Feast of St. Francis - The Blessing of the Animals

 On Sunday October 3^rd my friend Rev. Mary Florence invited me to share a reflection at the Eucharist and the Blessing of the Animals for the feast of St. Francis.  So, accompanied by my two poodles, we set forth. It was a very joyous occasion with the human community very welcoming and the animal community very well behaved with each other.  This is the text of my reflection.

The readings for the Eucharist were:

Job 12:7-10

Isaiah 11:1-4a, 6, 9 (canticle)

Rom. 8:22-28

Lk. 12:22-34

My Text:

A theme running through the three readings and the canticle today is the reign of God and what it might look like.  It has indeed pleased the Father to give us the Kingdom - and not just us humans, but all creation is drawn into this new life of the Resurrection.

All living creatures are so integral to our identity - whether from the point of biodiversity of the planet to the animals who support our existence to our pets who share our lives and our homes.  We are all part of that great unity of creation St. Paul writes about in today’s reading as we are moved by the Spirit to the fullness of creation in Christ.

For me, St. Francis is such an example of this Spirit-directed humanity.  He so surrendered himself in love to the God of Jesus that he saw all creation for what it is - an expression of Trinitarian love that was transparent with God’s glory and redemptive love.   This was the very ground of his reverence for and delight in all things.  There was no romantic sentimentality in his relationship with creation.  He saw with the eyes of redeemed love.  St. Bonaventure, the great follower of St. Francis described this revelatory nature of creation as seeing the footprints of God in creation.

Nature was so transparent for Francis that a lamb would remind him of Jesus, the Lamb of God; doves (which he always bought and released) reminded him of the peace of Christ.  Two twigs crossed - the Cross of Jesus - and then he would pick them up and turn them into a fiddle to sing and play the praises of God.  He would not let the brothers destroy the grasses and flowers growing around the friaries because they gave praise to God and Francis’ preaching to the birds was his response to Christ’s injunction to preach the gospel to all creation.

I love the story of the wolf of Gubbio – Francis did not ‘tame’ him.  He did a far more astounding and respectful thing – he brought peace between the townsfolk and the wolf.  In bringing this peace, he set up a mutual relationship – the wolf protects the town and the town feeds the wolf.  It was a foretaste of that time when all things would be brought together in Christ which are written about by Paul and Isaiah in today’s texts.

Francis could only do this because he had found peace deep within himself in his surrender to the healing, redeeming Brother Jesus.  He grew in absolute trust in God which enabled other creatures to instinctively trust him.  He called all creation sister or brother, not through sentimentality but because Jesus, through whom all things were created, became our brother in his Incarnation.

So, what does all this mean for us and our relationships with our beloved animals?

We most certainly have a duty of care – no one here would deny that.  However, if we would see with the eyes of love, we need to open our eyes to how these creatures who live so closely with us speak of God for us, to recognise those ‘footprints’, as Job said in the first reading, ‘ask the animals, and they will teach you…’

I would like to tell you stories of two poodles who have taught me so much:

Sophia Chiara – very elegant, reserved, true to her name of Sophia, the wise one.  She has the ability to read people and she is the first to sense if they are in trouble.  She tries to cuddle up to them, and she watches them closely.  I still have the marks on my office door where she tried to chew down the door to try to get to be with someone in distress.  So she speaks of God who nurtures and knows us better than we know ourselves. 

However, she is also persistent.

In my office the couch on which visitors or clients sit is in front of a window.  When the poodles are shut outside during consultations, in her younger days she would come around to the window and bounce up and down until she could see in.  All I would see would be eyes, nose and two flying ears.  I would have to pull the blinds to keep my concentration.  During a time when I was in a state of ‘contention’ with God, she reminded me so much of the God who never lets us go.  Who pursues us, is always there, waiting, even when we draw the blinds.

Beatrice Boudicca is another matter.  Even though she is almost blind now, Beatrice lives to run and play.  She has her own sort of wisdom.  In her playfulness she reminds me of Proverbs 8 in which Divine Wisdom says she was at play before the Lord as a little child, delighting in his universe.  Now, I tend to be rather serious and focused on what I have to do, Beatrice has taught me to play – to take time to delight in the gifts of God all around me.  She welcomes whoever comes to the house – indiscriminately – just as Jesus welcomed all who came to him.

