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The Missions that Redemptorists give in Parishes throughout Australia provide an opportunity for spiritual renewal and religious experience to the people who attend. Mission Sermons give you something of an insight into the spirit of how a Redemptorist Parish Mission is conducted, and the themes Redemptorists preach about on Missions today. Though the spirit of the Mission remains the same, Redemptorists have many ways of conducting their Parish Missions. The following Mission Sermons have kindly been provided by Fr. Kevin O’Shea C.Ss.R. who is presently situated at the Redemptorist Monastery at Kogarah, in Sydney. These Sermons give you an insight into the spirit and style of the Missions that Fr. O’Shea conducts.

(N.B. Permission is required for distribution or copying of the following material)

© Fr.Kevin O'Shea C.Ss.R. 2002

Please contact Father Kevin O'Shea C.Ss.R. for permission
          Click for email   (kfoshea@hotmail.com)

THEME OF THE MISSION THAT FOLLOWS:

Renewing the spiritual values of a Christian community

through the theme of personhood

The theme of this Mission is about the spiritual renewal of personal and Christian values, through preaching, in a context of community reflection and prayer. It has been developed in Catholic parishes, in a programme derived from the traditional 'parish mission'. The programme usually lasts for one week. It belongs to that tradition. It is a contemporary form of that tradition.

The matter is taken from talks and sermons as actually given and preached in such programmes. A certain simple and oral style has been maintained.

A prospectus of the programme is given at all masses over a preceding week-end (or two). From Monday to Friday, there are talks given for about 10-15 minutes at the daily celebration(s) of the Eucharist. Again from Monday to Friday, there is a major evening session, lasting about 70 minutes, and organised around a 35 minute sermon. This is the core of the mission.

The community intended in this programme is a typical catholic parish. It would hope to gather about one third to one half of the Sunday mass-goers of the parish. Among them, it looks especially to those who have not been involved in specialised opportunities for adult education or formation. It is aimed at the general large group of people who have not had, or have not used special opportunities, but who have their own questions and their own reflections.

Below we have the actual materials of such a programme. Clearly, they can be used either in the original context of such a mission or renewal, or in a different time-frame, or in a group smaller than a parish, or by individuals for their own 'retreat' purposes.

The content and the programme are one attempt to 'renew' renewal preaching. Its inspiration and foundation is a philosophy of personhood, a pastoral theology of moral conscience, and a spiritual psychology of tenderness and positivity, that have developed especially among catholic thinkers over the past two decades. This foundation is used in a pastoral and populist way.

The key ideas are meaning, values, and hope. Pope John Paul II has urged - in this context - a 'forceful proclamation of the fullness of meaning that Christ has opened up for human life, of the unshakeable foundation He has given to human values, and of the new hope He has introduced into the human story'.

The programe has been put to use in the following parish missions in Australia: in Victoria, in St.Joan of Arc, Brighton, and in Holy Family, Mount Waverley; in New South Wales, in St.Laurence O’Toole, Forbes, in St.Joan of Arc, Haberfield, and in Star of the Sea, Watsons Bay; in Queensland, in St.Stephen’s Cathedral, Brisbane, in St.Patrick’s, Fortitude Valley, in St.Bernardine, Browns Plains, in St.Catherine, Jimboomba, in St.Joseph the Worker, Moranbah, in St.Therese, Dysart, and in Holy Family, Middlemount; in St.James, Coorparoo, Regina Caeli, Coorparoo Heights, St.Thomas, Camp Hill, and St.Edward, Daisy Hill; in western Australia, St.Peter and Paul Monastery Church, North Perth. These locations include central business districts of major cities, suburbia, new housing developments on the fringe of the suburbs, rural towns, small villages, and mining towns in the coalfields.

My gratitude and appreciation go to the Redemptorists who have worked with me in these missions: Des FitzGerald, CSSR, Michael Gilbert, CSSR, Pat Corbett, CSSR, Don Kennedy, CSSR, Reg Ahearn, CSSR, John Hodgson, C.SS.R.

LETTER FOR PARISH BULLETIN

In giving talks these days, I try to use stories that are simple and easy to listen to. I try to pick stories that focus on everyone’s good side. I want to give a sense of positive, not negative religion.

Why? I have come to realise that a lot of people don’t feel good about themselves. They feel overburdened — by work and more work. They feel that ‘Church’ only makes them feel further ‘down’.

Many of these people have picked up a lot of conditioned reactions to events in their lives (recently or in the past). As a result, they carry feelings of fear, guilt and anxiety.

I like to suggest that life doesn’t have to be like that. I like to encourage people to think through all this and learn more positive responses to life. I hope to tease them into discovering a new security, a new freedom and a new openness to God and one another.

So I see the coming time with you as much more than a series of disparate talks. The whole week will hang together. But it is not a ‘course’ — not a head trip. It’s a process that can touch you at a deep level.

It is really a way of giving moral formation to the general population. Not high level spirituality. More like rock bottom common sense. Not ‘education’. A real formation of persons together.

That’s why Father Michael Gilbert will some of the basics of our faith: our calling to be persons, the person of Jesus, being Catholic in Australia today. And we will look at the three big issues of life: Death, Guilt, and Love. It’s a gentle approach to eternity, a freedom from undue guilt feelings, an encouragement to love your dear ones more intimately.

Yes, I like to do this through stories. But — to hear the stories, please come!

 

TALK TO GROUP OF PARISH LEADERS/PASTORAL COUNCIL

Thank you for the invitation to offer a mission here, and thank you for the opportunity to discuss it with you this evening.

I realise that there have been many missions here over the years. Many Redemptorist missions. I wonder if some of you have memories of missions — the last one? If some of you have never been to one?

A mission is meant to be a special, extraordinary, even ‘prophetic’ time in a community.

It is meant to address a major and fundamental need in the community.

 

The word ‘mission’ is a bit outdated, but it still has more drawing power than other titles for what happens.

It is basically a five day, or better five evening, event, principally of preaching.

There are many kinds of (Redemptorist) mission: what kind can we offer here this September?

I like to call what I offer ‘a mission with a difference’. What is the difference?

NOT fire and brimstone…

NOT chase ‘mission Catholics’…

NOT devotional life…

NOT parish retreat…

NOT exercise in spirituality...

NOT chiefly for the children...

NOT family based…

BUT adult moral formation for the general population, at a basic level

adult: for the thinking person,

moral: it is about values for living, the quality of life,

formation: it is not a head trip, but a change of attitudes in living,

it is not an education seminar, but an appeal to the heart and whole person

general population: anybody and everybody...

at a basic level: the key, underlying principles of Christian morality.

RATIONALE: we are at a new stage in catholic history and need to address it

We went through Vatican 2 and the renewal that followed.

We ‘modernised’ our catholic living.

The world has changed: it is now ‘post-modern’.

It is a world that has given up on moral values, and given up on positive hope.

POPULATION: EVERYONE (Catholic, Christian, Religious or not)

but especially, among parishioners, two kinds of people:

• those hurt in their own past and present (especially by the Church)
• those disillusioned by the present world (and its lack of things to believe in)
• note: those who do not usually come to church, usually come with a friend or group, hardly ever on their own...but they do come.
• note: the themes are very open to ecumenical invitation to other churches in the area.

 

HOW ? Selection of themes

5 evenings

Mon and Tue: a platform

first plank — on being a ‘person’ today

second plank — Jesus as a ‘person’

Wed - death and dying (destiny)

Thu - guilt and moral conscience (responsibility)

Fri — love and sexuality (marriage and the family)

5 mornings (short, at each of 2 masses daily)

Mon — a personal God

Tue — how to sin personally

Wed — personal loss and grief

Thu — personal praying

Joy — personal joy (Blessed Virgin Mary)

Deliberate use of many stories

Creation of a reflective, supportive, prayerful atmosphere

 

WHAT ?

Weekend preaching at all masses (first weekend)

Preliminary week

Aim is to light as many small fires of interest as possible

Homily (10 min.) at all usual parish masses

topics related to Eucharist, church-community, positivity

Visits to school if found appropriate

Visits to aged care facilities, etc.

Offer of educational seminar for teachers after school one day

Something for catechists in state schools?

