TWO ADVENTS

 

TWO ADVENTS

There are two Advents; the one we know about and is thoroughly written up, especially in Isaiah, and the one we don’t know but we are racing towards. This second one is where we are involved and, in a real sense, have a say. We are not just in the stands, watching, but influence the unfolding of this Advent by the decisions we make. The timing is up to us: the sooner we succeed in making this world in the image of the One who designed it, the sooner that One will be able to ‘gather’ all his people into the peace he has planned for them.

But we keep postponing this universal community of peace. We run away from the implications. One story in the news is of an Iraqi family driven out of their home by the IS who sought refuge in a camp where they had to stay for seven years. They struggled to get to Europe and a better life only to be hounded on the Polish border, sent back to Iraq. The report ends, ‘and there is worst to come.’

The Isaiah reading for the First Sunday in Advent says; ‘I will make a virtuous branch for David who shall practice honesty and integrity in the land.’ It is poetic hidden language but it expresses the times that are coming when God, working with people, will bring truth in relationships. God cannot do it alone. Maybe the people of the first Advent who were looking forward to a Messiah, thought the Messiah would do everything for them. We know they had a narrow focus on Israel. Few had any thought for the ‘gentiles’.

But the first Advent did bring us a Messiah and that is what makes our hearts rejoice this 25 December. Yet this Messiah can do nothing without us. The whole plan is that we wake up and take steps in our lives to bring about community in the world. Sending the Iraqis back to where they came from, washing our hands of them, is certainly not building community. What should we do? Well, it is easy to be an arm-chair strategist and there is no avoiding the problem. But some kind of follow up of the lives of these people, some kind of support for them in their own countries to help them get settled, would be better than sending them back in despair.

We cannot wait around for this second Advent. It calls for our full engagement in doing what we can. If this sounds starry-eyed, one thing we know: if we decide to do something we will succeed, one way or another, and we are not alone. Our five loaves and two fish quickly grow.

28 November 2021       Advent Sunday 1C    Jer 33:14-16   1 Thess 3:12-4:2       Lk 21:25-28, 34-36  

A WORLD VIEW

 

A WORLD VIEW

The feast of Christ the King was instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as an antidote to the rising secularism and nationalism of the time. The forms these movements took threatened the dignity the Church saw as an integral part of the vocation of human beings as children of God destined to develop their own gifts and so find their way to the Father. The feast announces a world view very different from one that sees human beings as sufficient in themselves.

‘No one is free until everyone is free.’ We used to say this about South Africa and, truly, it was obvious then that white people lived in fear of the ‘black peril’. They were not ‘free’ in any meaningful way. And, of course, it is also true with regard to Covid and climate change, ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’. Long ago, a war in Viet Nam or Ethiopia did not greatly concern those not directly involved. It was far away and we could get on with our lives without taking much notice. Something similar could be said about famine, droughts, tsunamis and floods. They were localised and the relevant governments would deal with them.

But Covid and global warming changed all that. No one is safe. Literally everyone on the planet is involved and Biden and Xi have to wear their masks too. Is this not an entirely new phenomenon? These two modern threats, whose effects have peaked in the last eighteen months, have made everyone take up a position in response. Some have chosen to ignore them and pretend life can go on as usual; others have got deeply engaged in facing these threats and doing something about them.

It is now clear that Covid will not be banished easily. We cannot put it behind us as we did the flu of 1918-19 which killed millions. No sooner have people begun to relax than a new Covid wave hits them – and there is no end in sight. Similarly with climate change. The Glasgow summit, recently ended, achieved some success but left many people deeply disappointed by the lack of compassion, imagination and courage displayed by many nations.

One lesson stares us in the face: these are global issues not local ones and humankind is painfully learning that pursuing local agendas and short-term benefits is like building on sand. This week-end the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Christ the King. Everyone on the planet has had a chance to see the 30 meter high huge statue of Christ the King dominating Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, because of the Olympics in 2016. It dominates a huge panorama of land and sea. It symbolises something far beyond our limited interests. Can we see it as a sign that this world is God’s world and he has made its fruits available to all of us that we find our way to him?  He invites us to reach out to one another and recognise, at last, that we are one people of God and we are to rise above our divisions and strain for his justice.

