Feast of the Holy Family

Christmas is about a God made flesh and living among us. The real God does not, as that pleasant but theologically flawed Cliff Richards song from some years ago put it, ‘watch from a distance.’ He is Emmanuel, God with us. He is part of our world and part of our lives and can be found in every human experience by those who have eyes to see. And so, on this Feast which we celebrate every year on the Sunday after Christmas, I invite you to reflect on how he is to be found in that most human experiences, the family.

The foundation stone of any family is a father and a mother. Legislation both in Scotland and at Westminster in recent years has highlighted a whole series of other issues around this reality. I am thinking, obviously of such things as civil partnerships and same sex couples adopting children. But I don’t want to go into these issues today. Nor do I want to go into the areas of single parenthood or marriage versus cohabitation. These, important as they are, are for another time. I begin, instead with what has always been the basis of the family, a man and a woman who enter into a committed sexual relationship with a view to having children and caring for them. So where, if anywhere, is God in this most human of experiences and what do we mean in the Catholic tradition when we call this union a sacrament?

Well, in the course of forty years as a priest, I have conducted several hundred weddings and for the last twenty-odd years my message to couples in the minutes before they exchange their vows has never varied. I remind them that, by proclaiming their commitment to each other before the Christian community, they are undertaking to be sacraments or signs to each other of what God is like. They commit themselves to love each other, not the way the world loves, but the way God loves and there are certain qualities of God’s love that I always invite them to reflect upon.

The first and most basic of these is that God’s love is permanent. It lasts forever. Nothing can change it and that in the end is the only credible basis for the Church’s insistence on the permanence of marriage. In purely human terms it makes no sense. Its sole purpose is to point us beyond the purely human to the presence of something divine in our midst. The fact that so many marriages fail, with all the pain involved, doesn’t fundamentally change that. It merely reminds us that, although we are called to be like God, we are not God, a truth that is perhaps seen most clearly in the contrast between what human sexuality is at its best and what human beings sometimes make of it. At its best it’s the very image of God’s love, a tangible experience of God with us, and yet it can also descend into cruelty and abuse of the very worst kind. We are deeply flawed creatures, a lesson marriage and family life teaches us over and over again, a constant reminder that to love as God loves is only possible through the power of God living in us.

No matter how much a bride or groom love each other, of course, there is a limit to how much time they can spend staring into each other’s eyes. Sooner or later, if their love is to blossom and grow, it has to turn outwards. And the most obvious way in which this happens is through the birth of children. The birth of a child opens up in most parents a way of loving they never knew before. And as such, it is a glimpse of how God himself sees every human being. Remember that experience, the deep instinctive love you felt for your new born child, and understand that that, only far more so, is how God loves you. And for the child, too, to be loved in that way, to be adored, to be cherished and cared for by a doting Mum and Dad, is also an experience of God. Sadly, of course, it doesn’t always happen this way, with life-long implications for those involved, another reminder to us of our flawed humanity and that, while we are called to share the life of God we are not ourselves Gods and should not expect perfection of ourselves or others.

Adorable as they are, of course, new born babies are totally self-centred, and so the long process of opening outwards to other people and the world begins. It is a painful process and the most basic lessons are learned in the midst of our family. Learning to share with our brothers and sisters, learning that we are not ourselves the centre of the universe is hard and involves many tears, umpteen little fights and not a few tantrums. It also draws out of parents another kind of love, as we turn out to be not quite as adorable or perfect as they first thought.

But if that’s bad, it’s nothing to what happens later when adolescence kicks in. It is a vital stage in our growth as, like a rockets launched into space, we push against everything that has given us life. To negotiate this stage in our lives more or less successfully, we need to know deep down that our parents love us and, like God himself, will keep loving us no matter how awkward or difficult we become And for parents at this stage the call to love as God loves is put to its greatest test. There is no greater evidence of God’s presence among us than a mother or father, but most often a mother, who will love a difficult child almost to the point of crucifixion. The hope is, of course, that, in time, all this will sort itself out. And usually it does. For some of you, however, this will not have happened. There can be wounds that remain open for years, families split and torn apart, another reminder of our human weakness, that we are not Gods, and that only the one who is God can ultimately resolve such things.

