Archive for 2005
At first sight there’s a contrast between the two readings today. The first reading is all full of haste and energy and speed. The Word coming to the rescue, saving the Israelites, giving them safe passage, re-making the world to make us free. And not just quietly let loose but light-hearted, skipping like lambs, singing like children. As the image goes it is God who takes the initiative and we who can only respond with songs of joy.
But the gospel good news sounds less promising: there’s not much singing and skipping going on. Just a promise that if we pester enough, if we threaten violence, if we are irritating enough then God might manage to right our wrongs. It sounds like the initiative has to be all ours and the labour unrelenting.
I reckon though we jump to conclusions if we put it that way around—if we see God as the harassed judge delaying the justice that we are nagging for. Isn’t it a cop-out to leave all the justice to God—aren’t the reins of righteousness in our own hands? Aren’t we the ones who make the laws and bend them? Aren’t we the ones who elect the politicians we deserve? Isn’t justice ours to make or break?
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November 12th, 2005
The war to end all wars didn’t.
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November 11th, 2005
Another cracking piece from WaiterRant. Marvellous!
November 8th, 2005
I’ve just been wrapping up an article for the British Jesuit’s spirituality journal The Way. The paper is about spiritual direction and the choices a director makes to follow one thread and set aside others. It should appear in January 2006.
Some time back (October 2004) I published another paper in The Way, this time on a relatively neglected suggestion found in The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. The suggestion in question is this:
A step or two in front of the place where I am to contemplate or meditate, I will stand for the length of an Our Father, raising my mind above and considering how God our Lord is looking at me, etc., and make an act of reverence or humility.
I try to show that buried in this rather dry injunction is a rich spirituality of personal relationship with God. You can download a PDF version or read on…
Continue Reading November 6th, 2005
Seems like dreams can go two ways. Ever had one of those nightmares where you are being chased down long corridors through tangled forests towards the ever receding safety of a half-open door? That door can go two ways: slam shut behind you with a flood or relief or slam shut in your face with whatever ravening monster ready to wake you up frantic and panting. Dreams can go two ways.
This parable isn’t quite a nightmare—though Matthew tries to make it one. You might be mortified if the door to the wedding feast slams shut but its not life or death—it’s only a party—though ‘I do not know you’ is ominous enough. And all because of a little oil. 50% of us consigned to oblivion over a little oil.
The door’s the problem here—not the oil, not the lamps, and not the bridesmaids. The sound of that door slamming is decisive; when that door closes you’re either in or out. Tough!
Is this the God we know? Tough on crime. No excuses. You had your chance? It’s certainly the God some people swear by. There’s a whole religious industry built around misreading our second reading, waiting for the door to slam shut so the righteous can be carried aloft to watch their unfortunate families and friends left behind and locked out of heaven. If that’s your God you don’t need to worry about global warming or waging war for oil—it’ll all be over soon anyway and before the dream becomes a nightmare you’ll be on the right side of the door.
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November 6th, 2005
They are all at it today. It’s an orgy of self-justification. The parable’s full of it. Paul’s full of it. And even our feast of Charles Borromeo hints of it. How do we do things right? How do we run our diocese, or live out our calling, or just make an easy living? If no one were watching it might all be easy. Who cares what a mess we make if we’re not caught out? Who’s bothered by the corners we cut if the boss is away?
But don’t we feel all the time that we are under scrutiny? There’s always someone to pick us up on what we’ve done, or done badly, or not done at all. And not just irate employers—there’s friends and family and community we live with. Don’t you wish they’d get off your back? Don’t you wish they’d let up? Don’t you wish you could have some peace and quiet?
Maybe that’s why you’ve come on retreat? To get away from it all. To leave the prying eye’s behind. To be left alone.
But then look what they do! They bring out crafty and dishonest stewards, apostles busy with their own self-assessment, and dead bishops who ran a tight ship.
Worst of all though is the all-seeing eye you bring along yourselves. The critical voice that will never quite quit. And I don’t mean God. I mean the personal inner tyrant that sounds like God, pretends to be God, but wears a disapproving frown.
If you want some peace and quiet, if you want to hear the real voice of the real God, you’re going to need to leave the inner critic at the front door and listen instead for the real God, the God who praises the strangest people for the damnedest things. If you opened your ears and relaxed your heart this evening what would you hear God praising you for … even you, even now.
