MAKING A WAY THROUGH THE SEA

 

MAKING A WAY THROUGH THE SEA

The sea was seen in ancient times as a hostile place. The Book of Revelations tells us a sign of the ‘new heaven and new earth’ will be that ‘there will be no more sea’ (21:1). But we have not got there yet and now we have to contend with the ‘sea’ of hostile forces – not just in eye-catching Gaza, Sudan and Myanmar – but in our own yard. The events – or non-events – of the 31^st March in Zimbabwe are yet one more reminder of the surrounding ‘sea’.

Yet, this week, the readings kick off with a word from Isaiah, ‘the Lord made a way through the sea.’ This reference to the Israelites crossing the Red Sea is constantly evoked to explain baptism. Passing through water – people are still sometimes baptised by ‘total immersion’ – is a sign of both entering a new community and being liberated from the sin that ‘clings so closely’ (Heb. 12:1).

Carl Jung, the psychiatrist, writing in the 1960s at the end of his life, says, ‘The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely predominant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree ... But that is – or seems to me – not the case. ... I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.’

That is our hope too. Lent is a time of hope. And Pope Francis has declared this year a Holy Year of Hope. As we approach the climax of this season in Holy Week, we are invited to see the opposites at work. On the one hand the world does seem at times to have no meaning but just be an endlessly ‘brutal and cruel.’ Yet, on the other, our baptism gives us hope that in the adverse experiences of our lives, there is meaning.

The woman ‘caught in adultery’ must have lost hope as they gathered their stones to throw at her. Yet her life was given back to her as a pure unexpected gift. She was given a way through the sea.

Our baptism is the sign of our entry into a pilot community which, it if lives up to its mission, gives a light to the world. In the oppressive environment of meaninglessness which at times seems to overwhelm us, we can be the salt of the earth.

6 April 2025          Lent 5C       Is 43:16-21     Phil 3:8-24        Jn 8:1-11

EDITH STEIN

 

EDITH STEIN, SR TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS,                              12 October 1891 – 9 August 1942

Edith Stein was born, the eleventh child, into a devout Jewish family in Breslau, in what was then Germany but is now Poland, in 1891. Her father died soon afterwards and her mother set about bringing her family up as devout Jews fulfilling all the laws and customs of their tradition. Edith was precocious and would endlessly probe the questions about life and faith that arose in her. As a teenager she concluded, she was not satisfied with her Jewish faith and became an agnostic – to her mother’s great sorrow.

At the university of Freiburg, Edith threw herself into philosophical studies searching for answers to her questions. Highly intelligent, she soon made her mark and won the attention of the renowned philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Deeply distressed by the outbreak of war in 1914, Edith volunteered to become a nurse. Her experience of the suffering of people unsettled her and left her with even more questions. Meanwhile her academic career progressed and she attained the highest honours but was blocked from the recognition that was her due because she was a woman.

She continued her search and one day in 1921 she happened to come across the Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila. She began to read out of curiosity without any high expectations but gradually was drawn into the book and could not put it down. She read all night and finished it at dawn. She knew then she had found what she wanted. She applied to be baptised into the Catholic Church but the priest said she needed time to prepare. She said she was fully ready and he gave way to her and she was baptised on 1 January 1922.

Edith wanted to follow Teresa and become a Carmelite immediately but she was persuaded to continue her philosophical studies and teaching. Now she had a new vision for her life and she studied St Thomas and taught at the Dominican school at Speyer. In 1933 the Nazis withdrew her licence to teach because she was a Jew. Edith wrote to the pope, Pius XI, urging him to protest about the persecution of the Jews which was ‘an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Saviour’.

She realised she was now free to enter the Carmelites which she did in Cologne in November 1933, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. The sisters knew the Nazis persecution of the Jews was only beginning and sent her for her safety to the Netherlands. But nowhere was safe. When World War Two broke out the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and the Dutch bishops issues a strong condemnation of their policies especially their persecution of the Jews. In response the Nazis arrested 987 Jews and sent them to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Efforts were made to save Edith but she said, ‘not to share the fate of my brothers and sisters would be utter annihilation.’ She was killed on the 9th August 1942. Pope John Paul II canonised her in 1998.  

