Like Floating ThoughtsA friend who is a poet recently wrote after a visit to the Aquarium in Baltimore of how she had ‘watched the other worldly fantastical creatures flutter a fin or a tail and fluently glide through the blue water. There Read More
Sound of MercyIn a recent episode of Private Passions, Francis Spufford recounts an incident he has also written about. It regards his coming to faith. The setting for it was pretty unpromising. Spufford had gone out to a café to recover from Read More
God in LawSaarland, the German federal state, this week added a preamble to its constitution. It reads: ‘Conscious of its responsibility before God and human beings, on the basis of its religious and humanistic heritage, Saarland has given itself this constitution through Read More
Searing GraceHomily given as part of a day of reconciliation to bishops at St Mary’s. Acts 14.19-28: They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him dead In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul itemises incidents of violence suffered after his conversion to Christ: ‘Five times I have received the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned’ (11.24f.). Today’s reading from Acts gives us details of the stoning. The event occurs in about 47 AD, at the end of Paul’s first missionary journey. It had been rich in contrasting experience. At Cyprus he had had a run-in with Elymas, a pagan magician, whom Paul’s prayers blinded in the hope that Elymas would, as he himself had on the road to Damascus, come to his inward senses by being deprived for a while of sense-perception. At Iconium Paul had had to escape an ambush mounted by Jewish opponents. Then, at Lystra, he’d had to fight to keep people from worshipping him as a god. The excitement had barely died down when a band of Jewish zealots turned up and won the crowds over: ‘They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city [of Lystra]’. A year or so later, Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians: ‘I have been crucified with Christ’ (2.20). In this statement there is more than just devotional hyperbole. At Lystra Paul had literally tasted something of what Christ went through in Jerusalem during his Passion. The crowd that one moment shouted ‘Hosanna!’ soon united in crying: ‘Crucify!’ Likewise Paul was hailed as a messenger of the gods by an ecstatic crowd only in order, hours later, to be pelted with stones by those same people, and left for dead. They had loved Paul as long as he had seemed a hero on terms they had set; they hated him when he turned out to be working on entirely different terms. Well, such is the life, such are the conditions of apostolic ministry. Paul’s example teaches us not to get too carried away by others’ praise. On the contrary, when the world speaks well of us and starts bringing out the incense, it’s time to be wary, prepared. There is another aspect of the stoning at Lystra worth considering. Paul first turns up in the Biblical narrative in the context of a stoning. When Stephen was stoned in Jerusalem for proclaiming Jesus as God, those who took active part, needing freedom of movement to chuck stones with all the needed force, laid their cloaks down at the feet of Paul who, still called Saul, was wardrobe-keeper for the occasion, fully approving of what was going on (Acts 7.54-8.1). With what grief, what shame Paul must later have recalled this incident! How powerfully it must have been present to him when he found himself cast defenceless on the ground, to be stoned. Paul would later write to the Colossians that he was making up, in his flesh, what is ‘lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his Body, the Church’ (1.24). Christ’s oblation, wrought on the Cross, was divinely sufficient. Nothing is ‘lacking’ in it in the sense that it is incomplete. The ‘making up’ concerns the instantiation of its effects, the application, through the Church, of the Cross’s grace to specific wounds and failings. First among these are our own intimate betrayals, needing to be reconciled. At Lystra Paul sustained, in his flesh, a concrete atonement. It released him from the particular wages of a deeply personal sin. This freed him to proclaim to others — and with what force! — the real possibility of such gracious liberation. May we likewise be open to receive God’s searing, purifying grace as it comes to us to set us free from our bonds; and may we thus acquire the authority and courage we need to witness credibly to the presence in our midst of God’s kingdom. Amen. The Stoning of St Paul at Lystra by Philippe de Champaigne. Wikimedia.
Like Floating ThoughtsA friend who is a poet recently wrote after a visit to the Aquarium in Baltimore of how she had ‘watched the other worldly fantastical creatures flutter a fin or a tail and fluently glide through the blue water. There were fish with funny lips, and with unicorn horns, and rays with leopard print, and huge silvery flat fish with tiny fins, not to mention gills, nettles that look like thoughts floating through the sky, and moon jellies with the finest fibers. We were utterly transfixed’. Today, having occasion to visit the Aquarium myself, I could so well understand what she meant, though I would not have been able to put it so beautifully. The gratuitous elegance and beauty of normally invisible creatures speaks powerfully of the existence of God.
Sound of MercyIn a recent episode of Private Passions, Francis Spufford recounts an incident he has also written about. It regards his coming to faith. The setting for it was pretty unpromising. Spufford had gone out to a café to recover from what he describes as ‘a horrible night of rowing’ at home. Sitting bruised and solitary in that neutral, public space, he heard the sound of Mozart’s clarinet concerto. It came to him ‘like unbelievably welcome news’. It sounded a way of facing reality illusionlessly, yet with firm (and at the same time tender) hope. Richard Powers apparently once said of the concerto that it is ‘what mercy would sound like’. That is how Spufford heard it. He, who had abandoned religion as a young man, was reawakened to the possibility of it. He didn’t experience the music as a divine revelation. Rather he encountered Mozart as a kind of emissary ‘reporting something I felt inclined to trust when it was put like that.’ That’s the sort of reporting any Christian is called to.