Offer of public lecture (e.g. on post-modern culture) if requested

Offer to meet with particular interest groups if any

Visitation

not done randomly

not social visiting

but only particular people, if arranged with them, and considered useful by parish ministers

etc

Weekend preaching at all masses (second weekend)

Mornings

Later mass, e.g. 9.15 a.m. with 15 min talk, out by 10.00.

The morning talks are not meant for the children, but if it is desired that children come from the school, we would give them a short word after the gospel, and keep the adult talk until after mass, when the children have returned to school.

Opportunity for reconciliation (first rite) and for consultation after each mass

Evenings — MISSION SESSION PROPER (not Mass)

Start 7.30 p.m. sharp, out by 8.40 p.m.

The evening session has three parts:

1. Preparatory: welcome, prayers, mood, notices, song.

1. Final: prayerful INTERIORISATION OF THE THEME, through symbols, stories, rituals, etc.

Opportunity for reconciliation (first rite) and for consultation after each evening

REQUESTS TO PARISH / PASTORAL COUNCIL

1. To talk informally about this kind of mission.
2. To organise good advertising for the mission:

3. Something written in school bulletin ?

4. Something in the local newspaper?

1. music leadership each evening (organist/band, and leader(s))
2. some sample lists of hymns appended — make up your own
3. welcoming people on arrival each evening
4. a cuppa after the session ends (each ?) evening
5. child minding ? (for small children only — those over 10 can learn from the Mission if with family).
6. TO LET US KNOW IF THERE ARE ANY SPECIAL AGENDAS WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AND/OR ADDRESS (e.g. ethnic/language groups).

OUTCOMES

The intended outcomes from a mission of this kind are mostly interior to the persons involved in the mission. They are not primarily external, or measurable.

The hope is that a happier and more genuine Christian life, lived internally, will show itself in a more real participation in the community life of the parish, in service to others, and in responsiveness to the demands of justice in the neighbourhood.

 

WEEKEND PREACHING: FIRST WEEKEND BEFORE THE MISSION PROPER

For the week-end celebrations of the Eucharist, one full week prior to the mission.

 

SERMON (Overview of the Mission Week ahead)

What is a parish renewal, or parish mission, nowadays?

A few years ago, a friend of mine, a lawyer, telephoned me and asked if I would be willing to give a few talks to a group of his friends and associates. I said, surely, but what would you want me to talk about? He said he would ask them and get back to me. He did. They wanted me to talk about 'learning to live'. I was surprised: didn't these highly educated, professional and successful people already know how to live? The response came: 'that's not really living.' I think any parish renewal today, any renewal in spiritual values, is about learning - really - to live.

For a number of years, there was a beautiful radio programme in Australia, hosted by Caroline Jones, in which people of many different backgrounds talk of their own personal journey in life. it is called 'The Search for Meaning'. I think any parish renewal nowadays, any renewal in spiritual values, is a 'search for meaning'.

Last year, Philip Adams (a noted critic), and Paul Davies (an eminent scientist) went to the desert of South Australia to have a conversation, for a television audience, on 'the big questions'. What questions?

What does it all mean?

Does it have to be like that?

They were questions of identity, of origin, of destiny, of pain, of meaning, of freedom. The big questions. I think any parish renewal, any renewal of spiritual values, has to address these 'big questions'.

I told someone I wanted to work on these things. His reply was: 'when I went to school, you could ignore things like that. No one ever told us. I've often wondered.'

A young teacher said to me recently:

He had discovered the 'big questions'.

Some older people may remember parish missions that did address such issues, but did so in what they remember was a very 'heavy' way. They recall the fear of hell, the fire and brimstone, the urgency. Today the manner is very different indeed. The questions are still there, but the answers are much more positive.

The truths are eternal; the insights into them are new.

Many people can look back now on a very productive period of renewal in the church, over some 30 years, since the end of the second Vatican Council. Many good things emerged: a new sense of scripture, of sacraments and liturgy, a new experience of community in the people of God, and of initiation into it, a renewal of devotional practices, special groups for adult education, groups for prayer (of various kinds), social justice, family life, etc. Most of this growth has been concrete and tangible. We are now asking, what about growth in inner attitudes, in values of real living, in our personal faith and love? The success of the external renewal is making it possible for a new look at internal renewal. It is not about the structures or the politics of the church. It is about the deeper things that make us who we are, together, and with God. It is about our relationships with God and one another.

In a way, this is a kind of adult education, but I would prefer to call it adult formation. It is about how we are from God and for God, how we are with God and one another. We have heard it all: from the Creed, the Commandments, and the Catechism, but have we responded to it deeply from within ourselves? The good news today is that we are ready to talk about these things, seriously and very positively.

The better news is that many people, including Pope John Paul II, have discovered a theme that can lead us through our reflection on these matters. It is the theme of personhood.

Who are we? We are persons, together.

Where do we come from? From a Personal God.

Where are we going? To the heaven of that Personal God.

Why do we suffer? As we grow into our personhood.

What does it all mean? In the end, personal love.

Does it have to be like that? In a way, yes, because persons, divine and human, are made for loving one another.

The hope of this programme/renewal/mission is to use the theme of person to lead us into a deeper sense of human, religious, and Christian values, in today's world. It is learning to live through being a person, searching for meaning through personal relations, realising that the big questions are personal questions, talking openly about our need to be more personal in our living than we have been.

Hugh Mackay has said that we need ‘a place where people will reclaim the right to attach their own meanings to their own lives....to acknowledge the worth of every individual, the need to feel connected to a community, and the importance of pursuing spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic gratification’. This ‘place’ is the ‘person’.

Paul Cox claims that ‘Western civilisation is without belief for the first time since the decline of the Roman Empire’, that ‘we are starved of love, dignity and tenderness’ and that ‘we need again the foundation stones of spirit and faith’. The basis of all these is the ‘person’.

Each evening, from Monday to Friday, there is a major reflection on some aspect of personhood.

On Monday, on being a person, our personal integrity

This looks at the basis of community, in gratitude to God and one another.

On Tuesday, on Jesus: his life story.

This looks at the story of Jesus, the sort of person he was, the sort of persons he helps us to be.

On Wednesday, on dying as a person, our destiny.

On, Thursday, on living without false guilt, in personal conscience.

On, Friday, on the persons we love, in marriage and the family.

This evening sequence is the major thrust of the programme.

Each morning, from Monday to Friday, at the celebration of the Eucharist, there will be a brief insight into central areas of our christian life, seen through the theme of person. This series is meant to supplement the evening offering, and yet to stand on its own for those able to attend only in the mornings. The talks are short, about 10 minutes each.

On Monday, on a personal God.

On Tuesday, on a being personally honest about sin.

On Wednesday, on personal loss and grief.

On Thursday, on personal prayer.

On Friday, on personal joy.

[If there are two weeks in which these short talks can be given, the topics for the second week are:

On Monday, the Church, a community of persons.

On Tuesday, the Eucharist, model of personal living.

On Wednesday, personal trust through the Eucharist.

On Thursday, praying as Jesus prayed.

On Friday, Mary the model and mother of personal living.]

In these morning 'instructions', significant use will be made of major biblical themes, about covenant and communion, about eucharist and prayer, about Mary in our life.

All this is done - morning and evening - in the context of community and prayer. There will be a prayerful, meditative addition to each of the evening presentations, for community experience, related to the topic of the evening.

The hope of it all is to lead us back to the scriptures and the liturgy of our church community, with deeper insight and commitment, and a renewed sense of values.

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MISSION PREACHING WEEK: THE PRINCIPAL WEEK OF THE MISSION.

Monday morning theme.

 

A PERSONAL GOD

 

Let us begin this series of insights, with the most basic of all: who is your God? Not the God of books, or of family traditions, or of the church, but your God - the God of your heart, as a person. I hope you have discovered, or can discover a personal God, a God who is even more a person than you are.

 

It is not easy to talk about our God. There is a story of a little girl who was drawing something on paper. Her mother asked her what it was that she was drawing. She said: God. Her mother replied: you can’t do that — no one knows what God looks like. She said: they will now.

 

Here are a few thoughts to help you think what your God is really like.

 

God belongs to you.