GIVE ME TIME

 

GIVE ME TIME

George Croft, a Jesuit priest and psychologist who died aged 98 eighteen months ago after some fifty years in Zimbabwe, used to playfully point to his name appearing in scripture. He was referring to John 15:1, which states ‘I am the true vine and my Father is the georgos,’ (Greek for vine grower).  I was thinking of George this week when reading the passage in Luke about the man in the vineyard pleading with the owner to give him time to ‘dig around’ the stubborn vine, which bears no fruit, ‘and manure it’.

Moses is such a key figure because he was the one who emphasised the need for a response from the people. Up to then the people of Israel had been carried along like young children in a family who never have to make a decision. Now they had to decide and Moses gives them a stark choice which we read on the very first day of Lent after the Ashes: ‘I set before you life or death, blessing or curse.’ Well, we know what they did. As Elijah put it, they stood on one leg one time and another another.

God waited and goes on waiting. He gave them time and he gives us time. The world is groaning in one great act of giving birth (Romans 8). When I came to Zimbabwe (it was still Rhodesia), I remember being shocked to see many of my fellow countrymen and women supporting Ian Smith. Surely, they had learnt, after hundreds of years of English rule in Ireland, that oppression of the people you rule brings no blessing? Much more seriously, and topically, surely the Jews, who were so unbelievably cruelly treated by the Nazis in the 1940s, have learnt what it must be like for the Arabs they now rule to be treated ‘without mercy’?

Why do we take so long to learn the lesson Moses told the people: ‘God is full of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in faithful love ...’ (Ex 34:6). This is the message given to the very people who are now full of anger towards the people whose land they took and who have tried to protest. And as a result, they too are full of anger and resentment. How long will it take? How long must the vinedresser dig around? 

These thoughts take us far away from our own daily reality. But we have to keep reminding ourselves that justice and peace are contagious. The more we try in our small way to live justly and bravely, the more ripples will go out to stir the waters of compassion and ultimately peace.

23 March 2025            Lent Sunday 3C          Ex 3:1...15    1Cor 10:1...12    Lk 13:1-9

 

 

 

PROMISE AND TERROR

 

PROMISE AND TERROR

To live without hope is a terrible thing. Life imprisonment without a possibility of release, tedious physical work from morning to night, incurable illness and a whole range of other human experiences – all can crush the human spirit. Viktor Frankl survived a Nazi concentration camp and later wrote, in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.” If you can see a meaning in what you are living day after day, your will survive and even relish your experience.

Abram (later Abraham) was plucked out of his routine in Ur, an ancient city in Iraq, by being given a startling promise by God. ‘You will have descendants as many as the starts of heaven.’ He questions God and there follows a strange ritual which ends with Abram falling into a deep sleep ‘and terror seized him’. Fast forward, and we find Jesus in the garden of Olives, with his companions in a deep sleep around him, and he is ‘filled with terror’. There was a prelude to this; Luke has told us earlier about those same companions on a mountain, drowsy and afraid.

As we go deeper into Lent, we see the promise to Abraham fulfilled in the offering of Jesus. The Son of Man knew that promise would cost him a cruel death - and it terrified him. The disciples did not know what was going on. It was a mercy, really, that they didn’t. They could not have taken it in. They continued confused and fearful to the end. It was only when he showed himself to them after he rose from the death, that they realised and ‘they stood there dumbfounded’.

Lent is laced through with this promise – and terror. It is like an explosion to end all explosions. We know the experience in our own small - and not so small – ways. We might have been promised a place at secondary school or university. We are delighted but there is some ‘terror’. What will it be like? Will I manage? Or we are given a demanding job. It can be frightening. When Augustine became bishop of Hippo, he tells us he was terrified. A responsible position is not something to ‘enjoy’ – though many fall for its allure. It should fill us with terror. Can I rise to this call? Can I give all I have? Many people’s happiness depends on my answer.  

