. The question of the West's role in creating this system is a very serious one. The problem is that this system didn't create a society. There are a lot of very nice people in Russia. But there is no civil society. That's why Russia can't resist.

 

These words, this week, of Steve Rosenberg, writing from Moscow, are alarming. ‘…the West’s role in creating a system … (that prevented) the creation of a (civil) society … (so that) Russia can’t resist.’ My particular interest is in ‘the West’s role in creating this system’. Even a distant observer can have an opinion and mine would be that the West never developed a generous and imaginative attitude towards Russia. Here you have an ancient Christian, cultured, society that has struggled with its identity at least since the time of Peter the Great (c.1700). Three times since then it has been invaded by western countries and, after the Second Word War, it built an enormous shield.

 

The Americans were tempted to break through that shield but wiser heads prevailed and we had a ‘cold’ - in contrast to a hot – war for forty years until 1989. It was then that ‘the centre could not hold’ and the Russian empire simply imploded and all the vassal states on its periphery became independent, including Ukraine. That would have been a moment for wise restraint in the West but instead they gloated that they had won and America was now the only superpower. Someone even went so far as to write a book called The End of History. The Russians were humiliated and have spent the last thirty years preparing to bounce back. Now they have done it in an unpardonable way but at least the West should acknowledge that they, the West, are partly to blame. Instead of reaching out to Russia and doing everything possible to help them build a ‘civil’ society in a respectful way, they simply continued to gloat. Now the West has to pay and pay big.

 

I did not mean to wander into politics, if that is what I have done, but we are not good at sustained study when things seem to be going well. We only use our brains when things begin to go wrong and we ‘know how to fix it’. But we should never have allowed them to go wrong in the first place. All this may sound like a far-off reflection on today’s gospel but when Jesus praises the poor widow for insisting against the ‘unjust’ judge, he is teaching us of the need for sustained effort and prayer if we are to find our way in this complex world that we have fashioned.

 

16 October 2022         Sunday 29C    Ex 17:8-13      2 Tim 3:14 - 4:2          Lk 18:1-8

 

 

AS MUCH AS TWO MULES CAN CARRY

 

AS MUCH AS TWO MULES CAN CARRY

Naaman the Syrian comes up with a seemingly weird solution when Elisha refuses to accept any payment for curing him of leprosy. He asks for as much earth from Israel as two mules can carry. His idea is to worship the God of Israel in gratitude but he can only do this on the soil of Israel. So he takes the soil of Israel with him and transfers his thanks from Elisha to the God of Elisha.

Behind the story is one more hint that God is going to reveal himself, not just to Israel, but to all the nations. Naaman gets it, which is more than the people of Capernaum do when Jesus reminds them of this story. Gratitude is the doorway to recognition. Naaman learns this when he persists in trying to reward Elisha and the prophet puts him off and points elsewhere. Naaman is a foreigner with an open mind.

I am always struck when, without warning, people are asked to say a prayer. Their spontaneous response is often to begin, ‘Thank you, Lord, for the gift of life…’ This is a profound reaction because life itself is the greatest gift of all. God went on to give us a planet and a universe in which to dwell and grow. He gives astronomers the gift of piercing the universe for knowledge, doctors the gift of diagnosing and healing our physical wounds and journalists the gift of seeking, day in and day out, the truth about war, injustice and abuse.

We are grateful to these people and so many more who help us to grow in beauty, justice and truth. They are Elishas. If they are wise, as he was, they will not take credit for themselves. They will know they build on the work of others and, while they may accept acclaim and Nobel prizes, they will know the meaning of the words of Georges Bernanos, in The Diary of Country Priest, ‘All is grace’. Everything is a gift.

The first lesson a new born child experiences, though they cannot reflect on it, is that they are dependent. They are dependent on their parents and family for food, warmth, bathing, hugs - in a word, for love. We grow to be independent and think we can be but Jesus tells us to learn the lessons of childhood if we are to be part of his kingdom. The world is too much for a little child to take in, so they cry for their mother.

It is no different for us who are ‘grown- up’. The suffering we encounter, the wars we start, the injustices we perpetuate, the global warming we ignore – all are too much for one individual to take in and respond to. Jesus knew this and so gave us himself, his presence among us. The Eucharist is the moment we gather and celebrate his presence and recognise he shares our suffering and holds out to us the promise of the fullness of life through victory over pain and death. We take our bare earth home into our hearts and there worship the Lord who is making all things new (Revelations 21:1-5).

9 October 2022     Sunday 28 C         2 Kings 5:14-17    2 Tim2: 8-13      Lk 17:11-19       

ROMANCE AND VIOLENCE

 

ROMANCE AND VIOLENCE

People can be very patient. They sit by the road and wait for a bus for hours. Or they can be very impatient, dodging across traffic lanes, overtaking on the left as well as the right. Some of us are good at waiting. Others, with the prophet, say, ‘we cry for help and you do not listen.’

But the message is: ‘Wait! Even if it come slowly, it is sure to come.’ I belong to two countries; one by birth, one by adoption. The one gives me hope for the other. One waited seven hundred years for freedom and does not have it fully even now. The other waited seven decades for freedom and it too does not have it fully even now. Both, in their frustration, resorted to violence but the violence only yielded a partial solution. You cannot force solutions, unless you are a mechanic. But people are not machines. They cannot be fixed.

Waiting does not mean you sit on your hands and do nothing. But it does mean you trust a solution is on the way and we do all we can to allow the solution to emerge – even if it comes slowly. It is like the farmer. They are quite different from the mechanic. They work with vigour to sow their crops but they cannot force them to grow. They have to wait.

The poet WB Yeats wrote, ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’ Those leaders, who, like O’Leary, had a romantic optimistic view that goodness and truth would triumph, are now being challenged by the men of violence who want to force a solution. They did force a solution but it didn’t satisfy the people.

So they had to go back to waiting. And now, after a hundred years, a solution is finally in sight. So it is with them. So it will also be with us. ‘We are only servants.’ We do what we can. We cannot force the river to flow faster. 

All this is common sense but it is hard for us to wait. We want solutions and we want them now. We need the gospel to tell us: authentic permanently satisfying solutions only come through patience. And patience is a word that comes from the Latin patio, meaning suffering. A patient in a hospital suffers in the hope of healing. So it is with us; we suffer but our suffering is not useless. It is the raw material of a solution.

2 October 2022    Sunday 27 C          Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4      2 Tim 1:6…14    Lk 17:5-10