IF YOU WANT TO SEE MIRACLES OBEY THE LORD: a homily for the Fifth Sunday, Year C (Luke 5:1-11)

During the week I was listening to an interview between an American Catholic journalist and a Dutch Catholic.  The Dutch Catholic was explaining what things are like for the Church and ordinary  faithful Catholics in Holland.  He explained that back in the 1950’s Catholics accounted for about 45% of Dutch citizens.  They were devout and staunch so much so that one in nine Catholic missionaries  worldwide were Dutch.  Ireland has a great missionary tradition but it’s not as great as that!  Today only 19% of Dutch citizens identify as Catholic and of them only 5% attend Mass regularly.  There is a real danger that where they are we too will soon be.

How did this happen?  To explain how I must make a distinction you may or may not have heard before.  Theologians usually make a distinction between the active and the passive will of God.  God always and only ever wills the good. God actively wills our existence.  Every moment is a gift from God.  Your parents, your children, your friends and neighbours, everyone and everything around you is a gift from God.  Every heart beat and every breath is a gift.   God never wills evil.  Yet obviously there is evil in the world.  This is because while God never actively wills evil, never chooses it and does not want it in our world, He does allow it so that He can bring some greater good from it.  Despite God’s goodness and mercy we do wrong.  We harm and hurt and betray one another.  We let each other down. God does not actively will this,  He merely allows it for the present moment.  Thus our Lord accepted the evil of the cross because through it He could save us and unite us with His Father.  When God is said to allow evil this is attributed to His passive will.  While we are here we have the chance to conform ourselves to His plan and His active will for us or not.  Where and how we will spend eternity depends on the choices we make here and  now.

In Holland God has allowed the Church to collapse, as it is collapsing here in Ireland, through the failure of Catholics to remain faithful, through embracing false teaching, through failing to hand on the authentic faith to the next generation, through choosing to neglect, abuse and hurt others.  Fundamentally the collapse came about through disobedience and God has allowed the Church to experience the consequences.

In this Sunday’s passage from Luke our Lord meets his first disciples in their ordinary day, in their ordinary lives, while they are engaged in the boring and time consuming task of mending their nets.  He comes to them and calls them to follow Him and become his disciples.  I find it interesting that none of the Gospel’s ever portray the disciples who were fishermen ever catching fish unless our Lord helps them.  

They listened to that call and despite what it cost them they followed our Lord and it did cost them.  There were no motorways or cars back then.  Only the rich could afford horses.  If you wanted to go anywhere you walked.  In addition the terrain of Israel is quite hilly and rocky, with long hot Summers, there were bandits and robbers, and not much in the way of police nor even hospitals.  Their following of Jesus lead them out across the Roman Empire and ultimately to their violent deaths.  They did not become rich nor were they influential.  They joyfully suffered to hand on what they received from our Lord.  Generations of Catholics handed that Faith on to the generations after them so that it came to Ireland and was handed down to us by our ancestors. 

Our lives have their troubles but nothing like that of our ancestors.  A French visitor to Ireland  in the Nineteenth Century, just after the Penal Laws were repealed, recorded searching for a Chapel for Mass one Sunday in Kerry.  He was directed to a local hill covered in trees.  It was raining heavily and the ground was sodden.  As he rode up the path he noticed the people moving through the trees until he arrived near the top of the hill and was met by a crowd packed around the chapel.  It was too small for them all to get in.  What amazed him the most was that when the bells rang for the consecration the people fell on their faces in prayerful adoration.  To their landlords and masters they were mere uneducated peasants but they knew where their treasure was and had held on to it despite great suffering.  Are we to be the generation that discards that treasure, that Faith?

We have no excuses.  I have on my phone apps that give me the whole text of the Bible as well as  one that gives the daily Mass readings.  Some are free; some cost a few euro.  There are apps and podcasts and websites providing almost any text of our Faith at the touch of a button.  Our ancestors would look on in awe if they could see what we have and how easy it is for us to learn about the Faith.  Never before in the history of the Church have so many Catholics had such easy access to the Scriptures, to the Catechism, to the writings of the Saints and to the vast treasury of knowledge of the Church.  Yet never before have so many Catholics been so ignorant of their Faith.  Never before has there been such indifference and disobedience.  If you fail to put fuel on a fire it will go out and if you do not feed your faith with knowledge then you starve it.  We cannot hand on what we have not got.