And so the ultimate reality for every family is death. Parents die. Husbands and wives die. Sometimes, tragically, children die, and those of you who have experienced this in your own lives know only too well that there is no pain on earth like it. But even the pain of bereavement itself is ultimately an experience of God in that it teaches us, no matter how painfully, that in the end all human love is but a shadow of what awaits us beyond death. And when we see the real thing all the rest will finally make sense to us.

BIDDING PRAYERS

We begin our prayers on this Feast of the Holy Family by praying for married couples everywhere. Called to be signs of God’s presence in the world through life-long, self-giving sexual love, we pray that they will never lose sight of their great vocation by sinking into complacency. We pray that they will keep loving each other for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health until death does them part, and so show the world what God’s love is like……Lord hear us.

In our modern society, many marriages fail, and in doing so cause great pain to those involved. And so we pray for all around us who live with this pain and its long-term consequences for their lives. We pray that their experience will not cause them to give up on the possibility of genuine, lasting love or lose confidence in the idea of marriage itself and that they will go on to find the fulfilment and happiness they long for in other relationships and friendships..........Lord hear us

There are many single parents in our modern society. Sometimes this is by choice, sometimes it is because of bereavement and sometimes it is the result of divorce or marital breakdown. But there are still many cases today of women and girls who are simply abandoned by partners and left to bring up children on their own. And so, whatever, the cause, we hold up before God today single mothers everywhere and ask him to give them the strength and courage they need..........Lord hear us

Human relationships, even within a loving family, can be very difficult. All kinds of tensions can exist and sometimes these result in serious breakdowns in communication. This, in turn, can lead to estrangements which go on sometimes for years and years. And so we pray for families we know where this has happened, perhaps even our own, that, with God’s help, there may be reconciliation and mutual forgiveness in the course of the coming year…........Lord hear us

The first reading today speaks of the need to show respect for elderly parents. ‘Even if his mind should fail’ it said ‘do not despise your father in your health and strength.’ And so we pray for the many families today who are struggling to cope with dementia or altzeimer’s disease. We pray, too, that, even in the midst of a recession, our country will be one which shows more respect for the elderly, not least by its willingness to spend money on the support and care they need…….......Lord hear us

Children are at the heart of every family. They are also at the heart of every parish. One of the reasons a parish exists is to provide the support parents need in the task of bringing up their children as people of faith and we do this by becoming a community in which children, as they grow up, can recognize, whenever they come among us, a faith that is alive, real and active. And so we pray for the grace to be this kind of parish for the sake of the children among us.........Lord hear us

Christmas day

If atheism is the great new religion of the 21st Century, then it is important that we understand it. It is the inevitable consequence of the times in which we live, and only those who are willing to engage with it in an open and honest way will be able to share the Good News of God’s love for the world with the men and women who share this moment in history with us. At Christmas we celebrate the mystery of a God who became part of our history and shared our experience, and only those who can do the same today, feeling what the atheist feels and seeing the world as the atheist sees it will have anything helpful to say to the people of our time. And so I invite you to reflect briefly on some of the roots of modern atheism and see what Christmas has to say about them.

Given the fact that we have recently celebrated the 200th anniversary of his birth, there has been lots of coverage recently of the influence of Charles Darwin on modern atheism. But while this has undoubtedly been very important, there was another even more important influence several hundred years earlier. This was the realisation by Copernicus and then Galileo that instead of the sun revolving around the earth, the earth, in fact, revolved around the sun; and that the sun itself was just one star among millions in the universe. Now that may not seem much to us today, but it was a discovery which shook to the very foundations the way people had thought about themselves up to that point. Based on the bible’s version of creation, our ancestors thought of themselves as the pinnacle of God’s creation and the earth they lived on as its centre. To discover that this was not the case, that they lived on small planet in the middle of nowhere, had a devastating effect on the way they saw God, themselves and the universe. It was a bit like an only child going to school for the first time to discover that the world did not, as he had previously thought, revolve around himself. He was not the centre of things any longer and life could never be the same again. And then, much later, along came Darwin.

