Mopping up after the Battle of the Pasch

I have a mission sermon I use from time to time on the "mopping up operation" in which we were enlisted at our Baptism, It's the "mopping up operation" following the decisive victory over evil that has been won by our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. That kind of image explains some of the paradoxes of the Christian life. So I was thrilled to see the following on Fr Robert Barron's blog, and I share it with you:

In the last days, mopping up after the Battle of the Pasch, 

this life can be grubby and hard

As Christians we rejoice for Jesus Christ is Lord. God is King. Sin and death have been defeated. At the same time, we mustn’t succumb to a “cheap grace” interpretation of Christianity, whereby Christ is risen and all is well. As Julian of Norwich said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Notice the future tense!

The definitive battle has been won, but the war continues. St. Paul knew this well. His strategy, as we know, was to go to synagogues first, for the message he had was a distinctively Jewish message: that the long-awaited Messiah had come.

Many Jews listened – and this was the beginning of Paul’s church. We hear that in Antioch practically the whole city gathered to listen to Paul and Barnabas. But “when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy and with violent abuse contradicted what Paul said.” Please don’t fall into an anti-Semitic trap here, for many of the Jews did listen to him. But from the beginning, this message was opposed.

Why? The most basic reason is that acknowledging the Lordship of Jesus means that your life has to change. For many this is liberating good news, but for others it is a tremendous threat. If Jesus is Lord, my ego cannot be Lord. My country cannot be Lord. My convictions or culture cannot be Lord.

The Resurrection is the clearest indication of the Lordship of Jesus. This is why the message of the Resurrection is attacked, belittled, and explained away. The author of Acts speaks of the “violent abuse” hurled at Paul. What was Paul’s reaction to this? He “shook the dust from [his] feet in protest against them, and went to Iconium” where he was “filled with joy and the Holy Spirit.”

We’re up against a great mystery here. We are called to announce the good news to everyone, but not everyone will listen. Once we’ve done our work, we should move on and not obsess about those who won’t listen. Why do some respond and some don’t? Finally, that’s up to God.

Stratford Caldecott R.I.P. Some great words . . .

On July 17, Stratford Caldecott, the British Catholic theologian, author and editor died after a lengthy and painful struggle with cancer aged just 60. With his wife, Léonie, he  was the founder of Second Spring, a journal of faith and culture, and also co-editor of Magnificat UK. A member of the editorial board of the International Theological Journal Communio, he was the author of a number of books, including: Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education and The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He was the G.K. Chesterton Research Fellow at Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and received an honorary doctorate in Theology from the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C. 

Read more about him HERE.

Back in 1996 he co-ordinated an international conference of the Centre for Faith and Culture held at Westminster College, Oxford, on the subject of renewing the Church’s liturgical prayer. The papers were subsequently published. The paragraphs below are part of his summing up. Rich in beauty, profound in their understanding of God’s way with us, as well as of the nature of our response, they  are “vintage” Stratford Caldecott. I share them with you in the hope that you will be inspired to read his books. May he rest in peace.

“Worship . . . must be a whole-body, a whole-person experience. This fuller participation can best be promoted not by the introduction of more physical activity (hymn-singing, liturgical dance, etc.) but by the greater use of the senses in liturgy, as well as a greater sensitivity to the richness of metaphor and controlled ambiguity in liturgical language. What we seem to be seeing, in general, is a growing awareness that beauty is a vital aspect of liturgical performance, conducive to ‘active participation’ in the deepest sense. The hope for a rapprochement with Eastern Orthodoxy, and the growing familiarity throughout the West with aspects of the rich Byzantine liturgical, theological and iconographic tradition (to a large extent already present within the Catholic Church through the Eastern rites), is another factor working in the same direction. The evident splendour and elaborate formality of the Oriental liturgies is not for all, but contact with it can still awaken an understanding of the original purpose of liturgy, and a longing for deep religious experience that may have been denied to those steeped in more action-oriented or secularised celebrations.