The commission received by the first disciples is our commission too.  It is not for a specialist few and never was.  The instruction to be ‘fishers of men,’ or ‘fishers of souls’ if you will, is directed to all of us.  Christ is there present in every aspect of our lives and speaks to us, calling us to follow Him, to proclaim Him by what we do but also by what we say.

I suggest to you that one of the reasons that so many get sick and suffer is that we as a people are indifferent and even disobedient to God, partly due to ignorance, culpable ignorance, and partly due to our wilfulness.  Only if we turn to the Lord and seek to know, obey, love and adore Him as He deserves will we find not only a great catch of souls but miracles in abundance.  God will not refuse us anything if we seek to do His will.  He has promised this in the Gospel of John.  If we keep His commandments we will now deep joy and peace in this life and the abundance of every blessing in the next.  

LIFT UP YOUR HEART AND MIND TO GOD: a homily for the Fifth Sunday, year B (Mark 1.29–39)

You can hear the audio here.

            Our Lord went out into the wilderness and there He prayed.  Why?  Why does God need to pray?  Our Lord prays because He is also man and as man, as a human being, He is never more human than when He spends time, in prayer, with God.  He also goes to pray because as God the Son He wants to spend time with His Father.

            It is said that a couple that doesn't spend quality time together will drift apart and undermine their relationship.  There needs to be communication between spouses, the members of a family or of a community or people lose connection, they drift and stop loving one another.  No human being is truly alive, truly human if they are alone.   The poet said it well: "No man is an island, entire unto himself."

            Yet like our Lord, without time away from those persons and things that drain us, without time given restore our strength and inner peace, we run dry and can give no more.  Our Lord needed to be in the wilderness in prayer so that He could recharge His batteries, so to speak.  He needed the solitude, the silence of the night, so that He could hear what Scripture calls "the still, small voice" of God.

            Our Lord also goes out into the wilderness to give example to His disciples and to us.  He is showing us that prayer is more important even that rest and sleep.  He is showing us that our relationship with our Father in heaven really is vital to us and without that contact in prayer we cannot fulfil our earthly mission; we cannot be truly alive.

            So impressed are His disciples by our Lord's prayer and His commitment to it that they will ask Him to teach them to pray.  So He taught them the Our Father not as the only prayer they should say but as a model for prayer.  When we pray it is ultimately to the Father that we pray even if the prayer we say is to our Lord or the Holy Spirit, to our Lady or one of the saints.  Our prayer should be simple and direct, acknowledging that all good things come from God.  It should be an act of trust and submission to His Holy Will.  It should seek only what is needed for today and entrust everything else into His hands.  It should be said in repentance for sin and forgiveness for others.  It should ask that we not be tested or tempted and trust that He will save us.

            Yet the Church's definition of prayer says that prayer is the "lifting of the heart and mind to God."  For years I thought that a mean and minimalist definition.  Now I realise that it is the essence of prayer.  Whatever enables us to sincerely lift our heart and mind to God is prayer.  If walking in the garden, or in a park or in the countryside helps you to lift heart and mind to God then it is prayer.  If painting yourself blue and standing on your head helps you lift your heart and mind to God then it is prayer though I recommend that you do not do it in public and perhaps you should talk to a professional... 

            Note that the Church's definition says nothing about the words we should use.  The words in our prayers that we learn teach us how to think about God correctly and they give us models for our prayer but it is the heart and mind fixed on God that is the prayer not the words.   If there was one thing the Franciscan tradition would add to the Church's definition is that prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God in faith and love.  

