L’ABITO NON FA … IL MONACO
So goes the Italian expression. It means that a priest, a minister of the Church, a religious person is as such, not because he, or she wears a special ‘habit’. It is more intrinsic, more serious; it goes deeper than simply wearing such a ‘habit’. In the long History of the Church we have read that quite a number, unfortunately who wore the ‘habit’ did not live up to the expectation that such a ‘habit’ calls for. Many others, who never put on such a habit, but were true, genuine apostles, followers and gave witness to their Master, Jesus Christ. Many, non-robed, have suffered martyrdom, as a proof of their genuine belief.
The Gospel of the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, is a case in point. Quoting John: “Teacher, we saw a man using your name to expel demons, and we tried to stop him, because he is not of our company”. So he did not wear the special ‘abito’ or ‘habit’. But, the one who loves God is a living member of the Church, under whatever sky he is living, irrespective of the skin colour, his age and his upbringing.
Quoting St.Augustine: “Two loves have made two cities.” Meaning; the love of this world has made the city of men, the love of God has made the city of God. And Jesus Christ is the Father of the city of God. From eternity HE was earmarked to be sacrificed in advance for our Redemption. In His extreme suffering He has moved our feelings that are too cold and too guilty to turn to God, in a natural way. The Church is not only what it seems to us… it goes, it stretches, it is felt,it exist in ‘deep waters’.
“It is not only in this visible building where everything is history, hierarchy, authenticity, virtues and shining miracles; it is also about the half-light, in the blur of shadows, saintliness lost to man’s sight, but not to that of the angels … and to God’s. There is not a single soul that has not an impenetrable sanctuary and which does not offer to God in this ‘holy of holies’, a hidden incense, and which is always acceptable to God.” (H. Lacordaire O.P.)
Love, which is the foundation of the Church, is the most evasive of living fluids, and if the eye of man has never yet been able to detect it in the swift current of his nerves, how much less is he aware of the ways taken by the ‘Divine Love’.
The Church, therefore has an extension that no human eye or mind can compass. Those who confront us with the boundaries, which appear only in their eyes, have no idea of the twofold radiance which is in its nature, and which raises up souls to it in the East and the West, in the world of both the setting and rising sun.
Saturday 26 September 2015
Saturday 19 September 2015
MYSTER MYSTERY, MYSTERY … ASK ME ANOTHER …
You are a person of ‘integrity’. And what is ‘integrity’ ? The definition, found in any standard dictionary is: ‘a person having the quality of being honest, of strong moral principles and moral uprightness, it is a state of being whole and undivided.
As a person of integrity you choose, you hand-pick, your own friends; you share your daily life with them; you instruct them; you give ample proof of what you teach; you make them realise that life is worth living, and, the ultimate reward of such life. They witness love to neighbour as something real, whereas so far, love had a different definition. The realize what justice is, how every person deserves, and must be treated with dignity.
Yet, though your friends feel that you are well-meaning; that you are a person of integrity and honesty; that you should be trusted; that they feel ‘at home’ with you; that you are the one and only one who has the ‘truth’, notwithstanding all this, they can’t understand all you tell them. Very often, notwithstanding their trust in you, they cannot make head or tail of you declarations that you will one day have to suffer death at the hands of your enemies.
If you are a person of integrity, needless to state that Jesus Christ was a superman of ‘integrity’ and the other characteristics that makes such a person. And, if you have experienced such a disappointment of having such ‘hand-picked’ friends’ who misunderstood you, Jesus felt the same and more. After living and sharing His life with the Apostles, a few days away from His passion, they still do not understand Him. Please keep in mind that these ‘hand-picked’ friends were to be the foundation stone of His Church, they were to be responsible to carry on His mission when He ultimately joins the Father in Heaven.
