Archive for 2004
“Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind!” Tall order! “Love your neighbour as you love yourself!” Fat chance! I don’t have to know myself very well to know how far short I fall in the love department. The longer I love God the deeper I know how little my love is next to God’s extravagance, loyalty, passion. Knowing that is Hell some days.
…
The Hebrew name for Hell was Gehenna, after the valley outside Jerusalem where rubbish was tipped and fires burned and it was said that, once upon a time, children had been sacrificed. No wonder Ezekiel’s people had a terror of tombs and dead bodies. Not just our horror-film-fed squeamishness but a bone-deep, religious, aversion. Ezekiel is sent in his vision to walk in a valley of dead bones. Hell. Horror, waste, desolation. It speaks of death and hopelessness. It echoes with disgust and sheer god-forsakenness.
We each have our own Gehenna, our own half-ignored valley of death, and we all have God’s pledge that even these bones can live, even what we have given up for dead can be a home to God’s life-giving spirit.
If even hell can’t resist God’s life-giving love I find a seed of hope for my own love-resisting heart. I find God looking at me, knowing me bone-deep … and against all odds loving me, liking me into life.
August 20th, 2004
I remember being at a morning mass once in a strange church. Everything happened normally until the time for the prayers. The first: ‘for a personal intention … lord hear us’. The second: ‘for a personal intention …’ The third … no prizes for guessing. The ten-person congregation managed at least a dozen ‘personal intentions’. I remember finding it funny, then disturbing, then the perfect opportunity to congratulate myself for being more theologically with-it than my fellow mass-goers.
It came back today with the gospel’s strange combination of sayings: one about interpersonal disagreements and the other about prayer. I guess I’m disturbed at how the gospel treats both as public, communal matters rather than private ones. These days we don’t think lawsuits should be a matter for the local parish to decide. These days we don’t think God is only found in church.
The fact people come on retreat says something about the desire for personal relationship with God—and a retreat focuses there specifically. But even that isn’t done alone. We need company in the work of retreat, we need to be accompanied. God is found in agreement, in conversation, in lives shared.
The liturgy expresses that. Though our journeys are individual we make them together. Though we each know God in a uniquely personal way, the God we know is one … and in the knowing we are united.
Why do we speak our desires and hopes at Mass when we pray? God knows them anyway. Why do we speak to God in prayer at all? God knows us through and through. The trouble is we don’t know our own self until we speak, until we offer ourselves in words to one another. And it’s not just the speaking. Hearing is a sacrament too. Until we hear our brother’s or sister’s offering, until we echo our assent, they cannot come to be. Agreement the gospel is telling us is a holy thing. Not just because we ought to be nice. But because each one of us comes to be who God made us to be only in the web of words we share in community. That’s what community is for—to make us human. Even this small community of prayer has that sacred opportunity.
August 11th, 2004
Here’s an image I like. Paris. Ignatius 38 years old and struggling in studies, sharing a room with Pierre Favre just 23. Pierre wrote later:
“That year Inigo entered the College of Sainte-Barbe and lived in the same room with us, with the intention of following the course in arts. And it was our master who was in charge of this course. … After it had been set that I would teach this holy man, it followed that at first we had a rather casual relationship and then I became very close to him, and finally we led a life in common where the two of us had the same room, the same table, the same purse.”
The other room-mate was Francis Xavier whose exploits turned out to be altogether showier than Favre’s but it is to Favre that we owe the work we do here. Ignatius gave the Exercises to the young Favre and then set him to find others who would benefit from them. One of the people Favre gave them to was a man named Dominic, who gave them to another man who gave them to another man, or to a woman who gave them to another woman.
For all of these centuries, someone has been giving these Exercises in person to another person who has handed them on in turn. We find ourselves a living link in that tradition. We might not be fabled missionaries like Xavier but we bring our little loaves and few fish to be blessed and broken and shared, trusting that God will take care of the rest.
August 2nd, 2004
The gospel tirade we hear today comes right after a bad night out with a leading Pharisee. It all starts when Jesus cures a man of dropsy and gets the dinner guests upset—it being the Sabbath. Then, as he watches these guests jockeying for the best places at table, he launches into a series of extremely pointed stories about how to behave at banquets. And now, the morning after, here he is, storming down the Jerusalem road, pursued by great crowds who think they want to follow him. And it is like he is sick to his stomach with it all.
So he fires off this barrage of stories about just how serious a thing it is to really follow him, to do more than show him off to your friends at a dinner party, or say you’ve seen him live at one of his open-air gigs.
How serious? “You’d better hate your family”, he says. “You’d better be ready to hang. You’d better be ready to die”.
Maybe on a better day he’d have found a way to say his piece without scaring the hell out of us. But we have to take his anger seriously too. He was sick of spiritual tourists. He was sick of being used. He was sick of being the latest big thing. “You want to follow me”, he says, “then you’d better give up all you own”.