Darwin’s influence, of course, is still being felt and is the basis for most of the attacks on the idea of God being launched today by high priests of atheism like Richard Dawkins and others. At the root of this, however, has been a complete failure to understand the nature of the Book of Genesis and its account of creation, as a result of which, when they were first published, Darwin’s theories shocked and horrified many. If the discovery that we are not the centre of the universe was a shock in Galileo’s day then the idea that we are descended from monkeys finally shattered the illusions of those whose faith was rooted on an infantile literal understanding of the Bible. And so the scene was set for atheism as we have come to know it. There is, however, a price for everything in life and that has included atheism. Take God out of society and other things will take his place. And so we have seen in our own day the rise of so many false gods promising happiness if only we believe in them and live by their commandments. And chief among them in the modern world has been the goddess money along with the materialism and consumersim which are her children. But taking God out of life has had other effects too. Much of the art and literature of the 20th century has been marked by a deep-rooted sense of the absurdity and pointlessness of life, hardly surprising if you remove from the equation the one thing which enables it to make sense. Anyone who looks to materialism or consumerism to provide happiness will inevitably be disappointed, and this has contributed in no small part to the sense of despair and confusion which lies behind, for example, a culture of drug-taking among young people today. If life has no meaning, if global warming is going to destroy us, providing swine-flu or some giant meteorite doesn’t do the job first – the background against which many see life at the beginning of a new century – then what’s the point anyway?

And in Christmas we have the answer to all this. Realising that we are not the centre of the universe had to come. Learning the true nature of the Genesis stories and facing up to the discoveries of modern science is all just part of growing up. But like every person who moves through childhood and adolescence into adulthood, the ultimate challenge for the world is to find out who we really are. And that’s what Christmas is about. Our planet may exist in the middle of nowhere. We may have evolved from apes. But in Jesus Christ, God has become one of us. Any doubts we may have about the meaning or otherwise of our own existence are overcome forever by the person who comes to realise that we have a God whose one desire is to draw us to himself so that we can share in his own life. If this is true, then far from being absurd or pointless, human existence is filled with meaning so far-reaching that it is far beyond our power even to imagine it.

But there’s a problem. And it’s this. Just as a failure to understand properly the great stories in the book of Genesis was part of the mixture that led to modern atheism so a very similar misunderstanding of the Christmas story is what prevents the people of our time recognizing the true meaning of today’s feast. As long as we remain stuck at the level of donkeys, shepherds and inn-keepers and tell ourselves that Christmas is ‘for the weans’ the world will never know the depth of what we celebrate today. This is no children’s story. The donkey and the inn-keeper are mere packaging. Behind them lies a truth with the power to transform the world. And that is the challenge currently facing us: to unpack what is a truly wonderful story and open up to the men and women of our time what it all means.

Richard Dawkins has said that he had become an atheist when he was fifteen. And in many ways that is what he and others like him are: adolescent atheists. And so we have nothing to fear from their atheism. It will, like adolescence itself, prove temporary. Beyond it lies adult faith, the kind which, once we have learned to embrace the deeper meaning of the story – something we will explore in the Bidding Prayers - Christmas is really about.

BIDDING PRAYERS

The presence of the angels in the Christmas story symbolizes the coming together in Jesus of heaven and earth. God has become part of our world giving new meaning to human existence in all its rich variety. There is no longer any distinction between the spiritual and the physical. And so we pray for a deep sense of the dignity that goes with being human, especially in a world where many have lost touch with God and see no point in life and are filled with fear and anxiety about the future.........Lord hear us

The shepherds in Jesus day were the outcasts of society and their presence in Luke’s Gospel is a sign of Jesus profound commitment to the poor and marginalized in every age. He began life among the poor and ended it among them, crucified between two thieves. And so we pray that the followers of Jesus throughout the world today will show that same commitment to the poor of our time and that here in this parish will always make them welcome and have a place for them in our lives.........Lord hear us

