SO GREAT A MYSTERY

 

SO GREAT A MYSTERY

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a Roman senator in late antiquity, was horrified by the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The traditional religion of ancient Rome was now labelled ‘pagan’ and the basilicas and shrines of the gods were either pulled down or converted to Christian use. We were taught it was all a ‘good thing’, this conversion of the emperor, but Symmachus protested, ‘We gaze up at the same stars; the sky covers us all; the same universe encompasses us. Does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for the Truth? The heart of so great a mystery cannot be reached by following one road only.’

St Ambrose was not amused. It was the central tenant of Christianity then and since: there was ‘one road only’ to the great Truth and Jesus had revealed it. Everything else, as Paul said in another context, was ‘garbage’. Today we would like to give Symmachus another hearing. There are millions of people on our planet who do not share the Christian ‘one road only’ view and we have learnt to respect and appreciate what they hold dear. It is not only people of other faiths, like the Muslims and Buddhists, but people of no explicit faith who lead lives of integrity and generosity.

And if Symmachus was around today he would feel further support for his view if he looked at the divisions among Christians. The spectrum is wide though not as intense as it was in the sixteenth century when we burned, hanged and quartered each other. And if we narrow our zoom even more and look at Catholics for a moment, we will see another spectrum. We are familiar with the label – that word again – ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ but we say there is one thing on which we all agree: the Eucharist is the heart of our faith.

But is it? I know two good, devoted and generous women who have quite different ‘takes’ on the Eucharist. One was a hermit, drawn out of her solitude by the BBC when they discovered her talent for explaining and commenting on art. She was taken to many places – Paris, Rome, New York – but there was always one condition. The BBC had to provide means for her to go to Mass each day. What they made of this isn’t recorded but each day a taxi driver in a foreign city had to scratch his head to find a Catholic Church in the early morning.

The other woman, equally generous and devoted, sat lightly on the Catholic custom of regular participation at the Eucharist. She did not feel the need and was irritated by the priest always being a man and often preaching bland sermons. She would have much sympathy for Symmachus.

If the reader is wondering where all this is leading, it is simply this. It is true that the mystery, which we sense in our inmost being, can be approached in different ways. Yet the gift of the Eucharist to the primitive community Jesus formed was prized from the beginning. All four gospel writers, as well as Paul, tell us about it. And they each write with special reverence as they sense that here we are actually touching the mystery. Jesus, the Son of God, is inviting us to be physically part of his offering of his life and death for the world.     

14 February 2021         Sunday 6B       Lev 13:1-2, 45-46         1 Cor 10:31-11:1          Mk 1: 41-45

 

THE VIRUS NEVER DIES

 

THE VIRUS NEVER DIES

La Peste, (The Plague) is a novel by Algerian writer Albert Camus, published in 1947, which describes the effect of a virus on a town, Oran, in his country. The town is real but the plague is not though its description draws on accounts of real plagues in other places in other times. The book was immediately hailed as a ground breaker for two reasons. It was seen as an allegory of the German occupation of France (1940-44) and how the people suffered and reacted. But it was also seen as a reflection on human beings in general and how they respond to the pestilence embedded in life that keeps breaking out all over the world. The most recent example is a report of the Chinese trying to eliminate the culture, language, dignity and even life of the Uighurs in their western province.

The first sign of something unusual in Oran was rats bleeding and dying in the streets. People notice it but aren’t worried and continue their normal life, leaving the authorities to clean the streets. Then there are some deaths among the population. Again it is shrugged off and causes no alarm. Finally, the death toll rises to around 500 or more a week. And then the dreaded word ‘plague’ is used for the first time. Camus describes the gradual change that come over the people. Health workers devise a response which is scientific, meticulous and generous. The doctor works twenty hours a day.

But many try to leave the town though the gates are locked and guarded to prevent the contagion spreading. The priest preaches a sermon saying the people have brought it on themselves and they must accept the suffering as a cleansing process. The bar owners are happy that people come to drink to drown their worries and frustrations.  Those who have money spend it in a luxurious life style without thought for the future. Ordinary people just wander aimlessly round the town overwhelmed by the sense of ‘illness, exile and separation’ that grips the town. Meanwhile the number of deaths rise and the authorities are more and more stretched.

Camus has no heroes and no villains. Everyone is just trying to survive. But Camus makes a quiet but earnest plea for people to face the truth.