God longs for us, and belongs to us, even more than

we long for God, and belong to God.

We came from God, and live for and with God.

We know, love, and enjoy God in our whole life.

 

God is your kind of person.

If God were human, God would be like you.

 

God won't drop you. (Even if you drop God occasionally).

You can't be lost.

God holds you in his hand.

God would have to drop the other persons of the trinity before dropping you.

 

God understands.

God stands under all you are and all you do.

Don't waste your time explaining yourself to God.

God knows already, and it is already ok.

Don't try to understand God, just enjoy God.

 

There is nothing you have ever done or worried about that God

can't make sense of.

You don't know how, but God does.

Let God do God's job: your job is to trust God.

 

God is not above, beyond, against, or even beside you:

God is with you, and within you.

'With' is a God-word: God is a 'with-God'.

 

All you need to do is catch your breath and recognise God's presence with you.

You don't even have to catch your breath!

 

God is God, not a business man.

There are no deals, contracts, arrangements.

There is commitment, from God to you.

 

God is your partner in life.

in your life,

and you are God's partner in God's own life.

 

God doesn't get angry with you.

God gets concerned for you.

God loves your whole story, not just parts of it.

 

If God were writing a book about you, God would not want to

leave anything out.

There is no need to be scared of God.

Just fall in love with God.

God already did, with you.

God is talking to you.

You can’t hear God speaking to someone else:

you can only hear God if you are being addressed.

God doesn't want you to stay in church all day thinking about God.

God wants you to go out and live, to enjoy your life, and discover other persons.

Don't try to imagine what God looks like. Just know that God is there, with you.

You remember the story of Moses at the burning bush. God told him to get the shoes off his feet, since he was on holy ground. God was not telling Moses to be scared of him. When do you most often get the shoes off your feet? When you get home and relax? God was telling Moses that he could behave as if he was at home, in his own place, with God: it’s ok, you’re at home here with me.

One cold evening during the holiday season, a little boy about six was standing out in front of a store window. The little boy had no shoes and his clothes were mere rags. A young woman passing by saw the little boy and could read the longing in his pale blue eyes. She took the child by the hand and led him into the store. There she bought him some new shoes and a complete suit of warm clothing. They came back outside into the street, and the woman said to the child, 'now you can go home and have a very happy holiday'. The little boy looked up at her and asked, 'Are you God, ma'am ?' She smiled down at him and replied, 'No son, I'm just one of his children'. The little boy then said, 'I knew you had to be some relation'.

A little boy wanted to meet God. He knew it was a long trip to where God lived. He packed a suitcase full of sandwiches and orange juice. On the way, he met an old lady sitting in the park. He sat down next to her and said nothing. He opened his suitcase and offered her a sandwich. She took it and smiled. Her smile was so good he wanted to see it again. He offered her another sandwich, and a drink. He was delighted. They sat there all afternoon eating and smiling, but they never said a word. As it got dark, the boy realised he was tired, and got up to leave. After a few steps, he turned round, ran back to the old lady, and gave her a hug. She gave him her biggest smile ever. When he opened the door of his own house a short time later, his mother was surprised by the joy on his face. Where have you been today? He said, I had lunch with God. And you know, she’s got the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen! Meantime, the old lady went home. Her son was stunned by the look of peace on her face. What have you been doing today? She said, I had lunch with God. And you know, he’s a lot younger than I expected....

I remember something I was told when I was a very small boy......In the larder there was a stack of apples. A small boy wanted an apple. He had been told by some grown-ups that he must not take things from the larder without permission. Why not take one? Nobody would know. It just seemed common sense. Nobody would see him. Was that true? One person would. That was God. He sees everything you do, and He punishes you for the wrong-doing, so I was told.

It took me many, many years to recover from that story. Deep in my subconscious was the idea of God as somebody who was always watching us just to see if we were doing anything wrong. He was an authority figure, like a teacher or a policeman or even a bishop.

Now, many years later, I have an idea that God would have said to the small boy, Take two...

(Cardinal Hume, Basil in Blunderland)

 

"When I have finished writing, when I am a hundred and ten, all I will ever have done will have been to attempt a portrait of God. Of the God. Of what escapes us and makes us wonder. I mean the God within us, awkward, twisted, throbbing, in our own mystery." (Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing, and other essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, HUP 91 p.129)

 

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Question.

If God is really like this, is it possible that we need not worry as much as many of us used to, about being finally lost ? If such trust were possible, what difference would it make to your attitude to life now ?

Monday evening theme.

said Jesus,

I am he.

John 4, 26

 

INTEGRITY: BEING A PERSON

Introduction

We talk a lot about 'being a person'. We say something is 'very personal', 'a personal matter', 'please treat me as a person'. We say 'she is a beautiful person', 'he is a real personality'. In the advertisements for this mission, you have seen the word ‘person’ used a lot, and highlighted. What does it mean to be a person? To be sociable, or friendly, to have civic graces, or more than that? Do you ever ask yourself: how am I special? What special spark do I have in my life? Is there something about me that you could never find anywhere else? To be a person is to be special, indeed to be unique, but it is to be special and unique for someone else. To be a person is not just to be me, but to be me for you. A person is made for loving and being loved, not for using others or being used by them. Person implies my whole being, body and soul, story and world; my whole mystery, my search for truth, my quest for presence; my deepest energy, that needs to express itself, creatively, for another. Living personally means more than just being me for you - it means that all of me is really for all of you. When God created us, God created us as persons, to live personally like that with God and with one another. How do we come to live like that, as persons together? How do we find ourselves in the joy of one another?

This evening I would like to speak to you about three beautiful qualities of personal living. [If you could name three things really worth doing in the world, what would they be?] A real person is meant to be a grateful person, a positive person, an outreaching person. I want to tell you some stories about such people, to show you how we too can become like that, and then to suggest that being like that makes real sense of religion, of christianity, and of life in the church. You can’t be a religious person unless you are a grateful person. You can’t be a Christian person unless you are a positive person. You can’t be a real member of the Church unless you are an outreaching person. We need to translate the words we usually use (religious, Christian, Church) into personal terms, (grateful, positive, outreaching) if they are going to be real in our life.

A real person is meant to be a grateful person.

How do we become like that ? I learnt it once from an elderly black lady, her name was Gloria, whom I met by chance at an airport in Michigan. I asked her what she did. She said : 'well, I try to build community'. 'How do you do that ?' She told me she lived in Pimlico (a very poor area of Baltimore). She came there, and found a neigbourhood of broken down tenement buildings, where people lived afraid of one another, in real isolation from one another. She closed her own doors, as they did, and just become one of them. One day she noticed a small plot of land that no one seemed to own, and to take any interest in. She dug it up, and planted a garden. In the spring, flowers came up, and the people stopped, and looked at them. They started to talk to one another about them. When the flowers were in full bloom, she cut them all, and went to every door of every tenement building, and gave each person a flower. (One old lady told her no one had ever given her a flower before). I said, 'what a beautiful story'. She said, 'it isn't finished'. She told me that next year, the people noticed there was another plot of ground that no one wanted. They dug it up. They planted their garden. In the spring, their flowers came up. When they were in full bloom, they cut them all, and they all came, together, with their flowers, to her door, and gave her their own flowers. Again I said, 'what a beautiful story'. She said, 'it isn't finished yet'. She told me that she and the neighbours (they were neighbours now) agreed to keep on growing their flowers, and giving them to one another, each year. I asked, 'is it finished now ?' She said, 'not quite'. She said, 'we kept our promises, we are still growing our flowers'.

From that story, I learn that to live personally we need four things :

to be gifted,

to be grateful,

to give thanks,

to promise to keep on doing it, and to keep the promise.

[..please repeat..]

Let us think about them. This set of four dynamics can teach us how to be persons, in our relationships, in our religion, in our Christian faith.

To be gifted..

When someone gives you a real gift, they give you more than a thing. They give you themselves as givers. Every giver is a self-giver. Real giving is the gift of a whole person to another whole person. It makes persons.

To be grateful..

We receive the gift, and we welcome the giver. There is a presence. We are not alone. We are together. We don't take it for granted, we welcome the person with gratitude. We don't think about it, we thank the other person for being there, with us. To be grateful is to be thank-full.

