SHEPHERDS AND SHEEPDOGS

A dog is a dog and maybe we do not think much more about it. There are big dogs, like Alsatians, and small ones, like fox terriers. But dogs are dogs and they are just there – part of the environment, maybe making visitors or intruders think twice before approaching a house, but not much more.

There is, however, one type of dog that always captures my interest; the humble sheepdog. Every farmer, especially those who kept sheep, in the part of the world I come from, had one. The dogs were so dedicated to their work there were festivals and shows where they would display their skills. They were ‘one’ with the shepherd and could interpret every whistle, every call and sign.

They would go out to the hillside, gather the sheep and urge them to go in a certain direction – to a new grazing ground or to the sheepfold. What is intriguing to watch is their gentle manner. They never frightened the sheep, never lead them to panic – like a wolf would. They just nudged them along.

Whenever a sheep makes a break for freedom and runs off on its own, the dog races round it and block its path, never bighting it, never touching it, but just crouching in front and staring the errant animal in the eye. The sheep would then give in and turn back and re-join the flock.

Once a year we celebrate Good Shepherd Sunday and perhaps we have our own images about what a good shepherd is. This is mine. The shepherd is there watching. He sends out his faithful helpers to show people the way home, the way to nourishment and security. If one of them strays they go in search and gently nudge them back.

A shepherd is a timeless image of a guardian – patient, gentle, faithful and prepared to go to enormous trouble to seek out someone in trouble. ‘Browser’, like so many words, has been picked by technology to serve that giant’s purpose. But it is a word that goes back to Ezekiel: ‘My people will browse in rich pastures on the mountains of Israel’ (34:14).

To browse is to explore and advances, big and small, have come with browsing. Modern education, at its best, encourages exploration. But there are many today who explore dangerously. Frustrated by the inequity of our age, they wander in to the hands of drug dealers and lose their way – even their lives.

We have a need for good shepherds.

30 April 2023             Easter Sunday 4A       Acts 2:36-42    1 Pet 2:20-25   Jn 10:1-10

DISSOLVE INTO IT

 

DISSOLVE INTO IT

The late Pianist Sviatoslav Richter explained his approach to playing music as being an ‘executant, carrying out the composer's intentions to the letter. He doesn't add anything that isn't already in the work. If he is talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn't dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.’

I found these astonishing words because they explain how we are part of a reality that is much greater than we are but at the same time we each have our own individuality, enabling us to contribute to that great reality.  The ancient Greeks puzzled over the question of the ‘one and the many’. In what sense are we just ‘one of the masses’, a brick in a wall indistinguishable from any other brick? And in what sense are we unique with our own indispensable contribution so that if we are not there the wall is incomplete?

I am always amazed by the gospel stories. Jesus is never impressed by numbers – even when there were so many they were ‘trampling on one another’ (Lk 12:1). The overwhelming impression is of relating to one person at a time; Peter, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, Zacchaeus. It is the same when we come to the resurrection stories. Again it is Mary at the tomb. Or the two going to Emmaus or Thomas. It is an essential of the Christian message that each person is unique to God and that he loves each person individually and eternally.

At the same time the witness of the mystics is that the more a person comes close to God they more they feel the draw to be ‘dissolved’ into the divine. They leave to one side, for example, the desire of what Claire Gilbert, in a recent issue of the Tablet calls, ‘pride in achievement.’ In other words, they leave behind any desire to be known or celebrated for ‘what I have done.’ They loathe the idea of drawing attention to themselves. They come into this world, make their contribution and go – a bit like Anna in the temple (Lk 2:36). No fuss, no fame.

Such people, as Richter and Anna, point the way to the beautiful harmony that must exist between the one and many. The one is for the many and the many are for the one. If we could live this balance, what a beautiful world we would have! It would be heaven.

23 April 2023              Easter 3A        Acts 2:22-33       1 Pet 1:17-21                    Lk 24:13-35

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BREAKTHROUGH

 

BREAKTHROUGH

For centuries people dreamt of flying. Then we did it. In 1903, the first plane left the ground. What a breakthrough! Less than seventy years later we landed on the moon! Who can believe what men and women can do? It is astonishing.

Easter is moving from ignorance to enlightenment. From one way of being to another. We tend to make Thomas a scapegoat for our unbelief. ‘Doubting Thomas’. But does he deserve the description any more than we do? Everyone who appears in the resurrection narratives in the gospels ‘couldn’t believe it’ at first. They were all doubters. Then they moved to a new state of knowledge which allowed frightened Peter to stand up and address ‘the whole House of Israel.’ It was a breakthrough for him, for them and for us.

The gospels are replete with stories of breakthrough. The woman at the well was a frightened broken woman, the target of derision in her community. Then she listened to everything Jesus said to her and slowly she was lifted out of herself. She dropped, not just her water jar, but her whole earlier way of life. It was a breakthrough.