'All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims - and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence. This may seem rather simple to you, and I don't know if it is simple, but I do know that it is true. I have heard so many arguments that nearly turn my head, and which turn enough other heads for them to consent to murder, that I understand that all the misfortunes of mankind came from not stating things in clear terms. So, I decided to speak and to act clearly ...' p 195 

 

There is one great benefit we have in our time with our own plague, Covid 19. We know the truth and can do something about it. Facts are available even though some politicians cannot resist bending the truth and presenting it in a way that suits them. This is a plague that our ancestors did not have the science to detect or treat. We do. And all the ‘stop/go’ about vaccines is only a temporary hitch.

The people of Oran lived a life of drudgery, reflected in the words of Job in this Sunday’s readings, as they waited for the pest to recede. Many today are locked up and frustrated and there are even cases of young people unable to bear the wait and taking their own lives. But Camus tells us that a pestilence is like an earthquake or a cyclone that hits us from time to time and reminds us of the underlying fragility of life. He ends his novel saying,

‘The plague bacillus never dies or vanishes completely … it waits in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and old papers, and perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or the misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.’

7 February 2021          Sunday 5B      Job 1:1-7         1 Cor 9:16-23              Mark 1:29-39

 

 

JESSE THISTLE – A HUMAN TRIUMPH

 

JESSE THISTLE – A HUMAN TRIUMPH

It is something to give joy to the heart of God and to us. He is about 42 now but indigenous Canadian Jesse Thistle has found his feet after an almost unbelievably broken life. His father, an indigenous Canadian from the Algonquin tribe, in trouble with the law, ran away from home and met up with another indigenous Canadian from the Métis-Cree tradition with whom he had three sons, Jesse being the youngest. Sonny, the father, was soon in trouble again and his wife ran away with the children when they were still small. He caught up with her and took the children back but neglected them. They ended up in ‘white’ homes, among people, who in the 1960s, despised and tried to scrub out the indigenous culture.

Jesse ended up on drugs and living wild. It is a dreadful story but slowly his grandmother and then his mother and finally a girl, Lucie, came into his life. He began to see another way was possible and, when he realised (it had been hidden from him) his mother was a Métis-Cree, he researched her history, and so his own. He found they were a noble tribe who fought for their land and their freedom against the Canadian settlers in the 1880s. He put himself to school and learnt to read and do maths. He shone and was offered a post at York University in Toronto where he is now working on his PhD. 

It is a story of rejection, destitution and redemption. Despite the pain of it all it is hard not to rejoice once again at the sheer resilience people have and their ability to survive unspeakable trauma. After all, what are we here for but to fight these battles and win? Shakespeare said famously, ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ True, but all the world’s also a workshop, where men and woman mould their destinies by their decisions. And we can rejoice in the writers who bring us these stories. They tell us of the plague we are living through. They tell us Trump and Biden and climate change and North Korea. But on the same page they tell us of Jesse Thistle and his triumph over the snares life laid for him.

Jesse’s new-found life did not end with himself. It drove him to compassion for his fellow Canadians who endured similar histories. He wrote and spoke on ‘homelessness’ as something that goes well beyond not having a roof over your head. A roof is one thing but kinship, land, culture, language and spirituality were also wrenched from the indigenous people and made them ‘homeless’. Jesse spreads his compassion to reach out to veterans returning from war and the elderly unable to live with their children. Kinship is a key value: it extends to visiting, hospitality and relationships. It makes you who you are. Without it you are lost as he was for ten years or more as he drifted from dead end to dead end. All of this could be written about Africa.

When an evil spirit shouted at Jesus, ‘I know who you are’, it was speaking the truth. But Jesus told it, ‘Be quiet!’ There was no way the people in that synagogue could understand then. It would take time. They thought he could solve all their problems at a stroke. But life is not like that. Jesus knew the struggle with evil would be a long haul – for individuals – and for the world. We are still at it all these centuries later. Each one and all of us together have to engage in that struggle. There are setbacks but there are also victories. Jesse Thistle’s story one of those victories; a human triumph forged in the workshop of life.  

31 January 2012          Sunday 4B      Deut 18:15-20       1 Cor 7 :32-35       Mk 1:21-28   

NEW AND SHOCKING

 

NEW AND SHOCKING

People keep holding a gun to my head. But it is only a thermometer. Normally it gives good news but last week it suddenly shot up into the red. Panic! I began to ponder how I felt. I persuaded myself I had all the symptoms of the beginnings of Covid and stayed away from others and so missed lunch. I lay there ‘grinding gears’ for a while thinking what next until my supposed bearer of bad news reappeared and told me his thermometer was faulty. He checked me out with another one and behold! I was normal. I suddenly began to feel well.

