Posts filed under 'Loyola Hall'
Maybe I just haven’t reached that age yet but I find it hard to get worked up over death. Let me be clear: I don’t want to die and dying scares me silly but as to what happens next … well I’m happy right now to leave that to the goodness of God.
But it’s clearly an issue that exercises street-corner evangelists who want to know if you are saved. They look rather disappointed if you say yes. And it’s an issue that clearly exercised Jesus contemporaries. ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’
I guess it depends on what the alternative is. Sheol, as the first reading describes it, is horrible not for its torments but for its drab dullness. Death for the ancient Hebrews was a shadowy place where not much happened—a dry and dusty place where praise and play and all the delights of living—and its pains—could find no home.
But it is not Sheol the Christian faces at death. The story we have been told about death makes it a fork in road with the highway to heaven and the low way leading down to fire and worm and just desserts. But my heart isn’t in that story. Maybe I’m too touched by some modern malaise but I can’t see myself in hell—my imagination fails me.
And yet I want to be saved. I feel the need deep in my bones. But saved from what? … I’m not sure … but there’s something in the invitation Jesus gives the rich man that moves me. Leave everything and follow me. You’d think that giving away the good riches of life was one step too soon to Sheol and its gloomy, stripped-down place past praise. But as Jesus hints what we have we lack and what we lose we gain. Somehow there is praise on offer, an open-handed overflowing of praise, in the letting go, the letting loose.
I want to be saved from what I have. I want to well up with praise for no reason at all, but love.
And for me that is impossible. But if Jesus should look at me steadily and if I should see love in his eyes … who knows what might break out in my impoverished heart.
May 23rd, 2005
We ask for peace and forgiveness and we get wind and fire. I lived in California for nine years, in the Bay Area. There’s a wind that blows there in October. It’s a wind that puts the fear of God in you. For a few days the weather heats up, the air wheezes, and this fierce, dry wind whips up the dust and throws it in your face. And the brown hills, tinder-dry after a long rainless summer, begin to crackle and hiss. You see these people standing in the street looking off to the horizon, praying it will not be dark; others will turn their heads as they walk, lifting them at the hint of a whiff of a scent of smoke. For the wind of October fans any spark to full flame and puts fire on the hills which races, driven, eating houses and gardens as it goes. Fifteen years ago only a freak lull in the driving winds saved the city of Berkeley from being burnt down to the ocean’s edge. So everyone waits when the wind changes, sniffing the air. Everyone has buckets of water handy … just in case. The wise have mowed their dusty lawns and swept leaves from their roofs. Everyone waits. The feel of it is eerie—no one wants fire but by god we are all excited—alert, alive, ready to run. It’s a wind of change—feared and loved and wondered at. And it’s what we celebrate today. A wind to blow us all off our feet, turn us like tumbling embers through the avenues of our imagination, and drop us who knows where, doing who knows what. And God doesn’t religious life need that! Doesn’t Church life need that! Doesn’t our world need that! And don’t we fear it and love it and wonder what it might be like? The strangest thing about Pentecost is that wind of change with its fiery tongues. Though it scatters the disciples from their hidden rooms and changes their lives forever, it burns away the one excuse that has separated us since time of myth. These fire-drunk idiots are in the streets undoing the curse of Babel. Babble as they might they cannot be misunderstood. The wind and fire bring a healing, a language, a calling: the peace and forgiveness we have been longing for. And by God we need it: think of all the divisions in us and in our world; the ways we tear apart and are torn; the bitterness; the incomprehension; the fear, the war, the hunger, the oppression. Pentecost seals the fate of the Christian community: we are driven by wind and fire to gather what has been scattered; to understand; to heal; to cross borders and banish barriers. It’s a utopian vision but the people that first Pentecost couldn’t see it; they weren’t praying for it, they didn’t expect it … but when the wind began to blow and the fire followed they were ready to burn. They went up like tinder. Something kindled in them. They burst into flame. And that’s the prayer I can’t quite bring myself to pray today: let me be kindling! Let us be the kingdom’s kindling!
