Today’s homily was conceived in a little tea-room in Muirkirk where my Dad and I sometimes go for lunch on a Monday. We always eat exactly the same thing. He has lentil soup followed by a toasted Sandwich and I have potato soup and two rolls, one in scrambled egg and the other in bacon, although I have been known on very rare occasions to change the bacon to sliced sausage and onions. We both enjoy it very much and it was while doing so last Monday that I read something from the previous week’s Tablet. We always read when we are out for lunch my Dad and I, occasionally commenting on what we have read, the thing that caught my attention that day being an article entitled, ‘The Most Difficult Leap.’ Its starting point was that it is only by completely trusting at least one other person that we can become psychologically healthy, familiar stuff to anyone who knows anything at all about modern psychology. But it was when the author related it to God that I made the connection with today’s readings and this homily began to take shape in my head.
He quotes a well-known theologian, Matthew Fox, who says that: ‘What God does first and best and most is to trust people with their moment in history. He trusts them to do what must be done for the sake of the whole community.’ adding that this, of course is ‘a huge gamble on God’s part. There is no safe way to trust. Control must be lost or, more accurately, given up.’ To trust is to be both exposed and vulnerable, helpless even in the face of how the other person chooses to respond, which is as true of God as it is of any human being who has the courage to trust. And it is on this aspect of God that I invite you to reflect today.
To have some understanding of the vulnerability and helplessness of God resulting from the fact that he has trusted us with our particular moment in history, depending on us to do what must be done for the sake of the world. is absolutely vital today. Millions of our contemporaries, working out of a totally inadequate image of God, have looked at what is happening around them and concluded that there is no God on the basis that, if there were, he would not allow evil to flourish the way it seems to in places like Croxteth where young Rhys Jones was shot and killed the other day. But this fundamentally infantile way of thinking misses the point entirely. What God has is the most amazing dream for us. Jesus calls it the kingdom and deep within everything that happens the Spirit is labouring to bring that dream about. But because God has taken this most amazing risk, trusting us with the gift of freedom, gambling, if you like, on us using his gift well, he can do nothing without us. He has trusted each one of us here with our own individual lives and together he has trusted humanity with the moment in history we are all living through. It’s not enough to say. ‘We ate in your company, you walked in our streets,’ the equivalent of, ‘We went to Church and called ourselves christians.’ There is so much more to it than that. Trusted by God to do what must be done at this moment in history, we are called to respond to the challenges of our time.The boys who killed Rhys Jones did not do so in isolation. They are products of a society which in its turn is the product of how we all choose to live our lives, and although God is labouring deep within it all and in the end his kingdom is coming, the whole process is hindered by the choices we make every day. And in response to this the words of Jesus ring out: ‘Try your best to enter by the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and will not succeed.’
But what is the narrow door and how do we pass through it? And if there’s a narrow door, is there a wide one too? Well, there is a wide door and it is the one our society is currently pouring through. Herded like cattle towards it by consumerism and the forces of the market-place, it is the door of narrow self interest, whether it be personal self-interest or national self-interest. The narrow door is the one that calls us beyond that to new ways of living and relating to others. ‘The Lord says this,’ we heard in the first reading, ‘I am coming to gather the nations of every language,’ and the response to the psalm was. ‘Go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News.’ And in this we have the thing that ‘must be done’ in the world of the 21st century ‘for the sake of the community’. This is the task God has entrusted to us at this moment in history and which he is helpless to bring about without us. As individuals or as nation we either look inwards towards self or outwards towards the world. Whether it be the environment, the world economy, international relations, immigration and the movement of peoples, the challenge is the same. It is to move beyond self interest, national boundaries, the limitations of race and nation and embrace a whole new way of living. At which point, I would like to tell you about Marcus.