16 March 2025            Sunday 2 C          Gen 15:5...18         Ph 3:17-4:1              Lk 9:28-36

 

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

 

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

It is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the ‘discontents’ of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our evolutionary background has not yet caught up.

Are these words of Carl Gustav Jung the nostalgic musings of an old man past his best or are they an insightful comment on our age? We value the freedoms we have won, the advances we have made and the solidarities we experience with others around the planet. But do we pay attention to where we have come from? Do we write off our ancestors as pre-scientific, as people who have nothing to teach us moderns?

Jung was the renowned advocate of the unconscious in each of us and the collective unconscious of all of us. In his long life as a psychiatrist, he studied every avenue that might open up our knowledge of what is unconscious. He quickly grasped that mental illness could often be cured by helping a person become aware of what lay hidden below the surface of their lives.   

There are different ways in which we become aware or wake up. Lent is one of them. When the scribe Ezra read the book of the Law to the people who had returned from exile they were ‘all in tears.’ They woke up and realised they had abandoned the ways of their ancestors and ended up as ‘discontents.’  It is no easy matter to probe our unconscious and interpret our dreams, as Jung did. But we are given these forty days to reflect on who we are and what we believe.

We can deflect our frustration on to someone like Trump, who seems not to care about the history of his own country or of others, some of which he hasn’t even heard of. We cannot do much about him. History will judge him. But we can do something about ourselves and our readings for the next forty days are like incoming drones that we can either repel or welcome.

9 March 2025       Lent 1 C      Dt 26:4-10    Rom 10:8-13       Lk4:1-13

 

THE TEST OF A PERSON IS IN THEIR WORDS

 

THE TEST OF A PERSON IS IN THEIR WORDS

More reliable than any alarm clock, the birds outside my window start chattering around 0515hrs. Are they saying their prayers or are they defending their territory? I don’t know. But they are having a conversation. We too are chatterers and we nourish or harm one another with our tongues.

At the height of the Reformation, when Christians were gathering stones to throw at one another, Ignatius of Loyola cautioned his companions against getting involved in verbal brawls. Console people, he urged them, and approach them with suavitas (genuine kindness, charm).  Among Ignatius’ first companions was a Frenchman, Pierre Favre (Peter Faber in English usage), who was renowned for the gentle attractiveness in his conversation. He won people over by his kind and patient interest in them.

John Bradburne, who devoted his life to accompanying people with leprosy in Zimbabwe and was killed near Mutemwa towards the end of the Liberation War, showed this same quality. People would say they felt better just by meeting him and having a few words with him. There was nothing false or pretentious in his conversation. There was always something genuine and encouraging in his words and people left his presence laughing.

There is, of course the other side to conversation which we call gossip. I suppose there is good gossip and bad gossip but it is the latter one that is harmful where the character of a person, who is not present, is torn apart. This really can destroy a reputation.

The parables, cited in the readings below, have a consoling message. If you are basically a good person, trying your best, you will automatically – without thinking about it – speak well of others and put a good interpretation on what they say or do. A good potter produces a good jar. A good tree will produce good fruit. ‘A person’s words flow from what fills his heart.’

There are people we enjoy being with and others we avoid! It depends on their conversation – and on ours. The tongue is there to build us up and to praise God – like the birds do in the early morning.     

2 March 2025       Sunday 8 C    Sir 27:4-7 1 Cor 25:54-58    Lk 5:39-45

DAVID’S RESTRAINT

 

DAVID’S RESTRAINT

David’s restraint, when he has Saul in his power, is a model for peacemakers. Saul set out with three thousand men to find and do away with David. David, aware of Paul’s aim, creeps up on Saul while he is asleep and takes away his spear but does not harm him. When Saul wakes and realises what had happened, he cries out, ‘I have behaved like a fool. I have been profoundly in the wrong.’