C.S. Lewis wrote that our relationship with our pets is a foretaste of the peace and harmony of heaven.  Some theologians think that is a bit romantic.  However, I do believe that our pets are God’s gift to us as is all creation.  They give us a very special insight into our relationship with God’s creation and to delight in it.  Also it is for us to love these animals with tenderness and care as was given to us as stewards of creation.  They teach us things no human can and they bring forth a unique tenderness, responsibility and joy.

Jesus’ words in the Gospel today reassure us that all creation is in the care of God and transparent with God for those willing to see.  If we wish it, our beloved pets as well as all creation remind us of this.

They are indeed God’s gift to us.

Names of God and the Mystery

 
Names of God

In my last few postings I have been exploring our attempts to image God who ultimately is beyond our knowing and understanding.  However, that is no reason for us not to use all the power of mind and heart to explore the mystery in which we dwell.

I think we have to confront two problems which we have made for ourselves:  in the Christian tradition we seem to have reduced the images and names of God to one - Father; and we have a sense that we have ‘captured’ the heart and meaning of this Mystery. It is as if the Trinitarian mystery is too much for us to struggle with.  Now, I don’t for a moment have a problem with the use of ‘Father’ - it is founded in the Scripture both as Father of Israel and ‘Abba’.  It holds an important place in the tradition.  However, to reduce the names for God is to actually do a disservice to the tradition of Scripture in which many names and images of God are celebrated.

Is ‘God’ a noun or a verb?

We use the word ‘God’ as if was a proper name rather than a class of beings that humans worship.  It really does not tell us much about the qualities of this being.  In these terms, our society worships many gods from success to fame to fashion to money.  However, the great monotheist traditions claim that there is only one being in this genre we call ‘gods’ and that being alone must be worshipped.

Nicholas Lash in Theology for Pilgrims[i] asks the question, ‘Is the word ‘God’ a noun or a verb?’  He goes on to quote J.R.R. Tolkien who pointed out the tendency in English to turn verbs into abstract nouns e.g. ‘truth is the same word as ‘troth’, a pledge or promise.  Lash quotes Franciscan Thomas Weinandy ‘Persons of the Trinity are not nouns; they are verbs and the names which designate them - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - designate the acts by which they are defined’[ii].  So, the names and attributes given to God in the Scriptures are more than names they indicate activity.  In God the name and the action are inseparable.  ‘The holy mystery of God simply is the giving, the uttering, the breathing, that God is said to be and do.[iii]

Scripture

The name God revealed to Moses (Ex. 6:2-3; Ex. 3:13-16) is generally translated ‘I am who I am’, however this does not do justice to the dynamics of the word.  It is more a sense of one who brings things into being, an active being, a promise - ‘I shall be that which I shall be’.  The names and qualities of God in the Hebrew Scriptures indicate action.  For example fidelity is a central quality of God in the Scriptures.  In fact, one could read the whole of Scripture as God’s fidelity to Israel and ultimately all creation; God the redeemer of Israel is also the faithful God; God the creator is also the faithful God.  Even the biblical sense of God’s anger is an aspect of fidelity - it is always to call people or the nation to conversion.

In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is God’s fidelity - and all that implies - made flesh and therefore action.  So, if in God name and act are one thing, it is impossible that God be unfaithful to God’s self and God’s self-expression which is creation.

It is truly worth playing with the images we have had handed down in the tradition, even if it fractures the language.  God fathers; God mothers; God faithfuls.  So, when I name God Father or Mother, I am naming an act of sustained creation, protection, fidelity, tenderness - all that that act implies.  When I name God Friend - as Jesus invited us to do - I am naming an abiding act of befriending.