21 November 2021, Christ the King   Dan 7:13-14         Rev 1:5-8     Jn 18:33-37

THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED

 

THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED

It is a strange way to begin. The first person to write a gospel starts by describing the end of the world. ‘The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from heaven’. This, eventually, becomes Chapter 13 after Mark goes back to write the earlier chapters. What are we to make of this? Perhaps we imagine something like the worst outcome of the climate crisis? In 1982, Annie Dillard wrote an account of her experience of a total eclipse (cf. Google).

 

            ‘… I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The                     grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone                         lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print.  This colour has never been             seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte.’

This is a taste of a long description of the effect of the eclipse on her. It is a taste too, perhaps, for us of what it the end could be like. Dillard writes of the disorientation and horror of our natural world in convulsion. Another quote:

            ‘The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. … My    mind                was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. …   You have                   seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse. The corona fills the print. All of those                  photographs were taken through telescopes. The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more                cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity             of internal experience. … You see the  wide world swaddled in darkness; you see a vast breadth of             hilly land, and an enormous, distant, blackened valley; you see towns’ lights, a river’s path. …

 

            “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” Wallace Stevens wrote that, and in the    long run he                 was right. The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The                                mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world,                 and all eternity, and God.’

 

The whole article is worth a careful read. It opens our consciousness to all that is beyond our imagination and comprehension. It is an awesome thought, both frightening and joyful. Frightening, because the onset of the end of the world seems set to be a time of unimaginable turmoil. Joyful, because we know that the gospel message is one, ultimately, of hope. The end will not be a catastrophe. It will be the moment when the ‘Son of Man’ will reveal the final triumph of God and the long foretold ‘gathering’ of his people. It is a message of consolation to close a difficult year.

14 November 2021      Sunday 33B     Dan 12:1-3      Heb 10:11…18            Mk 13:24-32

 

NIGHTMARES AND DAYDREAMS

 

NIGHTMARES AND DAYDREAMS

A nightmare is described in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘a female monster sitting upon and seeming to suffocate a sleeper.’ I know a little boy in Ireland who was so traumatised by his primary school teacher’s description of the advance of Communism in Europe, and the way its enthusiasts brain-washed those who opposed its beliefs, that he had a nightmare. He woke up screaming at a vision of Stalin’s divisions marching down O’Connell St, the main street in Dublin.

Well, Stalin’s divisions came – not to Ireland but to other places – and now they are no more. Hitler’s divisions marched through Europe and North Africa and now they too are no more. The colonial empires pegged out territories for themselves across the world are also no more. The cold war – from the 1950s to the 1980s – is also no more. And the threat of MAD – mutually assured destruction by opposing nuclear powers - is, if not no more, at least unthinkable.

While we have the power to make life miserable for others there is always a push- back when those oppressed rise up. As I write, delegates of the human race are gathering in Glasgow to ‘push-back’ on global warming. The media heightens the tension telling us of the many battles lost across the globe: forests destroyed, habitats eliminated, sea levels rising and global temperatures relentlessly going up. We wonder what kind of world we will leave for our grandchildren. Already, in Kuwait for example, life is almost unbearably hot.

But history tells us that human being always resist, always fight back. I met a man the other day who grows ‘essential natural oils’ and he helps others to do likewise. He is adamantly optimistic. ‘We will win this thing.’ The ‘thing’ is, of course, climate change. Uniquely, it is not about war or famine or disease. It is about the human will. It is not about science. We know the science. It is about morality. It is about doing the right thing – not the selfish thing.

‘Now that you know these things, blessed are you if you do them’ (John 13:17). Jesus knew this was the crux of the matter. We know what to do but we lack the will to do it. We have won many battles before. Are we going to win this one? The answer – based on our past success in building a better world and our present exponentially growing awareness of the threat to our survival - is, ‘yes’.  We need the will of a Churchill or a Martin Luther King or even a Merkel to get there. Or perhaps it won’t be one individual who will convince the world; maybe it will be a globally shared now consciousness which is so strong it will overwhelm the delayers and begrudgers.