He has just spent two weeks in Kilmarnock prison for breaching security at Prestwick airport last year as part of a protest against the use of Prestwick by the CIA for what is known as the ‘rendering’ of prisoners; moving them to prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere where they are subjected to interrogation and, allegedly, torture. It was not his first time in jail. He has been in Greenock Prison twice for protesting at Faslane and spends several months a year in the Middle East as one of those peace campaigners who from time to time get shot by the Israelis. As a younger man he was a computer consultant who made lots of money. A visit to Africa, however, made him realise that, in his own words, ‘something had to be done.’ And so, to the horror of his friends and family, he gave everything up to do what he does now. And he does it is a committed christian.
Now I’m not suggesting for one second that we should all do what Marcus does. Even he would recognize that, mixed in with the Gospel, there are elements to what he does that are obsessive and compulsive. But I leave you today with one simple question:
What are you doing?
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by asking God to lead us to deeper and more mature ways of thinking about who he is and how he relates to us. Inadequate, childish, fundamentally pagan ways of thinking have led, in modern times, to a massive loss of faith and we pray that more mature ways of thinking and believing will, in time, lead humanity back to the God who created us…….Lord hear us
As we reflect today on a God who has trusted us so much as to become vulnerable in the face of our freedom, we ask that same God to stir in us, through the power of the Spirit, a deep sense of wonder at the privilege and responsibility which are ours. Trusted to do what needs to be done at this moment in history for the sake of the men and women of our time we ask God to pour into our lives the graces and blessings we need so that we will not fail them………..Lord hear us
In the first reading, Isaiah dreamed of the day when the nations of the earth would flock to Jerusalem. His vision, of course, was limited and he could not have foreseen how God would fulfil his own prophecy. The Church is the New Jerusalem and, rather than the nations flock to it, The Church is sent out into the world to touch and embrace people of every nation. We do not come to God.God comes to us, and we pray that the Church will become a more and more effective instrument in his hands…………………Lord hear us
Every few days we seem to be shocked by yet another story of teenage murder and violence. And so we pray for all who are caught up in it. We pray, too, for the wisdom we need to understand what is happening so that, as a country, we can address it. Every time it happens we are being confronted by the fact that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we are living and we pray for the courage to recognize it and face up to its implications for ourselves………………...Lord hear us
In the second reading, the letter to the Hebrews speaks of how God trains us the way a father trains his children. How this happens, of course, varies from age to age and the author of Hebrews is simple reflecting the way it was done in his day. Then, the atttitude was, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’ a way of thinking which is no longer fashionable. And so we pray for parents that they will have the wisdom they need to bringsup a family in the midst of the world as it is today……….Lord hear us
Faced with the many challenges confronting humanity today, many very committed people see protest, sometimes violent and sometimes non-violent, as an appropriate response to what is going on. And so we pray for them, that their anger will be tempered when necessary by wisdom and insight. And we pray, too, for the grace to see the prophetic nature of much that they do so that we can learn from them and imitate them in ways appropriate to our own lives….……………………Lord hear us
Sunday, 26 August 2007
Saturday, 18 August 2007
20th Sunday C
Last weekend, having just come back from holiday, I spoke to you about the way I had experienced the movement of God in myself over the summer. I told you about the things I had read and how they had stirred in me feelings of sadness about the role of the Catholic Church in Spain over many years. The Spanish Church at its best has produced some of the great figures of history, but at its worst it has embodied all that has been negative about traditional Catholicism with its deep resistance to modernity in all its shapes and forms And I explained to you how God had used this experience to show me again how important it is that our faith be in Him and not in human beings who are always likely to disappoint us.
There were, of course, different reactions to what I said. One woman wrote to say how moving she had found it, the reason being, it turned out, that it echoed her own experience on holiday in Ireland. Another person said it went to the heart of why so many leave the Church today. But someone else thought it was completely inappropriate and asked why I so often draw attention to negative aspects of the Church. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I think the implication was that, as a priest, it was my job to praise the Church and defend it rather than draw attention to its shortcomings. Well, apart from the fact that, after thirty eight years as a priest, I kind of object to my commitment to the Church being somehow called into question, why do I so often highlight the weaknesses and flaws of a Church in which I have been a priest for so long?
