Silence

I didn’t really intend to stop blogging here. It crept up on me. Oddly, given that I had far more time on my hands during that period, the experience of lockdown pushed me away from maintaining this blog. It felt like, after having said a few things about life as a Catholic in the time of Covid, I had nothing else to say. And I suppose something like that has prevented me from coming back to blogging: I’m not sure I have anything to say. Or rather, I do have things to say, but I’m not sure I should say them. I have things to say which might play into ecclesiastical factionalism. I have things to say about important things, the things of God, which I am uncertain about putting onto the internet, for fear they might be wrong or misleading. We speak falteringly, if at all, of these things. And yet, saying nothing can be a subtle indulgence of its own. And it is certainly the vocation of Dominicans, Lay Dominicans included, to speak of God. So I’m going to give blogging another go. Easter is an appropriate time for new beginnings after all.

For a start, I’d like to reflect on precisely what I have been implicitly talking about, on remaining silent in the face of God. There is a proper silence in the presence of God, which recognises that God is wholly beyond our ability to comprehend or contain. ‘We do not know what God is’, writes Thomas, ‘but only what he is not’. We are united to him ‘as to one unknown’. Faced with such utter unknowability, silence is inevitable. Yet we cannot be silent forever. God, after all, whilst remaining utterly beyond our language and thought, speaks to us, speaks to us in the work of creation and in the outpouring of love that is revelation. We cannot but respond to these things with our words, by singing God’s praises and telling what God has done for us. It would be perverse to remain silent given these things. And yet our words, to the extent that they are genuinely directed towards God, turn back into silence as we encounter the mystery that lies behind and at the origin of God’s works. This interplay between words and silence is fundamental to the Christian life. It does not matter if we have times of silence, so long as we don’t forget to speak of God. It does not matter if we speak of God, so long as we end up silent before the mystery of God’s being.

The eucharist and our neighbour

I want to maintain two things: first that the eucharist matters, is the centre of Christian life, so that the ongoing disruption of our celebration of the mass ought to be a source of hurt. But secondly, I want to say that this disruption is justified, and that if we grasp these two points together we learn something about the eucharist itself.

Human beings have an anti-tragic streak in us, there’s a temptation to always see the best in a situation, even when the best isn’t there to be seen. So it is understandable that some people have seen the separation of the faithful from the eucharistic mysteries over the past months as an opportunity. The pages of the Catholic press have been full of stories of people discovering new forms of spirituality during lockdown. Now of course God does bring good out of ill, but to my mind people have sometimes been too quick to see the good and ignore the ill, there’s been a glib sitting lightly to the loss of the eucharist which ultimately runs up against what must be non-negotiable Catholic belief: that here in a unique way, Christ and his sacrificial self-giving are present to us.

But they are not present for the sheer sake of it, rather Christ comes to us in the eucharist – so Aquinas insists – to bring about charity, that love of God and of neighbour that is constitutive of God’s Kingdom. The mass, like all sacraments, does not exist for itself but for the sake of the Kingdom. It is not intended to make of us a religious in-club, but of people who are sent forth to change the world – Ite missa est. And so if the demands of love of our neighbour require restrictions on the celebration of mass, as they clearly do at the moment, far from being in tension with the nature of the eucharist, those restrictions – albeit in a tragic fashion – invite us to a proper living out of the eucharistic life. For the sake of the charity symbolised in our eucharistic communion, we must for a time live differently. When the full practice of regular masses, frequent communion, singing, full Sunday congregations, and so on is restored, we can say ‘this too is for the sake of our neighbour’.

Divine Mercy

One of my favourite hymns for the Passiontide season we’ve just left contains the lines:

Cease not wet eyes,

His mercy to entreat,

To cry for vengeance sin doth never cease.

To cry for vengeance to whom? The natural reading is that our sins are crying out to God for retribution, and that we are entreating God’s mercy against that. But that is not how things are with God. There are not two sides to God: a vengeful, retributional one, and a loving, merciful one. God who, is utterly simple, is all love. God’s justice is nothing other than his mercy, his arms outstretched to welcome us.

It is not to God, but rather to ourselves, that our sins cry out. We convince ourselves that we do not deserve the life God promises us, that we are not forgivable, that we are not loveable. Today’s feast is a reminder that these are lies. God in Christ, risen from the dead, has broken us out of the cycle of sin and retribution, and simply loves us. It is sin that cries for vengeance. To see ourselves not as people about whom sin is the last word, but rather to see in ourselves the image of the Risen Christ, that is to be a recipient of the divine mercy.

Good Friday in lockdown

Of all the liturgies we have missed since, for good reasons, public liturgies were suspended, I feel the loss of Good Friday’s the most. I think that’s because today speaks to our situation. There is a desolation about the day, acted out in our churches: the empty tabernacle, its door flung open; the stripped altar; the lack of candles; the statues still veiled. The liturgy disorientates us; we don’t do what Christians most characteristically do when they gather together to worship, celebrate mass. Instead we work through a liturgy which is perpetually unfamiliar to even the most seasoned attendee.

Good Friday feels like every day feels in lockdown: separated from the mass, confused. Today’s drama belongs to all of us at the moment. But so too does today’s hope. Because today teaches us that God can bring good out of the most profound desolation. Those priests who, alone at the altar, celebrate today’s strange rites wear mass vestments – the light of Easter shines in anticipation already – there is a hope attached even to the cross. That is a message our world needs right now.

Preparing for Easter

Lent is, above all else, a time of getting ready for Easter. Just as the catechumens use the season to prepare for their baptism, so the whole Church uses it to prepare to celebrate Christ’s passing over from death to life, and to recall our baptism into that mystery as we celebrate the Easter Vigil. We prayed at the office today,

grant us now a single-handed perseverance in keeping your commandments,

and bring us untouched by sin to the joys of Easter.

