LeavetakingThroughout the year, the acclamation ‘Alleluia’ structures our worship. Not only do we sing it each day at Mass before the reading of the Gospel; it resounds at the end of the introduction to all the day hours in the Read More
A Good TeacherNo one forgets a good teacher. I have been fortunate to have many. None, perhaps, has marked me more than John Sweet. John taught me exegesis throughout my undergraduate years. He opened up to me the Biblical text in all Read More
Near MusicThe Norwegian painter Pola Gauguin, son of Paul, wrote a review of the art of Ludvig Karsten in 1915. He remarked: ‘Rarely has painting come nearer to music than in the art of Karsten.’ I found the quotation in last Read More
Ash WednesdayJoel 2.12-18: Between vestibule and altar, let the priests weep. Matthew 6.1-18: Do not do what hypocrites do. We associate Lent with self-denial. The association is correct. Self-denial is important. We must remember, though, that it is a means to an end. We are expert at making means into ends, and at redirecting them to other purposes. Self-denial can easily become self-serving, even as it is piously dressed up. Perhaps we’ve turned a little pudgy over Christmas, so think: Aha! During Lent I’ll make sure I lose some weight. There’s nothing wrong about that. The Church gives us Lent so that we can form our formlessness, but let’s be honest: we don’t really fast for the love of God if we primarily have in mind how we’ll look in a bathing-suit this summer. God calls us to the cleansing and renewal or our heart. That is the end our bodily ascesis should serve. The Gospel warns us against hypocrisy. It’s not about appearing devout or strict or serious. On the contrary, Christ stresses that our observance should be invisible. Our attention is to be directed towards our Father in heaven. He is in secret and sees in secret. He sees through our costumes and masks, straight into the core of our being. More than at any other time we need to be reminded of this, we who live in the world where so much is make-believe and where, again and again, what is essential is cast aside, or forgotten, in favour of virtuality, projection, or mere frippery. ‘Let your hearts be broken’, says the Prophet Joel, inviting us to repentance. The notion of ‘repentance’ can, in my experience, be a challenge to people. Perhaps you think, ‘OK, I know I did or said this thing or that, which I shouldn’t have done or said, but I don’t feel repentant.’ Perhaps you hesitate about going to confession, thinking that the feeling must come first? I’d say: what you feel or don’t feel has no importance at all. Repentance is primarily rational. Repentance is about recognising that I have been deceitful, not lived up to an obligation, not given credible Christian witness. Confession provides, first and foremost, an occasion to be absolutely honest before God and with regard to myself. We might say that confession is a school in honest truthfulness. If we are honest, we know we shall be met with forgiving, transforming mercy. It is wonderful! Don’t miss the opportunity. If it’s been a while since you went to confession last, use this Lent to pick up the thread. Joel speaks, too, about the priests who, between the vestibule and the altar, in the field of tension between the world and God’s presence, weep as they say: ‘Spare your people, Lord!’ To be a priest is to open one’s heart to that which pains others in order to bear this up towards the heart of God. It is to live in a state of resolute vulnerability. An ordained priest lives this mystery with especial intensity, strengthened by the grace of ordination, which he must allow to recharge him constantly, like a divine generator. Remember, though, that by baptism we have all been incorporated into a priestly people. Every Christian existence ought to be defined by growing compassion. Today, on Ash Wednesday, we may ask: Do I deeply long for all God’s people to be spared? Am I distressed at the thought of others’ loss? Do I pray for others? Do I help and comfort them as best I can? Or is my religion really a private business, an enterprise of self-improvement, like dieting? In 1927, as part of a process of conversion, T.S. Eliot wrote a poem to which he gave the title Ash Wednesday. I first read it as a teenager. Some verses from it haunt me at the beginning of each Lent. Eliot summons up a gracious veiled nun. She walks, robed in white and blue, the colour of Mary, in a garden. She symbolises the faithful soul and the Church as such. She is beautiful, dignified, sublime. Then, weighty questions are put to her: Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee? Will the veiled sister between the slender Yew trees pray for those who offend her And are terrified and cannot surrender And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks In the last desert before the last blue rocks The desert in the garden the garden in the desert Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed. To follow Jesus into the wilderness in order to watch and pray for forty days; to be signed with ashes in recognition that we are dust, but dust into which God has breathed a living soul: this is to enter into God’s work of redemption. It is to own that each human being’s salvation concerns me personally. Let us pray that we, this Lent, may be formed in profound compassion for man, man who, right now, is ever more conscious that the world’s garden has become a desert of drouth, and that the withered apple-seed of sin is really, over time, too meagre fare. God is working the world’s redemption. He bids us work with him, in his name. May we be present and alert when he has need of us. May we embrace with our prayer those for whom he gave his life in love, who are so easily forgotten, who so easily forget. On their behalf we shall live and labour and love. In the name of Christ! Amen.
