Weekly messages

Advent waiting is a purposeful activity combined with real dialogue

Posted on November 27th 2011 in Weekly messages

Last week a head teacher was pleased to explain that the school’s unannounced Ofsted inspection went well, and that the inspectors had found a happy but purposeful school been run diligently by the staff. The head teacher explained, to my surprise, that it was much better to have instant inspection than being given many months notice, since the intervening period just fostered an increasingly fevered environment where the teaching of children came a distant second to making sure the school was ready to be inspected. Advent is the season of waiting for the coming, not of some terrestrial inspector, but of the infant king, the Word made flesh. But what sort of waiting is being asked of us in the season of Advent? The answer is certainly more of the first sort identified above, but not without the second, since there is always need for spiritual and charitable ‘improvement’.

This Sunday’s Gospel describes the Christian life in terms of ‘waiting’, not in the sense of doing nothing but of being engaged in purposeful activity, of being attentive to one’s vocation as a follower of Christ, wherever this may be, at home, at work, in the community, or the country at large. Christian life is therefore never to be identified with frenetic activity. It is never to allow oneself to become submerged by the maelstrom of human business. Such a path quickly comes to an impasse when confronted with failure, frustration and confusion. The command to ‘stay awake’ implies that much of life can be described as the ‘dream world of sleep’ – a vivid, pleasant, well-padded, and active dream world certainly but still a dream world. The believer has answered the call from Jesus Christ and made the conscious step from sleep to wakefulness, from dream to reality, without in any way passing judgement on those who have not yet done so. The life of ‘wakefulness’ may be described as the life of the Holy Spirit, the spark of divine fire within, given to us out of love, a completely un-coerced gift from God.

The gift of the Holy Spirit brings to a provisional conclusion 1,500 years of religious history, the promises made to Abraham, to Moses, and through the prophets. The objects of the Old Testament promises of people and land have become real in the Kingdom of God, of which the Church is a visible anticipation and embodiment. Until the birth of Jesus Christ the hopes of the Israelites were disappointed, but are now being answered in a way only achievable by God. The prophet Isaiah gives a beautiful description: ‘we are the clay, you are the potter.’ God through Christ has come to remould us in His own image.

The question is how to accept this into our hearts. What form should the second type of waiting take? It is more a spiritual journey. It requires an intense dialogue with God. To say that faith is simply to say OK is not sufficient as such a response fails to develop any self knowledge. Last Sunday’s prophecy from Isaiah shows subtle psychological insight. The prophet knows that without God he and others have become withered leaves. He knows that God must be rightly angry. Yet his first response is to blame God, ‘You hid your face and gave us up’ (Isaiah 64:7). He is angry with God, a perfectly acceptable sentiment as part of a wider dialogue but not as the final conclusion of a relationship with God. The prophet passes through this anger to admit that God is Father, someone beyond humanly perceived right and wrong. An analogy may be seen in relation to one’s own parents. Any argument starts on the back foot, whatever the merits, since parents gave life to children, something that precedes the rights and wrongs of a particular case.

This is the utter mystery of God, but from this God has entered human life. The Word was made flesh, the mystery of God has taken human form, and embraced us through the gift of Himself in the Holy Spirit. The season of Advent then is a restoration of the quiet purposeful activity of life through a renewed and real dialogue with God that does not fail to embrace all our disappointed hopes and failures.

Praying for the dead has been the immemorial tradition of the Church

Posted on November 6th 2011 in Weekly messages

Solidarity and its polish original, Solidarność, become a byword for a coherent response to the violence and degradations of communism. The word finds a weak translation in the ‘Big Society’, but the original concept looked to a key Catholic idea about the nature of human society, that of the ‘common good’. There is something more to society than simply an amalgam of individual rights, concerns and duties. This natural order of solidarity finds its supernatural equivalent in the Church’s teaching on ‘the communion of saints’. In the years immediately after Pentecost, the Church was described in the New Testament as the ‘communion of saints’. The ever present threat of martyrdom made membership of the Church a real matter of life or death. Later, the term ‘communion of saints’ was restricted to those gathered round the risen Jesus and His Blessed Mother in the Kingdom of God. The saints are not gathered as a group of solitary Christians but are united in a living unity through the grace of the Holy Spirit. This spiritual vitality animates the whole Church, and connects the communion of saints with the Church on earth and the Church in purgatory.

The Catholic doctrine about death teaches that the soul is bound either to heaven or to hell at the point of death. If heavenward then that soul either ‘goes’ to heaven immediately to be united with his or her resurrected body at the end of time, or ‘goes’ to purgatory where it is prepared to see God face to face. Purgatory reveals one of the great paradoxes about death. While on earth most people would rightly shy away from saying they are ready to God face to face but, after death, their relatives show no such reserve. It therefore has become more difficult to speak about praying for the recently deceased. The contemporary desire to arrange eulogies after the final prayer, and the demands for secular music at cremations, often make the traditional understanding of praying for the dead even more difficult to explain.