St John Vianney, the Cure of Ars, tells of a farm labourer in his parish who would call into the church to pray before his day's work .  Sometimes he would be so deep in prayer his tools would still be at the church door that evening.  St John asked him one day "How do you pray?"  The man shrugged and said, "He just looks at me and I just looks at Him."  That simple labouring man, who probably could not read or write, was near the heights of prayer.  He understood that prayer is lifting heart and mind to God in faith and love.  He is not that exceptional among those who love God.

            If you read the lives of the saints, or better still their writings, again and again you will hear the same story: they sought the Lord in prayer and they found Him.  He had been with them all along but He waits until we have proven our faith and love before He reveals Himself.  Why does God need proof?  He doesn't.  We need to prove it to ourselves.  We need to make the sacrifice of going out into the wilderness, that is, of getting rid of all the unnecessary things, the noises, the distractions that keep us from lifting our hearts and minds to God.  The great Cardinal Sarah in his book, the Power of Silence, talks about how today we are subject to a dictatorship of noise so much so that we cannot really hear not only God's voice but our own.

            In prayer we discover God and in discovering God we discover our true self.  In making space for God we are actually making space for one who loves us and made us for Himself that we might know Him and be with Him forever.  In neglecting to pray we are not neglecting a mere optional extra.  In neglecting to pray we are neglecting to be truly human, to be truly Christian, to truly follow Christ.  In neglecting to pray we are starving our soul of what we most need: contact with God.

            I urge you make time to pray.  Make time to lift up your heart and mind to God even if you feel a fool.   Lift up your heart and mind to God by whatever means you can.  If you are like the sinner in the temple who could only ask for mercy you will find that He is full of mercy.   If you are weighed down with worries He will ease that weight.  No one has ever sincerely sought the Lord in prayer and come away unheard, unchanged, unblessed.  Persevere in prayer and keep praying until your last breath and you will finish your prayer in heaven.

CHRIST COMMANDS THAT WE LEAVE THE TOMB: a homily for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A (John 11:1–45)

You can hear the homily here.

In my time as a secondary school chaplain I buried four students, three girls and a boy.  I felt inadequate that all I could do was offer my prayers and words of condolences to their parents.  I wondered how I could have so failed to cooperate with God’s grace that there was no miracle for each of them and no restoration of them to their families.  This is probably the experience of all who minister to the dying and bereaved.  We want to make the problem go away and end the sorrow.  In this we touch on the mysteries of suffering and death.

Suffering is part of this life because our first parents refused to live in obedience to the Lord and asserted their own will.  The human race morally fell and we have been asserting our own will ever since.  Every family row, legal battle, crime, or sin is a testimony to our addiction to our own will.   Deep down in the core of our being we believe, each and every one of us, that we are the centre of everything, the hero of our own drama, the composer and singer of our own unique song.  We are not usually aware of this but if you examine any evil act there you will find at its heart the human drive to be the centre and to assert one’s own will over all others’, even God’s.  From this arises most of the suffering in our world.

Especially death.  Death is the one absolutely certain fact of our lives.  We cannot avoid it.  It takes from us our family members, friends and neighbours and eventually takes us from those that remain.  We die because our nature is fallen but our soul is immortal.   Here lies the suffering that we all experience in life, the one we dread will come to us inevitably, and the one we learn to live with: the loss of those we love.  As human beings everything we do is done in the shadow of our own mortality.  We fear death and dying and in that fear we flee away into all sorts of what addiction counselors call ‘self medications’.  We use the things of this world to numb us against the profound reality of our own limitedness.  Pretty gloomy thoughts for a Sunday evening yet there is hope.

So many Christians do not grasp the significance of this: we were made for communion with God.  We are a work of God’s goodness and humility and it was so that He could take the lowest possible place that God created us.  But through the disobedience, the self-regard of our first parents we have lost our friendship with God.  According to Genesis God saw that “it is not good for man to be alone” but this not only means that man and woman are made for one another but that we are also made for communion with God.  The ultimate loneliness is to be without God.  That is now reestablished in Christ.  More than the friendship our first parents had we are offered communion with God in the heart of the Trinity, a communion not just on the spiritual level but even on the level of our bodies; all in Christ.