LeavetakingThroughout the year, the acclamation ‘Alleluia’ structures our worship. Not only do we sing it each day at Mass before the reading of the Gospel; it resounds at the end of the introduction to all the day hours in the Divine Office. Then, on Ash Wednesday, it falls silent, remaining unuttered until the deacon solemnly announces its return at the Easter Vigil. It is an ancient, beautiful custom to take leave of the Alleluia on the threshold of Lent. The eleventh-century hymn Dulce Carmen, resoundingly Englished by John Mason Neale, was composed to accompany the ritual. I have just discovered this even earlier text from the Mozarabic rite that sings of mournful-hopeful leavetaking, summoning up the spirit of Shrove Tuesday: ‘Stay with us today, Alleluia, and tomorrow thou shalt part. When the morning rises, thou shalt go thy way. Alleluia, Alleluia. The mountains and hills shall rejoice, Alleluia, while they await thy glory. Thou goest, Alleluia; may thy way be blessed, until thou shalt return with joy. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia’.
A Good TeacherNo one forgets a good teacher. I have been fortunate to have many. None, perhaps, has marked me more than John Sweet. John taught me exegesis throughout my undergraduate years. He opened up to me the Biblical text in all its complexity and beauty. Like John Sentamu, I fondly remember his cold room and warm kettle, his fingerless gloves, his supply of ginger biscuits. But these things just evoke the setting. Sentamu writes: ‘Many of us were taught not only Greek and the New Testament, but also a way of being in the world marked by graciousness, kindness, generosity, courtesy – old-fashioned values all too rare these days.’ John was the epitome of the scholar-priest, stern with regard to truth’s requirements yet concerned to communicate them kindly. Asked how one might best evangelise, he would say: ‘Attend to people.’ He taught and ministered, notes the obituary in The Times, ‘with a spirit of total, selfless dedication’. That is a noble epitaph.
6 Sunday ASirach 15.15-20: If you wish, you can keep the commandments. 1 Corinthians 2.6-10: We teach the wisdom of God. Matthew 5.17-37: Say ‘Yes’ if you mean ‘Yes’. The Gospel we have heard is rich. It is about relationships, reconciliation, liturgy, marriage, desire, and pledges. We may feel a bit out of sorts after hearing it. We think of faith as a source of comfort and peace. Presented to us here is a list of obligations. They’re pretty stern. We’re reminded that words and actions have consequences. There are things we might say and do for which we’d have to answer ‘in hell fire’. The gentle Christ isn’t always gentle. We see how some who heard him in person could say: ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ We see how some who sought to be confirmed in their own options ‘drew back and no longer went about with him’ when they awoke to what it really means to be a disciple of Jesus (cf. John 6.60-66). We must ask, then: What about me? Will I be a Christian on the Gospel’s terms, or have I fixed my own, getting upset when these are challenged and I am summoned to answer to a higher standard? Consider what Our Lord says about offerings made at the altar. It is a remark about liturgical practice, something many are interested in. It is important to celebrate the liturgy worthily and well. If we believe that God is God, we must worship him with intelligence and beauty, focused on essentials. We can’t fidget about and improvise. At the same time, if we believe that God is God, we can’t pretend he’ll be impressed by spotless choreography if the heart’s intentions are dark. He is, we read in Sirach, ‘all-seeing’. Therefore: if, before the altar, on my way to seek reconciliation with God, I perceive that I am unreconciled to another human being, I can’t abstract one relation from the other. How can I pray, ‘Lord, forgive me!’ if, in my heart, I think with regard to others, ‘To hell with them!’