Well, the clue is in today’s Gospel where Jesus tells us he has not come to bring peace but division. ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth’ he says, ‘and how I wish it were blazing already.’ And in the first reading we hear how Jeremiah was thrown into a well to die because the king’s leading men considered he was disheartening the soldiers by speaking unwelcome truths, a bit like those today who would question what is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan. And all of this is summed up in a quote, the origin of which, even with the help of Google, I can no longer identify. It says quite simply that the task of the homilist at Mass is ‘to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,’ and in drawing your attention from time time to the flaws and weaknesses of the Church, that is what I am trying to do. So in what way can what I do comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable?
Well, by sharing with you my own frustrations with the Church, I hope I am able to give comfort to others who are also disturbed by some of the things that go on. There are many such people in the world today, and large numbers of them have turned their backs on traditional religion and walked away. The reasons for this are many. Many people, in my experience, are just lost and confused because the bubble we once lived in has burst and we have been forced to face up to the shortcomings of a Church we kept for so long on a pedestal. Often, in this we are quite deeply influenced by the media where coverage of religious matters is very negative, the fundmantal message being that anyone who believes all that stuff nowadays is naïve and needs their head looked. This message finds fertile soil in the minds of millions whose understanding of the things of faith has never been very adult anyone and is not helped by the fact that the Church itself often speaks a language few today can understand, re-enforcing the impression that it belongs to a different age and has nothing to say to the modern world. And to all those who, to one degree or another, are disturbed by these things, I want to speak words of comfort. The message of the media is simply not true. There are many problems facing the Church today as it struggles, not always successfully, to adapt to the times in which we live, but there is no need for any of us to walk away. There is nothing to fear. What is happening is actually OK. Any weaknesses and flaws we see in the Church today are nothing compared to what they have been in the past and by speaking about them sometimes what I am saying to you is quite simple. I, too, struggle with these things, but I have not the slightest intention of walking away. And you don’t need to either.
But as well as comforting the disturbed, it is also my job to disturb the comfortable. The Second Vatican Council tells me that, as a priest, I am a successor of Jeremiah and all the other prophets – not to mention Jesus – who disturbed and challenged the people of their day. It is not the job of the priest at Mass to tell the people in front of him what they want to hear. It is his job to challenge, to call the people to conversion and new ways of living. Whether the congregation like it or not is not really the issue. Whether they like the priest or not is not the issue either, although, since priests don’t have a wife and family, one of the great temptations he faces is to seek approval from the people he serves, sometimes at the expense of speaking unwelcome truths. But this is a serious error. There is nothing in the world more radical or challenging than the message of Jesus. It calls us to the most profound conversion imaginable: to move beyond the limits if human love, human logic, human ways of living and learn to love as God loves, think as God thinks and live by the values of God’s kingdom. To come here each week is not to engage in some weekly social event. It is to engage with the very deepest things in life and, in the second reading, the letter to the Hebrews tells us that we must throw off everything that hinders us and keep running steadily in the race we have started. It urges us not to lose sight of Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection. Think of Jesus, it says, and you will not give up for want of courage.
It’s a truly enormous challenge. In one movement it both comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Alone we cannot do it. In God everything becomes possible. So are you up for it? …I am.
