Posts filed under 'Loyola Hall'
Retreat directors are a sneaky bunch—they often give today’s gospel to people coming on a retreat as an invitation to ‘come away to a quiet place by yourself and rest for a while’—and they completely leave out the bit about not actually getting any peace or quiet when you get there. All the clamouring crowds have worked out where you are going and they’ve got here ahead of you—asking, needing, occupying, bothering. Retreat directors don’t mention that bit. We wouldn’t want you emulating Jesus paying attention to the crowding distractions.
But Jesus does—pay attention—you get the sense almost against his better judgment. Despite his plans he is moved to pity. He can’t ignore the crowd because he sees them like sheep without a shepherd.
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July 23rd, 2006
Time to come out of the closet: I’m a CSI fan. (only the original of course…) Last time a scene struck me and stuck with me. A cop was talking about his wayward daughter. He’d been watching her on a street corner, drugged up, plying her trade as a prostitute. But he said all he could really see was the five-year old, her tongue sticking from the corner of her mouth with the effort of drawing a picture, sitting there colouring, absorbed, humming a bright tuneless song.
‘Let your peace come back to you’ – I like that phrase from the gospel – ‘if the house deserves it, let your peace descend on it; if it does not, let your peace come back to you’… Let your peace come back to you.
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July 13th, 2006
‘I will betroth you to myself for ever, betroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love. I will betroth myself to you faithfully and you will come to know the Lord.’
For years now I haven’t been able to call Jesus ‘Lord’. The word worms uneasy in my mouth and in my heart I always know that when I call him Lord, our Lord, the Lord, I am evading something. Jesus is not Lord to me. Once he was. But at some point he slipped in closer, ducked under my guard, and planted himself beside me. Since then calling him Lord has felt like a diversionary tactic, a way of keeping him at arms length—not that it stops me, from time to time, from doing just that.
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July 10th, 2006
‘When I am weak, I am strong’. Isn’t that a lie, a sweet lie? It sounds good, sounds holy, but it hides the fact that this world is run by the strong for the strong—and the weak, the weak have to get by with the crumbs from the strong man’s table.
Who bears the brunt of global warming but the starving poor of Africa? Who carries the cost of storm and hurricane but the weak that can’t get out of the way? Who pays the price of heat and cold but the old and neglected?
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July 9th, 2006
The storms we experience in the readings today are as ambiguous as any we face in our living. Are they destroying hurricanes or are they occasions when the veil is blown away to give a glimpse of God?
We have two storms, today. We hear God finally answering Job from the heart of the whirlwind—all noise and thunder and know-it-all. And we have the terrified disciples caught at sea by a squall while Jesus sleeps quietly on a cushion.
We have two awkward questions, too. We have Job the proverbial good man to whom bad things happen. Why? And we have the disciples making their heartfelt plea—‘Master, we are going under! Don’t you care?’
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June 25th, 2006
Pauline—one of the Loyola Hall team—Pauline spends most of late winter trying to convince the rest of us, at every meal, that the beech trees are about to get their leaves. The rest of us peer at the barren branches and enjoy ourselves pouring scorn on Pauline. This goes on regularly for weeks until she loses heart. Then one day you look out the window yourself and there they are—somehow the trees have crept up on you and covered themselves with green fuzz. And before you know it everywhere is bright with that fresh tender salad-y green.
Living in a garden like this one, that kind of thing happens all year round. There’s a particular dark-red rhododendron that pokes me in the eye once a year when one morning in early summer I pull back my curtains and somehow it has crept into full and blousy bloom when I’d swear it wasn’t even budding the night before.
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June 18th, 2006
We all make promises … and we all break them. Yes, we say, we will do X or Y or Z … but find A and B come to hand instead. Some promises we make lightly and in haste and renege on them with hardly a qualm. Other promises gather a life’s hope and commitment to a honed edge so sharp it draws blood when once again we cannot be who we thought we could.
Blood and promises. The ancient habit of blood sacrifice seems a strange way to seal a promise but even so many centuries later we can feel the weight and thrill and solemnity of sloshing around all that blood. The studiers of symbols say blood stands for life but you and I know blood means death and it is death that seals promises. We know it in the schoolyard: cross my heart and hope to die. We know it at the altar: till death us do part.
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June 15th, 2006
This is the one day of the year I wish I was a vegetarian. It’s a problem for me sitting at Sunday lunch eating my roast meat because it puts me in mind of just what it is to be a sheep. Being a sheep is all about the slaughter. I don’t like to think of Jesus as the Good Shepherd because, of course, then I’m a sheep and however well shepherded I might be I know it’s all to keep me fit and fat for the table. In the paintings the Good Shepherd is always carrying the lamb tenderly close to his heart but Sunday lunch reminds me that all the same it is a lamb led to the slaughter.
The symbol of the Passover lamb only makes it worse. The slaughter becomes sacrifice. Give the sheep a brain for a moment and wonder whether it would come quietly, whether it would be a willing sacrifice, and what it would think of the butcher who cuts its throat in worship.
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May 7th, 2006
There are two things going on here – the promise of life and the shock of its asking price.
A promise of life – but it’s more than about just being alive – it’s about having life in you. Do you ever feel that, inside? That you are alive, against the odds, breathing, beating, fragile, amazing. ‘Eternal life’ never captures that for me, it suggests life after death, suggests something preserved, suggests living on in some way forever, non-stop, endlessly. It makes me hope it’s not eternally a wet Bank Holiday weekend in Morecambe.
But it’s on offer, eternal life, and the offer makes me question what there is about my life I’d want to see extended and lived out for eternity. It begins to make me wonder about the quality of my life, about what in my life is worth the living, worth the loving.
And that’s what the phrase is really all about – eternal life is translator’s shorthand for the life of the age to come: the life of the age to come, the life of the kingdom, the life of the age of the messiah, the time when all those prophecies we hear in advent are at last here and in place – when justice and mercy met, when the banquet of fine wines is laid, when the lion lies down with the lamb, when there’s no more dying and no more crying. That’s what’s on offer here – not some endless, everlasting life we can have if we are very good and wait patiently – but the life of the kingdom now, here, today. A quality of life. A glorious life to have within you. Now. Alive.
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May 5th, 2006
Jesus has had a busy day as Luke tells it. First there’s the rising thing—whatever that was like—then a seven mile hike-cum-bible-study to Emmaus, a brief pause to break bread, and back to Jerusalem and this strange encounter with its awkward mood and fish supper, before another trek, this time out to Bethany to part from his friends in an act of blessing.
The only private moment Luke gives Jesus is his rising – all the rest of the day is spent on foot, on the move. In Acts, Luke spins out the single day into a full forty and gives Jesus time to do and say many things. But here in the Gospel it’s all go. Jesus has just the one day to say it all, do it all, and that pressure makes his choices count. Out of all he could have done – confounding Caiaphas, perturbing Pilate, conferring the secrets of the universe, or whatever – Jesus chooses two simple acts: he goes for a walk and he eats a meal, and both with friends.
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April 30th, 2006
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