The Scriptures represent people, over thousands of years, trying to name the Mystery that they experienced as one who called, adopted, and protected them.  They used the images to hand in their culture and time.  One of the images I like to ‘play’ with is ‘rock’.  God is Israel’s rock and fortress.  So, images of stability, eternity, strength etc.  However, they knew nothing about tectonic plates and how they shift and change with huge continent-shaping effects - powerfully and inexorably.  Now, think of that eliciting a quality of God:  do we not have huge shifts that change our lives?  Sometimes they are slow like the slow moving of continents; sometimes they will be like the clashing of land masses.  Can this experience of ‘rock’ be God enticing, calling, and leading us to change and move from the known to the unknown, to become more human therefore more God-like? 

While new times, experiences and cultures will change how we understand and image, we also need to use scholarship to understand the original context for the biblical images.  Images such as redeemer and father have rich and socially important aspects of meaning throughout the history of Israel.

Because all names and images of God are poetry and analogy, they have the power to be constantly revitalised and therefore open us to the Mystery.

Incomprehensibility of God[iv]

This brings me to the matter of the mystery of God, the fact that God is and always will be impenetrable mystery even though we see God’s footprints in creation, in each other and above all in Jesus.  The Hebrew Scriptures and St. Paul saw God’s creative action in the world as incomprehensible (cf. Rom 11:33-35 - the great doxology to God’s wisdom and mystery), later theology understood it as God’s nature and characteristic of God’s freedom.  The danger is that we understand this as naming a remote God, a God unwilling to reveal the mystery fully and who keeps humans subservient.  However, this quality of God should be understood in the context that God has indeed revealed the Mystery in Israel and in Jesus and we name this Mystery with words such as fidelity, redeemer, Father.  God’s incomprehensibility touches on our finitude - we are limited, always ‘on the way’ to maturity. 

We have very few models of reciprocal relationship between people.  Adolescents perceive authority as oppressive; the slave had no freedom from the authority of his or her owner; and even the model of marriage as reciprocal relationship is a recent understanding.  Our culture tends to frame unequal or authority relationships in terms of domination/submission. The startling thing about the God of Scripture is that God’s absolute power, freedom and mystery are the very ground of God’s loving self-communication in creation.  We, in all our finitude are the manifestation of this mystery and in that relationship with Divine mystery we find our own freedom, truth and identity.

To return to the question of the grammar or God, God’s incomprehensibility or mystery is not simply an attribute of the nature of God, it is an aspect of every act of God, every name or quality we give to God.  So, God’s fidelity is incomprehensible; God’s compassion, God’s justice, God’s redeeming and God’s love are such that they manifest the qualities that take us beyond what we know, they take us into the dark luminosity of Mystery where we find our own mystery.

In the incomprehensible freedom and love, God has communicated the Mystery which will be our journey for all eternity.  We are the expression of this as I quoted in Link ‘The God who in and through Jesus reveals himself is human, and the human being who emerges in and through Jesus is divine.’[v]  For this reason the great name of God for Christians is the God of Jesus.

Living the mystery

So, is this question simply a bit of academic esoterica with little or no relevance to our lives?  As I wrote in a previous post Link the images of God deeply influence how we perceive reality, ourselves, our relationships.

In faith, we encounter a God who acts, whose actions and identity are completely congruent, who is true to God’s self.  We learn trust, and that surrendering to this Mystery is in no way a loss of identity or freedom, rather it is the opposite - here we find our freedom and our true self.  It is as if the whole of salvation history and the whole of our personal history are about learning to be who we are created to be - the image of God in creation.  God is very patient.

Living the mystery in trusting surrender means that our faith, to be faithful, is about act. It is living out the name we bear.  Maturity in faith means that who we are - created in the image of God - and what we do become more congruent - so our fidelity over time more closely resembles fidelity of God, our acts of justice and love more closely resemble God’s justice and love.

For this reason prayer and service are inseparable.  Together they draw us into the Mystery and make the Mystery manifest in the world.  Together they transform us personally and collectively.  In the end, however, we will always be confronted with the incomprehensible mystery we name of God of Jesus and this mystery will have no end.  When 1 John 4:8 calls God ‘love’, the writer is naming the very life of creation, the very being and breath of all that is, love.  Even human love is ultimately mystery and the joy of love be it marriage, friendship, parenthood or the many forms love takes, is to explore the mystery and be delighted be each new insight.