It is hard for us, Easter after Easter, to grasp the newness of the Easter event. We get used to it. Yet occasionally you see a spark that lights up the scene. This week. I watched a video interview on you tube with Amai Takura, composer of many of our bast known Shona liturgical music. I learnt a lot about what she has actually done but I was even more touched by how she did it. Her faith bristled with life. Every sentence was an acknowledgement that her work was a gift. Her part was to receive and do the hard work of crafting the gift into a composition that resonated with people. Faith has broken through into her life big time.

Early on in John’s gospel we have the awful words: ‘though the light has come into the world, people have preferred darkness’ (3:19). Easter is the proclamation of opportunity, of choice. Every generation intuits this. Thomas could have persisted in his stubbornness, his darkness – ‘unless I see …’ – but he didn’t. He grasped the gift that was offered.  That is the joy of Easter; to lay hold of the gift that is ours, to allow it to percolate into our being, to witness to the breakthrough in which we share.

‘Oh! That you would break through the heavens and come down!’ (Is 63:19) That is exactly what he did.

16 April 2023        Easter 2A    Acts 2:42-47         1 Pet 1:3-9      Jn 20:19-31  

HAPPY EASTER!

 

HAPPY EASTER!

Happy Easter! What is the content of this greeting? Christ has risen! We do not have to understand exactly what that means but it helps if we do! We go further. Jesus has shown us that death has no ‘sting’ (1 Cor 15:55). We do not have to fear it. It is tamed. It is almost a friend. And what is more: its source, sin, has no more power to enslave. We can be free. So, let the Halleluia chorus ring out!

But how did Jesus do it? How is death tamed? How did he free us from sin? He walked our roads and invited us to follow him. He raised us from our ‘daze’ (Mk 10:32), lifting us to believe that if we choose him he will show us the way.

He was determined, setting his face like ‘flint’ (Is 50:7), facing whatever evil could throw at him and never giving in. Evil crushed him, but only physically. It tormented him and killed him, but it could do no more. He showed that, although we are ‘body’, we are more than body. We are spirit. Nothing on this earth can crush spirit.

The spirit of a person, of a society and of the world grows and grows - like a mustard seed. This is beautifully shown in the most recent Council, the meeting of two and a half thousand bishops at the Vatican in the 1960s. The Council placed the Church at the heart of humanity and, perhaps for the first time, claimed that the secular is the proper realm of God’s dynamic and saving love. The Church manifests Christ as the soul of humanity, the life-giving leaven of creation.  

And, also for the first time, the Council welcomed the achievements of the Enlightenment, the age of reason, which broke upon the Church in the seventeenth century and seemed such a threat then. As the centuries passed, the Church acknowledged the fruits of that age in, for example, the emphasis on human freedom which the prophets of reason proclaimed, And, as James Hanvey strikingly wrote, ‘the Council out-thinks the secular atheistic view and asserts that secularism is an integral part of the incarnation’. Freedom is not claiming our absolute autonomy but recognises that we are called to go beyond ourselves. This is not a limitation but a fulfilment.

All this is contained in the Easter message but now there is something more. The Church must listen and learn from secular research. It was not priests and bishops who laid bear our sins in the abuse scandals but the journalists. It is they who fearlessly battered us, like the widow with the unjust judge in the gospel. Finally we paid attention. It has been painful but now we – insofar as we have listened - , and those we abused, are free. We are humbled and purified like brash Peter when Jesus ‘looked at him… and he went out and wept’ (Lk 22:61).

THE HINGE OF HISTORY

 

THE HINGE OF HISTORY

Countries, businesses and organisations search for a logo to announce, in a simple sign, who they are. It could be a coat of arms, a traditional emblem or a modern eye-catcher. The fish eagle (Zimbabwe), the harp (Ireland) or two ellipses in the form of a cross (Toyota) are examples.

Mention of a cross brings to mind the Christian faith and the climax of our annual remembrance of it is about to begin. The shadow of the cross falls heavily over Holy Week. It is one of the simplest logos imaginable - an upright and a crossbar - and yet this sign is the hinge on which life hangs. In every situation, the door leading to life either opens for us or shuts. It depends on whether we choose the cross or avoid it.

The gospels make it dazzlingly clear from the outset – ‘this child is destined to be a sign that is opposed’ (Lk 2:34) – and throughout his life - ‘the Son of man is destined to be rejected’ (Mk 8:31) – that the cross is the thread running through the whole mission of Jesus. It is the yeast that gives his whole life – and ours – flavour. If I choose to forgive, I may find it a great struggle but I will discover a  deep freedom within me. I will be like a person who has let down a great burden they are carrying. Phew! That was heavy but now I have let it go.

It is simple! No, it certainly is not. But we have chosen the cross and it has set us free. The cross of Jesus is the hinge of history on which everything hangs. All the events, from the beginning of creation, either open the way for us or block it.

