At the heart of Christianity is the call to love the way God loves, a challenge which goes on all our lives. No matter how adorable babies and young children may be, the truth is that, as you may have noticed amidst all the giving and receiving of presents on Christmas day, we begin life as deeply selfish little monsters. We tolerate this, of course, in the very young and even find it attractive and amusing at times. But even at the human level, and leaving Jesus and any spiritual dimension to one side for a moment, we know that, if the child is not to grow into the real thing, a fully grown adult monster, he or she cannot be allowed to stay like that. And so, before too long, we all have to start learning the painful message that we are not the centre of the universe and that the rights and feelings of other people have to be respected too. And when this lesson is not learned, the consequences can be quite horrific. You can see it already in some children who, by the time they start school, are already showing signs of monsterhood. And the fundamental reason why half the people in Kilmarnock prison are in there is that, as children, they were never really taught this lesson and so go through their lives basically not understanding why they cannot just do what they want. And what I invite you to reflect on today is how it’s within the family, amidst the cut and thrust of daily life, that we learn this lesson, not only as children, but all through our lives.
And it’s a delicate, sometimes risky, business. Children, as we know, do not come with an instruction manual, and so parents have to learn as they go along, a lot depending on what their experience was at the hands of their own parents. And, again, that’s why so many of those in our prisons, although obviously not all, are the offspring of parents and grandparents who themselves have fallen foul of the law. But in general terms, its a case working out at this stage how to teach discipline and respect for others in a way that does not crush the child but enables it to grow and gradually become the person he/she is.
At this stage however, the concept of generosity has not developed in us, the first step towards what will, hopefully, become generosity being a sense of fairness. Which is why, of course, our great cry at this point in our lives is, ‘But it’s not fair.’ We should not, of course, underestimate this stage in our development. If the world were fairer, it would be much better for it. But beyond fairness lies something else and one of the ways we learn this is through adolescence, a crucial time for both parents and young people.
I speak here, of course, as one without children, but one of the conclusions I have come to, watching the process from a bit of a distance, is that there’s no form of love closer to the love of God than the love many parents show to difficult adolescent children. If fairness were the criterion, then the son/daughter struggling through this journey from childhood to adulthood would not have a leg to stand on. But in many parents, this struggle draws out of them a generosity which makes no sense in terms of mere fairness. And the experience of receiving such love, even although it is not necessarily acknowledged or appreciated at the time, is, I would suggest, one of the main things which draws the young person, too, towards maturity and a new way of relating to others.
But then, of course, comes the next stage, when we begin to enter into relationships with people of the opposite sex. Here, too, despite all our early protestations of love, there is an enormous amount of self and selfishness involved. To reach the point where sexuality is about the other person rather than ourselves is a long journey which many never complete and which, even for those who do, takes many years. And as one stage in our lives gives way to another, children again play a huge part. One of the saddest things about the Sharon Matthews case recently was the fact that, in court, an expert witness said that her mother was psychologically incapable of putting her child’s needs before her own, one of the single biggest challenges of parenthood and one which plays a huge part in our development. And again, I speak as one less wise. But through the challenges of marriage and children, slowly but surely – if the process works that is – we move towards great and greater maturity, which is the same thing as to say we learn the meaning of the word love.
The stage of our lives which remains, of course, is the last stage, ageing and growing old, during which the great challenge for us is to learn to receive. The popular writer, Henri Nouwen - of whom it has been said that he never had an unpublished thought - has written about this stage in our lives, saying that its overall purpose is to teach us to let other people do things for us. Because, if we have not learned this – and how many older people have you see stubbornly resisting it - we are not ready for the God who longs to do more for us than we could ever imagine. But ageing presents another challenge too. And its to those not yet old. In a society ruled by market-forces, the danger is that those who have ceased to be productive cease to have value. And so the ultimate test of family life is how we care for the elderly, a test our society today is struggling to come to terms with.
But, having said all that, and having faced all the difficult challenges of what it means to love within the family, even this is still not the love the Gospel speaks of. It is part of our growth towards that love, but it is not it. If we only love those who love us, Jesus tells us, then we are no different from the pagans. Our love, he goes on, must be perfect. It must be like God’s love and reach out beyond the limits of blood and family. It must go out to those on the margins. It must include those whom the world considers unloveable. Family life, hugely important as it is and vital to our development, is no more than training for a far greater love. Because, in the end, there’s only one family: the human family.
So, on a scale of one to ten, where would you place yourself on this great journey?
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin our prayer today by asking God to stir in us a deep sense of gratitude to our parents and brothers and sisters for all we learned through and from them in our early years. Recognizing, in particular, the many ways in which they challenged those aspects of our personalities which, had they been left unchecked, would have had a long-term harmful effect on the way we have grown and developed as people, we ask God to bless them now wherever they are...................Lord hear us
When the gospel calls on us to love one another the way God loves, it is, of course, calling us far beyond the limits of family relationships. But to do so, to reach out to the world with a love that is willing to embrace the unlovable and those on the margins of society, is not something that we can do by ourselves. It is only possible through the power of the Spirit living in us and doing, through grace, what, left to ourselves, we could never do. And so we pray for this grace.....................Lord hear us
Even within our families and among people who, deep down, still love one another, there are often deep, unresolved tensions. Sometimes, as we know only too well from sad experience, families can be split apart, sometimes by incidents or disputes which, in the beginning, seemed, on the face of it, quite insignificant. And so we pray for families we may know where this has happened, that, with God’s help, the resulting wounds will be healed before it is too late.....................Lord hear us
We pray, too, in a very special way on this Feast, for parents and young people in the midst of coping with the period in life we call adolescence. Like birth itself, it can be a very difficult and painful time, as the child begins to develop and change so that the adult man or woman can be born. Only through the love of parents who are willing to keep loving their children when they are not always loveable is this possible, and we ask God to give parents today this grace in abundance..................Lord hear us
For a whole variety of reasons, many families today live in a state of chaos where the guidelines children need to develop in a healthy and balanced way simply do not exist. And so whole generations are growing up in a moral landscape devoid of signposts, where, at an age when they are not ready to do so, young people are having to make adult moral choices and work out for themselves what is right or wrong. And so we ask God to guide and protect them....................Lord hear us
The developed world, today, is struggling with the issue of the elderly and infirm. In more traditional societies, the elderly are valued for their wisdom and experience. In a society driven by market-forces, however, the danger is that, since they no longer produce anything, the elderly come to be seen as a burden to the tax-payer. Some even talk of a future war between old and young over the issue of pensions. And so we ask God to teach us sense in this area while there is still time..............Lord hear us
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Thursday, 25 December 2008
Christmas: Midnight Mass
There’s a phrase in that second reading which always sounds out of place to me at Midnight Mass. And it’s when Paul tells us that we have to give up everything that does not lead to God, and all our wordly ambitions. Every year when I hear it I feel for the many people throughout the world for whom this is, perhaps, their only visit to Church in the year and for whom those words must sound very negative and discouraging, reinforcing the feeling they already have that religion is full of prohibitions and means giving up the things they enjoy. And while this is not true at all – the very opposite, in fact, is the truth - it may well sound that way to some of you here tonight. But for those of you who have been with us all through Advent and have been part of our weekly reflections on the nature of sin, I hope the rich, positive aspect of Paul’s words are obvious to you.