At the very centre of human history lies the Gospel of Jesus Christ, challenging humanity to the very depths of its being and at the same time showing us the way forward, the way we can move beyond the limits of human thinking which have caused so much trouble over the centuries. And so we pray for the world at this time, facing as it does so many challenges, that it will, through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, hear and respond to what Jesus is saying to us…………………….Lord hear us
At a time when the world faces so many challenges in areas like Development, the Environment, International Relations and so on, the Christian Churches have a special role to play. We are called to be signs of the Kingdom, to embody in our own lives and in our own communities, the new way of Living Jesus speaks of and so show the world that it is possible to live in this new way. And so we pray that we will not fail the people with whom we share this moment in history……….....Lord hear us
As the Church moves into a new century and struggles to come to terms with a world in which it does not hold the position in people’s lives it once did, many are disturbed and confused. Deprived of mature, adult faith, the immature childish faith which was once enough to keep us going is no longer sufficient and we are vulnerable to attack from the atheistic secular society we live in. And so we pray for all who are disturbed in this way that God will comfort us……….......Lord hear us
As a result of this disturbance, millions of people today have walked away from the Church. And so we pray for them today. We pray that God will continue to guide them on their journey and, through all that happens in the course of their lives, lead them to himself. And we pray that if and when they return to the Church, they will find us in a better place than when they left, ready to welcome them and show them a Church renewed and fit for the third millennium…………………...…..Lord hear us
It is possible that some of us here may be wavering on the edge of walking away from the Church and joining those who have already left. We are especially vulnerable to this when life is a struggle, when things are going against us, or we are simply down or depressed, feeling perhaps that God has abandoned us. And so we pray for all who may be feeling this way today….Lord hear us
On Wednesday, the children went back to school, some taking the huge step of starting school for the first time. And so we pray for all the children of the parish, that they will grow to become men and women of mature adult faith, willing and able to take on the immense privilege and responsibility of bearing witness to Jesus in the midst of the modern world.….………………..Lord hear us
There were, of course, different reactions to what I said. One woman wrote to say how moving she had found it, the reason being, it turned out, that it echoed her own experience on holiday in Ireland. Another person said it went to the heart of why so many leave the Church today. But someone else thought it was completely inappropriate and asked why I so often draw attention to negative aspects of the Church. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I think the implication was that, as a priest, it was my job to praise the Church and defend it rather than draw attention to its shortcomings. Well, apart from the fact that, after thirty eight years as a priest, I kind of object to my commitment to the Church being somehow called into question, why do I so often highlight the weaknesses and flaws of a Church in which I have been a priest for so long?
Well, the clue is in today’s Gospel where Jesus tells us he has not come to bring peace but division. ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth’ he says, ‘and how I wish it were blazing already.’ And in the first reading we hear how Jeremiah was thrown into a well to die because the king’s leading men considered he was disheartening the soldiers by speaking unwelcome truths, a bit like those today who would question what is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan. And all of this is summed up in a quote, the origin of which, even with the help of Google, I can no longer identify. It says quite simply that the task of the homilist at Mass is ‘to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,’ and in drawing your attention from time time to the flaws and weaknesses of the Church, that is what I am trying to do. So in what way can what I do comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable?
Well, by sharing with you my own frustrations with the Church, I hope I am able to give comfort to others who are also disturbed by some of the things that go on. There are many such people in the world today, and large numbers of them have turned their backs on traditional religion and walked away. The reasons for this are many. Many people, in my experience, are just lost and confused because the bubble we once lived in has burst and we have been forced to face up to the shortcomings of a Church we kept for so long on a pedestal. Often, in this we are quite deeply influenced by the media where coverage of religious matters is very negative, the fundmantal message being that anyone who believes all that stuff nowadays is naïve and needs their head looked. This message finds fertile soil in the minds of millions whose understanding of the things of faith has never been very adult anyone and is not helped by the fact that the Church itself often speaks a language few today can understand, re-enforcing the impression that it belongs to a different age and has nothing to say to the modern world. And to all those who, to one degree or another, are disturbed by these things, I want to speak words of comfort. The message of the media is simply not true. There are many problems facing the Church today as it struggles, not always successfully, to adapt to the times in which we live, but there is no need for any of us to walk away. There is nothing to fear. What is happening is actually OK. Any weaknesses and flaws we see in the Church today are nothing compared to what they have been in the past and by speaking about them sometimes what I am saying to you is quite simple. I, too, struggle with these things, but I have not the slightest intention of walking away. And you don’t need to either.
