GenieIn a brisk piece, Nicola Shulman reflects on ‘the overcompensating sense of self-importance that flourishes in the dark of self-doubt’, a sense likely to erupt ‘with all the towering egotism and sweet relief that a genie might feel after a Read More
St TeresaTeresa is a witness to the beautiful dimension of faith. When she speaks of it, she is categorical: ‘The fact of seeing Christ left an impression of his exceeding beauty etched on my soul to this day: once was enough’. Read More
Light-Filled LampA wonderful text from St Columbanus’s Instructions in today’s vigils: ‘I am a lowly creature but I am still his servant, and I hope that he will choose to wake me from slumber. I hope that he will set me Read More
Desert Fathers 43You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here. A priest made his way to a certain hermit in order to offer for him the sacred mysteries. But someone went to the hermit and talked the priest down, saying he was a sinner. When [the priest] arrived as was his custom, the hermit, who was scandalised, did not open the door to him. So the priest went away. Meanwhile a voice came from God to the hermit. It said: ‘Men have usurped my judgement.’ Finding himself as in ecstasy, [the hermit] saw a golden well, a bucket of gold, a gold cord and an abundance of pure water. He also saw the man who was drawing and distributing the water. He was a leper. And even though [the hermit] wished to drink, he did not do so because the one who drew the water was leprous. Again the voice came to him: ‘Why are you not drinking the water? What does it matter who draws it? This man is merely drawing and distributing.’ The hermit came to himself. Seeing the sense of the vision, he called the priest and invited him, as he had previously done, to offer the sacred mysteries for him. We may have wondered how solitaries partook of the Church’s sacraments. This saying gives us a clue. It presents us with the office of itinerant chaplains making the rounds of hermitages to celebrate the Eucharist for non-ordained hermits. A bond formed in this way between anchorites and settled communities, a bond intended to be of charity. The spirit of detraction, however, could cause such bonds to snap. We are presented with a scene of village gossip. It is a tragic, for it involves men vowed to an angelic life, that is, a life supposed to be of pure intention. One hermit goes to visit another to share some titbit of a rumour picked up in the market about one of the chaplains. The other man, whose mind should have been on higher things, exclaims, ‘Well, I never!’, delighting in being righteously shocked, pleased to manifest to all the world that he, an anchorite of devout renown, would have no dealings with a public sinner. Drawing a chest in front of his door, he refuses to grant the priest access. He would rather fast from communion in the Lord’s Body and Blood than allow his reputation to be tainted in the eyes of desert busybodies. Can such situations really arise among consecrated persons? Yes, alas. They originate in that obscuring of vision which comes about as a result of sin, keeping us from seeing things and people as they are, projecting upon them instead our own perceptions, of course to our own advantage. Not for nothing did St Bruno, whose Charterhouse is the Western Church’s closest equivalent to the desert’s mode of life, speak of monastic life as a process by which ‘an eye is acquired’. The process of conversion is tantamount to the gradual removal of cataracts that keep us from seeing clearly, causing us instead to fumble in a universe made up of moving shades. The monk in this story, ungracious and unmerciful, does not take the trouble to confront the priest with accusations made against him; he entrusts himself to his blindness. How marvellous that God responds by letting him entertain a vision full of light, made up of gleaming objects and the joyful sound of water poured. There are multiple lessons in this illumination. The first is explicit and Biblical. St Paul put it firmly in his letter to the Romans: ‘Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God’. We are free, of course, to evaluate human behaviour and to position ourselves before it; but to condemn another is to usurp a divine prerogative. The vision does not say whether the priest was guilty of a misdemeanour or not. It asks us to view the matter theologically. Faced with the infinite purity of God, and of his gifts, any human being is unclean. Think of Isaiah in the temple. Think of Peter when, in a flash, he saw Jesus for who he is and exclaimed: ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.’ Disproportion must be taken for granted. Even when the dispenser of grace is objectively compromised, human filth just does not have the power to contaminate God-given grace. In Latin theology this line of thought is summed up in the principle, ex opere operato. It is hard to render literally. An adequate paraphrase might be: ‘the work itself is efficacious’. The Church teaches that a sacrament’s beneficial impact, when celebrated validly, does not depend on the celebrant’s or the recipient’s worthiness: it is, for being humanly mediated, an act of God. As such it is imbued with intrinsic potency. That is why God in the vision asks the hermit: ‘What is the intermediary to you? Do you really think a sullied human instrument can obstruct my divine, salvific design?’ The story ends edifyingly. The hermit opens his door and asks the priest in. We are prompted to confront our censoriousness. We are also given hope in the face of disappointment. There has, alas, been no shortage within living memory of bishops and priests bringing shame on the ordained ministry. Their legacy calls for justice, conversion, and tears. Let us not for a moment, though, think, that an unworthy steward can sabotage God’s design. Oh, no. Providence is infallible. God, who can make something out of nothing, can bring good out of evil. Further, he can make the leprous clean. Christus Pantrocrator from Subiaco. Christ is the Judge of All, and the only judge who knows the full truth of anything, or anyone.