Ephesians 5:1 urges us to ‘be imitators of God as dearly beloved children’.

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[i] Nicholas Lash, Theology for Pilgrims, (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2008), p. 21f.

[ii] Ibid p. 23

[iii] Ibid p 23

[iv] Cf. Karl Rahner, ‘The Human Question of Meaning in the Face of the Absolute Mystery of God’, Theological Investigations, Vol. XVIII, tr. Edward Quinn, (London, Darton, Longman & Todd , 1983), pp. 89f

[v] Karl Rahner, ‘On the Theology of the Incarnation’, Theological Investigations, Vol. IV tr. Kevin Smyth (London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966) p. 116

God Images and Faith Maturity

God Images and Faith Maturity

Cultural God images

Whatever our belief or non-belief, we all carry around with us images of God.  These ‘pictures’ work in both our conscious mind and our unconscious therefore they go a long way to shaping attitudes, beliefs and actions.  We absorb these images through both religious and secular cultures, from family, school, media and so on.  Whatever name we give to the deity, it is always accompanied by a cluster of images and more often than not linked to authority figures.

The most powerful god images that operate in us, shaping self-image, beliefs and relationships are those that we have taken for granted or are not consciously aware of.  Therefore they are unexamined and unquestioned.

The images of God that have dropped unreflected into our minds show an anthropomorphised god who is either an angry, punitive deity, one who sends suffering for punishment or ‘character building’ or even the ‘magician’ god who bends to our will - just to name a few stereotypes around in our popular culture.  These stereotyped, concretised images either work as ego-support so that we hold onto something definite and containable that reinforces identity, or they become the reason to reject all images of God.  When these are the only images available a person either lives in a dependent, closed relationship with the deity and thereby colouring all their relationships, or in rejecting those images fail to see that they have rejected a false god.

Within the Catholic tradition, I am frequently appalled and grieved at the level of faith understanding that many good people struggle through life with.  As children, they inherited a catechesis that actually made the images of God irrelevant to their adult lives.  The teaching church has been remiss in not presenting faith education as something that needed to develop and change as people matured. 

All images inadequate

All theology is an exercise in poetics, metaphor and symbol, but we have frequently forgotten this and reduced symbol to the reality, so distorting both the symbol and the reality to which it points.  God is not an elderly, bearded man!  Neither is God just another being like us only writ large.

Ultimately, all images are inadequate to name the Mystery we call the God of Jesus; however maturity in faith demands we question those images we carry in us and hold them up to the mirror which is Jesus, Word incarnate.  In doing this we allow the symbol to break open to new meaning.  The paradox is that the more we allow our received images of God to be made conscious and considered the more we will free ourselves from destructive, binding images that lurk in our unconscious.

Even the best of our images of God will always be inadequate and even wrong to some extent.  Newman[i] said that we can only replace one erroneous image of God with another.  This is simply because we are trying to name the Mystery who is being and life itself.  There will always be a tension between God revealed in Jesus and in creation and the unfathomable mystery of God who is life itself.  Unknowing is the corrective to thinking we have comprehended or grasped the God of Jesus.

Finding more adequate images

The life of faith is not isolated from all that a person is - individually and socially and if this life of faith is to mature, it requires the exercise of both mind and heart. 

We tend to want to hold onto what is important to us, to insulate it against change.  However, in order for something to remain alive, fresh, relevant and transformative it has to be renewed from time to time.  So, with our God-images.   If the core of faith is to remain liberating for us, we, both as individuals and as church, need to hold our beliefs and in particular our God images up to the light of Scripture and the lived tradition to find new content and new ways to name the Mystery that is God and also the mystery that is humanity.  For example, fatherhood as a social construct is different in many aspects in our society from that of Jesus’ time.  Our God-language must speak to our time and culture so that the Gospel continues to confront and comfort.  The Scriptures use so many images and names for God but we have tended to limit them to a few. 

There is a passage in Terry Pratchett’s novel The Fifth Elephant[ii] which brings the need for change to keep something precious relevant.  Sir Samuel Vimes is shocked that the throne on which the dwarf king has just been enthroned upon is a fake. 