What we have been reflecting on, for those of you who weren’t able to be here, is the fact that sin, and with it all the trouble it causes in the world, is the result first and foremost of foolishness rather than badness. Every human being longs for happiness and is created for happiness, the problem being that we look for it in all the wrong places. At the heart of our reflections has been something Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the Middle Ages, said seven hundred years ago: that human being are not attracted by evil, only by apparent good. We chase after what appears to offer happiness, but, since we are constantly being conned by a mixture of illusions and our own stupidity, just when we think we have the happiness we seek it turns out not to be what we thought it was and slips through our fingers like sand. Each one of us could tell the story of how this has happened in our own lives, but, as we gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus this year of all years, the evidence for it in the world around us could hardly be more obvious.
From time immemorial human beings have caused pain and suffering to each other through hatred and violence, always in pursuit of some illusory good – very often peace – which, being an illusion, never materialises. And then, in recent years, we have been struggling to come to terms with the problems created by our abuse of the environment, likening us to a man up a tree happily sawing off the branch he himself is sitting on. But this year we have an especially powerful example of our own foolishness in the form of the financial crisis currently afflicting the world. For years we have worshipped at the altar of the goddess money, living by her commandments – the laws of the marketplace – sacrificing human beings to her every day and treating as heretics anyone who had the temerity to question her teaching. And now we are seeing all of this for the insanity it always was: spending money we didn’t have and borrowing even more to pay for it. Time and time again here at Mass we have reflected on the ultimate unsustainability of an economic system which depended on consuming more and more things we didn’t need and couldn’t afford, the ultimate insanity being, as the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out this week, that, as the system collapses, the solution being offered by politicians is to do more and more of the thing that got us here in the first place.Time, of course, will tell how the politics and economics of it all work out. That is not our concern tonight. Our concerns are infinitely deeper than that as we contemplate a God who, in Jesus, enters into this world, and, faced with the insanity of so much human behaviour, shows us a whole new way of thinking and being which itself seems insane to those who think in traditional human terms. And it’s all contained in the Christmas story, not in words, but in images and symbols which, if we can move beyond childish ways of thinking about them, tell us everything we need to know at this moment in our history.
And at the heart of it is a complete turning upside down of values and ways of thinking which are taken for granted in our society today and never seriously questioned, the reason being, of course, that they are too radical for us even to contemplate. And at the very heart of it lies Jesus attitude to riches, the thing we value above everything else in the developed world and the yardstick by which we gauge the worth of other human beings. Born in poverty, Jesus rejects the worship of money. Later in his life he will call it a tainted thing and tell his followers that they cannot worship both God amd money. They will either hate the first and love the second or love the second and treat the first with contempt. The greedy pursuit of money for its own sake lies at the heart of all our current difficulties and even the bankers and financiers – the high priests of the goddess money – can finally see that. But by being born in poverty, Jesus is also telling us something about what it is to be a human being. In a consumer-driven society, people are judged by how much they own and what they have, drawing us into a never-ending struggle to compete. But Jesus has none of this. Right from the first moments of his life, symbolized by the shepherds, he was at home with those on the margins of society, reminding us that a person’s worth comes, not from what they own or from the status or position they hold, but from the fact that they are created in the image and likeness of God. And by rejecting the road of fame and celebrity – shunning Herod’s palace and later in his life walking away when the people wanted to make him king - Jesus rejects the shallow, bogus celebrity culture to which so many are addicted today in the form of cheap television programmes designed to keep our minds off more serious issues
And so, once again, we see that Christmas, far from being for children, is something which challenges us to the very depths of the way we live our lives today. And it’s not about stopping doing the things we enjoy. It’s about stopping doing the things which seem to offer happiness, but don’t, and embracing the things which will really lead to the happiness we seek and are made for.
So understand this and embrace it. Then, you will know what it is to have a happy Christmas.
BIDDING PRAYERS
If the world is to respond to the profound challenges contained in the Christmas story, three basic things are necessary. First, through the power of the Spirit living and working in us, our minds must be opened to understand what it is saying. Then, through the power of the same Spirit, we must begin to desire it. But finally and most importantly of all, our behaviour must begin to change. And so we ask God to grant us these graces in abundance this Christmas.........Lord hear us
Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury likened our society to a person addicted to heroin. Hooked on consumerism and driven to spend more and more money buying more and more things we cannot afford, we are caught in a vicious circle of spending and debt from which we cannot escape. And so, he said, the current financial crisis is a blessing in disguise, a reality check, inviting us to confront unwelcome truths about ourselves. And so we pray that it will be this for us...................Lord hear us
The state of the world economy is a matter of huge importance. The lives and future of millions of poor people depend on it working in a just and effective way. And so we pray that those with power to influence these things will be, in the words of Scripture, people with far-seeing eyes: men and women who have the vision needed to question and re-examine things which everyone else takes for granted and never stop to question, so that real, radical change becomes possible.................Lord hear us
Even today, in the midst of an increasingly secular and atheistic society, there is still something magical about Christmas. This is because the story, filled with powerful images, speaks to our imagination rather than to our intellect. And so it reaches and touches parts of us which words and ideas could never reach or touch. And so we pray for the world at this time, that, in a way beyond its own understanding, it will be affected by the story of Jesus’ birth this year...............Lord hear us
In rejecting riches and palaces and associating himself with outcasts and foreigners, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made flesh, is saying something of immense importance to the world at this time. And so we pray that, in the course of this new century, the world will see dramatic and long-term changes to the way we treat the poorest among us, whether at home or abroad. And we pray that this parish will play its own part in this story, reaching out to all in need..............Lord hear us
The following of Jesus is not at all about giving up the things that we enjoy. It is about letting go of our addictions, rejecting ways of thinking and behaving which cause us harm, and embracing newer, healthier ways of living. Ultimately, it is about opening us up to the happiness we seek but which, in the end, only God can give us. And so we ask God to pour into our lives over the coming days this happiness which only he can give, especially within our families.............Lord hear us
What we have been reflecting on, for those of you who weren’t able to be here, is the fact that sin, and with it all the trouble it causes in the world, is the result first and foremost of foolishness rather than badness. Every human being longs for happiness and is created for happiness, the problem being that we look for it in all the wrong places. At the heart of our reflections has been something Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian of the Middle Ages, said seven hundred years ago: that human being are not attracted by evil, only by apparent good. We chase after what appears to offer happiness, but, since we are constantly being conned by a mixture of illusions and our own stupidity, just when we think we have the happiness we seek it turns out not to be what we thought it was and slips through our fingers like sand. Each one of us could tell the story of how this has happened in our own lives, but, as we gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus this year of all years, the evidence for it in the world around us could hardly be more obvious.