This year the Easter Vigil will be celebrated by priests alone in our churches. The rest of us will have to associate ourselves with that celebration as best we can, perhaps following some of the readings or saying some of the prayers. It is going to feel very odd, and to be deprived of the public liturgy of the Church at Easter cannot be anything other than hurtful.

It’s important then to be clear that we are still preparing to celebrate Easter, with the emphasis on celebration. In spite of all that is happening, in spite of the coronavirus, God is still victorious over death. The message isn’t a glib one: the God who as a human being rises from the tomb has shared our suffering, lived and died in solidarity with our pain and loss; he still bears our wounds on his body. Yet, in spite of it all, he is risen. And, I think, it is especially important at the moment to orientate ourselves towards this truth.

 

By the rivers of Babylon

Separation from public liturgy and from the sacramental life of the Church is difficult beyond words. It is clearly the correct response to the coronavirus pandemic, but still it hurts. I don’t have many words at the moment.

The mass continues to be offered and we, by virtue of our baptism, participate in that offering. One thing that strikes me is that this first Sunday of closure in Britain is Laetare Sunday. Priests will stand alone and offer mass dressed in rose, symbolising the rejoicing of this mid-Lent Sunday, and using texts that have the seemingly incongruous character of joy. But there is a profound truth here. Even in the depths of sadness, uncertainty and separation, the joy of the gospel remains. Because that joy is not a facile upbeatness, but rather born out of the love of God. May that love sustain us through the coming weeks.

Herbert McCabe on Almsgiving

“We do not give alms during Lent because we are under the illusion that almsgiving will solve the problem of world poverty; and by the same token we do not think it foolish to give alms because we know it will not solve that problem. The point is… to dramatize for ourselves the reality of poverty and oppression and need, and of our responsibility for it. Almsgiving is not a substitute for political action. Art is not a substitute for reality”

‘Ash Wednesday’ in God, Christ and Us

Love in the ashes

 

Here is how not to think about Lent.

We, as we occasionally bring ourselves to acknowledge, do wrong things. These offend God, and we need to placate God. So we pray more, give things up, and generally behave in a more religious fashion in the hope that God will forgive us.

Stated boldly like that, hopefully no Christian would sign up to this view of Lent. Yet, such is the temptation to make God in our own image, and such is our own moralism, that we often behave as though the above account were true. So it’s important to remind ourselves of the truth.

This is quite simply that God is in love with us, cannot help being in love with us, and is in love with us no matter what we do. So over-the-top is his love that his response to us turning away from him, as we all do, is to act in the very depth of our being to draw us back into fellowship with him. Even our turning back to God is God’s gift (notice that we are given ashes, sometimes with the words ‘turn away from sin’). We do not need to earn this love, which is just as well, since there is nothing we could possibly do to earn it.

The difficulty, from our side, is accepting this love, which is often tied up with accepting that we are loveable (as we are: made in the image and likeness of God, sharing our humanity with Christ). This, I think is the task of Lent: to work with God’s grace to bring ourselves to accept that we are loved, prising our fearful hands away from the substitutes for love which we all build in our lives, placing ourselves in prayer in the presence of the God who loves us, and who calls us to life from the ashes.

We are a Christmas people

“We are an Easter people”, runs a familiar saying, “and Alleluia is our song”. And that, of course, is right. In the Easter mystery we see the fullness of redemption and, in the risen humanity of Jesus, catch a glimpse of what we ourselves are destined to be. But still, I want to add, “we are also a Christmas people, and Adeste Fideles is our song”! The Incarnation, the mystery of Christmas, lies at the basis of so much in Christian life and belief.  It is the starting point for the Easter mystery – it is because the one who passes over from death to life is both God and one of us that we are saved – the foundation of our salvation, ‘God became man so that human beings might become divine’. And it underwrites so much about Christianity, including so much that we are in danger of forgetting.

At Christmas, a season that has always been the occasion for puritans and miserablists to practise their creeds, the Incarnation speaks against any attempt to write off the material world or its pleasures as somehow intrinsically excluded by the faith. We feast and drink and go to parties, and the association of all of this with Christmas is not mere sentiment. On the contrary, God himself in Christ has eaten, and drunk, and been to (if we believe the gospels, thoroughly disreputable) parties. Our celebration has been hallowed. How can the things of the material world be bad, when God has taken up the material world in the Incarnate One?

Nor is it just in the ‘secular’ sphere that these implications are to be seen. Beautiful and sensorially-engaged liturgy is a way of recognising the Incarnation. Against the kind of view that would see incense and chant as somehow the badge of ecclesiastical reactionaries, these things too are really just the natural consequences of belief in the Incarnation. We use all our senses to worship God because God has assumed all our senses in Christ. Material things – genuflections, statues, vestments – honour the God who became material for our sakes.

But so too does a Christian concern for social justice flow from the Incarnation. What happens in the world is of theological significance, because God has declared himself for this world when he became part of it. We cannot write off ‘politics’ as something that has nothing to do with ‘religion’; the Incarnation runs straight through the middle of any such dualism. Nothing human is outside the remit of our faith, since everything human is God’s in Christ. And, we should add, within the political sphere it is the well-being of the poor, amongst whom Christ lived, that should most concern Catholics.

As a Christmas people our role is to offer the material world to God in Christ, through our celebrations, through our liturgy, through our passion for justice.

Happy Christmas!

“O wonder of wonders, which none can unfold:
The Ancient of days is an hour or two old;
The Maker of all things is made of the earth,
Man is worshipped by angels, and God comes to birth”