Suddenly the King was holding his mining axe again.  “This milord, is my family’s axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see.  Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade.  And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation… but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family?  And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y’know.  Pretty good.  Will you tell me this is a fake too?”

It is not easy to question what and how we believe because it takes courage to let go of the known to launch into the unknown; to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar; to allow new images to replace or expand familiar ones.  However, it is, in fact a glorious adventure of mind, heart and spirit.  This adventure means we have to then ask questions about our prejudices and assumptions about life, politics, justice and people as we allow the more profound and truthful God images to transform us

Prayer and knowing

While intellectual enquiry is essential to maturity of faith, it will only take us so far.  Faith is about a relationship, and like all relationships, it needs nurture so prayer is the heart of growing in maturity, understanding and love.  In prayer we allow the God images we carry to be broken open, until we are brought to a place where all images fall away and we know beyond cognition.  St. Bonaventure[iii] writes of this contemplation as driven by desire, i.e. love, ‘If this passing over is to be perfect, all intellectual operations must be given up, and the sharp point of our desire must be entirely directed towards God and transformed in him.’  And this is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

 We take into prayer our personal lives, our beliefs, our culture, the totality of who we are and allow who we are to abide in the presence of the Mystery who is the source of all being.  In this we open ourselves to be changed and converted from the always inadequate god of our imaginings.  God is always and everywhere awaiting our coming, our attention, our love in order to draw us into this relational mystery.

There is an important dictum:  We become what we contemplate.  So allowing ourselves to be open to God is to become more like God of Jesus and thereby more profoundly human, after all, humanity created and redeemed, is the icon of God.  However, this humanness will always, to some extent be somewhat out of step with the culture in which we live.

There are three things we need to do in order to pray well:  One is to be present to God in absolute honesty - as honest as we are able to be at a particular time.  God can take it!  The Scriptures teach us that God loves our honesty.  Secondly, we need to very gently, kindly and firmly put ego aside for a while and allow ourselves to be curious, vulnerable, surprised, unsure and above all directed to the ‘Other’.  Finally, we need to learn to listen, attentively, humbly, fully. 

In this way, our limited God images slowly, like a good marinade, soften, break open, change and we open our heart and mind to Reality which we name Trinitarian.  By the way, these three points are good for human communications also.

To pray with an open heart and mind, with honesty and surrender will take so from the limited, unreflected upon images of God that lurk in our minds and hearts and influence how we live our lives and how we live with each other.  It is called conversion.

The Book of Job

Like all good literature, the story of Job has many layers, one of the threads is the story of Job’s ‘conversion’.  Job was faithful, upright and wealthy.  He lost his wealth and his children.  Job’s friends who came to comfort him spoke long and piously about God’s will, while Job rants and laments - ‘Perish the day I was born’ (Job 3:3).  He calls God to account.  For most of the book God is silent.  Then He speaks to Job, not answering Job’s questions but simply and humorously taking him on a journey through creation and rebukes the well-meaning friends for ‘not speaking rightly of me’ (Job 42:7).  Job surrenders - he has encountered God as he never knew him before. ‘I heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you.’ (Job 42:5)

Job’s story could well be a paradigm for our own growing maturity into the Mystery who envelops us and delights in us and who prays in us.

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[i] John Henry Newman, The theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and certainty, ed. J.D. Holmes (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976) p. 102

[ii] Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant, (London, Corgi Books, 2000) p. 405

[iii] St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, tr. Ewart Cousins (New York, Paulist Press 1978) p. 113

Photo courtesy of Beverley Anne Jansen

God images in darkness

In my last posting I wrote of the experience of God in times of darkness, when God seems absent and uninterested.  An important aspect of this is the image of God we carry in our minds.  The God we ‘comprehend’ will always be greater than anything we can possibly imagine.

However, having said that, we always move from the known to the unknown.  The fact that we make God in our own image and likeness is relevant and normal as human processes go.  It also has good biblical support in that according to Genesis we are created in God’s image and likeness. Karl Rahner [1] wrote ‘When God wills to be non-divine, the human person comes to be’.  So to make God in our own image and likeness is an intimation of the nature and character of God.