May 17th, 2005
There’s a strange sense of time here: time approaching and time receding. Paul is trekking inevitably to Rome where he will die, and Jesus, beyond death, is promising Peter life … and death—a life spent nourishing and a letting go at its end.
We chose this last part of John, as novices, for our vows. Answering a call we were, and knowing the call both our deepest desire and our reluctant response: somebody else putting a belt around us and taking us where we would rather not go … but going gladly.
John Paul chose it for his requiem—maybe seeking a summation of his life, maybe hungering for the next.
Benedict chose it for his inauguration—maybe making a promise, maybe asking exoneration, maybe praying in hope.
Pentecost is waiting for us … a harvest festival and a new spring … and beyond it … ordinary time.
What is being promised us today before and beyond the ordinary? What can we not foresee that draws us forward? And what is asking to be loosed from our overburdened hands?
May 13th, 2005
I hate homilies that begin with an apology or a complaint … so I apologise about the following complaint! … Don’t the readings today leave you caught between two worlds? Acts is so prosaic—this happened, that happened: it could be the minutes of a meeting—and John is so … John—mystical, wordy, repetitive, obscure, strangely beautiful…
Now I could set this homily up as one against the other—the plain and worldly vs. the sublime and spiritual—but that would do justice to neither Luke nor John, nor—especially—to our own lives. The story Luke tells in Acts might be dressed up as secular history but it’s a story of faith, faith acted and acting, a story of God at work even in the minutes of a meeting. And John, well John often speaks straight in crooked words but his Jesus, however obscure, however much he seems to hover an inch off the ground, his Jesus is grounded in the earthy details of human life. John it is who so often speaks as though he was there: at 4 o’clock invited to come and see, or naming the women around the cross, or putting real words into the disciples’ mouths.
Both Luke and John are in the business of gospel, good news and the good news is we are not split in two. We don’t have secular lives which take turns with our life of faith; it’s not right vs. left. We have one rich and intricate existence where God is alongside us constantly in our loving and our working, our sleep, our politics, our prayer. The Good News is that God is as much at home in what we, in our audacity, allege is the secular world, as God is often absent in what we piously hope are our sacred rites and institutions.
Anywhere we look we might see God; anywhere we go we might touch God. For even now God is beside us reaching out to touch: is that touch tender, is it strong, is it urging on or holding back? Only you can tell. Even now God is looking upon us—in delight, in hope, in challenge, in joy, in compassion?—and in that look we might know ourselves whole and entire for the first time.
April 20th, 2005
The other years of the cycle of readings are a lot easier to handle than this one. They focus on the shepherd, on the one who guides us, the one who’s voice we know, the one we can be certain of. But today we have an image I find altogether more uncomfortable: ‘I tell you most solemnly, I am the gate of the sheepfold’. The gate. I guess it’s an image about safety and safekeeping: ‘anyone who enters through me will be safe; he will go freely in and out and be sure of finding pasture’. But I’m not sure I like the image… I do want to be safe, I’m sure of that. But gates can be shut as well as open; gates keep out as well as letting in. Maybe our safety depends on thieves and murderers being kept out. Maybe for us to have life to the full some others have to have far less. Maybe.
We have a problem with gates here. They keep breaking down. They get stuck on open. The local kids climb them, fiddle them, abuse them. To us the gates are a necessary evil. They deter vandals and car thieves. They keep the grounds quiet so that John’s garden can be the place of peace we want it to be for our retreatants. They keep the grounds a safe place to walk in at night. Or at least they should. We want them to.
But for a necessary evil our gates are quite grand, all wrought iron and gold leaf, with the name of Jesus on each one: the gate of the sheepfold.
Retreatants often say they feel a real sense of peacefulness when they come through those gates to this oasis. But it’s an oasis won with iron bars and barbed wire.
What do our neighbours think? What do the kids who sneak past them think? How do they see this place? Forbidden? Mysterious? A place to hide? A place for pranks?
Robert Frost says, ‘before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence’.
We know here what we are walling out but what are we walling in?
I’m not talking about Loyola Hall but about the Church.