The moral of the story is that our feelings sometimes have nothing to do with reality. This may sound trite and obvious but we often stay with our feelings because the reality is just too hard to bear. Joe Biden tried hard in his inaugural speech to raise the aspirations of his fellow Americans but he pointed out the obvious; the ideals of the founders, about equality and opportunity, are still, 240 years later, far from the reality.

In Zimbabwe we are into our fifth decade of freedom yet the ideals spoken that night in April, 1980, are still simply ideals. They do not reflect the reality. Simukai Chigudu, who was at a renowned school in Zimbabwe before he moved to the UK to completed his secondary education and pursue studies in medicine and then politics, writes in The Guardian that ‘colonialism has never really ended’.  The way people think, in Zimbabwe and in the UK, is still colonial in essence. They may assent in their heads to the notion of equality and may rave in anguish at the events, for example, that led to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement but when they meet another person in the street who is different from them, they become tense and search for a politically correct attitude or, worse, ignore or condescend to them. Between their ideals and the reality there is a yawning gap.

There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

That knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new at every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been.

 

These words of T.S.Eliot, in East Coker, are a commentary on the words of Jesus which we have this Sunday: ‘The time has come and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Change your way of thinking and believe the Good News.’ As a companion piece to this gospel we are given that passage in Jonah where the people of Nineveh – an ancient pagan city – ‘believed’ in the words of Jonah and did precisely that: they changed their way of thinking.

The pattern of our life ‘is new at every moment’ and we are always called to conversion: to make our best effort to welcome the ‘new and shocking valuation of all we have been’, and do the hard work of bringing our thinking into harmony with the reality we live each day.

24 January 2021          Sunday 3B      Jon 3:1-10       1 Cor 7:29-31              Mk 1:14-20

 

 

 

 

A BREAK-IN

 

A BREAK-IN

There are break-ins and break-ins. When people want change, they try to break into the system and reform it. The break into Congress in the United States on 6 January has horrified America and people around the world. Frightening as it was, it still showed that dissatisfied people will sometimes take extreme action to express their frustration. It will be an awesome task for Joe Biden to begin the healing of America when he is sworn in as President next Wednesday. 

We celebrate another type of break-in as we begin a new year in the scripture readings of the Church. In today’s readings God breaks into young Samuel’s world and the boy takes time to understand what is going on. Jesus also breaks into the complacent world of some fishermen, a tax man and a bunch of others. He has a big impact for we are told ‘they left everything and followed him’.

Breaking into someone’s life can change everything and the follow through from Christmas alerts us to the work that is only just beginning. We can dust down the crib and stow it away for another year but it would be good if we could also stow away in our hearts the message that crib contains. Jesus broke into the world in order to bring to perfection the work already begun. For centuries people had felt their way towards the divine but now the divine had come to dwell among them.

This would make all the difference but, like Samuel, people don’t get it – at least not at first. If we can look in the mirror, we realise how contaminated we are. Peter and the others may have been called but the gospel tells us how slow they were to understand. In their faltering steps we recognise ourselves. We are not converted. We have not allowed God to break into our lives. If we did, we would experience ‘peace flowing like a river’ (Is 66:12). But we don’t and we haven’t. I think of Matthew and the way he seems to have totally surrendered to the break-in. He accepted it and never looked back.

I also think of Franz Jägerstätter who was the only person in his village in Austria to vote against the Anschluss, the proposed union of Austria and Germany, in the plebiscite of 10 April 1938. He was dismayed that many Catholics in his village supported the Nazis, writing, "I believe there could scarcely be a sadder hour for the true Christian faith in our country". He was eventually arrested, tried and executed by guillotine for refusing to take the oath to Hitler. His last recorded words before his death were, ‘I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord’. It took his fellow Austrians a long time to understand his heroism. Even after the war he was considered a traitor to his country and a deserter of his family; his wife and three young daughters. His wife lived to see her husband beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 and she died only in 2013.   

Jägerstätter was one of the many through the centuries who allowed the Lord to break into their lives. As we start this difficult year, we may draw courage from him and those like him who welcome this sort of ‘break-in’.

17 January 2021          Sunday 2 B     1 Sam 3:3-10, 19         1 Cor 6:13…20           Jn 1:35-42

A FEW DROPS OF WATER

 

A FEW DROPS OF WATER

The more we acquire the power to destroy our earth the more, happily, we acquire the ability to do something about it.  Just think how we would be if Covid 19 had crept up on us and we did not know what it was and how it had arisen! As it is, we do know and what is more we know how to prevent it. We have found, it seems, a vaccine. ‘Follow the science’ has become the wise counsel which has borne fruit and politicians who have ignored science for political gain have endangered the lives of their people.

