GOD'S UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IS NOT AN INDIFFERENT LOVE

Recently I heard someone declare that he believed in God's unconditional love for him and that God loved him just as he was. I have no quibble with the unconditional love bit. God does love unconditionally. His love for us is not dependent on our behaviour, individually or collectively, but is a free, unmerited and unasked for, unimaginable gift. But to say that God loves unconditionally is not the same as saying that God loves indifferently. To say that God's love is not lessened by sin is not the same as saying that God does not care about sin. God loves me not as I am but as He intends me to be i.e. in perfect union with Him. He loves that I exist and all that is good in me but not the evil, not the sin. God hates sin. God hates sin because it makes me less than human. Sin damages and destroys my relationship with Him, with my neighbour, with myself and with His Creation. Sin is a choice away from God's plan, away from being truly human. God cannot love that. God cannot love what makes me less than He created and redeemed me to be. These three days are the holiest of the year because they celebrate just how deeply God's love will go for us. During these three days we celebrate His victory over sin and death. Tonight we begin with His institution of His Church: the Mass and the Priesthood. Tomorrow we remember how He revealed, and saved us through, the Son's love for the Father on the Cross and in embracing suffering and death. On Saturday night we will remember the Father's response: the raising of the Son from the dead.

A LITTLE PIECE OF ART

Above is a piece of work made by one of our students. I don't know the girl, a junior, but it illustrates the talent that our young people have. All it needs is channeling in the right direction, encouragement and support and they can produce such beautiful things. The Merit awards in the school where I work are given not for academic achievement but to recognise the contributions students make to other parts of school life: the Meitheal who look after the First years, Community Care that raises funds for charity, or Cool Fm that entertains the school with music on every second friday to name a few. It was amazing to see the number of students who do that bit extra for others and the ones who are involved in many different areas. They have so much potential and such generosity.

RTE HEAD OF NEWS QUITS

According to the Belfast Telegraph Ed Mulhall, RTE's Head of News has quit and 'Prime Time Investigates' taken off-air for the foreseeable future because of the 'Mission to Prey' program that defamed Fr. Reynolds. What will happen to those others who were involved?

INTERVIEW WITH AN ARCHBISHOP

Watch this, it's powerful to see an Archbishop, my Archbishop, in tears over the abuse of children. It shows what drives this man to do what he does. I hear he does not have the support of his clergy that he might like and I don't agree with him on everything but he is obviously a man who cares and wants to do the right thing. He is right that this will not be over soon. Even when all the abusers among the clergy have been identified and dealt with there is still the abusers among the laity. The victims and their families still carry their pain and the hurt from that spreads. It feeds indifference, scepticism and hatred. It distorts relationships and places blocks on the path to God and His Church. I think too this report is a little too heavy on the Vatican. It's as if the interviewer wanted the Archbishop to blame Rome for everything. The bishops had all the canon law they needed (the Murphy Report said so) but they did not use it. The were 'pastoral' with the abusers and failed to be shepherds to the victims. The acquiesced with the psychologist of the age and forgot the wisdom of the ages: that sin needs to be named, confronted and dealt with especially among the clergy. Why though did they pick a parish like Allihies, Co Cork (Diocese of Kerry)? Why go to the back end of the country when they were interviewing the Archbishop of Dublin? Was there no parish in Dublin that might give an interview?

THIRD STATION OF THE CROSS: JESUS FALLS THE FIRST TIME

Whenever a penitent in the confessional tells me a particularly gruelling litany of sins or is weighed down with guilt I usually begin my response with "Welcome to the human race". We are all in the same boat, we have all fallen short of the glory of God. Christ falls three times on this journey to Calvary and death. He does not fall into sin but he falls because there is a limit even to what His perfect human body can endure. He has been beaten, tortured and abused. He has endured unjust imprisonment, an illegal trial and condemnation. They who ought to have welcomed Him and worshipped Him have rejected Him and chosen another. Christ stumbles under the weight of such appalling suffering and He falls. Yet there is more to this. He wishes to console us. Christ falls too so that we do not despair in the midst of our trials but He gets back up so that we do not stay down. That's the difference between sinners and saints, the saints get back up after they fall. Of course we do not get back up by our own power but by His grace and our grace-empowered will. We have to choose to keep on going. We have to choose not to despair in the face of our own limitedness and failure. We should not expect that the cross is easy to bear. Others may or may not want us to change, to be converted. Even when they do they may want us to change according to their standards. True conversion is according to the standards of God. It is the will of the Father that we must seek and do. We may be buffeted and abused by friend and foe, our efforts judged harshly, opposed, or impeded. We may find our path blocked and redirected with those we had thought on our side letting us down and turning away from us at the very time we feel most in need of support. We may come to believe we are on our own. Christ has already walked this path and the saints have followed Him. It is He who carries us and it is He who picks us up. We are never alone. We are always in His arms.