But as well as comforting the disturbed, it is also my job to disturb the comfortable. The Second Vatican Council tells me that, as a priest, I am a successor of Jeremiah and all the other prophets – not to mention Jesus – who disturbed and challenged the people of their day. It is not the job of the priest at Mass to tell the people in front of him what they want to hear. It is his job to challenge, to call the people to conversion and new ways of living. Whether the congregation like it or not is not really the issue. Whether they like the priest or not is not the issue either, although, since priests don’t have a wife and family, one of the great temptations he faces is to seek approval from the people he serves, sometimes at the expense of speaking unwelcome truths. But this is a serious error. There is nothing in the world more radical or challenging than the message of Jesus. It calls us to the most profound conversion imaginable: to move beyond the limits if human love, human logic, human ways of living and learn to love as God loves, think as God thinks and live by the values of God’s kingdom. To come here each week is not to engage in some weekly social event. It is to engage with the very deepest things in life and, in the second reading, the letter to the Hebrews tells us that we must throw off everything that hinders us and keep running steadily in the race we have started. It urges us not to lose sight of Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection. Think of Jesus, it says, and you will not give up for want of courage.
It’s a truly enormous challenge. In one movement it both comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Alone we cannot do it. In God everything becomes possible. So are you up for it? …I am.
At the very centre of human history lies the Gospel of Jesus Christ, challenging humanity to the very depths of its being and at the same time showing us the way forward, the way we can move beyond the limits of human thinking which have caused so much trouble over the centuries. And so we pray for the world at this time, facing as it does so many challenges, that it will, through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, hear and respond to what Jesus is saying to us…………………….Lord hear us
At a time when the world faces so many challenges in areas like Development, the Environment, International Relations and so on, the Christian Churches have a special role to play. We are called to be signs of the Kingdom, to embody in our own lives and in our own communities, the new way of Living Jesus speaks of and so show the world that it is possible to live in this new way. And so we pray that we will not fail the people with whom we share this moment in history……….....Lord hear us
As the Church moves into a new century and struggles to come to terms with a world in which it does not hold the position in people’s lives it once did, many are disturbed and confused. Deprived of mature, adult faith, the immature childish faith which was once enough to keep us going is no longer sufficient and we are vulnerable to attack from the atheistic secular society we live in. And so we pray for all who are disturbed in this way that God will comfort us……….......Lord hear us
As a result of this disturbance, millions of people today have walked away from the Church. And so we pray for them today. We pray that God will continue to guide them on their journey and, through all that happens in the course of their lives, lead them to himself. And we pray that if and when they return to the Church, they will find us in a better place than when they left, ready to welcome them and show them a Church renewed and fit for the third millennium…………………...…..Lord hear us
It is possible that some of us here may be wavering on the edge of walking away from the Church and joining those who have already left. We are especially vulnerable to this when life is a struggle, when things are going against us, or we are simply down or depressed, feeling perhaps that God has abandoned us. And so we pray for all who may be feeling this way today….Lord hear us
On Wednesday, the children went back to school, some taking the huge step of starting school for the first time. And so we pray for all the children of the parish, that they will grow to become men and women of mature adult faith, willing and able to take on the immense privilege and responsibility of bearing witness to Jesus in the midst of the modern world.….………………..Lord hear us
Saturday, 11 August 2007
19th Sunday C August 2007
My advice to people who take prayer seriously and go on holiday is always the same. Don’t even try to pray on holiday the way you do at home. The situations are so different that any attempt to do so is doomed to failure. The secret is to let go of all the things we normally do and focus instead on one thing only: the movement of God deep within everything that happens while we are away. It’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last three weeks and, in the light of today’s second reading, I would like to share some of it with you.
The key for me this year has been the many hours I have spent reading. The first book I read was called ‘The Disinherited: the Exiles who created Spanish culture,’ and in it, the author describes how, since 1492, a year which saw the destruction of the last Moslem territories in Spain and the discovery of the New World by Columbus, the history of Spain has been marked by the brutal expulsion and exile of one group after another. First it was the Jews, then the Moslems, then the Protestants, the Liberals, the Socialist, the Communists and anyone at all who, by thinking differently threatened one very limited, narrow and above all ‘Catholic’ understanding of what it meant to be Spanish, a process which reached its climax in the catastrophy which was the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939.