The problem is that not only are we often reluctant to let go our always inadequate images of God, we limit our vision of humanity.  Both require that we step into Mystery but it is easier to live with containable labels. So we cling to what we know and can name like comfortable old shoes.  Our understanding of being human is too small therefore our God will always be too small.  For the hints as to who God is, let’s look to the sages and saints of human history as well as those life-giving people who enter our lives.

While our images of God will always be profoundly inadequate precisely because God is not just another entity in creation that we can analyse, God is continually beckoning, inviting, showing forth the Mystery in creation and particularly in us humans, and in Jesus in order that we may become like God. ‘The God who in and through Jesus reveals himself is human.  And the human being who emerges in and through Jesus is divine’[2]. 

The parables and stories Jesus tells in the Gospels are alive with human stories - Would a father give his child a stone when he asks for bread? The woman who turns the house upside down to look for the lost coin.  Above all, the ease with which Jesus dispenses forgiveness - even from the cross - is disconcerting for us.  He scatters it around abundantly.  The trouble is, I think that sometimes it is all too good to be true and it is too easy to dismiss Jesus’ actions as ‘different’ from our own.

We need to be attentive, to learn, to wait, to allow ourselves to be slowly transformed by our contemplation of this Mystery and this contemplation is not detached observance, it is the contemplation of love.  It is the gaze of lovers, of an adult upon a beloved child - it is a look to tenderness, love, wonder and awe.

So, when we go through times of spiritual darkness and there is a deep sense of the absence of God, perhaps it is because our understanding of God is too small.  The events of our lives have taken us to a point where we need to surrender into relationship with the God we think we know in order to enter into a new relationship with the God who beckons us further into the Mystery. Thus we become profoundly human and thereby divinised. It is conversion.  We will and should strive to understand, but ultimately it is a journey of faith and surrender in faith, love and trust into the God of Jesus.

This surrender of faith, love and trust takes time.  The human mind and spirit needs time to grow into something new.  Even if there is a moment of profound insight, that moment still needs time and nurture in order to transform us, our relationship with God and our relationship with the world.   So, we may have to wait in the darkness for a time.

In this darkness our relationship with God becomes more truthful.  In this time we will struggle and at times rant at the God who seems hidden.  There is nothing wrong with this.  The psalms are full of it and after all, don’t we struggle from time to time with all our relationships because dethroning our isolated egos is one of the most difficult things we do in life until our being-in-relationships grows stronger and stronger.

So, as we wait in the darkness of prayer, we are, in the process being created anew to be more human - humanly divine and divinely human.  The darkness is luminous.

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[1] Karl Rahner, ‘On the Theology of the Incarnation’, Theological Investigations, Vol. IV tr. Kevin Smyth (London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966) p. 116

[2] Leonardo Boff, Jesus Christ Liberator:  A Critical Christology of Our Time, tr. Patrick Hughes (London, SPCK, 1980)

When God seems hidden:

For even though the fig tree does not blossom,

nor fruit grow on the vine,

even though the olive crop fail,

and fields produce no harvest,

even though the flocks vanish from the folds

and stalls stand empty of cattle,

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord

and exult in God my saviour.

The Lord my God is my strength.

He makes me leap like the deer,

he guides me to the high places.

               Hab. 3:17-19

This is one of my favourite texts that I return to often.  There is juxtaposition between disaster and rejoicing, a motif that occurs often in Biblical literature.  This is not just a literary formula; it is the experience of God whose fidelity is beyond anything we can imagine.

 There was a time when I held onto this text as a lifeline at a period when I had lost almost everything that gave me meaning and happiness.  My sense of God became very dark and God seemed far away - remote and silent. 

In the darkness of loss I asked the age old question of ‘Why?’ as I tried to understand what was happening to me.  I had no sense of God’s presence and no sense of meaning in what was happening.  However, it was here that what was left of my fuzzy, confused head came to the rescue of my heart and spirit.  I held onto the fact of Jesus, his flesh-taking, his life, his own suffering apparently without meaning and all that God brought forth from that.  At the same time I would pray Habakkuk in trust and as a promise that this time of loss would not just end, but become in some way fruitful.