The Three Wise Men, or Magi, represent people in every age who are searching for the truth. There are many such men and women in the world today, and in a society with so many versions of the truth their search is not an easy one. And so we pray for them, that they will have the courage to follow their star wherever it leads and however long it takes until they come to know the God who created them and longs to share his life with them……Lord hear us

The shadow of the cross hangs over the Christmas story in the murder of the Innocents, the flight into Egypt and Simeon’s prophecy that a sword of sorrow would pierce Mary’s heart. And so we pray for suffering humanity, that, in moments of grief and despair and in the midst of warfare, violence and hunger, people throughout the world will know the presence of God and find hope in the mystery of his coming among us............Lord hear us

We are living through an age of widespread atheism the likes of which has never before been seen. And so we pray for the wisdom and insight we need to understand this phenomenon. We pray, too, for the courage to recognize the part the Churches have played in creating this atheism by offering people a version of the great truths of faith, like Christmas, which are infantile and so are rejected today by many intelligent people as little more than fairy stories on a par with sleeping beauty or the three bears ..........Lord hear us

And we pray, finally, for the grace to enjoy to the full these days of Christmas celebrations. We pray for the insight we need to see God in our families, to taste him in the food we eat, to savour him in the drinks we drink and to recognize in the gifts we give and receive, a sign of his immense generosity which has caused him to pour so much goodness into our world.........Lord hear us

4th Sunday of Advent C

One of the problems about Year C of the liturgical cycle, I often think, is that, when it comes to this time of the year, we tend to get the readings that are left over, the ones, if you like, which A and B didn’t want. On this last Sunday of Advent, for example, A has the story of Joseph and his struggle with Mary’s pregnancy. B has the story of the Annunciation. And poor old C, always at the tail end, is left with the story of the Visitation, not exactly the first scene that comes mind when they think of Christmas. So what are we to make of this story today and what does it have to say to us, especially in relation to our Advent theme of integrity? Well, the key, I think, lies in the answer to a very simple question, which is why Mary went to see Elizabeth in the first place.

As a child I was told that she went because Elizabeth was old and needed help. But I’m afraid I don’t buy that explanation. The much more likely answer, I suggest, lies in the Annunciation story itself and, in particular, in Mary’s question to the angel when he tells her why he has come. ‘But how can this be,’ she says, ‘since I am a virgin.’ Mary does not understand and isn’t afraid to say so. She has a question and is not afraid to ask it. And so the angel gives her a sign. Elizabeth, her elderly cousin, after years of longing for a child, is expecting. And so Mary, willing to do what God asks – yes, but sensible enough to know that not everyone who claims to be an angel comes from god, heads for the hill country of Judah to check things out. And how clever it was of God to send her to Elizabeth, a woman of complete integrity who, as Luke tells us earlier in his Gospel, was worthy in the sight of God and scrupulously observed all the commandments and observances of the Lord. Elizabeth, the older woman, was the ideal mentor for Mary, the perfect person to accompany her through this moment in her life, not least because, having been childless for so many years herself, something which was a terrible disgrace in the culture of those days, she knew from personal experience the kind of criticism and gossip Mary could expect in a small village like Nazareth. And so they spent six months together, a vitally important time of prayer and reflection for each of them, and a time which would never have happened had Mary not been willing to ask that crucial question: But how can this be? What is going on here? I need to understand this better; questions which, I would suggest, we all need to be asking about the things of God at this moment in history. So what do I mean by this?

Well, two weeks ago, on the second Sunday of Advent, I put it to you that, if we are to be people of integrity, we must be constantly learning and increasing our knowledge. We live in an age of questions. As we enter a new millennium, the men and women of our time are uncertain about almost everything. Our world is a veritable market-place of truth where each individual is free to peddle his or her own particular version of it. There has never been such uncertainty around questions of what is right and wrong. Millions have lost faith in God. Atheism has become the new religion of the 21st century and even among those who believe in God there is an enormous amount of disillusionment with Churches, organized religion and all that goes with them. Old, traditional ways of thinking no longer make sense to people and as a result the world is desperately searching for new answers to new questions. And what I invite you to see today again is the tremendous potential for good in all this. To ask questions is what leads to knowledge and the really big questions people are asking today about the purpose and meaning of life in our modern world are what will lead them to God. Where there are no questions there can be no growth in knowledge. Questions are what open us up to the truth, except that if the questions the men and women of our time are asking about God are going to lead them to God, then, like Mary in the story of the Visitation, they will need their own Elizabeths to help them. And we are called to be those Elizabeths. So how can this be?