The Church does reassure us that the souls in purgatory do benefit from the spiritual solidarity expressed both by the communion of saints, who intercede to God for the deceased, and the prayers of those who mourn and mark their passing. The solidarity expressed by those on earth may take a number of forms, of fasting, of charitable works, and, most importantly, the offering of Mass. The Eucharistic prayer includes a passage for all the faithful who have died, but the priest may also seek to ‘apply’ the infinite fruits of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross to a particular person, a group of people, or the Parish, normally on a Sunday. This may take place throughout the year, but the Church becomes particularly sensitive to this during the month of November. The teaching on purgatory finds its Scriptural origin in the Second Book of Macabees (12:40-46). Judas Macabeus sends a donation to the Temple for the priests to offer sacrifice for those who had fallen in godliness in the battles against Gorgias, the pagan overlord of Israel.  Their prayers were that these fallen heroes would not have their sins of idolatry held against them. The desire to offer sacrifice for fallen war heroes points towards this country’s Remembrance Sunday, one of the rare moments which brings together the natural order, the continuing well-being and safety of the nation, and the supernatural order, thoughts and prayers directed to those who died defending the country. For many who will participate in next Sunday’s Remembrance Services, the supernatural order may remain hazy, but the act of collective remembrance does not make much sense without some intimations of the immortality of the soul. The Catholic Church gives flesh to such thoughts and gives firm purpose in praying for those who have died, and whose souls are in purgatory. 

The unity of the love of God and of humanity is the way to understand the world

Posted on October 23rd 2011 in Weekly messages

The occupation of the forecourts of St Paul’s by the anti-capitalist demonstrators is more by good luck than by design. The London Stock Exchange moved to Paternoster Square only recently having been located near to the Bank of England for many years previously, and this is one of the largest open spaces in the vicinity. Their encampment in front of the national symbol of Anglicanism alludes, unbeknown to them, of the demise of religion in public life and its unravelling in the fabric of society. The causes of the demonstrators might be the common currency of the moment, greedy bankers, public sector cuts, etc., but the solutions suggested lack coherence. One of the identifiable causes is the collective amnesia of the last twenty years as to the dangers of excessive credit, so both the country as a whole and much of the population has been living beyond its means. This leaves both country and individual at the mercy of fluctuating levels of confidence and little hope in the face of this current financial climate. Obviously not everyone in debt is there because of the consequences of their lavish lifestyle but many, who should have known better, have enjoyed an unsustainable standard of living that would have been completely unknown to their grandparents. During the 1980s it was common to hear of young men and women who had earned more in their 20s than their parents had throughout their working life. 

The role of money has changed fundamentally in the last thirty years. It seems everyone has become an expert on financial matters, investments, property, etc., and the list goes on. What has been lost though is the recognition that money is a necessary tool for life not an end in itself. Money allows for the exchange of goods and services that in themselves permit human life to flourish. It seems as if now money buys a lifestyle, rather than merely providing the wherewithal to sustain life. The tasteless luxury of so many strong men’s palaces, here and abroad, only goes to show how money detached from life becomes like a dead weight. The financial world has taken the place once occupied by God and religion, natural and revealed. The Christian recognises that the world of finance presents a challenge, and one that cannot simply be rejected outright, otherwise human life in any organised form would quickly disappear. This world, like the world of science, education and culture, has to be firmly placed in the larger context, that of God’s world. The world of God is created, its inhabitants having a determinate nature with an inbuilt spiritual DNA on which all just human society should be so organised. The acceptance of myself as created brings with it a sense of responsibility towards other creatures, humanity in particular, and indeed to the whole of creation. The sense of responsibility is found in the exercise of individual conscience that recognises that everything ultimately comes from God, and so has a proper order and way of working.

This Sunday’s Gospel, the request by the Pharisees to identify the greatest commandment, would not make sense unless the world was accepted as He created it. Here the complete dedication towards God, ‘to love Him with all your heart, soul and mind’, brings with it a responsibility for His creation. And humanity, which stands at the pinnacle of creation, shares with God the power of reason, willing and loving. The two commandments, the second being ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself’, are intimately connected. By placing  their tents outside St Paul’s, the demonstrators are alluding, unconsciously, to this vital connection, which need to be restated time and time again, as human arrogance can easily make light of the connection in the pursuit of absolutes whether money, property or the communitarian thinking of many of the demonstrators.