Now, Habakkuk wrote at a time of disaster for Israel, so he knew a thing or two about suffering, and suffering on a grand scale at that.  His prophetic text starts questioning God, ‘How long, Lord, am I to cry for help while you will not listen; to cry oppression in your ear and you will not save?’ and ends with this prayer of trust.  It is significant that he is able to rejoice and affirm God’s strength while still in the time of suffering.  In this he stands with Job and the psalmists and above all Jesus.  Habakkuk surrenders in trust to the great Mystery we call God.

This surrender in the midst of darkness is not a fatalistic ‘throwing-the-hands-in-the-air-because-it’s-all-too-hard’ surrender, nor is it the stereotype surrender by which society keeps people ‘in their place’.  It happens when absolute trust in the Mystery breaks forth as we experience God as the one who abides and sustains and who is the very source and pulse of life beyond anything we categorise or imagine.  At the same time we know this breakthrough moment to be absolute gift.

So surrender is not inert passivity.  Words and concepts fail as a knowing greater than knowing happens and turns this moment into hope and joy.  We are capable of this surrender because God has gifted us with freedom and in turn, the surrender allows us to be free.

This experience is possible and has meaning only because we have been drawn into relationship with God.  In any strong and valued human relationship when there is disharmony and crisis, we hold onto what we have experienced as valuable and life-giving in order to weather the crisis.  This is the ground from which we take the relationship to a new depth because we have surrendered in trust to the other in the relationship.

This is an image of what is happening with our life in God.  As crisis or suffering enters our faith relationship we hold on, wait in hope on God who has shown fidelity to us in Jesus.

I remember one of my lecturers when I was an undergraduate saying, ‘God has one very obscene four letter word and it called “Wait”.’  He happened to be a Carmelite and this drew on that great spiritual tradition.  So we wait in the ambiguity with trust and joy for beyond our expectations or imagination, because despite all signs to the contrary God is at work.

This active surrender actually makes us able to live with suffering and ambiguity that is part of human life.  It gives us the strength and hope to sit and wait.  It does not give easy answers; it enables us to begin, however, minutely, to see as God sees and pick up the life-giving threads of who we are.

And it is in this surrender that the first green shoots of forgiveness and compassion born of new freedom break forth.

Corpus Christi - a post script.

Should anyone think that yesterday’s reflection, ‘Do this in memory of me’ questions the Catholic understanding of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, I wish to say that that was not my intention. Sadly, too frequently the popular Catholic understanding of Eucharist has taken on images of crass materialism, for example people were told not to eat or chew the consecrated bread, a sentiment totally at odds with the biblical narratives. I remember a devout person remarking to me in all seriousness, that she thought Jesus must get very tired of standing in the tabernacle. Don’t blame the people, blame bad theology.

While our experience of ritual and memory give us a ’doorway’ into understanding the presence of Jesus, they, like all theology, simply paddle on the shores of mystery which is a reality revealed to us. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is inseparable from the presence of Christ in the community who are the Body of Christ. I think that understanding the power of ritual and memory helps contemplate that gift of Christ which is himself present in his totality of being.

'Do this in memory of me' - Feast of Corpus Christi

These words of Jesus at the Last Supper, repeated at every Eucharistic celebration appear straight forward and simple yet Christian theology has meditated on them throughout our history. I think that how we understand them depends, among other things, on how we understand being human and how we encounter the Divine in Christ. So, I want to reflect on these words….

‘Do this.. .’

Jesus tells his disciples and us to ‘Do this’. This memorial celebration is to be no mere cerebral examination. We are asked to do something. It is an action. Like all Christian faith it is something that is done and lived out. Life, love, tenderness, care are not only ideas, they are not fulfilled until they are done, acted upon. This may sound pedantic, but I think it is too easy to mistake thought for action and conversely, too easy to mistake action for thought. The Eucharistic remembering is a ritual that is done, not only thought about.