And the second book I read fitted in very well with the first. It was a history of the Church in Spain between 1875 and 1975, the year General Franco died, a period part of which I lived through in the 1960s. And if the first book made me feel sad at the historical shortcomings of the Church to which I belong and with which I am see deeply associated, the second made me weep. Like the Vatican itself throughout that period, the Church is Spain resisted virtually everything that was modern or new. It was against democracy. It was against workers’ rights. It was against freedom of speech and virtually any other form of freedom you could think of and in every way possible sided with the rich, ruling classes against the poor, causing to build up in Spain a hatred of the Church and the clergy which occasionally broke out into violence and came to a head, again, in the Civil War. And in all kinds of ways this hatred is at work in Spain today even if in a much more constitutional and therefore less violent form.
And the third book I read, not as good as the first two, but interesting nevertheless, was about the relatively small number of people from outside Spain who went there in 1936 to fight for Franco’s Nationalists against the Spanish Republic. Most of them were Catholics of a Fascist disposition, supporters and admirers not just of Franco but of Hitler and Mussolini, deeply anti-semitic, anti-black, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-socialist and anti-intellectual, the most prominent supporter of all this in Britain being, the author says, Cardinal Hinsley, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. By this time, of course, my sadness was complete and yet, at the same time, the whole experience felt very Godly, which was exactly what it turned out to be.
None of this, of course, was entirely new to me. I have read about it all before. But as I read it again in such detail, God was moving very deeply in me. The sadness I felt at the role of the Church in what is a tragic and violent story was, I have no doubt, the sadness of God himself. And the questions it was stirring in me were real questions. How can I be part of such a Church? Why am I part of such a Church? Do I want to be part of such a Church? Having faced it many times, I knew the answer to this last question was ‘yes,’ but the real confirmation came last Saturday evening in Seville.
I had intended to go to Mass the next morning in Seville Cathedral, but at about eight that evening I found myself outside a little church in the city centre. It was open, so I went in. It’s quite common to have rosary before Mass in Spanish churches, but in this case the rosary was on a tape or CD. The only person there was the priest and as I saw him sitting there alone and thought of all the things I had been reading, my heart went out to him. A psychologist would say, no doubt, that I was seeing something of myself in him, but, wanting to support him in some way, I stayed for Mass, even putting a E20 note in the collection, much more than I normally would. There were very few at the Mass – resentment against both Church and clergy in Seville has always been among the deepest in Spain – but for me the key moment in the whole process I am trying to describe to you came at the consecration. As the host was lifted up, the whole holiday experience fell into place as God held up before me a truth he has shown me so many times before. Put your faith in religion or Churches, he keeps telling me, and they will always, sooner or later, let you down. Only God will not fail or disappont us. And yet – and here we see the sheer cleverness, humour even, of God – we find that God who can be trusted in the midst of a deeply flawed Church. And there it all was staring me in the face in Seville. The backdrop to that Mass for me was the whole sad story I had been reading about and yet there on the altar before me in that poor little church which had lived through those same tragedies lay everything that matters: Jesus, his death and resurrection and the promise of the kindom. All I had to do was trust it.
And it has always been the same. It was by faith, we heard today, that Abraham obeyed the call of God. It was by faith that Sarah, in spite of being past the age, was able to conceive. It was in faith that they and so many others down through the centuries died trusting the promises God had made but which they could only see vaguely in the far distance. And that is the challenge facing me and facing you today: to keep trusting; to keep believing; to keep deepening our faith and, above all, to make sure that that faith is not in Churches or religion which for so many in the modern world have led to loss of faith, but in God himself who will never disappoint.