So here we are in a scientific forum which tells us how we got into this and how we can get out of it. But scientists know the more they advance the more they become aware of their limits. ‘Getting out of it’ requires human cooperation and that cannot be engineered by scientists. Science is becoming a more humble discipline and is ever more open to a mystery beyond their ability to understand.

Here is a mysterious saying from St Hippolytus in the third century:

‘The boundless river that gladdens the City of God is washed by a few drops of water. The source without limits that engenders life for all mankind and is beyond all understanding is covered by the poor waters of this world’.

Hippolytus is referring to Baptism and more specifically to the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. John’s action, pouring ‘a few drops of water’ on the head of the Messiah, triggered the whole drama that soon unfolded in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. ‘The whole world lies in the power of the Evil One’, but that is about to change. Something very small – ‘a few drops of water’ - is going to set off a process which over the years and centuries will transform humanity.

That little vaccine, contained in a few drops of water, has the power to comfort and protect all humanity and the connection between these drops of water and the waters of baptism is becoming ever more blurred. As science is losing its confidence it can solve all problems, even as it solves some, so religion is losing its confidence it can provide the answer to all human grief.

Since the days of Tertullian, a contemporary of Hippolytus, who famously asked ‘what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ meaning what has the city best known for philosophy and science to do with the city where Christianity was born, people have argued over the claims of reason and faith. We live in exciting times where this argument is being resolved. Science today is much more open than before to the deepest claims of faith. And faith, too, is much more aware of the necessity of science for the growth and perfection of the human person. And a few drops of water have bridged the gap.     

10 January 2021          The Baptism of Jesus     Is 42:1-7       Acts 10:34-38              Mk 1:7-11

THE DIAPHANY OF THE DIVINE

 

THE DIAPHANY OF THE DIVINE

I like the suggestion of Teilhard de Chardin that the word Epiphany, for the feast where Jesus shows himself to the wise men from the east, be changed to ‘Diaphany’. Epi-phany means ‘showing upon’, that is the ‘showing’ of God who has come ‘on’ earth. The wise men made a long and hazardous journey, symbol of our life, to come to this fulfilment of their quest and their reward was to ‘see’ the child whom they came to know as a great king and ‘light of the gentiles’. That is our joy too as we celebrate the Epiphany rounding off the Christmas season.

We can, though, move on to say that this coming of God to ‘dwell among us’ is for the purpose of completing creation: ‘recapitulating’, that is, ‘gathering up all things under Christ as head’ (Eph 1:10). Everything is touched by the divine. Everything. And especially every person. ‘Dia-phany’ captures this as it means ‘showing through’. We are more familiar with the word ‘diaphanous’ and its use to describe a type of dress but even that use illustrates what is meant. We can see its meaning in great artists, musicians, sportsmen and the like. We call them ‘inspired’ and they are given their gift to raise our hearts. Seeing or hearing them takes us ‘through’ them to a glimpse of the divine.

This expansion of the word ‘epiphany’ leads us to be on the watch for sparks of the divine in others and in creation. There is no single person on earth who does not reflect in some way that divine life. To brush any person aside, to ignore the suffering of any woman or man, is to trample on the divine, now ‘shown’ to be on earth. It is to turn away from the light of which the Christmas readings are full. The light comes into the dark but the dark tries to snuff it out. We saw this in 2020. We became aware of the generosity and the courage people showed to others as we wrestled with the virus. Compassion and solidarity pushed their way forward as dominant virtues across many parts of the globe.

Yet the darkness fought back and is now trying to regain its ancient ground. It wants us to retreat to ‘normality’ with the help of a vaccine. We want the skies full of planes again and the cities clogged with cars. We want ‘the standard of living to which I am accustomed’ back again.

Or do we? There are so many signs that people are waking up to climate change and Covid will be seen one day to have contributed to this awakening. It is maddening for politicians to have to put their great plans on hold while they deal, at great expense, with the crisis under their noses. But a new electorate has appeared in many places that demands action in creating a sustainable planet.

That is our great hope: that a great multitude will discover their voice and demand a new world where the divine life ‘shows through’.    

6 (3) January 2021      The Epiphany     Is 60:1-6            Eph 3: 2…6           Mt 2:1-12