This incident from the Hebrew scriptures prepares us for the gospel where Jesus says bluntly, ‘love your enemies, do good to those who hate you’. As many have pointed out, a shocking command to Jews then under the Roman yoke. To love is to go out to another with a desire they be free and full of joy. The story is told of Aston Chichester, before he became the first Catholic bishop in Harare, that he accused a boy at a school in England of helping himself to the altar wine. The boy feared the worst when he was called to the office but Chichester had investigated and found the boy was innocent. He told him, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve made a fool of myself.’ History doesn’t tell us what the boy thought of this but he surely went away amazed and elated.  

The desire to respond to other’s fears and build bridges does not seem prominent in the mindset of many world leaders. Rather than removing the spear they use it to impose their own solution. After all these centuries of war and oppression, we still seem far from practising restraint. To take just one example, why is it not obvious that the Palestinians want a place where they can live and prosper without fear? Why is this denied them these past eighty years?

Restraint brings peace to both sides. To compromise is not to show weakness. On the contrary, it takes courage to face the cost of another’s fears and allay them. I come from a country, still divided, but where efforts to remove the bitter hatred of three centuries has succeeded to the extent that young people hardly know what you are talking about when you recall the wounds of the past. To reach that point both sides had to restrain themselves and recognise their antagonisms were leading nowhere.

To see a problem from the point of view of the other person, to get into their mind, is what actors, psychotherapists, priests and many others try to do. Somehow, we have to empty ourselves of our own standpoints and take on that of another. Isn’t that what the Lord himself did when he became one of us? 

23 February 2025  Sunday 7 C  1 Sam 26    1 Cor 15: 45-49        Lk 627-38

PLANTED BY THE WATERSIDE

 

PLANTED BY THE WATERSIDE

What makes for a good doctor, or a good anyone? The doctor who knows the clinical answer to every disease will, no doubt, do a good job. But if they only rely on book knowledge, there will be something missing. That ‘something’ is the space between the doctor as a person and the patient. The book knowledge is necessary and may well provide a cure for many ailments. But it is not enough.

I have mentioned before in this column the etching I once saw in a house in Ireland where a child lay on a bed dying. The mother has her head buried in despair in the bedclothes, the father standing lost in the background and the doctor sitting by the bed deep in thought. He is straining every inch of his knowledge and his intuition to find a remedy.

Scientists today are humbler than their forbears. There was a time, in the hubris of the Enlightenment, when they boasted they would, in time, find the answer to all nature’s secrets. Few would claim that today. The more science advances, the more scientists know their limits – and the more some of the gospel sayings show their wisdom; “When you have done all you were told to do, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty'” (Lk 17:10).

But still, scientists, like doctors, explore beyond known boundaries and follow their intuitions. They leave aside rule books, manuals and maps and search for solutions that may never have been tried before. They will not go wrong if they remember another scripture saying, this time from Jeremiah; ‘Blessed is the one who trusts in Yahweh ... They are like a tree by the waterside ... which never stops bearing fruit’ (17:7).    

I take this to mean, when a person is rooted in God, they can try all sorts of things. They will never go far wrong. Am I saying anything profound? No! We know that no soldier can be trained for every eventuality in war and no player can prepare for every twist of a football game. True, but we are not soldiers or footballers – most of us. The point surely is; we are all called to be explorers, all called to announce the kingdom of God wherever we are planted.

The tree has no choice, but we have. We can choose to be planted by the waterside and ‘thrust our roots to the stream’ (Jer 17 again). There we draw water that gives us energy and imagination to engage in the struggles of today. Alone, we can do nothing. But rooted by the water’s edge we can make a difference – beyond the rules. 16 Feb 2025. Sunday 6 C. Jer 17:5-8. 1 Cor 15:12... 20. Lk 6: 17... 26

  

     

AMONG YOU, UNKNOWN TO YOU

 

AMONG YOU, UNKNOWN TO YOU

The story is told by Indian wise man, Anthony de Melo. about a religious community that was disintegrating. They were aging and bickering and had lost direction. The leader of the group decided to consult a holy man and ask his advice. He simply said, ‘Do you not know the Messiah is among you?’ The leader was puzzled and went back to the community and reported the holy man’s words.

