UP A HIGH MOUNTAIN

 

UP A HIGH MOUNTAIN

A young boy plays outside my window. A hedge divides us but I hear his shrieks of delight and sometimes his wails of distress. His mood changes rapidly.

Twenty years ago, Russia wanted to join the North Atlantic Alliance and 59% voted to join the European Union. Two years ago today, they invaded Ukraine.

Hidden away in the early chapters of the Bible is an account we read each year as Lent gets underway of Abraham climbing a mountain to offer his son Isaac in sacrifice. His offering is accepted and his son is spared.  As Lent gives way to Easter, Jesus carries his cross up the hill of Calvary. His offering is accepted and he endures a terrible death. Stat crux, the Carthusians say, dum volvitur orbis.  The cross stands still, while the world goes round.

Everywhere, in the scriptures, there are echoes of the cross. And everywhere in our daily news these echoes reoccur. Alexei Navalny’s death makes no sense otherwise nor does the death of 7,000 children in Gaza.

Each second Sunday of Lent we read of the ‘high mountain’, where Jesus showed himself in glory to Peter, James and John. But the conversation was about the cross. The disciples had no idea what he was talking about and neither do many today. Mountains? Climbing a mountain raises you up, gives you a far and wide view. In Nyanga, in Eastern Zimbabwe, you can even drive up high and look about. ‘World’s View’ it is called. It is the bigger picture.

And the bigger picture is that our lives make no sense without the cross. It is the threshold we have to cross (that word again) one way or another. Alexei Navalny, while he was alive, reminded us of Nelson Mandela. Mandela survived. Navalny did not. Yet one thing they had in common was a sense of humour and a sense of humour means one has risen above the disputes and entanglements politics and indeed day to day life throws up. Navalny too went up a high mountain and there is no telling the influence he will now have.

Belief in the power of sacrifice is common to many cultures and I first came to know it when I was young and found it written on my uncle’s mortuary card when he was killed in the Great War: ‘a person can have no greater love than to lay down their life for their friends’. Lent is here, as I wrote last week, to lengthen our view; to see the destiny of humanity beyond the immediate view. It should be obvious to those dazzled by the power of weapons of war. But it isn’t. Human beings still narrow their vision and exclude compassion. They have no notion of how history will see their actions. Perhaps children understand.

25 February 2024  Lent 2B       Gen 22:1-18      Rom 8:31-34    Mk 9:2-10

WIDEN YOUR SPACE

 

WIDEN YOUR SPACE

The word ‘Lent’ comes from Northern Europe. It describes a practice, dating from the early Church, of preparing for Easter and recalls the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert and the forty days Jesus spent preparing for his mission. In many European languages the word used is not ‘Lent’ but a word that derives from ‘forty’. Norman Tanner, an English Jesuit, gives us a sample,

Quaranta (Italian), Cuaresma (Spanish), Carême (French). The English word ‘Lent’ has another, very beautiful derivation. It comes from the Anglo-Saxon (early English) word meaning to ‘lengthen’. Lent comes at a time when the hours of daytime are ‘lengthening’ in Europe, as spring approaches, and so it is a time when we too can ‘lengthen’ spiritually, when we can stretch out and grow in the Spirit.

Isaiah urges us:

Widen the space of your tent, extend the curtains of your home, do not hold back. Lengthen your ropes, make your tent pegs firm for you will burst out to right and to left … (54:2)

The woman who cared for my parents in their old age once wrote to me during the dark, cold and often wet days after Christmas in Europe, ‘there’ll be a stretch in the evening from now until St Patrick’s Day (17 March).’ She was talking of the weather but that is what Tanner also points to – as an image of life in the Spirit. We are to stretch ourselves, lengthen our reach, in preparing for Easter.

And Tanner also makes a further point. You do not have to do anything. You just wait for the days to lengthen. So it is with Lent. Sometimes we think of Lent as a time when we ‘do’ things; as children we were encouraged to give up sweet things. As adults we are encouraged to give up excessive TV or internet exploration. These are good but the message here is to stretch our capacity, open our doors. Allow the Spirit to be heard in our hearts.