This is a mystery. You might argue: ‘why has Christ chosen these twelve persons almost all, illiterate? But there is still another mystery to all this; notwithstanding all, the apostles did remain with Jesus, even when they did not understand Him and what was going around them, they remained steadfast. They are faithful, they are patient. They bank on Jesus, as it were, made an advance declaration of confidence and trust. Meantime the Holy Spirit must have taken over to convince the Apostles of what they had been feeling inside them, though they were not realizing it, that the Master, must be believed for all He has instructed and shown them by facts. His Resurrection from death sealed all their feelings, what they had been feeling, deep down in their hearts, without sharing or making it known to each other. This behaviour is another mystery.
Would it not be folly to expect everything to be intelligible, or to accept no more than we can understand. As Karl Rahner once said: “The incomprehensible must lay hold on us, for only then shall we be open to God the infinite. One day we shall find everything’ .
You are a person of ‘integrity’. And what is ‘integrity’ ? The definition, found in any standard dictionary is: ‘a person having the quality of being honest, of strong moral principles and moral uprightness, it is a state of being whole and undivided.
As a person of integrity you choose, you hand-pick, your own friends; you share your daily life with them; you instruct them; you give ample proof of what you teach; you make them realise that life is worth living, and, the ultimate reward of such life. They witness love to neighbour as something real, whereas so far, love had a different definition. The realize what justice is, how every person deserves, and must be treated with dignity.
Yet, though your friends feel that you are well-meaning; that you are a person of integrity and honesty; that you should be trusted; that they feel ‘at home’ with you; that you are the one and only one who has the ‘truth’, notwithstanding all this, they can’t understand all you tell them. Very often, notwithstanding their trust in you, they cannot make head or tail of you declarations that you will one day have to suffer death at the hands of your enemies.
If you are a person of integrity, needless to state that Jesus Christ was a superman of ‘integrity’ and the other characteristics that makes such a person. And, if you have experienced such a disappointment of having such ‘hand-picked’ friends’ who misunderstood you, Jesus felt the same and more. After living and sharing His life with the Apostles, a few days away from His passion, they still do not understand Him. Please keep in mind that these ‘hand-picked’ friends were to be the foundation stone of His Church, they were to be responsible to carry on His mission when He ultimately joins the Father in Heaven.
This is a mystery. You might argue: ‘why has Christ chosen these twelve persons almost all, illiterate? But there is still another mystery to all this; notwithstanding all, the apostles did remain with Jesus, even when they did not understand Him and what was going around them, they remained steadfast. They are faithful, they are patient. They bank on Jesus, as it were, made an advance declaration of confidence and trust. Meantime the Holy Spirit must have taken over to convince the Apostles of what they had been feeling inside them, though they were not realizing it, that the Master, must be believed for all He has instructed and shown them by facts. His Resurrection from death sealed all their feelings, what they had been feeling, deep down in their hearts, without sharing or making it known to each other. This behaviour is another mystery.
Would it not be folly to expect everything to be intelligible, or to accept no more than we can understand. As Karl Rahner once said: “The incomprehensible must lay hold on us, for only then shall we be open to God the infinite. One day we shall find everything’ .
Saturday 12 September 2015
ET TU, BRUTE !
Very often, in life, we miss the beauty of certain ‘subtle’ delicacies, because of the rush of time. We take too many things forgranted; we have become a ‘cog’ in a huge machine. We are too much in a hurry to stop, look, and appreciate the majestic beauty of the sunrise, or of the setting sun; the fresh breeze of early Spring; the smell of the first rain. Sometimes we are ‘too blind’ though we can see. At times, though we hear … but alas, very often we do not listen, we do not think, ponder on the meaning of simple statements, which we take forgranted.
This applies to next Sunday Gospel text, when Christ asked his apostles, who do the people say or think that He is. It’s not enough reading that the people said that ‘Christ could have been the Baptist come to life’ or that others think that ‘He could have been Elijah’. What these declarations really meant was that Christ was only the one preparing the way for the expected Messiah, ergo He was not the expected One, not the Messiah.