‘…this…’

The ‘this’ of Jesus’ injunction is to take food - bread and wine - in a ritual setting and remember him. His ritual setting was the Passover, a festival deep in Jewish origins and beyond until its origins are lost in prehistory. So Jesus has taken this already ‘weighted’ ritual and invested it with his own meaning.

Rituals are such deep actions in the human psyche and history. We are ritual making species. As I have written elsewhere, I understand rituals and festivals to be periods that take us away from the normal passing of time which takes on a ‘timeless’ dimension. Whatever the ritual, be it family, civic or the festivals of faith, we allow ourselves to enter into a moment that draws past and present and future together.

The rituals of sharing food lie deep in the human community, to be used among other things to show gratitude for a harvest or commune with the dead. However, think about our own special meals, particularly those we prepare ourselves for others. Now, I love cooking for friends and while it certainly is about a modicum of skill there is a ritual quality to the meal. It is sharing with the guests what I have and the what and the how will always reflect to some degree who I am and who they are and who we are to each other. But this is no self-satisfying closed circle. All this carries us forward to the future and other relationships we have. Now, when all this happens in a particular ritual context the many meanings are brought into a sharp focus. So Jesus, at the Passover celebration turned all these meanings into his own loving self-gift for us to enter into his life and who he is and therefore discover who we are.

‘…of me.. .’

The ‘me’ of his injunction is Jesus - human, divine, self-giving, life affirming who gifts us with this food and memory.

At that Passover meal, he gives himself, he invests the bread and wine with new meaning which is himself at the most ‘intense’ moment of his life when death was imminent - the final fidelity. However, to take this moment out of the context of his whole life and identity is to impoverish the love-gift which only came to be understood after his Resurrection. Now, if we understand that all creation exists in a web of life, in the risen Jesus that life is renewed and given a new and vibrant quality. So the ‘me’ we are remembering is Jesus in the fullness of who he is in this web of life, therefore we also know who we are, our identity in Him.

‘…in memory.. .’

We are told to ‘Do this in memory of me’. I think of the long theological and devotional history of trying to understand this gift and command. To the Jewish people the remembering in a ritual made the great power of God manifest in a particular historical event present for those remembering now. It was not some vague wishful thinking. It was allowing God who is beyond history to act again to save and nourish in the now.

I think this is not unlike our own human memory. For us memory makes present people and events in our past whether it is our individual history or a collective history. Those memories to a great extent make us who we are as individuals and as a community. If my memory of aspects or people of my past are negative, it will fill me with pain and prevent me being free, whole and loving person. This sort of memory calls for a journey of healing and forgiveness. The memories of love given and received by family and or friends, gives me strong identity, makes freedom, courage and love grow. Either way, identity is shaped and acted out.

So for us, memories are very, very real. To lose our memories whether personal or collective is to forget who we are and therefore unable to act in the present or create a future. I think the Jewish people had the right understanding.

So ‘..in memory of me.’ is no nostalgic, wishful-thinking past event. The love and fidelity which led to death and resurrection is active, vivifying and transforming now and each time we tell the story, share the bread and wine we know who He is and who we are in him now, at this moment is the world’s history.

Finally

Sometimes I think that theology can become forgetful of our ordinary human processes. For us humans memory gives us identity, can treasure the joy of a past moment to real strength in the present; sharing food with friends is more than sustaining the body, it is nourishing spirit by sustaining identity and building bonds of life; and finally, when we love it always has to be shown, that is, done, otherwise it can’t be sustained.

To say that the Christian life is essentially Eucharistic means that ‘Do this in memory of me.’ speaks to every moment of our lives because it is the truth of who we are and therefore how we are.

So Jesus, who loved to the end and beyond, gave us the gift to so that he could abide with us in a most tangible way. In these terms, the Eucharist is not so much ‘Godhead here in hiding’, as showing forth the great mystery that God-with-us wants to stay with us until we come, all of us in this web of life, to the fullness of joy in the End.

Until then, ‘Do this... .’ is not mere repetition. Each time we celebrate Jesus’ memory we enter into the life of God now, at this present moment and we know who we are. It is always new, just as each time friends meet it is new because of the joy and the deepening of that friendship and the history and truth we bring to each other.