In the meantime though, made as we are for eternal life with God yet subject to suffering and death, we struggle to cope with this tension.  We long for the infinite, the everlasting, the final victory of all that is good, beautiful and true and yet we are constantly facing the reality that even as new beauties and wonders arise, so many are passing away.  If you have read the Lord of the Rings you will understand what I talking about.

So we come to this Sunday’s gospel.  The Lord loves his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus, yet delays to visit dying Lazarus in order that His Father be glorified.  The Lord always answers us but, whether He answers with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, He may delay the answer for His own good reasons. Martha gives testimony to the Faith, much as Peter did elsewhere, and our Lord affirmed her.  Mary has faith but not as Martha has.  Mary sat at the feet of our Lord and He fed her with His word but Martha, labouring in the kitchen, heard the word and believed.  In Martha the word has set down roots that have flowered in her confession of faith in the Lord and the resurrection on the Last Day. 

Our Lord gave a sigh that came from the depth of His heart.  He was moved at the suffering around Him.  His Divine love comes to us through a human heart, a human heart that is to be pierced on Good Friday and from which, as John himself testifies, he saw blood and water flow; often understood as symbols of the Sacraments especially Baptism and Eucharist.  It is through the Sacraments that we are given communion with the Holy Trinity.  But He does not love us only with His heart.

Our Lord wept.  He wept but He did not mourn.  Some take the line that He wept so as to give us a model for moderation in our emotions.  We are not to keen and mourn over those who have passed away the way unbelievers do because we have the hope of the resurrection and eternal life.  The only true reason to mourn is over our sins and the sins of others.  Why did He weep over Lazarus though?  He knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead so why did He weep?  One does not weep for someone one will see again in a few days (not if you’re a man anyway).  I would suggest that our Lord wept for the condition of man, of the human race, fallen under the power of death and sin, deprived of grace, deprived of truth, deprived of God and His light, of the possibility of the Beatific Vision, the sight of God for ever in Heaven.  He weeps for man stuck in darkness, without the friendship of God, without the Divine illumination, and without saving faith, doomed to the domination of the evil one and his minions.   He wept that at that moment He could only raise Lazarus from the dead not the whole human race from the tomb of sin and death.

Lazarus is us.  We are Lazarus.  Christ has raised us from spiritual death through His suffering, death and resurrection.  He has unbound us and brought us out of the darkness of the tomb into the daylight of grace.  By this means He has revealed that we are made for communion with God and that outside of that communion true peace cannot be ours.  By becoming man, truly human without surrendering His Divinity, He made it possible for us to become one with Him through the Sacraments in His Body the Church.  Our old self died in baptism; it is up to us to apply the death and resurrection of Christ to all aspects of our lives.   We are a new creation in Christ, members of the Body of Christ the New Adam and children of Mary, the New Eve.

            When we die we leave our bodies behind but we will get them back on the Last Day, the Day of Judgment when all mankind, everyone who has ever existed will stand before God and give an account of themselves.  On that Day we shall get our bodies back for we are made to be embodied spirits.  The just will join the Lord in Heaven and the unjust, the unrepentant will go down into Hell.  Purgatory will be no more.  

As one man who had died and came back to life said “when you are dead everything is different.  What is important to you here is not important there.”  One can be confused in this life, ignorant and subject to bad habits and pressure from others but once dead all these fall away and one sees onesefs as one, what you and I have made of our own self.  One chooses where one goes when one dies by how one lives here on Earth.  If you refuse to take Him seriously in this life how can you expect to attain to eternal life with Him in Heaven?  You can delude yourself that you will receive mercy when you die but you will only receive that mercy if you repent of your sins and confess them in this life.  We are to throw ourselves on His mercy now and not some time in the future. 

You and I are Lazarus in the tomb.  The voice of the Lord commands that we come out and join Him in the daylight.  It is up to us to repent of our sins and confess them and step out into the light of Divine grace.  It is only in the daylight of His loving mercy that we can be free to flourish and live.  The tomb has nothing to offer but darkness, dust and death.