I received this week the most recent copy of The Way, a review of Christian spirituality published by the British Jesuits. Looking at the lists of articles on offer I felt a bit like a child in a sweety shop. I wanted to read them all at once. But the one I chose to read first was, perhaps not surprisingly, entitled, What is Specific to an Ignatian Model of Spiritual Direction? After all, I spend a lot of time doing spiritual direction according to the Ignatian model and so the question of what is specific to it, what makes it different from other forms of spiritual direction, goes to the very heart of what I do. There are, of course, basic things which are common to all spiritual direction. It is, after all, the same God we are dealing with. But the article in question spelt out a number of things which, put together, constitute the essence of the Ignatian approach, the one that struck me most being the fact that, for St Ignatius, spiritual direction is always in the context of the Church, a very important point in an age when so many people claim to be spiritual without any reference to the Church or to the wider Christian community. According to the author of the article, the spiritual director must be deeply rooted in the Church even if the person coming for direction isn’t yet quite so rooted. He or she must be a person who understands the Church, is familiar with the theology of the Church and, most importantly of all, loves the Church. And although some of you may find this surprising, I consider myself a person who loves the Church deeply.
But how can I say this? Have I not spent a lot of the last twenty three years highlighting and drawing to your attention the faults and weaknesses of the Church? Yes, I have, and will, God willing, continue to do so for as long as I am here. And I’m in good company. In the first reading today, the prophet Malachi slates the religious leaders of his day for profaning God’s Covenant with his people and by their teaching causing many to stray. And in the Gospel Jesus continues this long tradition, telling the people they must do what the Pharisees tell them, since the occupy the seat of Moses, but must not do what they do, since they don’t not practise what they preach, taking the places of honour at banquets, being greeted obsequiously in the market squares and putting burdens on people they won’t carry themselves. And there are only two reasons for indulging in this kind of criticism. In the case of the Church, you either do it because you hate the Church and want to pull it down, or you do it because you love the Church and want it to be all that it is called to be. People who couldn’t care less don’t speak the way Malachi and Jesus did in today’s readings. Only those who care deeply speak the way they did. It wasn’t those who favoured the status quo who loved the Covenant in Malachi’s day. It was those who cried out against the abuses of the time. It was not the Pharisees who really loved the Law. It was those who, like Jesus, could see to the heart of it, could’nt bear to see what was happening to it and wanted to see it fulfilled rather than observed in a empty mechanical way. And it is not those who think the Church is beyond criticism or who defend the indefensible who love the Church today, but those who care so deeply about it that they work tirelessly to transform it and make it a more effective witness to the presence of God in the world of the 21st century. And it is against this background that I have so much hope for the church history course we are about to have in the parish.
For years I have been saying to you that only men and women of personal faith, people who have met God and know God rather than simply having heard of him, will survive in the Church of the 21st century. But in an age when every sign of human weakness in the Church and in society is exposed for all to see, it is also vital that that faith be robust enough to withstand every kind of scandal or unsavoury revelation. The leaflet advertising the history course has a quote in it from Henri de Lubac, a French theologian who helped lay the foundations of the Second Vatican Council. As an old man in his nineties he was made a cardinal, a gesture which was designed to acknowledge, not only his own work, but the work of others like him who for years had been treated with suspicion by the Church but who, in the end, were vindicated, even although many of them, unlike de Lubac, did not live long enough to see it. And what he says takes us to the heart of this week’s liturgy and why we are having the history course at all. If we do not learn to love the Church in its sinfulness- he writes- we will not love the Church loved by the Lord, but rather some figment of our romantic imagination.
And so the whole course is designed to help us face the reality rather than the fantasy. It will help us, God willing, come to a deeper understanding of the journey the Church has been making and continues to make through history so that, to quote Pope John XXIII, the person who started the process of renewal we are currently living through, we can read the signs of times and face up to the challenge of the gospel at this moment in history. I have met too many people over the years who have no sense whatsoever of just how much the Church has changed over the centuries. They seem to think that, prior to the Second Vatican Council, nothing in the Church had changed since the days when Jesus said Mass in Latin and Peter was Pope in the way Joseph Ratzinger is today. But the way Mass is celebrated has change many times over the centuries and the present model of how to be Pope dates back no further than the mid-nineteenth century. And we could say the same about so many things.
In the second reading today, St Paul thanks God for the way the people of Thessalonika have accepted the gospel for what it is, God’s message and not some human thinking. The Church is the vessel in which that message makes its way through history and my prayer is that, by studying the vessel, the message itself will become clearer.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by holding up before God the Church throughout the world. We pray that it will have at this time a deep sense of where it has come from and how it got to where it is now, so that it can discern with clarity what God is calling it to at the beginning of the 21st century. We pray that it will be true to its origins, faithful to its long tradition and yet profoundly open to the new things God is longing to do in and through it now.........................Lord hear us
We live in an age when the media is merciless its exposure of the weaknesses and mistakes of both individuals and institutions. And so, along with everyone else, the Church has, in recent years, had to endure its weaknesses being exposed to full public gaze. For many people, their faith has been neither robust nor mature enough to withstand the impact of these revelations, and they have walked away, shocked and disillusioned. And so we pray for them today..................Lord hear us
And so we ask God to give to all of us here present a faith which is both mature and robust, a faith so deep and so based on personal experience that it can withstand and survive anything and everything the modern world, so often anti-faith in its thinking, throws at us. And we ask this grace in a particular way for young people today, exposed as they are to so many versions of the truth that it is often very difficult for them to know what true actually is.................Lord hear us
In every age there are prophets who question the status quo, challenge current ways of thinking and speak unwelcome truths to the world. And so we ask God to raise up in the Church today many such prophetic voices. We pray, too, that the Church will have the courage and openness it needs to hear those voices and listen to what they say so that it can become all that it is called to be and not settle for something less than what God has in mind for it...............Lord hear us
Both the prophet Malachi in the first reading this morning and Jesus in the Gospel are very critical of the religious leaders of their day. Jesus tells us that ‘Anyone who exalts himself will be humbled and anyone who humbles himself will be exalted’ and yet, throughout history, Church leaders have fallen into the trap of wearing broader phylacteries and longer tassles and have people call them Rabbi. And so we pray that in the 21st century this will finally become a thing of the past................Lord hear us
Finally, we ask God to bless the church history course we are about to have in the parish. It will require a commitment of both time and effort from us and we ask God to give us both. We pray, too, for those who have agreed to lead us through the course in the coming months that their presence here will be a source of blessing both for themselves and for us. But we pray most of all that the course will lead us to God and to a deep, mature and realistic love of the Church..............Lord hear us
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