“The danger to be avoided, of course, is that of falling back into a kind of mystification. But with the vernacular safely established and the laity thoroughly aroused I personally doubt this is a serious problem. An even greater danger now comes from presenting the Mass and the prayer life of the Church as something stale and prosaic, and therefore unrelated to the work of self-transformation. When this happens, and when the purpose of the sacraments comes to be seen in ‘moralistic’ terms - as a way of inculcating good behaviour and loyalty to the Church of Rules - people vote with their feet, and flock to the New Age movement, where they will gladly fast, or spend days on their knees reciting mantras, or even learn Sanskrit, for a chance of experiencing a numinous reality beyond the ordinary. In such circumstances, the use of Latin or the reintroduction of traditional devotions to the Blessed Sacrament can help to revive the feeling that what is going on in the Mass is not a banal celebration of the community’s solidarity with itself, but the sacred enactment of a ritual with truly cosmic significance - even if the inner meaning of the words and actions does not reveal itself without the accompaniment of silent prayer:

‘What you have come to is nothing known to the senses: not a blazing fire, or a gloom turning to total darkness, or a storm; or trumpeting thunder or the great voice speaking which made everyone that heard it beg that no more should be said to them. . . . But what you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a “first-born son” and a citizen of heaven’. (Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-23)

“The auguries are therefore good for a widespread revival of Catholic spirituality in the next century [i.e. this century] - perhaps reinvigorated by the expansion of the Church in the Third World, and the development of innumerable new movements and communities from Taizé to Focolare, from Neocatechumenate to the charismatics. Religious consciousness in general is mystical poetic, sensitive to the many-layered meanings of symbolism, aware of the correspondences and analogies which bind the universe together. Catholicism and Orthodoxy provide a home for such a consciousness by being essentially sacramental. Even their ecclesial structures exist for the sake of the sacraments and the spiritual life these are designed to nourish. For this reason, any recovery of religious sensibility must in the long run work in favour of traditional sacramental and liturgical forms, even as it enriches and transforms them.

“For a ‘sacramental Christian’, the life of Christ is distributed through the Church and throughout the liturgical year. We relive the entire cycle of his self-giving life, death, resurrection and sending of the Spirit. Time and space, drained of meaning by sin and secularism, can he resanctified by Christ’s presence, flowing through the sacramental organism of his ‘Mystical Body’. By participating in the Mass and the Church’s daily prayer, baptised believers are caught up in Christ’s sacrifice, so that all we are and do in our daily lives is given to the Father for him to raise from the dead. That fact is what energises, heals and transforms us in the common life of the Christian community.”

Stratford Caldecott, ed. Beyond the Prosaic: Renewing the Liturgical Movement (1998), 

T&T Clark Ltd, Edinburgh, pages 153-154

Swept into the Community of Love

Medieval stained glass windows in Exeter Cathedral

Have you ever been down the wrong end of town in a large city and come across an old church building with windows that look grubby, dark and boring, only to be dazzled by their colour when you see them from the inside? 

Stumbling upon the Christian Faith is a bit like that. From the outside it looks unpromising indeed, - and especially considering the failings of church communities and those who lead them.

But one day we decide to explore. 

We don’t put it into these words at this stage, but we are “prompted” or “nudged” by the Holy Spirit to have a look inside. Maybe it's after growing up and drifting away from church. Or maybe it's a brand new experience. But something happens! Just like being dazzled by the world of colour and beauty that opens up to us as the sun’s light streams through that window.

Of course, some people take longer than others to begin making sense out of the picture, the patterns and the different coloured glass. But we don’t have to understand every bit of the window to see how as a whole it makes sense, or to experience the new vision of glory that it has brought to our soul.

When we look closely we notice the dark bits of glass as well as the strips of heavy black lead that hold it all together. We step back again and they disappear into the vision as a whole.

Isn’t that like the suffering and pain we experience, the injustices we endure, and the unfairness of life that makes us weep? We dare not try to explain why good people suffer in ways that torture their souls and ours. But we do try to step back and see the whole picture, and sometimes, even when we are hurting badly, we can't help being dazzled by glory and we cry out to God in the words of a man who had seen everything he held dear crumble around him: “Great is thy faithfulness . . . the Lord is my portion” (Lamentations 3:22-24).

It’s not just the question of suffering that bamboozles us!

Think about the Trinity, the idea that God is Three and God is One. Even some Christians get embarrassed about this idea. (I can assure readers that over the years I have had curates who desperately asked not to preach on Trinity Sunday!!!) 