April 17th, 2005
The death of Stephen marks the beginning of a great persecution of the Jerusalem Christians. Saul thinks he sees his life’s work: to destroy the Jesus-movement entirely. But the way Luke tells it he only succeeds in spreading the gospel on the tongues of scattered believers.
There’s an irony in the very word Luke uses for the persecuted people. Church he calls them—in Greek ecclesia—meaning the gathering. It is the gathered people of God who are scattered. The ones called together who spread the word by being flung apart. The gathering grows by being un-gathered.
We can read that as an irony for Saul—especially since we know the change of role and name coming up for him. But it’s also ironic for everyone involved. Though ironic doesn’t really capture the pain, the uprooting, the imprisonment. Is the Church being destroyed or being built up? Who are the heroes of the story and who are just the walk-on parts, the extras, history’s cannon fodder?
Don’t we wonder that in our own lives from time to time? Particularly at times of scattering, when the fabric is fraying, and the unknown opens ahead of us. Are we extras in someone else’s drama or is this our moment, the chance to speak our lines from the heart and move the great story on.
John has thought about that: “The will of the one who sent me is that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me and that I should raise it up on the last day”.
In his way of telling the story there are no extras, there are no loose threads or wasted lives: each of us is at the heart of the tale. As God sees it, each of us is the axle history turns upon. You and I, each one of us is the hero of a story that has God riveted.
April 13th, 2005
An image from this morning’s papal funeral has been haunting me all day: it’s the small, plain, rather ordinary wooden coffin in the middle of all the splendour and ceremony filling the square. Just a simple box. And around it cardinals and bishops, prime ministers and presidents, and weeping, cheering pilgrims from all over. Just a wooden box.
…
Gamaliel gives good advice today: wait and see. Here’s the full might of the nation’s priests and scholars, lawmakers and law enforcers—the Sanhedrin—and in their middle just a couple of scruffy Galileans. Are they worth suppressing? Wait and see, he says. Christianity then was a handful of men and women with little going for them but a boldness and a crazy vision. Just a very few, a handful. Will they survive? Wait and see.
…
Despite the choirs and the cameras aren’t we heading that way ourselves—at least in Europe—dwindling to a handful. Our churches echo to empty words, the culture at large cannot take us seriously, while we argue among ourselves about trivia. Will we survive?
…
The Jesuits in this country have a single novice. In the six months he’s been with us half a dozen of us have died. Not long before we are just a handful. Will we survive? Will we be enough? Wait and see, says Gamaliel. Not much of an encouragement!
Jesus has encouragement aplenty but the price may not appeal to us. A handful, he says, is all he needs. A couple of fish and few lumps of bread. Will it be enough? He doesn’t wait and see. He wastes it. He takes it, blesses it, breaks it and gives it all away to feed a waiting world.
Not so many months on, he does the same, does it with his own body and blood, wastefully, in an attic room, while the Passover rages all around him. That was enough.
We only need a handful, only need to be a handful, if we are willing to throw it all away and waste it. Take it, bless it, break it, and give it away.
April 8th, 2005
It seems there are two ways for a preacher to play this gospel and in my time I’ve done both. Either doubt is a bad thing and Thomas’s a cautionary tale to make us believe blindly or doubt is good and Thomas is an image for us to imitate. The first approach is easy: John puts words into Jesus mouth – ‘Doubt no longer but believe’. The second is harder to pull off persuasively but you have that great profession of faith to work with: ‘My Lord and my God!’
Right now I’m feeling that both these miss the point. We are tricked by a name into making this story about doubt but I doubt it is. … What is it that the others believe yet Thomas will not? For me the clue is in the extra evidence Thomas demands: he doesn’t just want to see the Risen Jesus he wants to see his wounds—touch the holes made by nail and lance. I think that’s Thomas’s stumbling block—not that Jesus might be Risen but that Jesus Risen should still be wounded, still bear the mark of his failure, his shameful execution.
What does it mean for us that even resurrection cannot heal those wounds? What kind of happy ending is it if the holes in the fabric never get mended? What kind of God is it who wears such shame with pride?