God in LawSaarland, the German federal state, this week added a preamble to its constitution. It reads: ‘Conscious of its responsibility before God and human beings, on the basis of its religious and humanistic heritage, Saarland has given itself this constitution through its freely elected parliament.’ The addition has met resistance. Isn’t reference to God in a legal text hopelessly old-fashioned, irrelevant in times not overtly religious? Thomas Jansen addressed criticism well in yesterday’s FAZ: ‘Democratic politics cannot pretend to present ultimate truths. The chancellor, members of parliament, mayors, and party conferences do not proclaim the Gospel. Ultimate truths belong to the religious sphere.’ Saarland’s parliament developed a formula developed by the Parliamentary Council while defining the national constitution in 1948-49. The memory of Hitler’s dictatorship was fresh. People knew what can happen when statesmen start deluding themselves they are divine. Jansen concludes: ‘Awareness of their agency’s limitation can be a helpful guiding principle for all engaged in politics, whether they believe in God or not, also beyond the frontiers of the Saarland.’
St Joseph the WorkerThis homily was given to conclude a symposium held in Kaunas for the religious of Lithuania. Matthew 13.54-58: Is this not the carpenter’s son? The feast day of St Joseph the Worker was instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955. The pope had a supernatural intention: he wished to foster devotion to a great saint. He also had a social intention: the feast was an antiphonal response to Communist May Day celebrations. It would show that the cause of workers is not over against the Church, or estranged from the Church. The example of Joseph places the worker honourably, even sublimely, at the heart of the manifestation of the New Testament. Since 1955 the feast has been instrumentalised in aid of many good causes and of some more dubious causes. It has been used as a means by which to politicise the Gospel. As we know, and see before our eyes these days, that is a slippery slope. This is not because the societal order, the polis we are part of, lies beyond God’s redemptive work or the Christian’s task. We’re called to sanctify society by the way we are and act in it; we are called to order the world in such a way that all may live worthily. The problem is that we, when we turn faith into a project of welfare, easily forget what the whole thing is about. We think of ourselves as decisive agents — our outlook becomes horizontal and we end up, to speak in Biblical terms, ‘forgetting God’. We cannot take Joseph hostage to this sort of enterprise. His life and sovereign silence are oriented vertically. When we honour Joseph as ‘worker’, it cannot just be about an effort to feel affirmed in the work we do ourselves. In the Litany of St Joseph, Joseph is referred to as a ‘patriarch’. The patriarchs of the Old Testament were all shepherds. The wilderness, the broad plains were their element; so was the camp fire round which they sat and spoke of God’s faithfulness in their own lives and in the lives of their fathers. The patriarch of the New Testament, by contrast, is a carpenter. His is an urban calling. It is in cities large and small that houses are built to last and to be furnished — for the Bible does not feature the romanticism of the little house on the prairie: it belongs to a different cultural setting. Joseph represents the forming of fellowship, a society that has at last found its place of belonging and is no longer constantly on the move. Even as life is movement, our final call is a call to come home; and home is what the city stands for. It is significant that Scripture lets human history set out, in Genesis, from a wonderful garden, but that the history ends, towards the end of the Apocalypse, in a city. Joseph, Protector of the Saviour, reminds us that our goal is within reach. He reminds us that we are called to flourish, and that our flourishing will result, not so much from what we go around saying as from what we do to enable communion, service, security. I would have loved to see a piece of furniture made by Joseph, the carpenter. I do not doubt that his artisanship was beautiful. In his arms he carried the Origin of all Beauty, all Loveliness. May we, as we honour Joseph, our patriarch, likewise work beautifully in the city of God, which is our city, too. We are called to found our city on Christ’s peace, not of this world. Let us make sure it infuses all our doings, from the most sublime to do the most everyday. Amen. St Joseph expertly at work. Details from the Merode altarpiece in the Met Cloisters. Did he also make this?
Today we celebrate St. Athanasius, Bishop and doctor of the Church. St. Athanasius was born at Alexandria around 295. He fought ceaselessly against the Arian heresy, defending the true and equal divinity of Christ. As a result, he had Read More 1 Comments
1st May - Feast day of St. Joseph the Worker Hail, Guardian of the Redeemer, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. To you God entrusted his only Son; in you Mary placed her trust; with you Christ became man. Blessed Joseph, to us too, show yourself a Read More 3 Comments
A MESSAGE FROM THE HOLY FATHER – NOW IN ENGLISH Many people asked about the message from the Holy Father shared on Sunday. We now have a translation of his words to Bishop Donal McKeown as he marks 25 years of episcopal Read More 1 Likes
