One of the good things that has happened recently, after years of talking about it, is that the priests in the area have started meeting young people in St Joseph’s Academy on a regular basis. I met two classes myself last week and hope to meet another two this coming Friday. Like the other priests involved, I have enjoyed the experience very much, although some of the questions the youngsters ask illustrate just how far they have drifted away from the Church and how ignorant they are about the most basics things to do with it. So when one of them last week asked me, ‘What happens when you die?’, I perked up, thinking that here, at least, was a serious theological question. And so, partly to give myself time to think, I said, ‘Well, what do you think happens when we die?’ ‘No, I don’t mean that’ he said, ‘What happens when you die. Will someone else come to St Matthew’s?’
I have told that story to a few people recently and they have all laughed. And I laughed myself, although, at the time, I tried to keep my face straight. But as I thought about it, I realised that the boy was actually expressing something quite profound in the consciousness of the Catholic community today; the feeling that things in the Church are in decline, on a downward spiral, falling apart even. The numbers going to Mass are dropping. Priests are getting older and fewer in number. Since this summer, Mount Carmel, here in Kilmarnock, is without a resident priest, something more and more parishes are having to get used to. And it will get worse. To answer the boy’s question: when I die or move away, whichever comes first, it is quite possible, likely even, that noone will take my place, as the number of priests in Kilmarnock is reduced to the two envisaged just a few years ago by the process we called Embracing the Future. And faced with this kind of thing, many in the modern world think that the churches are in terminal decline, that their time is over and that they will soon disappear altogether. So, is this true? Are those who say these things right or wrong? Well, I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that I believe they are completely and utterly wrong, the reason for this being hidden deep in today’s first reading.
‘All scripture,’ as we heard St Paul tell Timothy this morning, ‘is inspired by God and can profitably be used for teaching… and guiding people’s lives.’ This does not mean that we can just pick any old sentence from the Bible and use it out of context to prove some obscure point or other. On this basis, the Bible could be, and often has been used to justify almost anything. What it refers to are the deep movements of God in Scripture, the dynamics that underpin the way God deals with us, the patterns that repeat themselves over and over again throughout history. And in that story of Moses and the Amalakites where, so long as Moses lifts his arms in prayer the people prosper and when he doesn’t the Amalakites do, we have one of the most fundamental of all of these. Whether this is a historical event or not is irrelevant. What matters about it is the fact that the truth it expresses, the truth that without God we can do nothing, that God’s strength is at work in human weakness, runs through the whole of scripture. We see it all through the Old Testament; we see it in the stable at Bethlehem; we see it on calvary; we see it in the history of the early Church and, if we have eyes to see, we see it in all that is going on in the Church today. St Paul sums it up when, reflecting on his own personal experience, he turns human logic on its head and tells the Corinthians that God’s grace it at its best in weakness and that it is when he, Paul, is weak that he is strong, something we need to reflect on deeply in the midst of a Church which, at so many levels, seems on the face of it, to be disintegrating and falling apart.
I have quoted you more than once recently the words of the Jesuit, William Johnston, a Irishman from Derry who has spent many years working in Japan. ‘Unless we give the people mysticsm’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘the Church is finished,’ words which reflect exactly my own deepest conviction about the what is happening today. Mysticism, you see, is not just for monks and those like them; people like St Teresa, whose home town Avila the men’s group visited recently, or St John of the Cross, whose tomb we saw in Segovia. They belong to another time. As we enter the third millennium, the whole Church is called to mysticism. We are all called to see the world as God sees it; to see beyond the externals into the depths of things; to pull back, at least for a moment, the veil that separates us from the miracle that God is working in history and in the life of every human being. And for this to happen God has to do what he did in the past to people like Teresa and John. He has to wean us off the human consolations we cling to. He has to lead us through darkness into a new kind of light. He has to strip us bear of all that prevents us entering this new world of faith. He has to teach us over and over again the message contained in today’s story of Moses and the Amalakites.
And everywhere we look God is doing this. He’s doing it as the weakness of the Church is constantly exposed to public ridicule. He’s doing it as the triumphalism and self-confidence which went with full churches give way to diminishing numbers and self-questioning. He’s doing it as the certainty of the past gives way to doubt and many inevitably feel confused and lost. The Church many of us were born into had an answer for every question. People nowadays laugh at those answers. To many it seems like a disaster, but, in reality, it’s the most powerful sign imaginable that God is doing something wonderful and new in the Church right before our eyes.
Millions today write it off. But they just don’t understand. Their thinking is based on human logic. Only mystics can understand what’s going on the Church today and it’s in such mystics, their arms, like Moses’ in the first reading, raised in prayer, that Jesus, in the words of today’s Gospel, will find faith on earth. Just pray that we will be counted among them.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the minds of many people mysticsim is associated with strange visions and extraordinary experiences. But this is a complete misunderstanding. The great mystics always warned against taking such things too seriously and attached no importance to them. Genuine mysticism is about seeing the world and everything in it in a new way. It is about seeing into the depths of reality beyond the obvious and superficial and we pray for that grace for ourselves….…………………..Lord hear us
Faced with the confusion and uncertainty which are part and parcel of the modern world, many in the Church today flee from the reality of this situation and seek refuge in old certainties, a form of fundamentalism found in all the major religions at this time. It is a failure to engage with the world as it is and renders those who choose this path incapable of speaking in a meaningful way to the men and women of our time. And so we ask God to show us all the futility of this………….……Lord hear us
Faced with the same uncertainty and doubt, others in the Church react by walking away. Just like those who choose the path of fundamentalism, they are unwilling or unable to engage with uncomfortable realities. But to walk away just because there are things happening we don’t like or find scandalous is not the answer. The challenge for men and women of faith today is to stay and engage with what is going on, and we ask God for the courage we need to do that…………………..Lord hear us
To make sense of what God is doing in the Church and world at this moment in history we need to learn to understand a logic which, in human terms, makes no sense. It is about a light which feels like darkness. It is about a birth that looks, for all the world, like death. It is about weakness that is, in reality, strength. It is about a falling apart which is more of a coming together. And so we ask God to help us understand this seemingly irrational logic………………………………...Lord hear us
Many, if not most of our young people would appear to have lost touch with the Church. But this need not be a permanent state of affairs. We may not see how they are going to find their way to faith in the midst of a world so opposed to the values of the Gospel, but that does not mean it will not happen. And so we pray that, in ways we cannot at the moment foresee, God will draw today’s young people to himself and lead them to deep personal faith…………………….Lord hear us
This Sunday see the beginning of the Nineteenth Annual Week of Directed Prayer in the parish. There are fifty six people involved this year, forty six participants and ten guides, and we pray that every single one of them will be open to what God is doing in the coming days…………...Lord hear us
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