From time immemorial human beings have caused pain and suffering to each other through hatred and violence, always in pursuit of some illusory good – very often peace – which, being an illusion, never materialises. And then, in recent years, we have been struggling to come to terms with the problems created by our abuse of the environment, likening us to a man up a tree happily sawing off the branch he himself is sitting on. But this year we have an especially powerful example of our own foolishness in the form of the financial crisis currently afflicting the world. For years we have worshipped at the altar of the goddess money, living by her commandments – the laws of the marketplace – sacrificing human beings to her every day and treating as heretics anyone who had the temerity to question her teaching. And now we are seeing all of this for the insanity it always was: spending money we didn’t have and borrowing even more to pay for it. Time and time again here at Mass we have reflected on the ultimate unsustainability of an economic system which depended on consuming more and more things we didn’t need and couldn’t afford, the ultimate insanity being, as the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out this week, that, as the system collapses, the solution being offered by politicians is to do more and more of the thing that got us here in the first place.Time, of course, will tell how the politics and economics of it all work out. That is not our concern tonight. Our concerns are infinitely deeper than that as we contemplate a God who, in Jesus, enters into this world, and, faced with the insanity of so much human behaviour, shows us a whole new way of thinking and being which itself seems insane to those who think in traditional human terms. And it’s all contained in the Christmas story, not in words, but in images and symbols which, if we can move beyond childish ways of thinking about them, tell us everything we need to know at this moment in our history.
And at the heart of it is a complete turning upside down of values and ways of thinking which are taken for granted in our society today and never seriously questioned, the reason being, of course, that they are too radical for us even to contemplate. And at the very heart of it lies Jesus attitude to riches, the thing we value above everything else in the developed world and the yardstick by which we gauge the worth of other human beings. Born in poverty, Jesus rejects the worship of money. Later in his life he will call it a tainted thing and tell his followers that they cannot worship both God amd money. They will either hate the first and love the second or love the second and treat the first with contempt. The greedy pursuit of money for its own sake lies at the heart of all our current difficulties and even the bankers and financiers – the high priests of the goddess money – can finally see that. But by being born in poverty, Jesus is also telling us something about what it is to be a human being. In a consumer-driven society, people are judged by how much they own and what they have, drawing us into a never-ending struggle to compete. But Jesus has none of this. Right from the first moments of his life, symbolized by the shepherds, he was at home with those on the margins of society, reminding us that a person’s worth comes, not from what they own or from the status or position they hold, but from the fact that they are created in the image and likeness of God. And by rejecting the road of fame and celebrity – shunning Herod’s palace and later in his life walking away when the people wanted to make him king - Jesus rejects the shallow, bogus celebrity culture to which so many are addicted today in the form of cheap television programmes designed to keep our minds off more serious issues
And so, once again, we see that Christmas, far from being for children, is something which challenges us to the very depths of the way we live our lives today. And it’s not about stopping doing the things we enjoy. It’s about stopping doing the things which seem to offer happiness, but don’t, and embracing the things which will really lead to the happiness we seek and are made for.
So understand this and embrace it. Then, you will know what it is to have a happy Christmas.
BIDDING PRAYERS
If the world is to respond to the profound challenges contained in the Christmas story, three basic things are necessary. First, through the power of the Spirit living and working in us, our minds must be opened to understand what it is saying. Then, through the power of the same Spirit, we must begin to desire it. But finally and most importantly of all, our behaviour must begin to change. And so we ask God to grant us these graces in abundance this Christmas.........Lord hear us
Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury likened our society to a person addicted to heroin. Hooked on consumerism and driven to spend more and more money buying more and more things we cannot afford, we are caught in a vicious circle of spending and debt from which we cannot escape. And so, he said, the current financial crisis is a blessing in disguise, a reality check, inviting us to confront unwelcome truths about ourselves. And so we pray that it will be this for us...................Lord hear us
The state of the world economy is a matter of huge importance. The lives and future of millions of poor people depend on it working in a just and effective way. And so we pray that those with power to influence these things will be, in the words of Scripture, people with far-seeing eyes: men and women who have the vision needed to question and re-examine things which everyone else takes for granted and never stop to question, so that real, radical change becomes possible.................Lord hear us
Even today, in the midst of an increasingly secular and atheistic society, there is still something magical about Christmas. This is because the story, filled with powerful images, speaks to our imagination rather than to our intellect. And so it reaches and touches parts of us which words and ideas could never reach or touch. And so we pray for the world at this time, that, in a way beyond its own understanding, it will be affected by the story of Jesus’ birth this year...............Lord hear us
In rejecting riches and palaces and associating himself with outcasts and foreigners, Emmanuel, God with us, the Word made flesh, is saying something of immense importance to the world at this time. And so we pray that, in the course of this new century, the world will see dramatic and long-term changes to the way we treat the poorest among us, whether at home or abroad. And we pray that this parish will play its own part in this story, reaching out to all in need..............Lord hear us
The following of Jesus is not at all about giving up the things that we enjoy. It is about letting go of our addictions, rejecting ways of thinking and behaving which cause us harm, and embracing newer, healthier ways of living. Ultimately, it is about opening us up to the happiness we seek but which, in the end, only God can give us. And so we ask God to pour into our lives over the coming days this happiness which only he can give, especially within our families.............Lord hear us
Saturday, 20 December 2008
4th Sunday of Advent B
It was with some anxiety that I turned to those readings last Sunday in preparation for this week’s homily. Every year during Advent I try to develop a theme over the four weeks without having any clear idea at the start what that theme will be. Its a case of one week at a time and see where the readings take us. Having spent the first three weeks this year, then, exploring the meaning of sin, my hope was that this last week would bring that reflection to a conclusion. And once again the Word of God came up trumps, although, having seen it do so so many times over the years, I wonder why I ever doubted it.
Take the first reading, which we have reflected on many times over the years. In it, we hear how David, having defeated all his enemies, has built himself a house of cedar. After years of political and military struggle he is now a man at the peak of his powers. But, in his moment of triumph, David, unknown to himself, has never been as vulnerable to the wiles of the Serpent as he is now. And so he has an idea. And it seems like a good one. Human beings, after all, as we have been hearing in recent weeks, are never attracted by evil, only by apparent good. And so David, the Lord of all he surveys, will build a temple for the Lord. It sounds terrific; a thoroughly good, holy religious thing to do, so much so that even the prophet Nathan is deceived.’Go and do all that is in your mind’ he says, ‘for the Lord is with you.’ But the Lord was not with David, just as he is not with many other apparently good, holy, religious things that we do, and it’s only when he retires to his room to pray that Nathan sees the tail of the snake and the truth dawns on him. And so straight away, without waiting until morning, Nathan goes to David’s room with a message from the Lord. And the message is this. Who does David think he is? Who is God and who is the creature here? It’s God who will build David a house and not the other way round. Puffed up by power, and seduced, like Adam and Eve in the Genesis myth, by the subtlety of the Serpent, David has lost sight of who he is in relation to God, and it’s only by turning to the Gospel and contrasting David with Mary that we can see the deep-rooted flaw in his position for what it is.