But there are two things, despite the shock tactics, that give me heart. The first is this. There seems to be something about following Jesus that is always like making a beginning—starting to build that tower, or preparing to wage that war. We should give our following all the consideration and care we give to any new beginning. And maybe your mind runs off to thinking you don’t have what it takes—like the builder and the king—and you’d better give up before you start. But I don’t think that Jesus is trying to discourage us. I think he’s saying there are no old hands in the business of discipleship—we are all beginners. Every one of us is just starting fresh. Every one of us should be happy that we really don’t know the slightest thing about how to do it, about how to follow him.
What’s the other heartening thing? I said there were two. The other is what comes next. After this reading, after all the noise and anger directed at phony people, Jesus goes on to tell three parables about the genuine God, the God he loves: the parable about the shepherd who lost a single sheep but found it; the one about the woman who lost a day’s wage but found it; and the one about the father who lost his youngest son but found him again.
We might be perpetual beginners when it comes to finding and following God but God is damned good at finding us.
July 31st, 2004
Soil is funny stuff. After that gospel I feel the desire to be rich, productive soil but soil is funny stuff. Soil is dirt. Soil is muck. How do we get to be soil?
Soil is humble, soil is humus. Humus is what gives real meaning to humility—not self-deprecation but an earthiness that recognises our origins in simple dirt. To be one with the soil is humility. To be one with the soil is to be human. We are called to be soiled, to be soil, to be down-to-earth. Can’t you feel the call?
Soil:
• without soil the planet would die—between bedrock and sky, the soil is a fragile, thin layer on which everything depends
• soil is alive—a spadeful holds more living things than all the humans ever born
• soil is a community—plants, bacteria, fungus, worms; growing, dying, rotting, feeding, breeding; fixing nitrogen; freeing minerals
• soil grows slowly—it takes 500 years to lay down an inch
Here’s the call—not to be rock, not to be sky, but to be soil, rich, living soil. Not pure. Not lone. Not clean. Not strong. Not hasty. But dirt, and earth and humus. The only place where the gospel can grow.
July 21st, 2004
A divided heart: I’ve been pondering that phrase and what it says to me and about me. A divided heart. For my heart is divided. I long for the moment when passion and hope and intellect unite and leave me whole to want, to desire, to do just the one thing, just the one simple, glorious, noble thing.
… But of course that’s a lie—I don’t long for that, not really. For I know too well where I can find it and that’s not a place I go willingly.
My integrity lies at the bottom of a pit, at the rock bottom where I have nowhere left to hide, and all secrets are out, and all pretence is gone. That’s where my heart is whole and healed and undivided, where I’m honest and alive and with my God.
But getting there is a fall, a plummet, and I have this urge to upward mobility.
“Israel was a luxuriant vine yielding plenty of fruit. The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built; the richer his land became, the richer he made the sacred stones.”
It strikes me as fitting that Israel erected his sacred stones in high places, as though the higher you get the nearer you are to God. That’s the creed I know I live by in my bones—the higher the better, the better the holier.
But on the high places all I have is my own divided heart with its guilty secrets and confused longings and broken dreams.
And I know where God is. God is in the depths. God is down, down, down where my fallen heart is whole in its honesty and my vision clear and my soul simple.
“Break up your fallow ground”, says Hosea, “it is time to go seeking the Lord”.
July 7th, 2004
The story goes that once, about a hundred years before Jesus’ time, a gentile wise-guy, put this proposition to Rabbi Shammai: ‘if you can teach me the Law, the Torah, while I stand on one leg I will become a Jew’. Rabbi Shammai, knowing a con when he hears one, sends him away with a flea in his ear. So the foreigner tries out his joke again, this time on Shammai’s rival, Rabbi Hillel. ‘Rabbi, if you can teach me the Torah while I stand on one leg I will become a Jew’. Hillel, always ready for a challenge, got him to stand on one leg and said, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it.’ And it is said that is what he did. … ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour’.
…
These two Rabbis were well known for their differences of opinion. Shammai taught that when it came to the shema—hear O Israel…—one should take scripture seriously and say it in the evening while lying down and in the morning recite it standing. Hillel’s opinion: recite shema doing whatever you are doing for it must fill your whole life, walking, sitting, working, playing: ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.’
…
So we are to love God with our every breath—all our soul, mind and strength—and love our neighbour as ourselves. … But who is our neighbour? Don’t you want to follow Luke’s gospel and ask that? The scribe here in Mark seems to know already but Luke uses him as a foil to set up Jesus’ great parable of the prodigal son: an enigmatic answer to the question. Who is my neighbour and how do I love her? You’ll not be surprised to hear that Rabbi Hillel had something pithy to say on the subject: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what good am I? … If not me, who? If not now, when?’
Aren’t those last two questions what ground and anchor our love for God and our love for others: ‘If not me, who? If not now, when?’