They did not understand but they began to look at one another and say, ‘Could this one be the Messiah? Or that one? Or even that one?’ They began to see each other differently and began to respect each other, a respect that gradually grew into a warmth. Soon the community turned a corner and became wholesome again and attracted others to join them.

We have no idea who this person is we meet today. When I was at our Social Development Centre in Chishawasha, we use to have members of the boards of organisations we dealt with coming to see what we were doing. I well remember the time Robert MacNamara was one such. I was in awe of the man who had been President John F. Kennedy’s Defence Secretary at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. For about a week the world was on the edge of a nuclear war that might have destroyed us all. And here he was calmly bumping along a Mhondoro dirt road looking at our projects.  I was the only one on the bus who knew who he was. I was totally in awe of the man and could hardly put a few sentences together in talking to him. 

In this first week of February we definitively end the Christmas season which has lasted forty days, as Lent and Easter will shortly do. The occasion is the ‘presentation’ of the baby Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem. No one, in that milling crowd, knew who this child was – except two old representatives of the ‘remnant’ of Israel, Simeon and Anna. The promises to Abraham, the covenant on Sinai and the words of the prophets are being fulfilled but no one notices.

Our world may look predictable and – for many of us – our lives secure. But we live in a charged world where those we meet – from the greatest to the least – may be about to change everything. John the Baptist told the pharisees ‘standing among you, unknown to you, is the one ... and I am not fit to undo the strap of his sandals’. Whoever and whatever we meet on our way, we are invited to stop and pay attention. Otherwise we may miss something that may change our life and that of those among whom we live.

9 February 2025    Sunday 5 C           Is 6:1...8      1 Cor 15:1-11       Lk 5:1-11

NO END IN SIGHT

 

NO END IN SIGHT

I was five years old and remember talk of the end of the Japanese war that year, 1945, but if there was mention of the liberation of the death camp in Southern Poland, I knew nothing of it. And many to this day do not know of the systematic killing of millions of people, mostly Jews, by the Nazis in the terrible war of that period. Perhaps that is why such publicity has been given this week to the discovery, by Russian soldiers, of the many emaciated people awaiting death in Auschwitz eighty years ago.

The Northern Irish reporter, on a recent visit to the camp, was close to tears as he showed us the ordinary looking railway lines that carried millions to their death, the block houses and the gas chambers. How could human beings devise a complex efficient system of deliberately killing millions of people? Even after eighty years it still sounds unbelievable.

And eighty years later, we are in the midst of the long-drawn-out re-assertion the Jewish people have been pushing ever since that terrible time. With international backing, they carved out a foothold in Arab lands without the agreement of the people who had lived there for centuries. The result was tension, violence and war. The Holy Land is now an armed camp with both peoples locked in a bitter struggle with no end in sight. Thousands have been killed, homes destroyed and lives of survivors blunted forever. This week has seen a truce given joy to a few on both sides but no sign of a lasting peace.

Also this week, we commemorate another event involving Jews. Following custom, every first born male Jewish child was brought to Jerusalem and ‘presented to the Lord.’ So Mary and Joseph took the child Jesus up to the temple and ‘offered in sacrifice a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.’

Is there any connection between these events? Jewish history was supposed to be about hope. Abraham was the father of a movement that would see his descendants as numerous as the sand on the sea shore – impossible to count. The child who suddenly appeared in the temple was the fulfilment of the longed-for promise, a pilot project that would multiply and create a new world where everyone would be a new born son and daughter. A light would appear in the darkness and each would look at their neighbour and say, ‘brother, sister’.

It hasn’t happened – yet. Paul’s ‘sorrow and unceasing anguish’ because ‘my brothers – my own flesh and blood ... have not recognised God’s saving justice and have tried to establish their own’ remains.

