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