There is a common saying among people in the U.S., when someone says to them, ‘thank you’, they say, ‘you’re welcome’.

 

To give thanks..

We want to return a gift, to reciprocate, to give back to the giver. Not something equal to the first gift, but something original : it is not an exchange, but a sharing. Not a sharing of things, but a sharing of persons, caught up in something bigger than either of them.

To keep on doing it..

We want it to keep going on like that. There is commitment. There is bonding. There is inter-personhood. Persons come in twos. To be is to be-long, for a long, long time.

Real personal life is being gifted, being grateful, giving thanks, and keeping on doing it.

We all have to be grateful for being alive. Our mother gave us life, and protected that life in us, and brought us into a world we did not make. It was a totally unmerited gift, a grace, in fact. Our first relationship was one of gratitude for that gift. All our choices since are developed forms of that gratitude. We never had to re-invent a world: we never had to give life to ourselves: but we do have to thank someone (lots of someones) for the gift of being alive, for the gift a world to be alive in. Our whole existence cries out ‘Thank You’.

We can live out our lives either in resentment or in gratitude. There is no middle ground. And God has done so much for us that — when we realise it — we become immensely grateful.

This can make a difference to what we mean by 'religion'.

When God created us, God gifted us with God's presence to us as a Person. God is always waiting for our gratitude. When we reciprocate, with the gift of our own personal presence to God, God is glad. Religion is God's gifting, and our giving thanks, gratefully. Real religion is a bond between God and us, to keep on being like this.

Real religion is being gifted by God, being grateful to God, giving thanks to God, and keeping on doing it with God.

Religion is not something we have to have out of duty, or just out of a sense of justice. It is not where we look for unusual religious experiences. It is living gratefully with a Gifting God. St. John began his gospel with the statement: In the beginning was the Word. What word? The word, Thanks. St. Paul told us we should always be eucharisting, always giving thanks.

 

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A real person is meant to be a positive person.

My story this time comes from a very negative context, but it is about a very positive person.

A 29 year old Jewish woman, Etty Hillesum, on the way to a Nazi prison for execution at Auschwitz, wrote in her diary of how she had come to recognise herself as a person. She threw it out of the train taking her away, like a bunch of postcards.

In the deepest winter, she had found an invincible summer. She knew what it is to be a person, with a personal God, with other persons.

From that story, I learn that to live personally we need four things :

to own my life,

to own my destiny,

to believe in my God,

to share my life with my God.

[..please repeat..]

Being a person means being able to live like that. Living like that, in positivity, let us see Christianity in a new way. Christianity is living like Jesus Christ. Jesus was a very positive person : we are asked to follow him, and be positive too. He knew that life is more than a project he was interested in for his own sake, life is more than what he could get out of it. He saw life as a gift, ready to be given, freely, to and for those he loved.

When Jesus gave us his message, he said, 'I have called you by your name, and you are mine'. He said, 'it was said to them of old...but I say to you'. He spoke personal words, as a person, to each of us as a person. His revelation is a personal matter, to each of us. Faith is our personal response to Jesus, who has spoken to us and touched us personally.

said Jesus,

I am he.

 

In the Eucharist, Jesus said : 'this is my body, given for you'. He said, 'here, me, for you'. There is no more personal gift. These words are a model for our living. We are meant to be here (not somewhere else), our very selves (not in some role or other), for persons (not for causes or institutions). When we live like that, we live like Jesus, we give thanks for his self-giving, and we extend his gift to other persons. This is christian living, and it is the fullness of our personal 'eucharist'.

Jesus came to know that 'no one takes my life away from me. I lay it down of myself'.

Martyrs have done that. Holiness is exactly that. It means to own your self, to share your self, to give yourself - not to give yourself away, but to give yourself to another.

In 1996 some French monks in Algeria were raided by a Muslim fundamentalist group of terrorists. They demanded that the monks rally to their cause. To the monks the leader said: You have no choice. The monks replied: Yes, we have a choice. Their choice was their fidelity to what they believed to be true, and they died for it. They were positive persons, and martyrs.

Jesus saw his life, positively, not as a project he could get something out of for himself, but as a possibility, a chance of giving something, giving himself, for others. He owned his life, he owned his destiny, he believed in his God, he shared his life, not only with his God, but with you and me.

Real christianity is being as positive as Jesus in the way we live for others.

It is the exact opposite of a consumerist mentality: we don’t close our hands over what lies on them, and claim them for ourselves alone (if we do we have a clenched fist); we hold out our hands and what lies on them, and offer to share it with others....

----

A real person is meant to be an outreaching person.

There is a well-known writer, poet, in Russia today, and her name is Anna Akhmatova. In the deep snow one winter, she once stood freezing for hours in a long queue, waiting to visit someone dear to her, who was in gaol. She, like everyone else, was starving. A woman in the queue recognised her, and looked at her, and said : 'Can you describe this ?' She replied, very simply, 'Yes, I can.' She had felt the hurt of that woman. Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. Someone had seen her reality, and put words on it. Someone had made her want to express herself as a person again : she had not lived as a person for a long time.

In 1942 in France, a young Jewish girl was separated from her parents - her father was executed, and she did not see her mother until the war ended three years later. By then she had lost her mother tongue, and spoke only French, which her mother could not speak. She did courses to learn Yiddish again, but she could not learn to say it. Then, one day, she happened to hear her mother singing in Hebrew. Tears came, and she spoke hers and her mother's language once more.

From that story, I learn that to live personally I need to do four things :

to feel the hurt of an other,

to make the other smile again,

to hear the song of the other,

to sing it in your heart.

[..please repeat..]

Who are these 'others' who suffer so much ? who are treated as if there were not persons at all ?

In our church-community, we think that when God creates, God creates persons and calls them to that kind of personal life. There are no non-persons in God's sight. Our God is a person-creating God. But there are persons who are not treated like persons in society. Other people have put them down, marginalised them, branded them socially as 'non-persons'. They are the real poor. They cry out for recognition as persons, they band together in solidarity. Who are they ? Those who have to struggle for survival at work, those who have to fight for emotional survival in a family or community...

Being a person in a community that believes in God and has faith in Jesus, means reaching out to these little people, so that they can become fully persons through your gift...

Being a 'church'-person means being an outreaching person to those whom others have tried to make non-persons... Let us do our best to reach out to them, to help them live their personhood. We do it in compassion, but it is more than just compassion. It is a question of a different kind of JUSTICE...they have a right, under God, to their personhood, and to our reaching out to them.

 

Being a person who believes in God and has faith in Jesus, means reaching out to these little people, so that they can become fully persons through your gift...

The christian life means to know, love, relate to, and enjoy the God of Jesus as a self-giving person. It means to open your whole person, gratefully, positively, and outreachingly, to that Person. It means to give yourself, and your Jesus, and your God, to the little people whom others do not treat as the persons God called them to be. That is the meaning of belonging to the Church.

----

We used to speak a lot about the 'salvation of our soul'. Salvation means wholeness, integrity, meaning. It happens when we 'find our personhood - with God and others'. Save your soul can only happen when you find your person. We used to speak about 'going to heaven'. We are already there, when as persons we are in love with our personal God, in our eucharist, here, and in our eternity. Today we speak of the church as a communion of persons who love one another on earth as they will in heaven, who love one another as the persons of the trinity love one another. We see the world as a workshop, a laboratory, for learning personal love. Our homes, our friendships, our lives are the places where we best learn that being persons is what God has always had in mind for us.

 

If we are going to translate our religion, our Christianity, and our sense of being in a Church into real life today, we have to become persons — grateful, positive, outreaching persons.

 

John Paul II has said : "the way of the church is the way of the person".

 

Paul VI called the church "an expert in humanity".

 

May this personal way be your way, as you become experts in humanity and in personal loving.

 

-------

Question.

The old language of 'saving our souls' doesn't seem to fit in with this whole notion of interpersonhood-with-God. What might salvation really mean in this context ? If our soul makes our whole being, body and soul, a person, can we save our soul without discovering and living our personhood ? Do we have two ways of saying the same thing ? Does it help to make the issue of salvation something that is going on now ? Do we have to work on becoming persons together, for real salvation of all of us to occur ? Does God give the grace of personhood as the first installment of the grace of salvation ?