2 February 2025   The Presentation     Mal 3:1-4    Heb 2:14-18    Lk 2:22-40

THE WORD

 

THE WORD

When I went to Mhondoro to learn Shona many years ago, I was astonished how much people enjoyed talking to one another. I saw two people approach each another on a path and they started talking before they met. They stood for a while talking and then moved off in their different directions still talking until they were out of earshot.

People could listen to Jesus for hours, even days – ‘these people have been with me for three days’ (Mark 8:2) – and not get tired. The early church circulated his teaching by word of mouth but as time went on, and those who listened to Jesus began to die, they decided they must write down his words and deeds. We have all benefited from this.

This week our readings record Jesus himself relying on the written word - from Isaiah. The first reading tells us of the return from exile when, frankly, most people had forgotten their own history and the promises God made to them in the desert. So when Ezra found the book of the law and read it to the people ‘from early morning until noon’ they ‘were all in tears as they listened.’

When Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah – ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me ... to proclaim liberty to captives ... and the Lord’s year of favour’, his hearers in Nazareth were astonished and ‘he won the approval of all.’

And now it is our turn to draw life from the written word. We are celebrating Sunday of the Word of God and it is a moment to remember what a rich treasure we have in the bible. It contains in written form the whole story of God’s gradual revelation of his purpose to the human family. The church has instinctively preserved the early texts through centuries of war, fire and floods. The original languages were put into Latin in the fourth century and, in modern times, in every language under the sun.

In the days before books, the monasteries developed the practice of lectio divina, holy reading, by which a person was invited to ponder, relish and express their thoughts in personal prayer. There would be lots of pauses in the reading to allow the meaning to sink in like water on arid soil.

This is accessible prayer for us all. But we can also realise, in our secular age, that the written word by any good writer can also convey a message to us. We can be nourished by the words of Shakespeare and also Chinua Achebe or Charles Mungoshi.  If we ‘listen’ attentively, the written word can be a partner to us in a dialogue about our world.

26 January 2025           Sunday 3 C                  Neh 8:2...10       1 Co 12:12-30            Lk 4:14-21

 

THERE ARE ALWAYS CONSEQUENCES

 

THERE ARE ALWAYS CONSEQUENCES

As Christmas disappears into our rear-view mirror, we are invited to begin the new year by listening to the letter to the Hebrews which is a meditation on what Jesus did. ‘He has purged sins away’ (1:3). I find myself asking how did he do it. From our earliest years we learn that Jesus ‘died for our sins.’ But what does that mean? How did that help us?

Well, one answer must surely be that he took responsibility for sin despite the fact that he was sinless. I remember as a small boy we were all herded into a classroom and the teacher announced no one was leaving the room until the one who had committed some crime owned up to being the culprit. He didn’t and we were kept in that room a long time. But I have since fantasised, ‘what if I had owned up, even though I was not guilty’?  I would have enabled the others to go free though I might have brought some punishment on myself.

They would have gone free but that might not have solved whatever the issue was. There are always consequences. Many innocent people bore the cost of the liberation of Zimbabwe. We attained freedom through their sacrifice. But that does not mean the root causes for the conflict were wiped away in a day. The consequences remain.

We have to work through the consequences. Even though we might say we were not responsible for ‘the system’ that existed in Southern Rhodesia, we have to engage in a new struggle to remove the ‘sin that clings’ to quote Hebrews again (12:1). What Jesus has done is clear the ground so that it is much easier for us than it was for our ancestors to build a just society which reflects the ‘hidden purpose of God’.

We can do this, first, by accepting our responsibility and becoming engaged in this building. Second, by enduring the consequences of failure when we have done all that we can – even if it means the cross. Edmund Campion tried to engage with Eizabeth I of England in 1581, in the days of persecution with these words:

If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour, I have no more to say but to commend your case and mine to almighty God, the searcher of hearts, who sends us his grace, and sets us at accord before the day of payment, to the end that we may be at last friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.

19 January 2025    Sunday 2 C           Is 62:1-5     1 Cor 12:4-11       Jn 2:1-11