And its not that Mary herself does not struggle initially with what is happening to her in the story of the Annunciation. She is deeply disturbed by the Angel’s message. and rightly so. Unlike David and Nathan in the first reading, fooled by the seemingly holy and pious thought, she is not one of those who think every thought they have is from God even if it does seems to be from an angel. She is well aware that the Serpent is more than capable of dressing up as God and that this is, in fact, by far his favourite tactic. Long before Thomas Aquinas, the serpent has always attracted people, not to evil, but to apparent good, the very method he used with David in that reading. And so, by a series of questions, Mary tests the angel’s message to see if it really is from God. And its only when the angel tells her about Elizabeth – something objective against which she can test what the angel is saying – that she utters those amazing words. ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me.’ David’s mistake was that he thought he could do something for God - classic religion without faith. Mary, the woman of faith, having first checked the situation out for any sign of the tail of the snake, was open to what God wanted to do in her. And if we can grasp the profound difference between these two positions then we are on the road to understanding the true nature of sin, the task we set ourselves when Advent began. And at its root, of course, is the desire to be God. We see it in the Genesis story – ‘eat the fruit and you will be like gods’ - and we have talked about it many times over the years. One member of the Men’s group even accused me on Wednesday night of harping on about it. But it was on Thursday morning, while listening to the radio, that I came across a wonderful example of it that I invite you to think about now.
The programme in question was Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In our time,’ one I often listen to and have referred to before. The topic this week was the nature of ‘time’, something that has fascinated me since I was about sixteen, and it took us into all kinds of amazing areas of science and philosophy. We talked about other, as yet unknown, dimensions. We talked about whether time existed at all or whether it was something invented by us to help make sense of our experience. We talked about an expanding universe, whether it would ever end, and if so, how. And we heard a lot about Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, key figures in this whole area. And it was utterly fascinating as well as mind-blowing, filled with all kinds of interesting speculation on as yet unanswered questions. But at the very end, the chairman, Melvyn Bragg, asked the panel if they thought another Einstein would come along and open up whole new levels of understanding. Only one person had time to answer, and what he said was this. ‘He will have to, to show us all how silly we have been.’
And there we have it. The arrogance of creatures who think we know far more than we do, spouting forth, at the drop of a hat, on things about which we know nothing. Looking back we wonder how people whom we think of as primitive could have thought the things they did, not realising that, in the future, people will look back on us and think the same, amazed at the primitive nature of our knowledge too. Created by God and sustained in existence by God, we have the sheer affrontery to think that we can decide whether God even exists or not.
This, in the end, is the root of sin: not badness but mind-blowing stupidity. Instead of declaring that God does not exist, the modern world would be better employed falling down on its knees this Christmas and, faced with the Christ-child, uttering those words of Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’
BIDDING PRAYERS
Given the subtle temptations of the Serpent in the world today, many things are done in God’s name which have nothing whatsoever to do with God. Fired by enthusiasm, and in some cases, fanaticism, many mistake their own thoughts for those of God, resulting often in things like terrorism and war. And so we pray for the wisdom and discernment we need to see through false gods who always think as we do, agree with everything we say and never challenge or question us.......................Lord hear us
In our own lives, too, we can easily confuse what is of God with what we have always thought or were taught as children. And so, even when God, through his Spirit living and working in history, calls us to change or embrace something new, we are unable or unwilling to do so. But not everything we have thought all our lives is true. Not everything we were taught as children is valid in today’s world or today’s Church and we pray for the grace to see this..........Lord hear us
The movement of God in our lives, as Mary discovered at the Annunciation, is quite often disturbing. It can be confusing and frightening and, like Mary, we can be left wondering how it can be. We say we are not good enough; we say we are too old, too young, too busy, too shy or any one of a thousand other reasons why we can’t do what God asks. But with God all things are possible and we pray for the grace to believe this about ourselves.................Lord hear us
Like Mary, we, too, are called to give birth to Jesus in the world of our own day. But first he must be conceived in us by the power of the Spirit, then grow in us until, when the time comes, we can offer him to the world. This means being fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist. It means becoming more and more like Jesus in the way we live so that, when people look at us, it is not us they see, but Jesus who lives and moves in us. And so we pray for this grace...........Lord hear us
Millions today have decided that God does not exist. And yet the vast majority of reasons given for this are infantile, based on ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of who God is. Over and over again we hear reasons why God cannot exist which were already tired and redundant hundreds of years ago. And so we pray that the world of our time will come to see this and learn to know the God who not only exists, but holds each one of us in existence too...........Lord hear us
The key to wisdom today is humility in the face of truth. Compared with the fullness of truth, even the most learned and clever on our planet today know next to nothing. Every week scientists discover new things which mean that what we thought was true isn’t true at all. And how often do we ourselves hold forth on subjects about which we know next to nothing. And so we pray for a deep sense of humility in the face of truth which is always far greater than we are..................Lord hear us
Take the first reading, which we have reflected on many times over the years. In it, we hear how David, having defeated all his enemies, has built himself a house of cedar. After years of political and military struggle he is now a man at the peak of his powers. But, in his moment of triumph, David, unknown to himself, has never been as vulnerable to the wiles of the Serpent as he is now. And so he has an idea. And it seems like a good one. Human beings, after all, as we have been hearing in recent weeks, are never attracted by evil, only by apparent good. And so David, the Lord of all he surveys, will build a temple for the Lord. It sounds terrific; a thoroughly good, holy religious thing to do, so much so that even the prophet Nathan is deceived.’Go and do all that is in your mind’ he says, ‘for the Lord is with you.’ But the Lord was not with David, just as he is not with many other apparently good, holy, religious things that we do, and it’s only when he retires to his room to pray that Nathan sees the tail of the snake and the truth dawns on him. And so straight away, without waiting until morning, Nathan goes to David’s room with a message from the Lord. And the message is this. Who does David think he is? Who is God and who is the creature here? It’s God who will build David a house and not the other way round. Puffed up by power, and seduced, like Adam and Eve in the Genesis myth, by the subtlety of the Serpent, David has lost sight of who he is in relation to God, and it’s only by turning to the Gospel and contrasting David with Mary that we can see the deep-rooted flaw in his position for what it is.
And its not that Mary herself does not struggle initially with what is happening to her in the story of the Annunciation. She is deeply disturbed by the Angel’s message. and rightly so. Unlike David and Nathan in the first reading, fooled by the seemingly holy and pious thought, she is not one of those who think every thought they have is from God even if it does seems to be from an angel. She is well aware that the Serpent is more than capable of dressing up as God and that this is, in fact, by far his favourite tactic. Long before Thomas Aquinas, the serpent has always attracted people, not to evil, but to apparent good, the very method he used with David in that reading. And so, by a series of questions, Mary tests the angel’s message to see if it really is from God. And its only when the angel tells her about Elizabeth – something objective against which she can test what the angel is saying – that she utters those amazing words. ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me.’ David’s mistake was that he thought he could do something for God - classic religion without faith. Mary, the woman of faith, having first checked the situation out for any sign of the tail of the snake, was open to what God wanted to do in her. And if we can grasp the profound difference between these two positions then we are on the road to understanding the true nature of sin, the task we set ourselves when Advent began. And at its root, of course, is the desire to be God. We see it in the Genesis story – ‘eat the fruit and you will be like gods’ - and we have talked about it many times over the years. One member of the Men’s group even accused me on Wednesday night of harping on about it. But it was on Thursday morning, while listening to the radio, that I came across a wonderful example of it that I invite you to think about now.