June 3rd, 2004
I think he came back to us …out of embarrassment or a nagging need. Back to Bethany and Martha and Lazarus and me—looking to explain or be forgiven or something—at least at first. After opening the tomb and giving back our brother and then running off like that leaving us no room for thanks, no room for gratitude, no time to ask him what he’d done or what it might cost.
No, just the turmoil and the disbelief and the laughing and the crying. And Martha dancing for joy, and me singing inside, and Lazarus—Lazarus dazed, surrounded by friends afraid to touch and then unable to stop touching, checking their unbelieving eyes. Even one or two less friendly eyes troubled, angry. I can remember it all and remember nothing—like a dream. I didn’t even see Jesus go, him and his companions. Too wrapped up in all the jubilation I was.
But what do you do when it’s over? When the crowd’s gone, picked you clean, and the three of you are, inexplicably, there. Sitting. Wondering. All the aching questions unasked or asked and unanswered.
It seems we weren’t the only ones wondering what it all meant since the passing days saw a price slapped on Jesus’s head. And lies spread. And threats too. Wouldn’t you think they all would be happy for us? Wouldn’t you expect that and not the whispers that a living Lazarus was an embarrassment—and better off dead. And through it all no sign of Jesus—not to explain, nor promise, nor make it all make sense.
With Passover so close the Holy City was packed and alive with rumour. Jesus was going to march on Jerusalem. Jesus was going to destroy the Temple. Jesus was going to show the Romans. Who could stop him now—with the power of life and death his to command? Fools!
Though we wondered too. Was he going to come? Would he risk it? How could he? How could he not?
Then suddenly there he was. At the gate. Our gate. To explain. To promise. To make it make sense. So I hoped.
This he said: “I’m sorry.”
“We were wondering if you’d come? Hoping! Wondering if you’d risk Passover. Will you?”
“I do not know.” And he said little else. Him the great talker, silent, brooding. John told us he’d been like this since the tomb. Moody. Unnaturally quiet. Hiding in the back of beyond, staring out into the desert. As if waiting for something. Turning aside their concern with a distracted shrug. Till the twelve of them thought it was all over. And argued among themselves about what they would do. Go back north? Or walk into likely death at his side?
Then he ups and tells them he must see his friends and here we all are. Around the table. Eating, drinking, trying to ignore his mood. The guys working hard at enjoying Martha’s feast—laughing, fooling—but, I could see, glancing over at him all the time. Him alone in all the hubbub. They all kept their distance. Confused. Afraid to touch. Embarrassed.
I watched him. I’ve been able to read him since first we met. And right now, fear in his eyes. A need not to be alone. To have someone promise to stay by him. Just like Lazarus’s look when death was crawling close. But mixed in him with the horror of choice—stay or go, up to him and no other. I could see him searching for his way out. Finding none. And searching again.
It was just then I heard the voice in my heart say: “It’s time.” It was time. He might not know it yet. But I did. I stood and fetched the oil of nard my inner voice had had me save all these years for him. I prayed. I wrapped a towel around my waist. Unbound my hair. And, as the room hushed, knelt before him. Held his eyes, steady, like. Touched his aching feet. “Do you know what I’m going to do for you?” Slowly he nodded.
I took the flask of oil, gave God thanks and praise, broke the seal, and poured the perfume to anoint him for his destiny. And as his tears began to flow I made my promise. “Whatever happens this week, my love, you will not be alone.”
April 4th, 2004
There’s a very physical, down-to-earth tone about our readings today. Naaman has to travel, has to bathe in river water, to get his promised healing. And not just any river, this river, in this land, to be healed by this God. Naaman is so impressed that in the verses following he carts back two donkey loads of this earth so he can have somewhere special to pray. His own corner of a foreign land.
The story is about locality. About the special-ness of places and times. About rituals and ways of doing things. And about easy answers to hard questions.
The moral of Naaman’s story—and Jesus’s too—is that we should take God where find her, enjoy God where he finds us. And not go looking for God in all the wrong places—or worse turn down the God we do meet because somehow the encounter has been too easy. There’s a streak in us that likes our religion tough and our God to play hard to get. But the God we get today is easy, here with us, under our noses.
March 16th, 2004
‘To us, Lord, the look of shame belongs …because we have sinned against you’. The look of shame is probably all too well known to us. Who among us is ignorant of failure and falsehood and the fear of being found out? The look of shame we know too well and the God who is great and to be feared. But shame can be cosy in its own way, an escape from life and love and risk and generosity.
What the gospel asks of us is altogether more difficult than shame—it is compassion, compassion and pardon.
In place of the tit-for-tat of shame and fear there is for us the reciprocity of compassion given and received, mercy given and received, forgiveness given and received, and—hardest of all—generosity given and received. To give is challenging, to receive … embarrassing. Especially to receive the way we are called to receive—full measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, great embarrassing laps-full of grace and goodness.
On retreat or off it, that’s the challenge: to be as generous in receiving as God is in giving.
March 8th, 2004
Next Posts
Previous Posts