 

Reflection.

Tonight’s talk has been really about LOVE. St.Paul wrote about it, in 1 Corinthians 13:

"Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy. Love does not boast. Love is not proud. Love is not rude. Love is not self-seeking. Love is not easily angered. Love keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil. Love rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, love always trusts, love always hopes, love always perseveres. Love never fails."

THE CREED : WHAT IT MEANS PERSONALLY

We trust together in

the Person who is the personal source of all (of us)

who owns us

and cares for us

in an unlimited

and innovative way

and gives us all a home where we can live

as persons together

the Person of Jesus

the Person-Source's personal offspring

anointed with that Presence

the Centre of our personal lives

conceived out of personal love

born of the originality of that love

from Mary, the woman who contained it

entered into our personal story and suffering

in Roman times

in occupied Palestine

annihilated from this life by crucifixion

and all it did to him as a person

risen to new life

to enjoy with the Person-Source, and

to share with all forever

 

the Person-Love between them

which is in their personal group that know no limit

their gathering of holy ones

immersed in their life

becoming risen life in their bodies

imparting an eternal quality

to their personal

lives

now

 

AMEN : THIS IS THE TRUTH OF PERSONAL LOVE

 

 

 

Tuesday morning theme.

ON BEING PERSONALLY HONEST ABOUT SIN

 

Introduction

 

On Ash Wednesday, a few years ago, I had said mass, blessed and distributed ashes to the people. After mass, a little girl, about five years old, followed me to the sacristy with ash all over her face. She smiled through the ashes. She said: "Father, I just received my first ash". As if it were her ‘first communion’. I wondered: ash is a symbol of our fragility, our frailty, our finitude. Have we ‘received’ it yet — in the sense of accepting it, owning it, claiming it as ours for what it really is? It takes a long time to do that. One step that is important in that process, is to stop calling it ‘sin’. Fragility, frailty, finitude, not being perfectly put together, not having it all together — these are not sins. They are our inheritance, our make-up, and they come from God, as gift, perhaps to teach us how much we need God and depend on God. They are not sins.

 

Someone comes to confession to me. She says: 'bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It is two months since my last confession. I have done...three of these, two of those, and one of them.' On the spur of the moment, I say, 'did you really do that?' and she says, 'oh, no, Father, I’m not that kind of person'. I say, 'well, could we start all over again, and maybe talk about what was really going on in your life?' I often get the impression that though I hear thousands of confessions, I do not hear about very many real things that people feel they mean to do, in their real lives. Perhaps this is one reason that some people do not come to confession very much: they feel they have to use a language that does not describe their 'real sins'. There is a gap between the way we feel, what we mean, and even what we do, on the one hand, and the way we are accustomed to talk about it, on the other. Can we look at what sin really means to us, beneath and beyond the usual talk about it? I believe there are real sins in our lives, and they need to be named (and avoided).

 

It is often said that we have lost, and need to recover, our 'sense of sin'. I am going to suggest that we need less of it, and more of it. We need less of it, because a whole way of talking about sin has put too heavy a burden of guilt on us; and we need more of it, because all too often we do not address the situations of real sin in our lives.

 

I think a lot of priests would agree with me, that we hear lots of confessions, but often we don’t hear lots of real sins.

 

Part One

 

Can I take away from you some ideas of sin that at some level may still be with you, or at least ask some questions about them?

 

A We still use words about sins that we learnt when we were children.

 

‘Father, I missed Sunday mass, because my wife got ill and I had to take her to the hospital’

That is not a sin.

 

‘Father, I lost my temper’.

‘Father, I had uncharitable thoughts and feelings’. ‘I spoke unkindly’.

It is healthy to get rid of this kind of sense of this kind of sin.

 

Part Two

 

Can I introduce you to a different sense of a different kind of sin ? Can I suggest to you where real sin might be in a real personal life ? Can I ask for a greater sense of this kind of sin ?

 

 

Do I put people in boxes? Do I give them names that hurt them?

Do I invade their personal space?

Do I demand their time, which is theirs and not mine?

Do I forget the difference between age-levels in people?

Do I kill people’s originality?

Do I olaim things to which I have no right?

Do I insist on getting too close, or too far away from people?

Do I let my desires and my imagination run away with me and rule my world?

 

I am other : respect my otherness.

[This means : in reality, you don't 'have' time !]

 

Conclusion

 

What we are talking about here is growing up. It is leaving the 'Egypt' where we don't think about who we are and what we really do; it is standing up to systems of society and language that enclose us in places that are not ours; it is going out to find the other person, in God and neighbour. It is an exodus, a passover mystery.

 

What we are talking about here is discovering mutual love. For Jesus, real sin is against the openness of mutuality, against communion. The true moral life is a holy communion, of real presence to God and neighbour.

 

The message is this : can we transform the wonderful possibilities of modern life in a spirit of openness to the other person ? There is a choice : a way of destructiveness and selfishness, that is, a way of death; and a way of constructiveness and personal openness, that is, a way of life. It is a choice between being all-consuming, and all-loving. Choose life, choose love, choose persons.

 

----------

 

Question.

 

Why does Church language talk so much about our having to make atonement or expiation to God ? Did Jesus really die to save us, individually, and to atone or expiate for every particular sin we ever did ? Is that language only one way to express how much he loved us ? Is that the way Jesus actually thought about it ? How would you put what he did for us, and who he is for us ?

 

----------

 

Tuesday evening theme.

 

JESUS : HIS LIFE-STORY

 

Through this mission, we have told stories about being persons together. To-night, I want to tell you the story of the life of Jesus Christ, and to show you what kind of person he was. Because we love him, we want to know as much as we can about him. More than that, we want to know ‘him’. The centre of our faith is not a doctrine, not even a doctrine about him: it is a person, the person of Jesus. He lived, and died, 2,000 years ago, as did so many others: what is it that makes him special for us? Why is his story at the heart of our own stories ? Why do we love him? He is really present with us tonight: and he wants to tell us about himself.

 

Often Catholics immediately think of Jesus as divine. That is a truth of faith. But they do not as quickly think of him as human, and often they do not know a lot about his human story. He wants to tell us now how human he was. They remember holy cards, statues of the Sacred Heart, pictures from Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, perhaps some gospel texts read on Sundays at Mass. There are many cultural versions of Jesus: most of them have little to do with the real Jesus as he actually was. It is always good for the church to find out what he was really like, and how he lived. He wants to show us, not something to admire in him, but how to live ourselves, as he lived.

 

Today we know a lot of detail about the way he lived. Tonight I won't tell you too many details, but I will concentrate on the point of his life, why he lived as he did, and why he is special for us. We will look at what he did in Galilee, in his ministry; what he did on Calvary, when he died; and what he did at Easter, when he rose from the dead.

 

----

 

Jesus was an unimportant person in the public life of his day. He would never have hit the headlines of the papers (in fact there were no papers). He was marginal to the great institutions and movements in his country. He was a poor peasant from an obscure village called Nazareth in lower Galilee. Like 95 % of the population there, he lived below what we would call the poverty line. He had no special social respectability from his family background. He had no permanent home of his own in his adult life. He had no permanent job. He was a wood-worker, or carpenter, a term we would better translate today as labourer on a building site. To find work, when he could get it, he moved around the towns and villages by the lake of Galilee. He lived among ordinary, simple people, as one of them, in the way they lived. He was a layman, an artisan. He was not a Jewish priest or scholar : he was not educated in the schools, but had learnt what life was about from hard work, and from listening to the people around him. The prayers he said were much the same as the prayers they said. But his attitude to life was different from theirs, and when he shared it with them, it made a difference to them.

 

What was that attitude ? To understand it, some little background is needed about life in Galilee in Jesus' times.

 

Galilee itself is a fertile place: there is no reason why people there should be poor. Just before Jesus' time, the Roman Empire had sent its Army to Palestine and conquered it : the Army remained there as an occupying force. They tried to force the Jews there to live like Romans. They destroyed the local economy, and the local culture.