When Jesus was on the mountain, giving his inaugural address, he included these words; ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for what is right.’ Their number is increasing.

November 7, 2021                  All Saints        Rev 7:2…11        1 Jn 3:1-3         Mt 5:1-12

 

STOKING THE FIRE IN THE HEARTH

 

STOKING THE FIRE IN THE HEARTH

If you have ever watched a chick breaking its way out of its shell or a new born calf struggling to stand on its feet or indeed an infant emerging yelling from the womb, then you have some idea of what Paul is talking about when he says creation is ‘groaning in one great act of giving birth’. Essentially, that is what our planet, our universe, is doing; and each of us, throughout our life, is always coming to birth in our unique individual way.

There was a time when Christians understood the Lord’s command, ‘Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations’, as literally baptising every person in every place. After two thousand years of often heroic missionary work, it is now clear to us this is not going to happen. What is happening, in ways that we do not see (Mark 4:27), is that ‘of its own accord the land has produced its crop’.

I remember an old German priest at Christmas, in the downtown Detroit parish of Holy Trinity, telling his congregation, ‘The world is a far better place than it was on that first Christmas night’. Although the baptised are in a minority, the influence of Christianity has been like yeast in society spreading its values wherever it is found. Many argue that the influence of religion has been harmful and held back the flourishing of human freedom. There is no way of winning this argument and it is a waste of time to try.

What is indisputable is the flourishing of good will and self-sacrifice in so many places. The instinct and immediate impulse of so many people is to help without much thought of ‘What do I get out of it?’  There was a time when our teachers used to solve the problem of why so few are actually baptised by saying good people express in their lives a ‘baptism of desire’, implying that they would be baptised if the circumstances were right.

I do not think anyone would hold that view now or even its more recent equivalent of speaking of ‘anonymous Christians’. The implication is that all good people want, even if they don’t know it, to be Christians.  They don’t.

But, despite all our anxieties about life today, there is goodness, honesty, courage and kindness waiting round every corner to show itself. The priests and prophets of this age are those who stand out and are recognised for their courage in seeking truth in every area of life: poetry, music, literature, sport, politics, economics, the social sciences and so much more. Some are actually priests as we normally know them, but most are not.

The role of Christians and all other believers is to journey with people, whoever they are, in their searching. The person of faith will say it is ultimately a search for God and his rule of justice. The person who holds no particular belief, in what transcends reason or science, will also say it is a search for justice and integrity. The two converge. You may climb the mountain by different routes but when you get to the top you meet. The role of the Christian and all people of faith is to stoke the fire in the hearth, though others with no particular beliefs in what is beyond sense and reason may dispute this. Yet, if they love others, as so many do, they love God, even if they do not know him.

October 31, 2021        Sunday 31B                Deut 6:2-6       Heb 7:23-28       Mk12:28-34  

WHEN THE ARCHBISHOP CAME TO BREAKFAST

 

WHEN THE ARCHBISHOP CAME TO BREAKFAST

 

It was the early 1960s and the archbishop was visiting his parishes. The parish council would select one member of the parish to host him for breakfast after Mass. The choice fell on Mr Mushore and in the course of conversation the archbishop told him he was trying to encourage multiracial education in Church schools and would he be prepared to send his children to what was then a school predominantly for whites. Mr Mushore, recognising this was an opening for his children to have many opportunities out of reach in the local school to which they were destined, readily agreed.

The result was that the two children, a boy and a girl, received an education which fast tracked them into careers that up to then were matters for dreams. Leaving aside for a moment the inequality of the system that then pertained, the point here is simply that Mr Mushore grasped a moment that might never come again. His choice instantly changed the life of his children and allowed them entrance to a way of life that would have a ripple effect on their families and on the community.