The programme in question was Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In our time,’ one I often listen to and have referred to before. The topic this week was the nature of ‘time’, something that has fascinated me since I was about sixteen, and it took us into all kinds of amazing areas of science and philosophy. We talked about other, as yet unknown, dimensions. We talked about whether time existed at all or whether it was something invented by us to help make sense of our experience. We talked about an expanding universe, whether it would ever end, and if so, how. And we heard a lot about Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, key figures in this whole area. And it was utterly fascinating as well as mind-blowing, filled with all kinds of interesting speculation on as yet unanswered questions. But at the very end, the chairman, Melvyn Bragg, asked the panel if they thought another Einstein would come along and open up whole new levels of understanding. Only one person had time to answer, and what he said was this. ‘He will have to, to show us all how silly we have been.’
And there we have it. The arrogance of creatures who think we know far more than we do, spouting forth, at the drop of a hat, on things about which we know nothing. Looking back we wonder how people whom we think of as primitive could have thought the things they did, not realising that, in the future, people will look back on us and think the same, amazed at the primitive nature of our knowledge too. Created by God and sustained in existence by God, we have the sheer affrontery to think that we can decide whether God even exists or not.
This, in the end, is the root of sin: not badness but mind-blowing stupidity. Instead of declaring that God does not exist, the modern world would be better employed falling down on its knees this Christmas and, faced with the Christ-child, uttering those words of Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’
BIDDING PRAYERS
Given the subtle temptations of the Serpent in the world today, many things are done in God’s name which have nothing whatsoever to do with God. Fired by enthusiasm, and in some cases, fanaticism, many mistake their own thoughts for those of God, resulting often in things like terrorism and war. And so we pray for the wisdom and discernment we need to see through false gods who always think as we do, agree with everything we say and never challenge or question us.......................Lord hear us
In our own lives, too, we can easily confuse what is of God with what we have always thought or were taught as children. And so, even when God, through his Spirit living and working in history, calls us to change or embrace something new, we are unable or unwilling to do so. But not everything we have thought all our lives is true. Not everything we were taught as children is valid in today’s world or today’s Church and we pray for the grace to see this..........Lord hear us
The movement of God in our lives, as Mary discovered at the Annunciation, is quite often disturbing. It can be confusing and frightening and, like Mary, we can be left wondering how it can be. We say we are not good enough; we say we are too old, too young, too busy, too shy or any one of a thousand other reasons why we can’t do what God asks. But with God all things are possible and we pray for the grace to believe this about ourselves.................Lord hear us
Like Mary, we, too, are called to give birth to Jesus in the world of our own day. But first he must be conceived in us by the power of the Spirit, then grow in us until, when the time comes, we can offer him to the world. This means being fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist. It means becoming more and more like Jesus in the way we live so that, when people look at us, it is not us they see, but Jesus who lives and moves in us. And so we pray for this grace...........Lord hear us
Millions today have decided that God does not exist. And yet the vast majority of reasons given for this are infantile, based on ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of who God is. Over and over again we hear reasons why God cannot exist which were already tired and redundant hundreds of years ago. And so we pray that the world of our time will come to see this and learn to know the God who not only exists, but holds each one of us in existence too...........Lord hear us
The key to wisdom today is humility in the face of truth. Compared with the fullness of truth, even the most learned and clever on our planet today know next to nothing. Every week scientists discover new things which mean that what we thought was true isn’t true at all. And how often do we ourselves hold forth on subjects about which we know next to nothing. And so we pray for a deep sense of humility in the face of truth which is always far greater than we are..................Lord hear us
Saturday, 13 December 2008
3rd Sunday of Advent B
Since Advent began, we have been reflecting on the nature of sin, not to give ourselves a hard time, but to lay the foundations of a mature understanding of the mystery we are preparing to celebrate. Christmas is about the birth of a Saviour. But what does this mean? Why do we need a saviour, and what is it he saves us from? Questions which cannot be answered without a profound understanding of sin and its effect on us at every level of our existence.
And so we went back to what St Thomas Aquinas said about sin hundreds of years ago: that human beings are not attracted by evil, only by apparent good; our conclusion being that, at its root, sin is fundamentally the result, not of badness but of foolishness. Like Adam and Eve in the Genesis myth, we are forever conned into pursuing paths which promise much but turn to dust in our hands, causing harm to ourselves and to others. And because the temptation is so subtle and becomes more and more subtle as we grow in the spiritual life – the serpent, after all, was the most subtle of all the beasts on the face of the earth – we must be constantly examining and sifting through, not just what we do – that’s the easy bit – by why we do it. That’s where the real problem lies; at the level of what moves and motivates us, and it’s only possible to come to grips with sin in a mature and adult way if we are both willing and able to confront this not very attractive part of ourselves where things are not at all the way they appear on the surface. As Paul said in that second reading: ‘think before you do anything – hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil.’ And we saw last week how, if we want to find the place in ourselves where sin lurks, one way is to look out for things which start of good and then become less good. This is always a sign of the serpent’s presence and, if we follow its trail, it will lead us into the place within us where sin lives.
But who would want to makes this journey? After all, it is like leaving behind a comfortable, well-heated room and descending into a freezing dimly lit old cellar filled with all kinds of creeply crawlies. This is the place where lie those unpleasant aspects of our personalities which we spend a lot of time hiding, not only from others, but from ourselves. And while there are a number of ways we do this – like never seeing any fault in ourselves and blaming other people for everything – the one I invite you to be aware of today is the way we are able to come here each week, hear the Word of God, and go away untouched by it. It reminds me of those invisible force-shields on the Starship Enterprise which could deflect away anything fired at it. There is no more challenging or subversive book anywhere than the bible and yet like Captain Kirks on our own little spaceships we have developed shields which deflect away what the Word says leaving us free to carry on as if nothing had happened. And we do this because we have swallowed the most subtle of all the serpent’s lies, which is that, to let God into the centre of our lives, to let Jesus be the Saviour we say he is, will mean doing dull, boring holy things we don’t enjoy. And it’s not true.
So why do we believe it? Well, because, at first sight, it appears to be true. Just as evil can initially appear attractive, and so deceive us into thinking it is something it isn’t, so the movement of God in our lives can seem quite daunting, even frightening or disturbing, at first. Mary herself, as we will hear next Sunday, was deeply disturbed by the angel’s greeting, and it will be the same for us, too, as, at some stage in our own spiritual journey, God leads us into the place where sin lies and invites us to confront it. But for those who have the courage to make that journey the most wonderful surprise awaits. This place which we would rather not visit, because, at the human level it is so often a place associated with failure, criticism and blame, becomes, instead, a place of profound consolation. It becomes the place where we meet God and experience, often for the first time, the sheer depth of his love and forgiveness. With God there is only one reason for going there. It’s not to blame or to criticise but to show us what, left to ourselves, we would become and why it is we need Jesus as our saviour. In this initially unexpected place we meet the God the prophet speaks of in the first reading, the God who brings good news to the poor, binds up hearts that are broken, proclaims liberty to captives and freedom to those in prison. And what I invite you to see today is that all of this is the work of the Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit, acting deep within the life of each one of us.