 

They did this through a massive building program (of sports arenas, amphitheatres, opera houses, and things they Jews found foreign). They paid for all this by taxing the local people exorbitantly. As a result they got into debt, lost the freehold of their small farms, and were forced to work - on land that was really their own - as virtual slaves of Roman absentee landlords. To make ends meet, they got into second jobs, working on the building sites. The Jews were in trouble. They were living under the totalitarian rule of Rome, which was like a transnational corporation. They were compromised by their own local politicians, who collaborated with the Romans.

 

There were two Jewish reactions to this. One was violent : bandits tried to fight the Romans, and of course lost their battle. The other was religious : sects emerged that thought God would save them, and give them their land back, if they were more observant. Among them there was a prophet called John, John the Baptist, who emerged and gave the people hope, with a strong call to repentance. Jesus went down to listen to him, was baptised by him, and stayed and worked with him for a period of time. When John was executed, Jesus went to Galilee. Then unusual things happened. Jesus broke away from John, and developed his own distinctive attitude.

 

Jesus took a different position. Jesus identified with his own people in Galilee. In one way, he had no choice : he was one of them, in their poverty. But he also deliberately lived in solidarity with them : he wanted to, because he saw in them not poverty, but personhood. He loved them as persons.

 

His love for them was all-inclusive : he openly welcomed every one of them. For him, it would be a crime against love to discriminate against anyone, to marginalise anyone, to ostracise anyone, to put down anyone, to leave anyone out. For example : the culture of the day, people held meals, and invited their friends. There were some people whose invitations were not usually accepted : they were regarded as unclean, living off dirty money, like tax-collectors (on behalf of the Romans), and prostitutes. No one would go to their meals. But Jesus accepted their invitations, and ate with them. Another example : in situations of oppression, people get sick with worry, and then they often get sick with sickness, and when they did, they were excluded from the town and its life by those who considered themselves to be upper-class clean people. They were literally treated like 'lepers'. Jesus went out to where they lived, touched these 'untouchables', healed them, and brought them back into full life in the community. A third example: Jesus said, ‘love your enemies’, and people knew he meant, ‘love your Romans’. There was no us versus them in Jesus.

 

Not only did Jesus live like this - he taught his friends this way of living. He taught them to accept one another, to relate to one another, to welcome one another, to include one another, to open up to one another in the midst of all the poverty and suffering that was around them. He did so in the name of justice. It was a different justice from that of the Romans, indeed diffferent from all human justice. It was God's kind of justice. In that justice, all persons had a right, given by God, to be persons together, all communities had a right to a fully personal social life. Jesus wanted it for them all.

 

To give it to them, Jesus WENT DOWN into the hurt, the shame, the fear, the guilt, the wrong of these people; he went down into their exclusion, their loneliness, their distress, their illness, their worry, their apathy, their listlessness and their lethargy. He SHARED it with them, and felt it as they did. And he TOUCHED IT with the positivity of his own person, and IMMERSED IT in the open community he had created. All that evil had done to these people was still there, but it stopped affecting them as it had : its power to hurt them caved in - they saw there was more in life that all that, and that More nothing could take away. They communicated with one another, they got well again, and they shared life again. Life and energy erupted, and they were happy again. Jesus did this, not by some special power from heaven, but by the positivity of open relationship with people. It will always make evil cave in.

 

God came to the party too. There were no barriers between God and Jesus, and what Jesus did, God did in him. So God WENT DOWN into the pain of the people, God SHARED the hurt of the people, God TOUCHED it all with the infinite positivity of God's own personhood, and IMMERSED IT in the unlimited love God had given to Jesus and to all Jesus' people. Evil caved in before it all. It always does when there is open relationship and love, because God’s own energy and life are there, and they erupted among the people, in miracles of healing and enlivenment : it was like a springtime of God's Action, and Jesus called it the 'Kingdom of God'. Life came back to a listless people. Energy erupted among them. People were healed of long-term illnesses. Joy, love, and hope came back. God would be available to everyone immediately, and concretely, and there would be no rulers who would put people down. Everyone was included. All were welcome. God was near them all, with them all, in them all, for them all. It was really, really new. It was a kingdom in which there were no kings, and no one would lord it over anyone else : all were equal in an all-inclusive love.

Incarnation is a movement from lethargy to energy, from disaster to the Energy of God. It is not enough to admire Jesus at the crib at Christmas. If we stop there, we run the risk of missing the real Action....

 

------

 

 

But if Jesus gave all this to everyone, he gave it especially to those who had been most excluded from life. In the mind of the upper class people, he was giving the Kingdom to all the wrong people. Jesus said that God and the Kingdom belonged, not to the self-righteous religious people, but to all and sundry - to those whom others called riff-raff, no-good, and down-and-out.

 

It was an unusual thing to do. In good marketing, you go for the upper class and get them to do something, if possible, for the rest: you market better if you do that. But Jesus was not into marketing: he did not have a product to sell. When the church gets into marketing, it does follow Jesus very closely. Jesus had a gift to give, without excluding anyone. The one’s who had been most deprived appreciated it more, and responded more strongly.

 

He mixed with them, ate with them, lived with them. He told stories (called parables) about what his God was - amazingly - doing around him and through him. Each story was like a stick of dynamite ready to explode in the hearts of the hearers. He planted these charges all over the place. The kingdom of God was going to change everyone's life. He called them all to be God's people in a radically new way.

 

But in the eyes of the upper class, he was blessing all the wrong types : the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the persecuted, the peacemakers. He was remaking God's people, putting people in it who never thought they could get near it, whom the upper classes did not want in it. Many of them ignored him, and turned away from what he offered them.

Jesus did not belong to the nice, clean world of Angela MacNamara or Mary Whitehouse,or to the honest, reasonable, sincere world of The Observer or The Irish Times. He belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers, and liars — he belonged to us and came to help us. No wonder he came to a bad end. No wonder he gave us some hope.

 

Who was this Jesus? He was not afraid of anyone, or anything. He was game enough to go where others wouldn't. Where people didn't want anyone to come. He did this because he was not afraid of God. He was natural and at ease with God. He knew God was with him, he was God's own son. So when he went down among the people into their troubles, he brought God with him, and God had no barriers between God and these simple little people. God loved them and Jesus with the same kind of love. It was a new and different kind of God.

 

Management didn't like it. They never like people who disturb the status quo, who don't go along with the way things have been, especially when they seem to have God with them and acting through them. They didn't like it when the crowds gathered and grew around Jesus. They didn't like when the people came alive, and did things that made life better for them. They seldom do. Ground swells among the people are dangerous in the eyes of the elite. And as a result they did not like Jesus : they were threatened by his success. The Roman authorities didn't like it, because they wanted to keep the people down. The Jewish authorities didn't like it, because they wanted to keep the running of religion in their own hands. They watched Jesus. They wanted to get rid of him.

 

Jesus knew he was in trouble. He knew that everything he did and said about the Kingdom of God was a threat to the Kingdom of Caesar. When he said that the Kingdom of God had come, he knew that they heard him - correctly - say that the Kingdom of Rome, and indeed of every totalitarian system, was over. And he knew they would eventually come after him, and get him. They did.

 

To get out of trouble in Galilee, he went to Jerusalem for a Jewish feast, Passover. There were always thousands of pilgrims there at that time. He thought he would be safer there. When he got there, he saw things going on at the temple, the holy place of the Jewish people. It was meant to be a place of prayer, and it was being turned into a market place, where a few made money out of the poor, in the name of religion. He exploded. He caused a scene in the temple area itself. The authorities were angry. Scenes like that often made the Roman army violent in their crowd control, and kill people: the Jewish leaders were afraid they would do it now. One of Jesus' own men betrayed his whereabouts to the authorities. They arrested him. In ancient times, arrest meant eventual death. They crucified him. It was a political assassination of someone they called expendable. If you practise compassion, you could get canonised; if you live for justice, you could easily get crucified.

 

Who, or what, killed Jesus? The power of evil in the world, in the Roman Imperial System, in the totalitarianism of a transnational corporation whose economic management had gone wild. It was not the little people who killed Jesus by any alleged ‘sins’ they had done. They were the ones for whom he died, by standing up for them and identifying with them. Today, we are Jesus’ little people: not the ones who killed him, but the ones for whom he died. As St.Paul said, ‘he loved me, and delivered himself for me’.