Blind Bartimaeus was stuck in his drab routine of sitting daily by the wayside until, one day, a large crowd of people passed by seemingly following some renowned person. Curious, he asked who it was and, being told, he began to cry out for help. The people were annoyed at him causing a disturbance and told him to be quiet. But that only spurred him on and he cried out even louder. He got what he wanted and, we’re told, ‘followed Jesus along the road.’ The story ends there but it is not hard to imagine what must have happened later.

They say, ‘learning never ends’, but we can get stuck in a way of thinking that says, ‘there is nothing I can do’. Bartimaeus must have often thought so as he sat by the road. But he did not give in to that thought. He was alert and ready when opportunity came by and he instantly grabbed it. People told him to accept his situation. It was hopeless. But he refused. He ‘threw off his cloak and jumped up and went to Jesus.’

We do not need to say more, except perhaps to remind ourselves that things do not have to be the way they are. We can get so stuck and maybe discouraged. But there is always something we can do. That is the beauty of being a human being. We can always grasp the moment. We are getting towards Christmas, or more specifically Advent, and our readings for the next month are going to hammer us in different ways with the simple message, ‘Be alert!’ Watch! The buck in the bush is alert for danger. We are to be alert for opportunity.    

24 October 2021         Sunday 30B                Jer 31:7-9        Heb 5:1-6        Mk 10:46-52      

 

FEELING OUR WEAKNESSES

Today, October 14, Weaver Press is launching a book[1] called, The Color of the Skin doesn’t Matter. It tells the life of Sr Janice McLaughlin in her own words. The title comes from the greeting of Josiah Tongogara when he welcomed her at the airport in Maputo during the Liberation War in the 1970s. Janice died earlier this year after a long struggle with a lung condition: it was the last of the many battles she embraced in her life of seventy nine years.

Born in the United States, she always wanted to come to Africa and become engaged in the process of liberation of a continent emerging from the shadow of colonialism. Her entry point was teaching journalism in Kenya and Tanzania and from there she was invited to Rhodesia. Without calculating the risks, she threw herself into the struggle and soon found herself in Chikurubi prison. Expelled from the country, she returned to live in the refugee camps in Mozambique before engaging in education programmes in the new Zimbabwe.

What leaps out from every page of her memoir is her generosity in giving herself, ‘welcome or unwelcome’ (2 Tim 4:1). In the process, she gives us a rapid run through of the history of Zimbabwe in the past fifty years. She too ‘gave her life as a ransom for many’ to quote the last words of this Sunday’s reading from Mark.

When we read or hear the lives of outstanding people, there is, I think, a tendency to compare ourselves with them. They seem so great; we seem so small. This can be a distraction. It is surely important to recognise that, mostly, we do the best we can in our circumstances. Each day we can try to improve, a bit at a time, the actual ways in which we live our lives. We may not make the headlines. We may never go to prison for our beliefs. But we can enjoy little victories each day as we struggle to live with integrity and kindness.

The letter to the Hebrews, which we also read this Sunday, has a phrase about ‘feeling our weaknesses’ and it is used in the context of Jesus himself doing just that. He felt his human limitations. These are not handicaps to be somehow ignored and denied. They are the very stuff of our life with which we are to make friends and use as our particular raw material for achieving small conquests each day. Our biggest enemy in all this is what I have recently heard called ‘pleasurable noise’, referring to the constant presence of words and sounds in our lives. These obstruct the power to reflect and can leave us no space to be in touch with our victories and defeats. So perhaps a key victory, to begin with, would be to turn down the volume!

October 17, 2021            Sunday 29B            Is 53:10-11      Heb 4:14-16    Mk 10:35-45

 

 

 

 

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[1] https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84174906540?pwd=U2l4UjZ2Y3ZuYkFScmFMNUdOR2k4UT09

Meeting ID: 841 7490 6540     Passcode: 421620        4.30 Zimbabwe time. October 14

 

On Thursday, October 14^th at  4.30

 https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84174906540?pwd=U2l4UjZ2Y3ZuYkFScmFMNUdOR2k4UT09

 Meeting ID: 841 7490 6540

Passcode: 421620