BIDDING PRAYERS
For much of the last one hundred and fifty years the instinct of the Church was to resist anything that was new or could be remotely described as liberal. The turning point was the Second Vatican Council when the Church turned its back on this way of thinking and committed itself to engaging with the modern world in a positive way. And so we pray for the Church that it will the grace it needs at this time to remain faithful to that commitment…………….Lord hear us
Many people in today’s world dismiss catholicism as out-dated and a relic of the Middle Ages. While it is possible to understand why they think this way - and sometimes we have given their grounds for doing so – the reality is that the message of the Church, when properly expressed and properly understood, is thorougly modern and relevant. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to express this message in a way that the people of our time can understand…………....Lord hear us
Far too often in history, the Church has sided with the rich and powerful against the poor. This was true throughout Europe for many centuries and has been very much the case in Latin America in more recent times where bishops and others have openly supported one dictator after another. Since Vatican II, however, things have begun to change and we pray that this change will continue and deepen…………..Lord hear us
The weaknesses and flaws in the Churches, which have become more obvious in modern times, have been the cause of many people losing faith. And so we pray that faith in the 21st century will not be in the Churches but in the God who alone can satisfy our deepest longings and who will never disappoint or fail us. And we ask this grace in a particular way for our children and young people today………Lord hear us
Abraham, whom we heard about in the second reading, is the Father in Faith of many millions of Christians, Jews and Moslems in every age. And so we pray that these three great world religions will become what they have not always been, instruments of God’s peace in the world. And we pray in a special way for the Moslem men and women who come here to our hall each Friday for prayer that their presence here will be a blessing for us and for them………………Lord hear us
Many who celebrate Mass with us each week are still on holiday or have still to go on holiday. And so we pray that, wherever they go and whatever they do, they will be open to the movement of God in their experience and so be able to appreciate and enjoy to the full the things they see, the people they meet, the food the eat and the drink they consume, all in a spirit of profound gratititude to God………..Lord hear us
The key for me this year has been the many hours I have spent reading. The first book I read was called ‘The Disinherited: the Exiles who created Spanish culture,’ and in it, the author describes how, since 1492, a year which saw the destruction of the last Moslem territories in Spain and the discovery of the New World by Columbus, the history of Spain has been marked by the brutal expulsion and exile of one group after another. First it was the Jews, then the Moslems, then the Protestants, the Liberals, the Socialist, the Communists and anyone at all who, by thinking differently threatened one very limited, narrow and above all ‘Catholic’ understanding of what it meant to be Spanish, a process which reached its climax in the catastrophy which was the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939.
And the second book I read fitted in very well with the first. It was a history of the Church in Spain between 1875 and 1975, the year General Franco died, a period part of which I lived through in the 1960s. And if the first book made me feel sad at the historical shortcomings of the Church to which I belong and with which I am see deeply associated, the second made me weep. Like the Vatican itself throughout that period, the Church is Spain resisted virtually everything that was modern or new. It was against democracy. It was against workers’ rights. It was against freedom of speech and virtually any other form of freedom you could think of and in every way possible sided with the rich, ruling classes against the poor, causing to build up in Spain a hatred of the Church and the clergy which occasionally broke out into violence and came to a head, again, in the Civil War. And in all kinds of ways this hatred is at work in Spain today even if in a much more constitutional and therefore less violent form.
And the third book I read, not as good as the first two, but interesting nevertheless, was about the relatively small number of people from outside Spain who went there in 1936 to fight for Franco’s Nationalists against the Spanish Republic. Most of them were Catholics of a Fascist disposition, supporters and admirers not just of Franco but of Hitler and Mussolini, deeply anti-semitic, anti-black, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-socialist and anti-intellectual, the most prominent supporter of all this in Britain being, the author says, Cardinal Hinsley, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. By this time, of course, my sadness was complete and yet, at the same time, the whole experience felt very Godly, which was exactly what it turned out to be.
None of this, of course, was entirely new to me. I have read about it all before. But as I read it again in such detail, God was moving very deeply in me. The sadness I felt at the role of the Church in what is a tragic and violent story was, I have no doubt, the sadness of God himself. And the questions it was stirring in me were real questions. How can I be part of such a Church? Why am I part of such a Church? Do I want to be part of such a Church? Having faced it many times, I knew the answer to this last question was ‘yes,’ but the real confirmation came last Saturday evening in Seville.