Crucifixion was a political assassination of someone who stood up for us in the name of justice. If we see it just as Jesus making up for our sins, we run the risk of missing the real Action.

 

-----

 

The Romans often crucified people. Literally thousands of them, within fifty years either side of Jesus. What made Jesus special ? Why do people like us tell the story of his death, rather than any of the others ? How can the death of one man, so long ago, in another culture, and another place, be so relevant for us, at the very end of the twentieth century ?

 

When Jesus died, it was like Galilee all over again. It was like a second innings of the Kingdom of God. On the cross, he WENT DOWN into death itself, he SHARED with all who had ever died the experience of the nothingness of death, and he TOUCHED IT with the positivity of his own personhood, and IMMERSED DEATH ITSELF in the openness of his unlimited and all-inclusive love. God WENT DOWN with him into death when he died on the cross, God SHARED the experience with him, and God TOUCHED IT with the positivity of God and IMMERSED IT in the infinity of God's love and life. It was all too alive for death, and death itself caved in : Life burst out on Easter morning, forever. Death could never have any power against it again.

 

 

----

 

This is the resurrection. They crucified him, but God raised him from the dead. It staggered everyone. Most Jews at the time believed that God would raise all his people to new life, at the end of the world. But nobody imagined that he would raise one person, an insignificant Galileean peasant, crucified as an unknown by a Roman execution squad, in the middle of history. Even his followers were not expecting him to be crucified, and they were certainly not expecting him to rise from the dead like that.

 

But he did. It was not just the individual glory of his body. They felt his presence, living among them. They sensed his new life. They experienced the empowerment they were still getting from him. He was alive. He was with them. He was still present to the little people, still enabling them to live. They were amazed at what had happened.

 

Jesus had done it again. He had gone down where no one wanted to go, to the depths of death, as a result of a brutal execution. There were no barriers between him and all that death means. God had gone down there with him. There were no barriers between God and all that death means. And when Jesus and God touched death, the life in them was too big for death itself : it burst out, just as the Kingdom had burst out in Galilee, and Easter burst on the world. Forever. Death could never take it away.

 

All this had happened, not just for Jesus, but for everyone included in Jesus' love, for all the poor little people who had ever, or would ever, be put down by pain or death itself. They too would rise from the dead. Jesus had empowered them to LIVE.

 

Jesus, the risen Christ, gave this life, this empowerment, to all those who believed in him and loved him. He told them to go out and bring this life, this Kingdom life, this Easter life, to the world. He set a new movement going, a new great cause, to give this life to everyone. It was a challenge of a new kind, a revolution with a difference, and a mission to go find and touch the hurting hearts of the world and make them all rise, with the risen Christ, to their own Easter. This was not politics, it was not even piety : it was energy and real hope. A new way of living. Really living. A 'Jesus' kind of living.

 

It meant that in the whole world, through all history, nothing was unclean, nothing dirty, nothing unacceptable in the presence of the risen Jesus. Not even death. It meant that people need not fear death as they used to : it was only their passageway to Easter life. Not even guilt. It meant that they need not feel guilty as they used to : the darkness of guilt was blown away by the rising of the Easter sun. Not even their limitations. It meant that they need not feel limited in their investment in life, in their contact with one another, in their entry into places where others refused them access : the risen Christ, and his healing and enlivening God, were there already.

 

St.Paul was right when he said that 'neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God given to us in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Romans 8).

 

They told people about this. They convinced them. The people believed. Then they baptised them in water, and the Holy Spirit of life - God's own life-giving energy - filled them. They became people like Jesus, ready to live as Jesus lived, to love as Jesus loved, to die as Jesus died, and - to rise as Jesus rose. These people, called christians, gathered to share together, to eat together, to break bread and drink wine together, in the name and in the memory of Jesus, risen. This was their Eucharist, their thanksgiving to God for the life of it all.

 

Baptised, and made one with Jesus in the Eucharist, they were sent out. To everyone, everywhere, to tell them, to convince them, to baptise them, to make Eucharist with them. They were the people of the risen Jesus.

 

Could I suggest that they were different persons as a result ? Persons more like Jesus ? Persons in the presence of the God of Jesus ? Persons like that personal God ?

 

If, in the Resurrection, we just see Jesus as risen into his own glory, we run the risk of missing his Action in us.

 

----

 

Jesus as a daring person; Jesus was a deathless person; Jesus is a living person who drives us to live, die, and rise like him. He was daringly real, unflinchingly faithful, and freely empowering those around him. He was an including person, a person who stood up for others, an inSpiriting person.

Who was Jesus, really? People sometimes ask, was he God? They tend to assume that they know who God is, and are really asking how Jesus fits into their picture of God. It is a better approach to think that we don't know, off the top of our heads, who God is, exactly, but we can discover God by looking at Jesus. Our God is in Jesus, his son, for us. Look at his life, look at his death, look at his resurrection, and you look at who God is. The closer we get to the original Jesus, to the story-telling, welcoming, healing Jesus, to the dying and rising Jesus, to the empowering Jesus who gives his life-Spirit to everyone, the closer we get to recognising the face of the living God.

 

St.John said it all: No one has ever seen God, but the only Begotten who is nearest to the Father’s heart, he has worked out God’s meaning for us.

 

Who are we, really ? We are people privileged, by grace, to know and believe in Jesus. And to love him. Not only do we know quite a lot about him : we know him. We know the power of his resurrection in us. We are Jesus-people, prepared to live differently because of Jesus, knowing that we will touch the rough stuff of life because Jesus did, but sure that we will rise out of it because Jesus rose from the dead into the clean air of God.

 

Let us be daringly positive like Jesus, unflinchingly faithful like Jesus, and freely empowering others to live, as Jesus did and does. Let us live without fear, in the energy and the aliveness of God.

 

 

Be Jesus people, be Easter people, be living persons in God, as Jesus was.

 

 

-----

Jesus turned around, saw them following him, and said:

"What do you want?"

Rabbi, they said, "where do you live?"

 

"Come and see", he replied. And they stayed with him the rest of that day.

 

 

Jesus said to Peter: "do you love me?"

"Yes, Lord, you know I love you."

Jesus said again: "do you love me?"

"Yes, Lord, you know I love you."

Jesus said a third time: "do you love me?"

"Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you."

 

 

Jesus said to them: "Who do you say the son of man is?"

"You are the Christ".

 

At the end of the millenium, on New Year’s Eve last, there was an opera in London called ‘The Last Supper’. There were 13 men around a table. It was Jesus and the 12. Jesus invited them to do the last supper again. Jesus washed their feet, and cleansed the dust of 2000 years. Judas was among them. Jesus explained that he had been misunderstood, and misrepresented by the media. Jesus embraced him. At the end, as in the Holy Thursday night liturgy, they exit to music. They go to the garden of olives. It is night. A voice, offstage, breaks the silence. "Whom do you seek?" There is a cock crow. Is it : Peter’s denial once again? or has a new day begun? or what will this new Easter bring?

Wednesday morning theme.

 

LOSS AND GRIEF

 

Most issues of personal living emerge in situations of loss. I do not mean the loss of little things. I mean the loss of big ones. We dearly want to keep what we love, to keep things we have grown to live with, and that have become part of our life. Life doesn’t always work out like that. We lose things, we lose people, and we grieve, and we do not stop.

 

We lose things, like a job, or money, or a house, or our security. We lose more personal things, like spontaneity, aliveness, a sense of humour; we lose our sense of self-respect, our feeling for the meaning of life, our basic happiness, our peace of mind. We lose people — perhaps a husband or wife, a partner, a child, a friend.

 

When feel losses like this, we grieve. Grief is not something we do. It is something we undergo. And suffer. Some people tell us to get in control, to deal with our problem, to cope with it. They are wrong. It is better, just to let it sink in.

 

People say to us: "I am sorry to hear your (wife) has died". What do you say? You talk about what happened. It hides more than it tells. The sentences feel empty. You say: "I am sad" — but that is not even half of how you feel. You are saying to yourself: how will things be when (she) is no longer part of my life?

 

If you read books about this loss and grief, they will tell you the stages you might go through: denial, anger, bargaining, settlement, etc. I wonder often if there is not much more to it than that.