I find myself torn. I love those wounds—they may be all that God and I have in common—my truest link to him, my surest unbreakable bond. But I hate them too—they seem … a flaw in things, an ugliness. I want my own wounds, my shame and shallowness gone. I want the touch of grace to make me whole and entire. I want the holes mended, the faults forgotten, the death undone.
Yet here is my Lord, my God, scarred, gashed, wounded.
…
I’m torn another way too. Why does Jesus only show himself to his friends? Why doesn’t he arrive in a flash of thunder on Pilate’s doorstep and teach him about truth? Why doesn’t he show Caiaphas once and for all the worth of a life? Why doesn’t he … well you can name the terms. He died, he rose, and still the rich oppress the poor, still we starve and suffer, still we murder in his name.
The fabric is still frayed, there are holes. The world is wounded like our God is wounded.
And we are given today a gift and a duty. The gift, the promise, is this: that when we put our fingers into those holes we will know and understand our God, and even ourselves. The duty? The duty is to be for the world what the Risen Christ has been for us.
April 3rd, 2005
It’s a long story but it asks a short question: where should we look to see God? And this drama enacts two answers to that question: there’s an exclusion and an inclusion. And it all comes down to what you think the Sabbath means.
Either the Sabbath serves to separate those who observe it—the good guys—from those who don’t—sinners all—thereby limiting God by the Law. Or the Sabbath stands as an opportunity for God to reveal God’s ever more creative goodness and kindness to us, unfinished creations that we are.
…
To the religious authorities in the story God has stopped creating and things are the way they are and if you are blind then someone’s broken the law somewhere. But to Jesus creation is open ended and God never rests from creative compassion.
And look what a difference it makes: To what we think of sin. What we think of suffering. What we think of God.
How do you know where God is and God isn’t? To some it is clear because the lines are sharply drawn. Who is in and who is out is black and white—not a grey area in sight. And sinners are easy to spot and easy to exclude.
But Jesus redefines sin. It’s not crossing some line that makes a sinner. What makes a sinner is drawing the line; seeing the differences between us in terms of guilt and fault and failing.
It comes down to this: Is God a little tribal deity, sleeping out his latter years, while his kingdom is administered by religious bureaucrats? Or is God Creator of all and endlessly unstoppable in her ingenuity and fecundity and grace?
That’s a question we all need to answer whether on retreat or a course or on the team. Where do I go looking for God? And where do I not look, never look, because I’ve drawn the line.
How creative will I let God be?
March 5th, 2005
The Law and the Land … that’s the strange link that’s forged all through this part of Deuteronomy. The Law and the Land.
The Law is given for the sake of the Land. So that the people might enter the land of promise and live there. The Land is given for the sake of the Law. So that the all the nations might gaze on Israel and marvel that such a Law—and such a God—lives among them.
You get the feeling that it is no arbitrary Law Moses offers them—not just a book of rules—not just what God thought up that day—you get the feeling the Law comes with the Land. God may be the giver, and it may be human hands that carve the stone, but the law rises up from the soil and blows in the breeze down from the hillsides. The law of God and the law of the Land.
Land given and Law given and, between the two, the one God who burned and thundered on the mountain at Sinai. All that divine energy channelled by Law and making the Land live. And the people with the touch of the land under them and crackle of heaven above them the envy of their neighbours who clamour for such a law for themselves, for such a God—drawn near in the Law, into the Land.
That’s the offer Moses makes. Take up the Law and enter the Land and God will live in the midst of you … not just in tabernacle and sacrifice but in waking and sleeping, in herding and tilling, making a living, loving a friend, baking the bread, wiping the dust from your eyes. Land and Law.
Lent. And the voice of our Land has fallen silent these days and we rarely hear it speak with power. All the mystery is gone. All the holy fear. And the nuclear pulse of God’s presence hardly crackles among us either. Maybe in here we still hear the dying echoes … but the deafening roar of divinity seems to have left our land.
When were you last astonished by the bare soil under your soles? When were you last burned by an electric holiness too powerful to contain?
Personally … it’s been a while … … but I hope and I wonder … What would it take for us, once more, to enter the Land and Live?
March 2nd, 2005
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