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

     

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[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