November 4th, 2005
You can’t take it with you, they say. And they’re right. We come into this world naked, defenceless and dependent. And that’s the way we leave it. Our barns can be bursting but we can’t carry a single loaf across death’s threshold to save our hungry souls.
I like the way God says ‘Fool!’ today. ‘Idiots’ he calls us, ‘dunderheads’, because we never quite kick the habit of barn-building. We never quite give up the hope that there is something we can take with us—loot might be out … but there must be a way, a way to pay for our lives, a way for them not just to be wasted, whether its good works or piety or perfect faith. Aren’t our days for something? We are born, we die but surely the time in between is worth something?
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October 17th, 2005
‘Put the sickle in, the harvest is ripe’, says Joel. It’s a common prophetic theme: the end-time, the restoration and reprieve of the chosen people. And all the imagery yokes harvest and judgment: the sickle, the threshing floor, the winnowing fan. It’s even there in the gospels. My New Testament teacher liked to point out that John the Baptizer comes with prophecies of end-time, of judgment, of reaping and winnowing and bonfires burning—all the sense of smoke and autumn and ending—but that Jesus speaks instead of seeds and shoots and green things growing. The good news of Jesus is a beginning and not an end, a fresh start and not a wearing out, spring not fall. I like that. I like the open possibility of … anything, of potential, of hope.
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But today, with Joel, I found autumn redeeming itself for me. The winepress did it. Joel imagines the harvest of judgment, the cutting down of the wicked, the violent end of the violators. But he’s possessed of a strange glee that seems to go beyond ordinary vindictiveness, because the greater the wickedness, the mightier the harvest. The winepress is full and the vats are overflowing. This isn’t just a bonfire of stubble and weeds and waste. Joel is rejoicing that great wrong is being transformed into un-containable good. When God squeezes hard enough even the wickedness of the world runs with juice and joy and flows with wine. A wedding’s worth of wine.
This is the fulfilment of all those green promises of spring. It’s the ripening of those summer fields of wheat and weeds. It’s at last a true judgement on the world—a promise that nothing will be wasted, that even horrors we can’t encompass can and will in God’s creativity be redeemed, reworked, remade.
It’s the Eucharist in reverse: broken bodies reborn as bread and blood once spilled re-poured as wine.
We live between the times. But every Eucharist we share is a taste of that mystery, a hint of that glee, a promise of it, pledged in the body and blood of one who held back nothing and invites us to the same gift.
October 8th, 2005
There’s something almost comforting about dear old Malachi. It could be a Conservative Party conference in Blackpool. ‘Look at the state of the world. Look at what we’ve come to. Look how things have gone to the dogs.’ It seems things haven’t been the way they used to be for at least a few thousand years.
Malachi’s complaint is that you can’t tell the bad from the good any more. In two senses. The bad guys aren’t getting their comeuppance any more. In fact we rather admire them—the arrogant, the go-ahead, the ruthless—and covet the blessings they inherit.
Malachi’s solution is appropriately apocalyptic. The day is coming, burning like a furnace and all the arrogant and the evil will be burnt up like stubble. But the others, the good guys—let’s hope that us—well, God makes allowances for us like the good sons and daughters we are.
Malachi wants to call a spade a spade—he wants clear labels sown on our clothes to mark the evil out from the good—he wants no ambiguity, no shades of grey. No more embarrassment when bad guys prosper and good guys suffer. The day is here when God gets tough on crime and we get a ringside seat at the show.
Jesus on the other hand is asking us to take a step back and a step inward. He’s asking us to entertain two awkward truths at one time. It’s this: we, who are evil, know how to give our children what is good. Malachi’s division runs right through us. We are good guy and bad guy all at once. In here.
In here we know ourselves cruel and kind, compassionate and callous, arrogant and humble. And somehow God looks upon our divided hearts, puts away the furnaces and fires, and brings out the eggs and fish and bread. God finds himself a father and mother of exasperating kids. Wicked and delightful brats with all the potential to be a Mother Teresa or another Hitler or just another loved sinner. And what does God do? She feeds us. She brings out the bread and wine and waits to see how her children will surprise her.
October 6th, 2005
Another powerful post from waiterrant: read it.
October 6th, 2005
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