The forty days are to be seen as a time of receiving rather than doing, relaxing rather than achieving, listening rather than speaking. Where there are resentments, we stretch out our tent to build harmony; where there are quarrels, forgiveness. Anger gives way to patience, hatred to peace. These are gifts we receive. We cannot manufacture them on our own.

And these are the ways we prepare for the climax of the Incarnation, God ‘with us’ in the flesh. So much with us that he suffers all our grievous wounds. Carries all our burdens. Lent is a deeply joyful time. We are in the midst of struggle but victory is certain.  

18 February 2024  Lent Sunday 1 B    Gen 9:8-15  1 Pet 3:18-22      Mk1:12-15

 

LET US GO ELSEWHERE

 

LET US GO ELSEWHERE

The first day, as Mark records it, of Jesus’ ministry ends in triumph. ‘The whole town came crowding round the door.’ He was instantly famous and the disciples knew it and bathed in his reflected glory. They wanted more. ‘Everyone is looking for you’, they said and they expected him to go on building up his reputation.

He could be ‘The Prophet of Capernaum’. He could build a following. There could be a little ‘contribution’ for each healing. The money would roll in. No need for that laborious fishing all night in the dark, in the cold, in the wet. He could build a stadium, an amphitheatre, like the Romans did. And he could build a palace nearby. It would be great and we would get our share.

But, no. He said, ‘Let us go elsewhere’. He was not at all happy. They had completely misunderstood what he was doing. They delighted in the healing but he had not come just to work wonders, to enjoy status. He wanted to heal them in their deepest selves. He knew it would cost them a lot. And it would cost him a lot to show them the way. It would require them to change. That would be painful. But the result would be deep peace, happiness.

We have just emerged from 40 days of Christmas. The child in the arms of Simeon in the temple closes the infancy introduction of the Messiah. ‘This child is for the rise of many’ - if they get the message. If they changed their way of thinking. But there would be opposition - from vested interests.

Some understood. Slowly, they got the message. ‘Here is something new.’ They found joy in their new life. And this was what Jesus wanted. He did not want fame or fuss. He just wanted people to get in touch with the core of their being. To move from the tyranny of the immediate concerns of family, work, relationships – important as they are. He wanted them to ‘go elsewhere’, to go deeper, to begin to sense they are made to share in the divine life.

‘You believe just because I said I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than that!’ Nathaniel went ‘elsewhere’ with Jesus. He saw immediately he was the Messiah. He came to grasp he had to go beyond his Jewish traditions. He had to change. To grow. It was a tough journey, following Jesus. But he got the point. And the early Christians did too. And the Church was born. It still struggles with people misunderstanding. It always will – until the end.

4 February 2024    Sunday 5 B    Job 7:1-7  1 Cor 9:16…23     Mk 1:29-39

WITH AUTHORITY

 

WITH AUTHORITY

Mark tells us, in his very first chapter, the people were astonished at what Jesus said and did. ‘Here is a teaching that is new and with authority,’ they said. The word ‘authority’ has a slightly negative taste to it. ‘Authorities’ are sometimes viewed as people who don’t do what they should do or do what that shouldn’t do.

Yet it is beautiful word originally coming from the Latin augere, meaning to grow. Authorities are people who help – or should help – people to grow. Authorities in schools are there to provide the environment where children can learn and develop. They must never be simply controlling. Their task is to enable, to encourage freedom.

Similarly in society generally, ‘the authorities’ – national and local – are there mainly to help people grow, develop and use their freedom. It is not their main job to control – though they do have some controlling to do. There are red and green traffic lights but the point is to keep the traffic moving.

The Pharisees had slipped into control mode. They loved inventing more and more rules and controls. They found it gave them power over the people and they were not interested that it also stunted people’s growth. What thrilled the people, as told in Mark here, is that Jesus swept away this attitude and replaced it with something quite different; freedom to expand their hearts, to grow.