Well, the answer lies in the Eucharistic Prayer we use each week where we ask God to keep us alert in faith to the signs of the times and eager to accept the challenge of the Gospel. We pray for the grace to share the experience of the people of our time – as Elizabeth shared Mary’s experience – so that we can advance together with them on the way to salvation. And the word ‘together’ is of crucial importance here. We can only do for the men and women of our time what Elizabeth did for Mary if we are prepared to enter deeply into their experience. We have to ask the questions they are asking about religion and Churches. We have to be able to feel their disillusionment, their disgust, their complete alienation from all that traditional religion stands for, something which, if we are really honest with ourselves, many of us do feel but are sometimes afraid to express. We have to confront our own deep questions about all these things. We have to get in touch with the little atheist inside each one of us. Because it’s only if we are willing to do this and feel what they feel that we will be able to offer something meaningful when the Marys of today come to us wanting to know ‘how this can be.’

But, of course, we need our own Elizabeths too. And what I invite you to see is that one important form she takes in our lives is our parish. For men and women committed to living lives of faith in the midst of today’s world, the parish community should be that village in the hill country of Judah where, without fear, we can explore together the great questions about God, spirituality, churches and religion, discover together what it means to be men and women of faith today and so prepare ourselves to be Elizabeths to others. It means doing what Mary did and setting out on a journey. It means being pregnant and carrying Jesus for others. But, although I have been here for just a short time, I really believe we can do it.


BIDDING PRAYERS


We begin today by praying for the world of our time. We ask God for the insight we need to recognize how, in the midst of all the doubt and uncertainty which characterizes the age in which we live, God is drawing humanity slowly but surely to himself. We pray especially that the rampant atheism of our age, along with the disillusionment many feel about Churches and religion, will, in time, lead the world to deeper and more authentic ways of thinking about God........Lord hear us

If we are to do for the people of our time what Elizabeth did for Mary in the story of the Visitation, then we must be willing to enter into their experience. We must be willing to confront the questions about God, Churches, religion, morality and so on which surface from deep within us too. Rather than be afraid of them, we must welcome them and see them as stepping stones to deeper truth, and we pray for the grace to do this in our own lives.........Lord hear us

If the atheist in us does not rear his head from time to time, then the God we say we believe in is not the real God, but an idol whom we have created in our own image and likeness. The real God is always far greater than we can understand. Nothing we could ever say about him is adequate. In the end he can only be known by those who go beyond the limits of reason and make a leap of faith. And so we pray for the grace to make this leap and move beyond the limits of human thinking..............Lord hear us

But it is not just as individuals that we are called to confront questions of truth and untruth. And so we pray that, as a parish community gathered around the Word and the Eucharist, we will learn to explore the great questions of our time together and so grow together into deeper and deeper faith. We ask God to give us the courage and generosity we need to do this, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of others, especially the absent children and young people of our parish.......Lord hear us

In the story of the Visitation, Elizabeth pinpoints the source of Mary’s greatness. She believed that the promises made her by the Lord would be fulfilled. But we, too, have received promises. Jesus has promised to be with us until the end of time. He has promised us the Spirit, who, he says, will lead us into the complete truth. And so, at a time when many in the Church are afraid and losing heart, we pray for the grace to believe that these promise, too, will be fulfilled............ Lord hear us

Christmas is very near. At its heart lies the most amazing truth. The God who created everything that exists and who holds it in being has become part of our world and part of our history. He is ‘Emmanuel’ ‘God with us,’ and he has given us everything we have. And so we pray for the grace to recognize him in the coming days in the sudden desire we all have at Christmas to give to others, especially those in need, in a way we simply do not do at other times of the year........Lord hear us