Edith Stein died, aged fifty, in a gas chamber in Auschwitz in 1942. Though brought up in a strict Jewish family, she was not religious. But she was a seeker and turned to philosophy for answers. Inspired by Edmund Husserl, she made huge progress and became a renowned philosopher in her turn. But she remained restless in her search. One evening, in a friend’s house, she came across the life of Teresa of Avila and read it throughout the night. Delighted, she knew she had found the treasure she sought and was baptised. She continued to teach but her heart drew her to a total self-giving and she entered the Carmelites. When the Nazis sought out the Jews to exterminate them, she was swept up into the darkness but in her deepest being she knew she was following Jesus to the cross and she rejoiced.

Palm Sunday        2 April 2023        Is 50:4-7     Ph 2:6-11     Mt 26:14ff

 THE CROSS

The Christian faith is utterly simple and yet it has layers of meaning we have no capacity to understand now. ‘If a person has been granted the power to behold the truth, then all that their senses perceive is for them nothing more than the ultimate extremity, jutting into this dark world, of another world infinitely more real than this’ (Hugo Rahner). What we are capable of experiencing is only a faint taste of what is yet to be revealed.

People often express their thanks for the ‘gift of life’ and clearly that is the greatest thing about us. We are alive. I am. One of the earliest experiences of a child is to smile; to recognise their mother, their father. It is the first moment of relationship. But then we know life does not flow in a beautiful sequence of never-ending good experiences. Sooner or later, there is limitation, frustration, anger. In a word, opposition.

What we are invited to do in Lent is recognise there is another word for opposition: the cross. We are not to use this word lightly, as a negative nuisance in our lives; something to be avoided, ignored and, if possible, eradicated. True, if I have a tooth ache, I need to do something about it soonest. But if we change the word ‘opposition’ to ‘opportunity’, we reach a point, we already know this, that opposition is also a crisis, a moment of decision. How do I respond? And I will grow insofar as the choice I make is according to the true way of life or not.  All creation comes to fulfilment in the cross because it stands for the moment of decision. When faced with the cross I can become truly myself – or I can run away from myself. Two images celebrate this: one is the Carthusian motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, the cross stands (as the fixed point of creation) while the world swirls around (intent on its own agenda).

The other image, perhaps comveying the same idea, is Salvador Dali’s Salvator Mundi, Saviour of the World, (the painting here) which shows the cross brooding over the world much as the spirit brooded over creation (Gen.1:2).

From the beginning of the Christian era, we have recognised that the cross is not just the great event in the life and mission of Jesus; it is above all the central event of the whole of world history – the make or break event of humanity. When I wear a cross around my neck, it is not for decoration, still less a talisman. It is an expression of a commitment to make the kind of choices Jesus made, choices that give life, even if they lead, in the short run, to Calvary.

 

CINDERELLA – AN ADULT CHILDREN’S TALE

 

CINDERELLA – AN ADULT CHILDREN’S TALE

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Cinderella. Her mother was very ill and before she died, she called Cinderella and encouraged her to be patient and kind.

She then died and the father married another woman who had two daughters. Both the step-mother and her daughters made life miserable for Cinderella who used to go to her mother’s grave to cry and pray.

The king decided to hold a party for his son, the prince, so that he could meet many girls and choose one as his princess. The stepmother and her daughters went to the party but they left Cinderella at home. She was sad and cried as no one seemed to be kind to her.

Then she had a vision of a kind god-mother coming to her and giving her a beautiful dress and shoes and providing a carriage to take her to the party. But she warned that everything will go back to normal at mid-night.

Cinderella wondered if she was dreaming; but she got into the carriage and went to the party. When the prince saw her, he was delighted and went to her and they danced together the whole evening. But when the clock started to ring twelve times to show it was midnight, Cinderella remembered the words of the god-mother and ran out of the party losing her shoe as she went.

The prince ran after her but she was gone. But he saw the shoe and determined to search for the one whose foot the shoe fitted. He went from house to house but no girl’s foot fitted the shoe.

Eventually he came to Cinderella’s house and tried the shoe on first one of the step-sisters and then the other. But the shoe fitted neither of them. He asked the step-mother if there were any other girls in the house and the stepmother was reluctant to tell him of Cinderella. But eventually she had to.

The shoe fitted her foot perfectly and the prince knew this was his beautiful princess. He took her away and married her and later they became king and queen and lived happily ever after.

This is a story which has been told in different ways in different places for thousands of years; how the poor, the weak and the sad can suddenly become transformed.

In the gospel we have just read, Peter, James and John who, up to that time were confused and afraid, were thrilled, delighted, by what they experienced on the mountain. They could not believe that Jesus could be transformed into this dazzling being.

Jesus revealed himself to them in this way to give them a glimpse, a taste, of what they too would become. They, and we, will one day become something beyond our imagining.

But first, like Cinderella at midnight, they had to come down from the mountain and enter into everyday life again where they would try to be patient and kind. Bu they do so with the knowledge that they will soon be transformed into something beautiful.

Jesus was particularly keen they should understand this as he would soon enter into his own terrible struggle and humiliation on the cross. This world is a cruel place, as Cinderella knew, but it is God’s world and he is transforming it day by day through our struggles.