Countless people in the gospels, like Mary of Magdala for example, ditched their old life and found hope and joy in the words and actions of Jesus. They were thrilled and crowded around him ‘treading on one another’ (Luke 12:1), in their enthusiasm. The gospel pages are full of ‘crowds’ attracted by him. They could not get enough of him.

Until … Until he started speaking about the cost of being a disciple. Then they started to go away. They wanted roses but they found roses come with thorns. They did not like that. And this is still the case. Real ‘teaching with authority’ includes embracing the cross ‘daily’. That is when real growth takes place. How pleasant it is to tell people what they want to hear. But it is often not the truth. The people of Mark chapter one had to learn the meaning of the cross. That is the whole point of the dynamic of his gospel. Excitement at first; hard truth later. The centurion, who saw him die, came to understand this (Mark 15:39).  

28 January 2024          Sunday 4B      Dt 18:15-20     1 Cor 7:32-35       Mk 1:21-28

A CARPENTER’S WORKSHOP

 

A CARPENTER’S WORKSHOP

What do you make of this? ‘Those with wives should live as though they had none.’ St Paul seems to be casting a shadow over married life (1 Cor 7: 29)! Yet the context tells us something else. His theme is ‘our time is growing short.’ We do not have much time. He is talking of having the perspective of us living a provisional life. We are not to live as though this life is everything.

True, we are called to live this live fully; to develop all our gifts, to enjoy using them, to enter fully into our relationships. But all these are not the whole story. We are to be like sailors with their eyes on the seemingly endless horizon, aware that there is another shore that will be revealed. No matter how satisfying our relationships and our activities, they are not the full story. We are made for something else.

There is a story, an amusing story, about Jonah and the whale. He runs away from the task he has been set and gets swallowed by a big fish. Surviving that, he has second thoughts and takes up the task and warms the Ninevites they have only 40 days left. Oddly, they believe him and every man, woman and beast begin to change their way of life. They respond to the bigger picture Jonah, the unlikely prophet, presents to them.

Coming to Jesus’ time, we have the story of him calling Peter and his companions. They too, like the Ninevites, ‘immediately’ – the word is used eleven times in Mark 1 – change their way of life. Nothing wrong with fishing. It’s a hard life but a rewarding one too if you succeed in catching fish. But Jesus says, ‘I have something bigger for you.’ There and then they drop everything and follow him. Surely, they should have taken time to consider the job offer? But no, they act immediately.

There was something about Jesus that was overwhelmingly attractive. Once they grasped it, they acted. And the early Church found it contagious and were full of expectation that the Lord would soon return. Everything else was provisional, precarious and a ‘valley of tears.’

We come to our own time. We are absorbed by our problems, our unease, our tears. The news is relentlessly horrible. We see no end to our wars and our problems – global, local and personal. Yet the gospel invites us to live with a deeper perspective. We cannot brush away our worries. But we can expand our vision to see the fuller picture. Our world is provisional – like a carpenter’s workshop. What you see is not the whole picture. A future is being fashioned that we can only imagine.                                                                                      21 January 2024                           Sunday 3B              Jon 3:1-10               1 Cor 7:29-31          Mk 1:14-20

WATCH THE CHICKENS

 

WATCH THE CHICKENS

The wise men from the east ‘saw his star’. There are many stars in the sky but they saw his star. They knew it was different. I have come across a privately, but beautifully, produced book on birds. The author, Stephen Buckland, writing at one point while describing Bronze Mannikins, branches off:

‘One of the things I love about birds is the way it requires one to look really closely at what is in front of one, at the world in which we live. Most of the time we do not really see what we are looking at. Watching birds - seeing not only how they look but how they behave, how they make their living on this planet – makes me engage much more deeply in that world.’ 

Stephen describes tiny differences between birds that most of us cannot see.

In our gospel today, John the Baptist is described as ‘looking hard’ at Jesus. It is the same Greek word that is used when Jesus himself first looks at Peter. It is stronger than just ‘looking’. It is more like intuiting, going beyond what is immediately obvious, having immediate insight of something deeper. Luke uses the same word at a more painful moment when, during the Passion, Peter denies knowing Jesus three times. We are told the cock crew and ‘Jesus turned and looked at him.’ The look pierced Peter and ‘he went out and wept bitterly.’    