In the end, you see, Advent is not about the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago. Yes, we remember that, but the coming of Jesus the Church really looks forward to now is his Second Coming - whatever that means exactly. From the beginning of time the Father has longed to share his own life with us and in the Jesus of history he shows us the way to himself, how to live the kind of fully human lives which prepare us to enter the kingdom. But the real work from the time of the resurrection onwards is done by the Spirit living and working in us. Slowly but surely the Spirit works to bring about his profound revolution in us, drawing us, stage by stage, little by little, into the life of the Father. The New Testament describes this in different ways. Paul speaks of puting on Christ, of becoming other Christs, of Christ living in us. At Mass each week we ask the Father, through the Spirit, to make us more like his Son and Paul, in words we will hear paraphrased in the music at Communion, says, ‘I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.
The whole purpose of our existence is to die to sin and grow into the likeness of the Risen Christ. And if that is what you want, visit the place in yourself where sin lives and bring what you find there to the Penance Service a week on Tuesday. God will be waiting for you there.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We have said many times over the years that only those with mature, personal faith will survive in the Church of the 21st century. But part of this mature faith is an adult understanding of what sin is. This involves moving beyond sin as ‘telling lies’ ‘swearing’ ‘being disobedient’ and so on and grappling with the twisted and distorted parts of ourselves which lie at the root of all the suffering that goes on in the world. And so we pray for the grace to confront these in ourselves.................Lord hear us
The capacity to spoil what is good is in all of us. We see it, even, in small children, when they smash other children’s toys or deliberately spoil their games. And so we pray again for the insight we need to recognize the good things we have spoiled over the years. Sometimes destructive, violent forces are stirred up in us which cause us to do or want to do bad things to other people, and we ask God for the grace to see these forces in ourselves for the deep rooted sin that they are................Lord hear us
The virtual disappearance of individual confession from the life of the Church in recent years is due, almost entirely, to our failure to develop a mature understanding of sin. Brought up on a diet of so-called sins which came to mean less and less as we grew up, many of us have stopped going to confession because we cannot think of anything meaningful to say. And so we pray that God will gradually lead us from this place to mature individual celebrations of this great sacrament................Lord hear us
The first reading this week speaks of a God who brings good news to the poor, binds up hearts that are broken and makes both integrity and praise spring up in the sight of the nations. And so we pray that, faced with the effects of human sinfulness in the world today, the Christian Church will be the bearer of good news rather than criticism and condemnation to the men and women of our time, so that the place of sin will again be the place of encounter with God’s love and mercy..........Lord hear us
The fight against our deep sinful tendencies is never-ending. That is why, in the second reading, St Paul tells us to think before we do anything, holding on to what is good and avoiding every form of evil. But he goes on to remind us that God has called us and will not fail us. And so we pray for a deep sense of God at work in history and a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil in the fullness of the Kingdom which we call The Second Coming of Christ.....................Lord hear us
One of the things we do with small children is shelter them from the uglier side of life. The danger, however, is that we spend our whole lives hiding from it, one sign of this today being the proliferation of superficial, shallow reality TV programmes at the expense of more serious ones which explore important issues like poverty, hunger war, homelessness and so on. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see what is happening to us and the courage and energy we need to resist it............Lord hear us
And so we went back to what St Thomas Aquinas said about sin hundreds of years ago: that human beings are not attracted by evil, only by apparent good; our conclusion being that, at its root, sin is fundamentally the result, not of badness but of foolishness. Like Adam and Eve in the Genesis myth, we are forever conned into pursuing paths which promise much but turn to dust in our hands, causing harm to ourselves and to others. And because the temptation is so subtle and becomes more and more subtle as we grow in the spiritual life – the serpent, after all, was the most subtle of all the beasts on the face of the earth – we must be constantly examining and sifting through, not just what we do – that’s the easy bit – by why we do it. That’s where the real problem lies; at the level of what moves and motivates us, and it’s only possible to come to grips with sin in a mature and adult way if we are both willing and able to confront this not very attractive part of ourselves where things are not at all the way they appear on the surface. As Paul said in that second reading: ‘think before you do anything – hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil.’ And we saw last week how, if we want to find the place in ourselves where sin lurks, one way is to look out for things which start of good and then become less good. This is always a sign of the serpent’s presence and, if we follow its trail, it will lead us into the place within us where sin lives.
But who would want to makes this journey? After all, it is like leaving behind a comfortable, well-heated room and descending into a freezing dimly lit old cellar filled with all kinds of creeply crawlies. This is the place where lie those unpleasant aspects of our personalities which we spend a lot of time hiding, not only from others, but from ourselves. And while there are a number of ways we do this – like never seeing any fault in ourselves and blaming other people for everything – the one I invite you to be aware of today is the way we are able to come here each week, hear the Word of God, and go away untouched by it. It reminds me of those invisible force-shields on the Starship Enterprise which could deflect away anything fired at it. There is no more challenging or subversive book anywhere than the bible and yet like Captain Kirks on our own little spaceships we have developed shields which deflect away what the Word says leaving us free to carry on as if nothing had happened. And we do this because we have swallowed the most subtle of all the serpent’s lies, which is that, to let God into the centre of our lives, to let Jesus be the Saviour we say he is, will mean doing dull, boring holy things we don’t enjoy. And it’s not true.
So why do we believe it? Well, because, at first sight, it appears to be true. Just as evil can initially appear attractive, and so deceive us into thinking it is something it isn’t, so the movement of God in our lives can seem quite daunting, even frightening or disturbing, at first. Mary herself, as we will hear next Sunday, was deeply disturbed by the angel’s greeting, and it will be the same for us, too, as, at some stage in our own spiritual journey, God leads us into the place where sin lies and invites us to confront it. But for those who have the courage to make that journey the most wonderful surprise awaits. This place which we would rather not visit, because, at the human level it is so often a place associated with failure, criticism and blame, becomes, instead, a place of profound consolation. It becomes the place where we meet God and experience, often for the first time, the sheer depth of his love and forgiveness. With God there is only one reason for going there. It’s not to blame or to criticise but to show us what, left to ourselves, we would become and why it is we need Jesus as our saviour. In this initially unexpected place we meet the God the prophet speaks of in the first reading, the God who brings good news to the poor, binds up hearts that are broken, proclaims liberty to captives and freedom to those in prison. And what I invite you to see today is that all of this is the work of the Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit, acting deep within the life of each one of us.
In the end, you see, Advent is not about the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago. Yes, we remember that, but the coming of Jesus the Church really looks forward to now is his Second Coming - whatever that means exactly. From the beginning of time the Father has longed to share his own life with us and in the Jesus of history he shows us the way to himself, how to live the kind of fully human lives which prepare us to enter the kingdom. But the real work from the time of the resurrection onwards is done by the Spirit living and working in us. Slowly but surely the Spirit works to bring about his profound revolution in us, drawing us, stage by stage, little by little, into the life of the Father. The New Testament describes this in different ways. Paul speaks of puting on Christ, of becoming other Christs, of Christ living in us. At Mass each week we ask the Father, through the Spirit, to make us more like his Son and Paul, in words we will hear paraphrased in the music at Communion, says, ‘I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.