? Our Lord knows how hard it can be to forgive. He knows that it hurts, sometimes, to be human being. We are able to hurt one another terribly. A wound can run deep; it can paralyse us; it can make us feel dead. But the Gospel proclaims, precisely, the possibility that the dead may rise, the lame have movement restored to them, wounds be healed. God can renew our lives. He can recreate our reality. He can bring light into darkness. For that to happen, we must let him act freely. Our ‘Amen’ to God’s work of atonement, communicated to us in the Body and Blood of Christ, must be an ‘Amen’ without deceit, a ‘Yes’ that is whole-hearted. This brings us to the crux of today’s Gospel, which sums up all the specific elements: ‘Say “Yes” if you mean “Yes”, “No” if you mean “No”. Anything more than this’, remember, it is the Lord who speaks, ‘comes from the evil one.’ In the Our Father we pray: ‘Deliver us from evil’. The prayer refers to metaphysical and, for that matter, personal Evil. It refers, too, to the evil hidden in my heart. On the basis of what we’re taught today, one dimension of the prayer is: ‘Free us from ambiguity.’ This interpretation chimes in with what the priest prays after the Our Father at Mass, when he beseeches God to free us from sin and all confusion, a peccato et ab omni perturbatione. Christian conversion is movement from disarray to clarity, from illusion to truth, from an immersion in fog to a bright existence under a blue sky made resplendent by the Sun of Righteousness. God shows us the way by inviting us to follow his commandments. He sets fire and water before us, life and death. He asks us to choose what will bless us. But he does not force our hand. With maternal wisdom the Church lets today’s Gospel be introduced by a passage from Sirach, a late book in the Old Testament. It synthesises the teachings of patriarchs and prophets in pregnant aphorisms. We read: ‘If you wish, you can keep his commandments. Faithfulness is within your power.’ At all times people have tended to think themselves determined. In Antiquity, many thought they were determined by fate, or the stars. Totalitarian regimes make us think we are determined by the State or Big Brother. These days a lot of people think they are determined by things they’ve experienced, or not experienced, or by their psychological make-up. Scripture challenges such assumptions. It tells us: ‘No, you’re no one’s prisoner. You are free. Use your freedom!’ Circumstances may condition us. All of us carry some heavy stuff in our luggage. But what conditions us does not determine us. If we wish, we can let the Lord act in our lives, for his gracious will so to act precedes ours. If we wish we can be set free from captivity, healed of illness and iniquity, raised from the slumbering dead. That’s the perspective the Church opens up for us on this last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Let us choose freedom and life. Let us choose to do what is right and good. In Christ’s name!
Near MusicThe Norwegian painter Pola Gauguin, son of Paul, wrote a review of the art of Ludvig Karsten in 1915. He remarked: ‘Rarely has painting come nearer to music than in the art of Karsten.’ I found the quotation in last week’s Dag og Tid, in connection with a review by Eva Furseth of the ‘very well composed’ Karsten exhibition currently on at the Munch Museum in Oslo: ‘Restless‘. The review points out how broad Karsten’s references are: ‘There are pointillistic works built up with splotches of colour as well as virtuosic paraphrases of known canvases by, for example, Rembrandt and Watteau; others are inspired by Van Gogh, Matisse and Cézanne.’ The Norwegian aesthetic medium is European. Furseth writes: ‘The many journeys [Karsten] undertook can seem to indicate restlessness, yet I do not find restlessness in the works themselves. What they have in common is the centrality of the composition of form, combined with a well-developed sense of colour.’ One can integrate much and refine it into original expression if one has a keen sense of form.
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You are invited to Lectio Divina every WEDNESDAY during Lent in Shalom (Charleville Parish) Retreat Centre after 10am Mass Lectio Divina—Latin for “divine reading”—is an ancient way of praying with the Word of God. This practice invites us to listen deeply Read More 4 Likes
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