SECOND STATION OF THE CROSS: JESUS TAKES UP HIS CROSSI

We are so accustomed to the cross that it does not hold the horror for us that it did for those of the Roman world. Fr. Robert Barron explains this very well in his series Catholicism which I highly recommend. For the peoples of the Roman Empire the cross was a sign of a method of execution of unbelievable cruelty and means of oppression. It was a symbol of criminality of the worst kind and a brutal form of justice. It is this sign that Jesus embraces and transfigures through His obedient love. He empties Himself by means of the cross and it becomes a seat from which He teaches and proclaims and a throne from which He rules and dispenses justice and mercy. But first He must take it up. First He must embrace it and with it the injustice of His situation. He has already suffered but He will not stop until He has drained the cup of all that separates Man from God. He takes up the Cross and He takes us up with it. He carries us and our sins, our banishment from the Divine Presence, and He carries us. He makes His act of loving obedience, His self-emptying worship of the Father ours. His taking up of the Cross is the root of our repentance for it is through Him that we return to the Father. For the ancients Atlas carried the world upon his shoulder but it is Christ who has the heavier burden for He carries us and all that separates us from God on a human shoulder. Here Divine Justice meets Divine Mercy and they are revealed to Man. Lent is a penitential season, a time to make up in some small way for the sins we have committed, to undone the harm done to ourselves, to others and to the world and the offence given to God. Let us then walk with Christ as He carries us to Calvary. Let us, in however small a way, take up the crosses of each day and follow Him.

FIRST STATION OF THE CROSS: CHRIST IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH

This image of the first station of the Cross is from Dalgan House, Co. Meath, headquarters of the Columban Fathers. I watched a film with a friend on Friday as I usually do. It was "Never Let Me Go", a film based on Kazuo Ishiguro's book of the same name. The story is set in alternative reality where genetic engineering(?) and organ transplants have allowed the end of illness and physical suffering but at a price; countless children are reared to be donors, to live a short life and 'complete' (die) via a series of organ donations in early adulthood. The three central characters, two girls and a boy, all future donors, form a love triangle within this horrific world. What shocked me was their complacency and compliance as if they had been bred for placidity. I wanted them to fight back, to resist and rage against the system. At one point, and this is a spoiler, their former headmistress tells them "We did not have the gallery so we could see into your souls. We had the gallery to see if you had souls at all." The frightening thing is that the story is not that far from reality. Forced organ transplants are happening regularly in China Transmission 6-10. Once one denies there is a God and that there is an immortal soul then all one has left is a gene-transmission vehicle, or a sack of meat. Human nature becomes an illusion or rather a delusion and morality is a mere social convention. What has this got to do with our Saviour before Pilate? I used to think that He was placid, compliant and perhaps helpless, the victim of c conspiracy and trapped by His Father's desperate plan for the salvation of the human race. Is He placid though? Is He compliant? His mission is not merely to save us. It is to bring us into communion with His Father. To do this He does what He does or rather Who He Is; as Son He reveals the Father through His Sonship and His passion and death are the revelation by the Son of His very Being. Through this revelation He reveals the Father and how utterly beautiful, good, and worthy of love and obedience He is. The Son explores the depths of the human condition and lifts it up, transforming it, transubstantiating it so as to make Himself the Way to the Father. Therefore, before Pilate, He is not placid. Pilate is the bureaucrat, the politician, whose concern is only for power and expediency. What Pilate does not realise is that he does not have any real power. Christ has the true power because He does the will of the Father; He is the will of the Father. Pilate can choose to spare Christ but at this point his previous choices have locked him into a pattern of self-preservation that mitigates against any impulse towards justice. Sin has consequences and not just in the short term. Jesus is not placid; He is calm. He has endured so much already and has much more to endure but His love for the Father will not let Him falter. He must give us a chance to see. He must show us on the Cross the indescribable depths of the Father's love. He chooses, He acts by accepting His fate.