GenieIn a brisk piece, Nicola Shulman reflects on ‘the overcompensating sense of self-importance that flourishes in the dark of self-doubt’, a sense likely to erupt ‘with all the towering egotism and sweet relief that a genie might feel after a thousand years in a small brass receptacle’ when some perceived slight rubs the lamp. It is useful, then, to pay due attention to the surging of pride within us. It may potentially point the way towards a wound that needs anointing and could be healed, if we’d let it be. By intercepting the genie we might also, quite simply, prevent ourselves from being silly.
29 Sunday CExodus 17.8-13: But Moses’s arms grew heavy. 2 Timothy 3.14-4.2: Be urgent in season and out of season. Luke 18.1-8: The need to pray continually and never lose heart. In our second reading Paul exhorts Timothy to ‘be urgent in season and out of season’. Timothy, who was bishop of Ephesus, was to ‘convince, rebuke, and exhort, unfailing in patience and in teaching’, ever ready, ever armed, like a soldier for battle, to fight for the good. In the Gospel Jesus tells the story of the persistent, bothersome widow who nags day and night so that a cynical bureaucrat lets her have her will for his own convenience’s sake. The point of the parable is to show that we must ceaselessly pray. Never must we grow tired. ‘My Father is still at work’, says Jesus after healing the man who for 38 years had been lying by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem: ‘My Father is still at work. I, too, work’ (John 5.17). When our God, the King of the Universe, is ceaselessly working, then we, too, his creatures and servants, must surely do likewise? Well, that’s a thought. But how tired we often are, how worn out! We live in an exhausting time. A record number of people hit the wall, burn out. We often hear ourselves and others say, ‘I’m so exhausted’. So ingrained is the habit that if someone doesn’t profess, within a few minutes of a conversation starting, to exhaustion, people are likely to think, ‘He must be a right layabout!’ What tires us so? Society moves at a terrific speed. The gadgets we carry beep, chirp, and vibrate day and night: there’s constantly something going on! We do not want to miss out. We wish to show ourselves engaged, hard-working. But do we have to live like this? Not necessarily. A few years ago a friend of mine started a career in finance in London. In the office people were working 12, 13, 14-hour days. He did as much for a while, then asked himself: ‘What for?’ There must be more to life. He made a decision. Short of a crisis, he started leaving work at 6. He went to dance lessons. Ballroom dancing! That’s what he wanted. There were a few raised eyebrows in the office, but not only did he not lose his job: he became more productive. Perseverance presupposes balance. Work presupposes rest. Our God, ‘still at work’, rested on the seventh day and bade us, bids us, keep the Sabbath holy (Exodus 20.8). O blessed commandment! It lets us catch our breath. More essentially, it relativises the importance of productivity. Too easily we make of the work of our hands, or of work itself, an idol. Rest frees us from this trap. It permits us to drop our shoulders and to look up. Somehow our work must be imbued with rest. It takes a while to learn this, but it can be done. It is the way to stop being a faceless cog in a machinery and to become instead a conscious, free agent. The widow in the Gospel is a worker. Her campaign is also an example of prayer. Prayer, too, is a mixture of effort and rest. The Lord shows us both. In the wilderness, tempted by Satan, he led a fierce battle. When his disciples found him in prayer at daybreak, he was in peaceful communion with his Heavenly Father. Prayer in the life of a Christian must become like respiration. It is obvious that we cannot always hyperventilate. So by all means, pray always. But remain at rest, grounded in God’s peace, which the world cannot give. Our first reading speaks of Israel’s battle against Amalek. The Amalekites were descendants of Esau, a people that did not wish to let Jacob’s sons complete their journey, which God had ordained, from Egypt to Canaan. The historical conflict was real. Further, the Amalekites acquired symbolic significance. ‘To fight the Amalekites’ means to fight all that in us and about us that hinders our essential progress, keeping us from reaching the goal to which God calls us. Moses, the people’s teacher and interpreter before God, watches over the battle his hands raised in blessing. He must ‘be urgent in season and out of season’, an image of devout attention. However, no