I had intended to go to Mass the next morning in Seville Cathedral, but at about eight that evening I found myself outside a little church in the city centre. It was open, so I went in. It’s quite common to have rosary before Mass in Spanish churches, but in this case the rosary was on a tape or CD. The only person there was the priest and as I saw him sitting there alone and thought of all the things I had been reading, my heart went out to him. A psychologist would say, no doubt, that I was seeing something of myself in him, but, wanting to support him in some way, I stayed for Mass, even putting a E20 note in the collection, much more than I normally would. There were very few at the Mass – resentment against both Church and clergy in Seville has always been among the deepest in Spain – but for me the key moment in the whole process I am trying to describe to you came at the consecration. As the host was lifted up, the whole holiday experience fell into place as God held up before me a truth he has shown me so many times before. Put your faith in religion or Churches, he keeps telling me, and they will always, sooner or later, let you down. Only God will not fail or disappont us. And yet – and here we see the sheer cleverness, humour even, of God – we find that God who can be trusted in the midst of a deeply flawed Church. And there it all was staring me in the face in Seville. The backdrop to that Mass for me was the whole sad story I had been reading about and yet there on the altar before me in that poor little church which had lived through those same tragedies lay everything that matters: Jesus, his death and resurrection and the promise of the kindom. All I had to do was trust it.
And it has always been the same. It was by faith, we heard today, that Abraham obeyed the call of God. It was by faith that Sarah, in spite of being past the age, was able to conceive. It was in faith that they and so many others down through the centuries died trusting the promises God had made but which they could only see vaguely in the far distance. And that is the challenge facing me and facing you today: to keep trusting; to keep believing; to keep deepening our faith and, above all, to make sure that that faith is not in Churches or religion which for so many in the modern world have led to loss of faith, but in God himself who will never disappoint.
BIDDING PRAYERS
For much of the last one hundred and fifty years the instinct of the Church was to resist anything that was new or could be remotely described as liberal. The turning point was the Second Vatican Council when the Church turned its back on this way of thinking and committed itself to engaging with the modern world in a positive way. And so we pray for the Church that it will the grace it needs at this time to remain faithful to that commitment…………….Lord hear us
Many people in today’s world dismiss catholicism as out-dated and a relic of the Middle Ages. While it is possible to understand why they think this way - and sometimes we have given their grounds for doing so – the reality is that the message of the Church, when properly expressed and properly understood, is thorougly modern and relevant. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to express this message in a way that the people of our time can understand…………....Lord hear us
Far too often in history, the Church has sided with the rich and powerful against the poor. This was true throughout Europe for many centuries and has been very much the case in Latin America in more recent times where bishops and others have openly supported one dictator after another. Since Vatican II, however, things have begun to change and we pray that this change will continue and deepen…………..Lord hear us
The weaknesses and flaws in the Churches, which have become more obvious in modern times, have been the cause of many people losing faith. And so we pray that faith in the 21st century will not be in the Churches but in the God who alone can satisfy our deepest longings and who will never disappoint or fail us. And we ask this grace in a particular way for our children and young people today………Lord hear us
Abraham, whom we heard about in the second reading, is the Father in Faith of many millions of Christians, Jews and Moslems in every age. And so we pray that these three great world religions will become what they have not always been, instruments of God’s peace in the world. And we pray in a special way for the Moslem men and women who come here to our hall each Friday for prayer that their presence here will be a blessing for us and for them………………Lord hear us
Many who celebrate Mass with us each week are still on holiday or have still to go on holiday. And so we pray that, wherever they go and whatever they do, they will be open to the movement of God in their experience and so be able to appreciate and enjoy to the full the things they see, the people they meet, the food the eat and the drink they consume, all in a spirit of profound gratititude to God………..Lord hear us
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