 

Real losses are never small: they always feel total.

 

Real losses leave gaps that can’t be filled.

 

Real loses always hurt. It is the hurt that talks in us, not our real selves.

 

In losses of that kind, we can easily become numb — quite passive, and unable to do anything about it. We can easily develop fantasies to fill the gaps. We can easily move into bursts of anger.

 

In loss situations, it is important to be patient with yourself, over a time-span longer than you would wish, and to trust...

 

If you feel like that about your own losses, it is even harder to enter into the pain of a stranger.

 

Here is one thought that might help sometimes. There are some things you can never lose.

 

There are three things in life, nobody can take away from you. One, your experiences, two, your true friends, and three, what you grow inside yourself.

 

Experiences : not on a grand scale, but the so-called ordinary moments (walks in the park, sleeping under a shaded tree, fishing, listening to music, taking a warm bath, mowing the lawn).

 

Friends: the ones who never leave your heart, even if they leave your life for a while. After years apart, you pick up with them right where you left off, and even if they die, they are never dead in your heart.

 

What we choose to grow inside : it is up to each of us. It could be bitterness and sorrow if we want to, but we would rather not. When you look into someone's eyes with love, warmth and gratitude, you can see what grows inside them.

 

What grows inside me changes with the environment, but there is something that guides me, an inner strength that works with me. My personal God, a partner with me. An atmosphere in which we exist and I am part of it. Almost like a mystical experience. Of being 'one' with 'God'. You realise you are much bigger, you are the universe. It is you who ‘are’ ‘in’ God.

 

A person who does not believe in himself is an atheist. Belief in your self, as God believes in you, is the foundation of your belief in God.

 

I like to see myself as a participant in the atmosphere of God. It is another name for the Holy Spirit.

 

What is life all about, anyway ? why are we here ? Do we learn it through loss and grief?

Perhaps it is a woman who has had a child who knows these things best. She has lost the life within her, only to see the life in the child that now lives outside of her.

 

'The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Usually after we have grieved for some losses."

 

It is really then that we become persons. To be a person means to look at the 'self' or the 'me' that has matured. A person cannot be looked at in isolation, because persons are meant for one another, and their histories are meant for them. The person is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. To use the word person means to convey a sense of discovery about humanness, over a long journey of acceptance and understanding. There then is a uniqueness about personhood that commands respect, reverence and appreciation. The person expresses who we really are at the roots of the being that we have become.

 

As often as you do these things, "remember me".

 

Wednesday evening theme.

 

pray for us,

little people,

now,

and at the hour of letting-go.

Amen.

It befits a reflective being only to live the examined life. (Socrates)

DEATH: DYING AS A PERSON

 

Introduction

 

If we want to learn to live, we need to know how to die. Death is something many people don't want to talk about, but deep down want to know about. It intrigues us, and puts us off. We know we will experience it someday, and we hope that day is not soon. It is a sensitive matter, a delicate one, since it touches us, ourselves, and those we love. And it leaves gaps that are hard to fill.

 

I have found a need to be unusually sensitive in speaking about death: almost always, there is someone present for whom death has been close in recent times. Perhaps they have been actually present at someone's death. Can I say that our Christian message about death is a very positive, and very consoling one? It can heal the heart, and give us hope.

 

In our own generation, attitudes to death are changing dramatically. For the last six hundred years at least, there has been, in the western world, a general cultural attitude to death that we can describe in the words fear and anxiety. In fact, I would prefer to call it anxiety rather than fear: we are afraid, but we do not know exactly what it is that we afraid of. Some people, at times, have actually been terrified by death. And sometimes, sermons and messages about death have actually led to that feeling. And now, within our own lifetime, the mood about death is changing. There is inevitably a sadness, but the new mood is rather one of greater calmness and gentleness. How has this happened?

 

People are living longer, in better health, and many are dying not only in old age, but largely of old age. (There are more people over the age of 85 now than at any previous time in the history of the planet, and we are told, soon there will be even more.) There is an attitude that it is 'normal' to die - it is the next phase of the journey of life. Accidents still happen, but for more and more people death will be eventual, at the end of life, rather than accidental, as an interruption of life. Religious approaches to death are changing too. God is no longer seen as someone who secretly determines the time and place and manner of our death: God rather leaves that to natural causes, and normal hospital and medical care. God is no longer seen as someone who decides our destiny at the moment of our death: God rather leaves that to the whole drift of our lives. God is rather present, when we die, to welcome us home. This change is reflected in the pastoral care of the dying: it is less urgent and anxious about the dying person, and more attentive to the needs of the bereaved. Those who report on near-death experiences say that they have not encountered anything frightening, and are calm about their eventual real death when it comes. We tend in our liturgy to focus on scripture texts that are positive about death: it is a passing over to the Father (John), a dying with- and in- Christ (Paul), a dimension of Eucharist, with the support of the Church's prayer and Mary's presence.

 

These days, there is often more concern about the death of someone near and dear to us, than about our own death. We get anxious because we have no access to their experience, and we do not know how to handle that vacuum.

 

In death, there are two dimensions. There is biological death, which happens to us, and there is personal dying, which is something we ourselves do. Biological death is medical death, and it would take a doctor to talk about it. This talk is about personal dying.

 

 

Part One

 

Personal dying ? what does it mean ?

Persons do not just meet death as a physical fact; they do not just lose the kind of consciousness we now have. They die. Dying is an act that they do. They pass from one world to a new one. It is like birth in one way, but in another way it is different : we are familiar with the old world we have been in, and we are unsure of the new world to which we are going. To go there as persons, we have to let go of the old world, and trust that there is a new one for us. [I have heard hospital nurses say that in their experience, death does not come to people unless in some way they are ready to let go, and trust like that. But the letting go I mean, is not just resignation to medical treatment or lack of it: it is not just the exhaustion that comes after the energy to live has gone: it is much, much more than that.]

 

 

A Personal dying is an act of letting go.

 

Henri Nouwen tells the story of his visit to a trapeze group in a famous German circus. He spoke with their leader, who said:

 

In fact that prayer has a biblical background. The Jews of old thought that life was in the breath. When we went to sleep, it was as if we were dead. So, before they went to sleep, their children were taught to say the prayer: Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my life-breath. They put it in the hands of Yahweh, who neither slumbers nor sleeps. Yahweh kept it overnight, and gave it back to them, freshened up, with interest, in the morning

 

Part Two

 

Does this letting go work for everyone who dies ?

 

We don't know. There was a time when we used to play the Judge (play God ?) in all this, and decide who went where: usually we and our friends went to heaven, and others with whom we did not get along so well, did not. Nowadays we prefer to leave it to the real Judge, to let God handle it. God alone has all the real evidence from the heart of people, and God alone is infinitely positive to all human persons, and judges the evidence in God's own way. There is indeed a difference between our kind of justice, and God's kind. So : is there a chance that God gives all the grace, in the process of actually dying, to let go to God and to be with God ? Again, we don't know. We can't prove it. We can't dare, with faith, to believe it, as God has not actually revealed it. But we are entitled to hope and pray for it : we would almost be selfish, if we hoped for it for ourselves and not for everyone. We certainly can’t prove it is not so. So : is there anyone actually in hell ? We don't know : there is no clear statement about that in scripture, but we had better live good lives, so we won't be the first there !

 

Pope John Paul II has said:

 

‘Hell is not a punishment externally imposed by God.’

 

Scripture : God hears the cry of the poor.

I sometimes suspect that the dynamics we always associated with our time in Purgatory, as a place, might all happen in the mystery of our dying... they are there, perhaps much more truly.

 

What do we actually do when we get to heaven? We see God, we thank God, we enjoy God. We see and do things as God sees and does them. It is more like eternal, enjoyable activity than eternal rest! St.Thomas says that we will know everything that is connected with us as persons: we will know and love everyone we knew (and perhaps didn’t love enough) here on earth, and we can pray for them. Yes, we will be close to our dear ones — those still to come, and those who have gone before us to God. Many saints have believed that when we come to die, our dear ones will not only be there to meet us, they will come to get us.

Conclusion

 

The best place to learn letting go, is in relationships.