But let us recall what Peter declared when asked by Christ. Peter did not simply add another, a more lofty name given by the people; HE was not the Baptist, not even Elijah or some other ‘prophet’. Peter said: “You are Christ.” In that declaration he expressed something special, something different from what the people had declared. Peter declared that Christ was not a forerunner, he boldly denied that somebody else was expected. He asserted that the decisive point of history had come, and that Christ, the bearer of the ‘new’ had come in this man Jesus, who was walking with them in the dusty village streets of Palestine. NOW was the point in time.
These are the subtleties, the fine tuning: the beauty of a sunset, the Spring breeze, which can be realised with open eyes and ears, with full awareness. We must stop and think, dig deep until we penetrate the cover, the obvious, and find the hidden treasure. Yes, Caesar said those famous last words: ‘Et tu, Brute’’. But these three simple words, whole volumes can be written about them. Those three words were a ‘flashback’ for Caesar, his close friendship with Brutus, etc.
What sometimes seems or sounds so ‘obvious’, especially in the Holy Scriptures, is not what we understand at first hearing. In music, one note can be applied to various compositions, but if that one note is accompanied by a chord (three or more notes, major or minor) it changes its whole effect, meaning.
When Peter declared Him as the Christ, he designated Him as the One who was to bring the liberation of Israel, the long-awaited One, the victory of God over the nations, the transformation of the human hearts and the establishment of the Messianic reign of peace and justice.
The greatness and the tragedy of the moment in which Peter uttered these words are visible in the reaction of Jesus. HE forbade them to tell anyone about Him..
Very often, in life, we miss the beauty of certain ‘subtle’ delicacies, because of the rush of time. We take too many things forgranted; we have become a ‘cog’ in a huge machine. We are too much in a hurry to stop, look, and appreciate the majestic beauty of the sunrise, or of the setting sun; the fresh breeze of early Spring; the smell of the first rain. Sometimes we are ‘too blind’ though we can see. At times, though we hear … but alas, very often we do not listen, we do not think, ponder on the meaning of simple statements, which we take forgranted.
This applies to next Sunday Gospel text, when Christ asked his apostles, who do the people say or think that He is. It’s not enough reading that the people said that ‘Christ could have been the Baptist come to life’ or that others think that ‘He could have been Elijah’. What these declarations really meant was that Christ was only the one preparing the way for the expected Messiah, ergo He was not the expected One, not the Messiah.
But let us recall what Peter declared when asked by Christ. Peter did not simply add another, a more lofty name given by the people; HE was not the Baptist, not even Elijah or some other ‘prophet’. Peter said: “You are Christ.” In that declaration he expressed something special, something different from what the people had declared. Peter declared that Christ was not a forerunner, he boldly denied that somebody else was expected. He asserted that the decisive point of history had come, and that Christ, the bearer of the ‘new’ had come in this man Jesus, who was walking with them in the dusty village streets of Palestine. NOW was the point in time.
These are the subtleties, the fine tuning: the beauty of a sunset, the Spring breeze, which can be realised with open eyes and ears, with full awareness. We must stop and think, dig deep until we penetrate the cover, the obvious, and find the hidden treasure. Yes, Caesar said those famous last words: ‘Et tu, Brute’’. But these three simple words, whole volumes can be written about them. Those three words were a ‘flashback’ for Caesar, his close friendship with Brutus, etc.
What sometimes seems or sounds so ‘obvious’, especially in the Holy Scriptures, is not what we understand at first hearing. In music, one note can be applied to various compositions, but if that one note is accompanied by a chord (three or more notes, major or minor) it changes its whole effect, meaning.
When Peter declared Him as the Christ, he designated Him as the One who was to bring the liberation of Israel, the long-awaited One, the victory of God over the nations, the transformation of the human hearts and the establishment of the Messianic reign of peace and justice.