In the Christmas letter, which Sr Gabriel wrote for the Children’s Home at Emerald Hill, Harare, she recorded the answers children gave to the question, ‘what do you like about our home? One answered,

I love to watch the chickens and see how mother hen takes care of the chicks by scratching the ground for worms or insects.’

Another wrote,

I like the different types of trees around the Home with the bright colours blooming at different times of the year; Jacarandas, Flamboyants, Tulips, Cassias and Frangipanis, as well as the local Msasa trees whose leaves come out in red, yellow and light green colours before they turn into their deep green …’

These children have, what Celtic spirituality calls, ‘rinsed eyes.’ They do not just see things and pass by. They stop and look hard. They begin to grasp that there is another world beyond the one that jumps at us from our little and big screens. That is what Eli eventually appreciated in the boy Samuel who, three times, heard the Lord call his name and thought, at first, it was only Eli calling him.

In the letter to the Hebrews, the twelfth chapter opens with the words, ‘With so many witnesses in a great cloud around us, we should throw off everything that weighs us down, like the sin that clings so closely, and keep running in the race that lies before us.’ We are to look beyond what we ‘see’. The father of the prodigal son looked beyond the actions of his errant son and believed that one day he would change his ways. We too are to see beyond the pain of the present in hope for the new future which is coming.  

14 January 2024          Sunday 2B      1 Sam:3…19       1 Cor 6:13…20       Jn 1:35-42

LOOK UP!

 

LOOK UP!

When I was small, I had weak eyesight and developed a habit of looking at the ground to see where I was going. I remember the exact place but not the year when my father said to me in exasperation, ‘For heaven’s sake, look up!’

If the ‘wise men from the east’ had been looking at the ground all the time they would never have seen the star. ‘We have seen his star as it rose and have come to do him homage.’ In a recent book called, Chastity, Reconciliation of the Senses, Norwegian monk and bishop Erik Varden writes, ‘It is time to effect a Sursum Corda, to correct an inward-looking horizontalizing trend in order to recover the transcendental dimension of embodied intimacy, part and parcel of the universal call to holiness’.

Sursum Corda, lift up your hearts, is an invitation we hear every time we participate in the Eucharist. Varden’s slightly forbidding language invites us to move out of ourselves and he does not hesitate to allude to sexual intimacy. Seeking the other – and not ourselves – is central to holiness.

This may all seem rather far away from the journey of the Magi to seek the new-born king in Bethlehem but the impulse is the same: it is the urge to set out and seek what is grasped in a hidden way when we speak of a rising star. Their search got entangled in Herod’s intrigues and they lost sight of the star for a while. But they soon found it again and Matthew tells us, ‘The sight of the star filled them with delight.’ They found the child and from then on, in T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘We returned to our places, these kingdoms / but no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / with an alien people clutching their gods.’

Epiphany means ‘showing’. The people who lived in darkness set out to see who it was that was drawing them to himself. They found him and they rejoiced. They were no longer ‘at ease’ with the old ways, Varden’s ‘inward-looking horizontalizing trend’. Their eyes were open. They were the Gentiles, our ancestors, of whom Simeon spoke: ‘the salvation which you have prepared for all the nations to see.’  

We live in Zimbabwe in 2024. We live in the midst of a flat earth where disappointment and frustration are never far away. We are absorbed in all the implications of an economy that only satisfies a minority. We can be trapped by the flat horizon of our daily lives. Yet we have rounded hills and granite mountains to remind us that the world is not flat but tapers off into an infinite horizon of which we are part. As seekers of Jesus, we can no longer be at ease in this old dispensation. While we grapple with our flat earth, we have the vision of a new earth drawing us forward. That is the good news of Bethlehem. It may be surrounded by rubble now but that is not the whole story.

Epiphany, 7 January 2024         Is 60:1-6     Ep 3:2-6      Mt 2:1-12