one can stay standing like that, with hands up in the air, indefinitely. Remember: Moses was already an old man. The image Scripture then puts before us is wonderful: they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat upon it, and Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; so his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. In just this way we are called to support each other. A believer is not abandoned to his or her own limited resources. A believer is borne by God’s ‘everlasting arms’, of course; but also by the people of God, which for us Christians is to say, by the Church. Thank God we are not all fragile at once. We can be a staff to one another. When I stumble, I hope you will give me a hand. Should you stumble, I’ll step in. We must look out for one another with alertness and care. It is comforting to live like this. It can also be demanding. It requires us to let go of a sense of self-sufficiency, an illusion to which we cling absurdly. From the beginning, God has been pleased to realise his purpose in this world not through individual contracts, but by making a covenant with a people. The people is called to move as one, as a body. Being members of that body (1 Corinthians 12.12-27), we are caught up in a rhythm in which continuous movement is allied to unshakeable peace. This is the mystery of the Church, put before us in the image of Moses flanked by Aaron and Hur, one on his left side, the other on his right. Let’s strive to live up to that image in our community here. If we do, the Lord will find faith on earth when he comes. And fidelity. In the name of Christ! Amen.
St TeresaTeresa is a witness to the beautiful dimension of faith. When she speaks of it, she is categorical: ‘The fact of seeing Christ left an impression of his exceeding beauty etched on my soul to this day: once was enough’. This beauty is disturbing, even dangerous. To behold it is to be struck down. It is to walk thenceforth, like Jacob out of Jabbok, with a limp. Teresa illustrates what this means when she speaks of her transverberation, when her heart was pierced by an angel with a fiery lance. The moment has acquired emblematic force in the mystical and aesthetic canons of the West. Bernini’s marble account of it still both enchants and shocks, yet is, for all its formal perfection, but an outsider’s limited view. Teresa stresses the exquisite beauty of the angel, an emissary sent from before the burning holiness of God. The impact on her of this beautiful encounter is complex. So physical was the transfixing that her innards seemed to be drawn out when the lance retreated. So spiritual was it that it left her ‘completely afire with a great love of God’. She makes no apology for not defining the ratio of embodied and transcendent experience. Paradox alone can convey what she went through, as she sums up: ‘It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it – indeed, a great share.’ Small wonder that for days she was left as in a stupor. From a talk given ten years ago at the Brompton Oratory.
Light-Filled LampA wonderful text from St Columbanus’s Instructions in today’s vigils: ‘I am a lowly creature but I am still his servant, and I hope that he will choose to wake me from slumber. I hope that he will set me on fire with the flame of his divine love, the flame that burns above the stars, so that I am filled with desire for his love and his fire burns always within me! I hope that I may deserve this, that my little lamp should burn all night in the temple of the Lord and shine on all who enter the house of God! Lord, I beg you in the name of Jesus Christ, your Son and my God, give me a love that cannot stumble so that my lamp can be lit but can never go out: let it burn in me and give light to others.’ https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Columbanus.m4a
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Today is the feast day of Saint Anthony Mary Claret, the 'spiritual father of Cuba' Anthony was ordained at 28 but was unable to carry out the duties of a priest due to ill health. He went on however to become one Read More 4 Likes
Today is the feast day of Saint John of Capistrano, the preacher John went to prison at 26 following a war with the Malatestas Italian family. While there, St Francis appeared to him in a dream and told him to Read More 6 Likes
Photos from Cloyne Diocese's postToday we celebrate the Feast of St John Paul II. St John Paul II is most remembered for his charismatic nature, his love of youth and his world travels, along with his role in the fall of communism in Europe Read More 10 Likes