The greatness and the tragedy of the moment in which Peter uttered these words are visible in the reaction of Jesus. HE forbade them to tell anyone about Him..
Saturday 5 September 2015
THE PROOF OF THE CAKE IS IN THE EATING …
Next Sunday’s Gospel text (23 Sunday) shows it quite clearly. We have to keep in mind one important fact: ‘Christ was no showman’; He never performed a miracle to draw attention. Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd, all by himself. This shows respect for the individual; that is the way Christ treats each and every one of us … He still is a master of psychology’. Christ realized that deaf people are a little embarrassed. Sometimes it is much better to be dumb, or blind than deaf.
A deaf person knows that he cannot hear, and when someone in a crowd shouts at him and try to make him hear, in his excitement he becomes all the more helpless. Jesus showed the most tender consideration for the feelings of a man for whom life was very difficult. Throughout the whole miracle Jesus acted as if He was performing ‘a dumb-show’. He put His hands in the man’s ear … without saying anything; and touched his tongue with spittle. In those days people believed that spittle had a curative power (this is found in the writings of the historian Suetonius).
The whole narrative shows us so clearly that Jesus did not consider this man merely as a ‘case’, He considered him and treated him as an individual. This man had a special need and a special problem, and with the most tender consideration Jesus dealt with him accordingly. In His dealing with this person, Jesus spared his embarrassment and feelings and left him to feel at ease.
The only sound, the only word that came out of Christ’s lips was the order “Ephphatha!” which means , “Be opened!”. The man’s ears were opened and the bond which which held his tongue was loosened, and the man spoke correctly. All the people were amazed beyond measure, and declared that He had done all things well. Do you recall in Genesis , after every ‘creation’ God declared and saw ‘that all was good’ ? That is God’s verdict since the creation of the world, and is still IS.
When Jesus came, bringing healing to men’s bodies and salvation to their souls, He had begun the work of Creation all over again. In the beginning everything had been good, man’s sin had spoilt it all; and now Jesus was bringing back the beauty of God to the world, which man’s sin had rendered ugly.
Next Sunday’s Gospel text (23 Sunday) shows it quite clearly. We have to keep in mind one important fact: ‘Christ was no showman’; He never performed a miracle to draw attention. Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd, all by himself. This shows respect for the individual; that is the way Christ treats each and every one of us … He still is a master of psychology’. Christ realized that deaf people are a little embarrassed. Sometimes it is much better to be dumb, or blind than deaf.
A deaf person knows that he cannot hear, and when someone in a crowd shouts at him and try to make him hear, in his excitement he becomes all the more helpless. Jesus showed the most tender consideration for the feelings of a man for whom life was very difficult. Throughout the whole miracle Jesus acted as if He was performing ‘a dumb-show’. He put His hands in the man’s ear … without saying anything; and touched his tongue with spittle. In those days people believed that spittle had a curative power (this is found in the writings of the historian Suetonius).
The whole narrative shows us so clearly that Jesus did not consider this man merely as a ‘case’, He considered him and treated him as an individual. This man had a special need and a special problem, and with the most tender consideration Jesus dealt with him accordingly. In His dealing with this person, Jesus spared his embarrassment and feelings and left him to feel at ease.
The only sound, the only word that came out of Christ’s lips was the order “Ephphatha!” which means , “Be opened!”. The man’s ears were opened and the bond which which held his tongue was loosened, and the man spoke correctly. All the people were amazed beyond measure, and declared that He had done all things well. Do you recall in Genesis , after every ‘creation’ God declared and saw ‘that all was good’ ? That is God’s verdict since the creation of the world, and is still IS.
When Jesus came, bringing healing to men’s bodies and salvation to their souls, He had begun the work of Creation all over again. In the beginning everything had been good, man’s sin had spoilt it all; and now Jesus was bringing back the beauty of God to the world, which man’s sin had rendered ugly.
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