The whole purpose of our existence is to die to sin and grow into the likeness of the Risen Christ. And if that is what you want, visit the place in yourself where sin lives and bring what you find there to the Penance Service a week on Tuesday. God will be waiting for you there.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We have said many times over the years that only those with mature, personal faith will survive in the Church of the 21st century. But part of this mature faith is an adult understanding of what sin is. This involves moving beyond sin as ‘telling lies’ ‘swearing’ ‘being disobedient’ and so on and grappling with the twisted and distorted parts of ourselves which lie at the root of all the suffering that goes on in the world. And so we pray for the grace to confront these in ourselves.................Lord hear us
The capacity to spoil what is good is in all of us. We see it, even, in small children, when they smash other children’s toys or deliberately spoil their games. And so we pray again for the insight we need to recognize the good things we have spoiled over the years. Sometimes destructive, violent forces are stirred up in us which cause us to do or want to do bad things to other people, and we ask God for the grace to see these forces in ourselves for the deep rooted sin that they are................Lord hear us
The virtual disappearance of individual confession from the life of the Church in recent years is due, almost entirely, to our failure to develop a mature understanding of sin. Brought up on a diet of so-called sins which came to mean less and less as we grew up, many of us have stopped going to confession because we cannot think of anything meaningful to say. And so we pray that God will gradually lead us from this place to mature individual celebrations of this great sacrament................Lord hear us
The first reading this week speaks of a God who brings good news to the poor, binds up hearts that are broken and makes both integrity and praise spring up in the sight of the nations. And so we pray that, faced with the effects of human sinfulness in the world today, the Christian Church will be the bearer of good news rather than criticism and condemnation to the men and women of our time, so that the place of sin will again be the place of encounter with God’s love and mercy..........Lord hear us
The fight against our deep sinful tendencies is never-ending. That is why, in the second reading, St Paul tells us to think before we do anything, holding on to what is good and avoiding every form of evil. But he goes on to remind us that God has called us and will not fail us. And so we pray for a deep sense of God at work in history and a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil in the fullness of the Kingdom which we call The Second Coming of Christ.....................Lord hear us
One of the things we do with small children is shelter them from the uglier side of life. The danger, however, is that we spend our whole lives hiding from it, one sign of this today being the proliferation of superficial, shallow reality TV programmes at the expense of more serious ones which explore important issues like poverty, hunger war, homelessness and so on. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see what is happening to us and the courage and energy we need to resist it............Lord hear us
Saturday, 6 December 2008
Second Sunday of Advent B
Last week, as Advent began, I invited you to reflect on the nature of sin and how an awareness of it is a vital part of our journey towards God. But the sin I spoke of was not the kind many of us learned about as children. Based on the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas that human beings are attracted, not by evil, but by apparent good, we saw sin as the result, not of badness, but of foolishness. Like Adam and Eve in that wonderful Genesis story, we are constantly conned into doing things which initially promise much but soon turn to dust in our hands. That’s why, in last week’s gospel, Jesus urged us to stay awake and be always on the alert. Only by doing so, by constantly sifting through the things we do and, more importantly, our often hidden reasons for doing them, can we begin to spot the sin before it ensnares us. St Ignatius Loyola, in his rules for discernment of spirits, gives us good advice on how to do this, and the piece I offer you today is this: always be on the lookout for things which start of good but then become less good. ‘Bad’ may lie further down the line, but the movement from good to less good is the beginning of a slippery slope and the sooner we get off it the better. Harking back to the Genesis story, Ignatius calls this movement the tail of the snake, the infallible sign that something’s not right, and anyone who is serious about the Christian life must be constantly looking out for it. The trouble is that its capacity to mutate and reappear in ever more subtle forms is endless, but in an attempt to explore how it works I invite you to look a bit more closely at today’s gospel.
In it, we are told that John the Baptist wore a garment of camel skin, not a piece of information that, at first sight, seems tremendously significant. But behind it lies a whole story about how people have related to the human body over the years. Obsessed at times by what they saw as the sins of the flesh, good people, eager to please God, practised extreme self-denial. They, too, dressed in rags and animal skins, refused, in some cases, to wash, and, thinking it was a virtuous thing to do, treated their bodies as their enemy. And at the time people admired them and thought they were holy. St Ignatius himself, after his initial conversion, did it for a while, until he saw it for what it was; something which had started good, a desire for holiness, but which had deteriorated into something less good and ultimately something deeply unhealthy.
Today, of course, we have a much greater sense of the dignity of the human body and the importance of looking after it. But even things like healthy eating, going to the gym, taking care of our appearance, dressing nicely – all, in themselves, good things – have, built into them, the same capacity to deteriorate into something less good, such as the kind of unhealthy cult of the body and good looks which leaves so many people today feeling bad about themselves. Fasting has always had a role in the Christian life. John did it, eating only locusts and wild honey, and we know Jesus did it too. But when doing without food gets mixed up with the cult of appearance, then mutates into obsesssive anxiety about body shape, and from there slips into the eating disorders so many people, especially girls, suffer from today, then its not just the tail of the snake we see. Its the whole darned snake. But it’s what John says about his relationship with Jesus which takes us to the heart of one of the most difficult dilemmas we face at this particular moment in history.
‘Someone is following me’ John says,’ who is more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals.’ And in another part of the Gospel he says that he himself must decrease so that this other person, Jesus, can increase, an idea that does not sit all that comfortably with the age in which we live. It’s the age, after all, of self-fulfilment, the age of person-centred counselling and psychotherapy, a time when we are encouraged to be everything we are capable of being, a time, we are told, when an individual can do anything he or she wants to do if they just set their mind to it. And this is fundamentally good. The idea that every person is unique and has the right be who they really are is clearly consistent with the fact that God has created every human being in his own image and likeness. And following centuries where only a small elite were ever able to fulfil their true potential and the vast majority of people were excluded from doing so through economic factors or through discrimination on grounds of social class or gender, it is clearly right. These old attitudes, however, were often reinforced by a certain kind of spirituality which, based on a false understanding of what pride and humility mean, a reflection to some extent of how we have understood what John says about himself and Jesus, encouraged people to be content with their position in life, respect their betters and not get above themselves.
But now that this way of thinking has largely disappeared and people today have options and possibilities that our great grand-parents could never have dreamt of, a new challenge emerges. As something essentially good again deteriorates into something less good, we are faced with another question. And it is this: when does self-fulfilment become self-indulgence? When does attending to my own needs become ignoring the needs of others? What happens when following your dream means trampling over the dreams of other people? How do we know the difference between self-esteem and self-delusion?
The human capacity to spoil what is good and turn it into something less good knows no limits. That’s why Jesus told us last week to stay awake, constantly examining and sifting through our motives for everything we do to detect the first sign of sin in ourselves. And it’s why, in today’s Gospel, John the Baptist speaks about the constant need for repentance and conversion. No sooner have we dealt with one manifestation of sin in ourselves than another takes its place, often the converse of the one we have just dealt with. Its like the Pharisee and the Tax collector. As soon as you think you are the first you are the second, and if you think you are the second you are the first.
The old snake, you see, has lost none of its subtlety.