Christian teachers have always pointed out that by thinking logically about the world, and by following what seems to be our inbuilt “instinct for transcendence,” it is possible to arrive at belief in the existence of “God”, and to make tentative observations about some of his attributes. But to go further than that we are dependent on revelation.

Where did the idea of the Trinity come from? Was it (as Dan Brown suggests in The Da Vinci Code) unheard of until the 4th century when Emperor Constantine “enforced” the idea of Christ’s divinity on the Church? Hardly. St Gregory of Nyssa, also 4th century, points out that there was no more adequate a theologian than the Lord himself, who without compulsion or mistake designated the Godhead “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (See Matthew 28:19). The word “Trinity” simply sums up the revelation about God that is clearly found in the teaching and actions of Jesus as experienced by his followers. St Athanasius, also 4th century, makes it clear that Christians had always had used the terms “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when speaking about God as Three Persons in One, a community of love.

Therein lies the real issue. What for YOU is at the heart of the universe? A vacuum? An impersonal force? A solitary Being (i.e. a lawgiver, an intelligent designer, or a cosmic megalomaniac)? JESUS revealed to us that the heart of the universe is a COMMUNITY OF LOVE.

Furthermore, he claimed that in him - in a special way - this life-giving love spilled out of eternity and into time. Through his incarnation, his life, his dying and rising, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, we are enabled (“in him”) to be incorporated into the eternal flow of love which is God’s inner life. Jesus empowers you and me to share that life forever.

From the Orthodox tradition, Fr Thomas Hopko put it this way: 

“Even Christian prayer is the revelation of the Trinity . . . Inspired by the Holy Spirit, we can call God ‘our Father’ only because of the Son who has taught us and enabled us to do so. Thus, the true prayer of Christians is not the calling out of our souls in earthly isolation to a far-away God. It is the prayer in us of the divine Son of God made to his Father, accomplished by the Holy Spirit who himself is also divine.”

For the rest of our lives and for the whole of eternity we will ponder the wonder of this Mystery with whom our lives are entwined. For now it is enough to stand back a little from the window and allow ourselves to be dazzled by the beauty of God's self-revelation, caught up with the company of heaven in wonder, love and praise.

Bede Griffiths on liturgy, art and worship

Bede Griffiths OSB Cam (1906-1993), was a British-born Indian Benedictine monk and spiritual director who lived in ashrams in South India. He became a pioneer of the developing dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism. The following is from The Golden String: An Autobiography (1954), the book he wrote detailing his conversion to Christianity and his eventual embrace of the monastic life. 

Just as the pagan who contemplated the course of nature, the movement of the stars, the dying of the vegetation in the winter and its rising again in the spring, strove to participate in the divine mystery and to share in the divine life; so the Christian who contemplates the life of Christ, desires to share in that life, to die with him and to rise again to a new and immortal life. This is the mystery which underlies the sacred liturgy. It is a means by which the Christian may share in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The ancient music of the chant, the ceremonial of the sanctuary, the use of candles and incense, are all so many signs by which the sacred drama may be impressed on the soul and become part of its own inner life. . . 

It is here that the true function of art becomes apparent. Art, like everything else in modern life, has become separated from religion; but in the earliest times it was not so. The function of art, from the earliest times, has been to invoke the divine presence. Man can only approach the divine mystery by means of images, and it is the work of the artist to represent or 'make present' the divine mystery in an image in such a way that the people enter into communion with it . . . 

To take part in the liturgy is not merely to be a spectator of this art and drama. It is to share mystically in the life and resurrection of Christ, to receive the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and to participate in the Communion of Saints. Here all the arts are combined in the exercise of their highest function. The architecture of the church, the sculpture and painting on the walls, the music of the chant, and the colour and shape of the vestments and the hangings on the altar, the ceremonies of the sanctuary, as solemn and rhythmic as a ritual dance, are all used to show forth the mystery of the Divine Word; to manifest it not in abstract terms to the reason only, but in its concrete embodiment, appealing to eye and ear, to sense and imagination, to heart and soul. Yet all this outward splendour is strictly subordinated to its end, to enable the soul to pass through the outward form to its inner meaning . . . This is what gives it all a timeless character. It is the representation of the mystery of the Eternal, the Light coming out of darkness, the Word being born out of the Silence, God becoming man . . .