BIDDING PRAYERS
There is perhaps no greater example of the human capacity to turn something good into something less good than the Christian Church itself. Sent out to be the light of the world and the bearer of Good News to the nations, it has time and time again succumbed to the temptations of history and failed to be what it is called to be. It is a Church ‘semper reformanda’, a Church in constant need of renewal, and we pray for a profound openness to that renewal in our own day........................Lord hear us
Governments, too, constantly disappoint and fail to live up to our hopes and expectations, a tragic example of this at the moment being Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe came to power after a long violent struggle against white domination of his country, and its people, at that time, were filled with hope and optimism. But now, all these years later, the country is in a state of almost complete ruin. And so we pray for Zimbabwe and for the whole of Africa at this time......................Lord hear us
The human capacity to spoil what is good is in all of us. And so we pray today for the wisdom we need to recognize the things we personally have spoiled over the years; the chances we have missed, the messes we have created, the bad choices we have made and the people we have hurt as a result. We ask God to come behind us, following our every step, clearing up our mess, healing the damage we have done and, slowly but surely, teaching us wisdom...................Lord hear us
One area where the human capacity to spoil what is good is most obvious is in marriage. Time and time again, relationships which begin with protestations of eternal love and undying commitment end up in pain and disaster. And even when this does not happen, many couples end up settling for something which is less good than it could be. And so we ask God to stir in married people here today something of their original enthusiasm and commitment..........Lord hear us
The contemporary emphasis on self-fulfilment, a product of both modern psychology and a more human-friendly theology, is fundamentally good. It is a sign of God moving in history at this time and the basic response of the man or woman of faith must be one of profound gratitude. But self-fulfilment can become self-indulgence and there is plenty of that around in the modern world too. And so we pray for the insight and wisdom we need to know the difference.................................Lord hear us
In the first reading today, we hear the opening words of the second part of the book of Isaiah, written, not by Isaiah, but by the anonymous prophet of the Exile in Babylon. ‘Console my people, console them,’ he cries out, in a world where there were no obvious grounds for consolation. But his cry came from deep within himself, from the place where God lived in him, and we pray for the grace to speak words of consolation to people today from that same place in ourselves..................Lord hear us
In it, we are told that John the Baptist wore a garment of camel skin, not a piece of information that, at first sight, seems tremendously significant. But behind it lies a whole story about how people have related to the human body over the years. Obsessed at times by what they saw as the sins of the flesh, good people, eager to please God, practised extreme self-denial. They, too, dressed in rags and animal skins, refused, in some cases, to wash, and, thinking it was a virtuous thing to do, treated their bodies as their enemy. And at the time people admired them and thought they were holy. St Ignatius himself, after his initial conversion, did it for a while, until he saw it for what it was; something which had started good, a desire for holiness, but which had deteriorated into something less good and ultimately something deeply unhealthy.
Today, of course, we have a much greater sense of the dignity of the human body and the importance of looking after it. But even things like healthy eating, going to the gym, taking care of our appearance, dressing nicely – all, in themselves, good things – have, built into them, the same capacity to deteriorate into something less good, such as the kind of unhealthy cult of the body and good looks which leaves so many people today feeling bad about themselves. Fasting has always had a role in the Christian life. John did it, eating only locusts and wild honey, and we know Jesus did it too. But when doing without food gets mixed up with the cult of appearance, then mutates into obsesssive anxiety about body shape, and from there slips into the eating disorders so many people, especially girls, suffer from today, then its not just the tail of the snake we see. Its the whole darned snake. But it’s what John says about his relationship with Jesus which takes us to the heart of one of the most difficult dilemmas we face at this particular moment in history.
‘Someone is following me’ John says,’ who is more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals.’ And in another part of the Gospel he says that he himself must decrease so that this other person, Jesus, can increase, an idea that does not sit all that comfortably with the age in which we live. It’s the age, after all, of self-fulfilment, the age of person-centred counselling and psychotherapy, a time when we are encouraged to be everything we are capable of being, a time, we are told, when an individual can do anything he or she wants to do if they just set their mind to it. And this is fundamentally good. The idea that every person is unique and has the right be who they really are is clearly consistent with the fact that God has created every human being in his own image and likeness. And following centuries where only a small elite were ever able to fulfil their true potential and the vast majority of people were excluded from doing so through economic factors or through discrimination on grounds of social class or gender, it is clearly right. These old attitudes, however, were often reinforced by a certain kind of spirituality which, based on a false understanding of what pride and humility mean, a reflection to some extent of how we have understood what John says about himself and Jesus, encouraged people to be content with their position in life, respect their betters and not get above themselves.
But now that this way of thinking has largely disappeared and people today have options and possibilities that our great grand-parents could never have dreamt of, a new challenge emerges. As something essentially good again deteriorates into something less good, we are faced with another question. And it is this: when does self-fulfilment become self-indulgence? When does attending to my own needs become ignoring the needs of others? What happens when following your dream means trampling over the dreams of other people? How do we know the difference between self-esteem and self-delusion?
The human capacity to spoil what is good and turn it into something less good knows no limits. That’s why Jesus told us last week to stay awake, constantly examining and sifting through our motives for everything we do to detect the first sign of sin in ourselves. And it’s why, in today’s Gospel, John the Baptist speaks about the constant need for repentance and conversion. No sooner have we dealt with one manifestation of sin in ourselves than another takes its place, often the converse of the one we have just dealt with. Its like the Pharisee and the Tax collector. As soon as you think you are the first you are the second, and if you think you are the second you are the first.
The old snake, you see, has lost none of its subtlety.
BIDDING PRAYERS
There is perhaps no greater example of the human capacity to turn something good into something less good than the Christian Church itself. Sent out to be the light of the world and the bearer of Good News to the nations, it has time and time again succumbed to the temptations of history and failed to be what it is called to be. It is a Church ‘semper reformanda’, a Church in constant need of renewal, and we pray for a profound openness to that renewal in our own day........................Lord hear us
Governments, too, constantly disappoint and fail to live up to our hopes and expectations, a tragic example of this at the moment being Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe came to power after a long violent struggle against white domination of his country, and its people, at that time, were filled with hope and optimism. But now, all these years later, the country is in a state of almost complete ruin. And so we pray for Zimbabwe and for the whole of Africa at this time......................Lord hear us
The human capacity to spoil what is good is in all of us. And so we pray today for the wisdom we need to recognize the things we personally have spoiled over the years; the chances we have missed, the messes we have created, the bad choices we have made and the people we have hurt as a result. We ask God to come behind us, following our every step, clearing up our mess, healing the damage we have done and, slowly but surely, teaching us wisdom...................Lord hear us
One area where the human capacity to spoil what is good is most obvious is in marriage. Time and time again, relationships which begin with protestations of eternal love and undying commitment end up in pain and disaster. And even when this does not happen, many couples end up settling for something which is less good than it could be. And so we ask God to stir in married people here today something of their original enthusiasm and commitment..........Lord hear us
The contemporary emphasis on self-fulfilment, a product of both modern psychology and a more human-friendly theology, is fundamentally good. It is a sign of God moving in history at this time and the basic response of the man or woman of faith must be one of profound gratitude. But self-fulfilment can become self-indulgence and there is plenty of that around in the modern world too. And so we pray for the insight and wisdom we need to know the difference.................................Lord hear us
In the first reading today, we hear the opening words of the second part of the book of Isaiah, written, not by Isaiah, but by the anonymous prophet of the Exile in Babylon. ‘Console my people, console them,’ he cries out, in a world where there were no obvious grounds for consolation. But his cry came from deep within himself, from the place where God lived in him, and we pray for the grace to speak words of consolation to people today from that same place in ourselves..................Lord hear us
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