mustard seed

A couple of weeks ago I led a retreat day for a local group. The reflections of the day were focussed on what God expects of us personally and as a parish / Church community.

Personally, all that God hopes for us is already built into us as desire.  In our efforts to satisfy this desire we often grasp at what we think we want. We indulge the want, then minutes later we are looking for something else. We thought that this would bring us satisfaction but we are still restless. There must be more?

The good news? There is more!

A healthy person will realise that what s/he thinks s/he wants right now is probably not what they really want at all.  When we think we want chocolate and a beer, it is really good friendship that we would prefer. 

When I think i need the company of another person, I may fail to realise that it is really a felt sense of the presence of God with me, that I truly seek.

The evil spirit has mastered this technique of deception, by suggesting to us that this thing or that person will make us happy. But our experience tells us that most of our conscious longings are misleading. We are created for something much more than that which first attracts our attentions.

As St. Augustine said in the fifth century: ‘you have created us for yourself O Lord, and our heart’s are restless, until they rest in you.

You may recall the C.S. Lewis quotation I published in this newsletter a few weeks ago. Take a moment to ponder it again. 

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

The Weight of Glory   C.S. Lewis

Sin is simply a willingness to settling for anything that does not deliver what it promises. God promises everything to us as gift, and gives everything. We want for nothing more.  All is gift.

Back to the retreat day.

As we reflected together it was clear that we all slip into the ‘bigger is better’ way of thinking. Over the years I have been to many Parish Council meetings where the key project has been to get people to Mass.

People think this is a daunting task. It is not!  I bet you anything you like, that I could fill every Church of the Hurunui and even the Chatham Islands, not just once but several times every Sunday. Impossible you think? Not at all. How would I do it?  In fact, if you name the age of the people you want me to fill the church with, I could manage that too!

Here’s how:

If you wanted me to fill the Church with teenage girls, I would call Justin Bieber in. to sing a couple of songs at Mass. If you wanted a church full of middle agers, I would twist the arm of a few All Blacks to give an ‘inspirational talk.’  See, not difficult to fill a church on a Sunday...

...but we know this is not the point.  Perhaps my example is a bit extreme. Let me offer another.

Some church communities seek to attract people by being ‘inclusive.’  This requires letting go of the fulness of life God has called us to, and settling for what is more easily achievable. The presumption here is that the Church is our Church, and that we are free to create it in our own image.

But the Church is not our Church. It is also not the bishop’s church or the pope’s Church. In the same way the parish is not our parish. It is God’s parish and we are God’s people.

There is a wonderful freedom in this. We do not have to invent or create ourselves. All we need to do is to be faithful to what God has called us to be. 

This means that if I have difficulty with Jesus’ teaching that I must love my enemy, I can’t simply discard or disregard the teaching. Nor am I called to alter this teaching to make it more ‘user-friendly’ in order to attract more people to the parish.

Our prime goal as a parish community is not therefore to fill our churches with people. Our central mission is to be faithful to all that God has called us to be.

But we have to face an overwhelming fear in the face of this task. The fear is that we want to be big and strong, powerful and influential. If what we say is unpopular then some will leave us and others will not be attracted.

This was exactly the situation that Jesus faced. Yet he remained faithful to all that he knew his Father was asking of him.

And, quite beyond all odds, this technique of gentleness and meekness confounded all who used methods and techniques of power and aggressive manipulation.

Sadly, too often, the Church too has used the techniques of the world to bring about change. The results may be temporarily satisfying, but never lasting. And then a saint like Francis of Assisi comes along in the Middle Ages and quietly feeds the poor. The results are not only immediate, but 800 years later Francis is probably the most universally popular saint.

And so back to the mustard seed. Pope Benedict is thinking that the church must grow smaller (in numbers) in order to be more effective. His point: we must not fall into the trap of thinking that it is our skill and our creativity that builds a parish.

"Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the church's history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intense struggle against evil and bring good into the world - that let God in."

“Light of the World” 

interview with Pope Benedict

Peter Seeward

Instead we are called to face our fear of what looks like failure (in the eyes of the world), and not be afraid of a simple and meek intimacy with God. 

As the pope suggests, this may mean that (for a time at least) our parishes are very small and even grow smaller. But our calling is not to be big or successful. We are called to faithful to God.

And the good news of history is that wherever people are faithful to God, they have not only survived, but grown (from the most insignificant of seeds) to become the most splendid tree of all.

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from Pope Benedict XVI  “Faith and the Future”

“The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning 

"She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members…. 

"It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . . . The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain . . . 

But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. People in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret. 

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”

airports

I have spent a bit of time waiting in airports in the past few weeks. This morning on a news report I read that Pope Benedict met with airport staff and offered them a few words of challenge and encouragement.

An airport is a unique kind of place. A liminal space where I am no longer where I was, but I am not yet where I am going.

Such a space offers unique opportunities for reflection.  

If I ever wrote a book I would like it to be the kind of work that airport kiosks sold; the kind of reading that a browsing traveller would be happy to pay a few dollars for, and to read at the gate or on the plane.

I suspect that whenever people find themselves in a liminal space they are more open than usual to considering a decision, or to pondering a new direction...

Back to the pope. You might be interested in the report:

new routine

The adjustment back into Study is a bit of a challenge.   I picked up the texts for the first semester of classes and struggled to carry them back to my room alone. 

It was good to meet many of the others who will make up the team of summer students.

The Mundelein Campus must be one of the most beautiful university sites in the world. The classical architecture buildings are along the shore of a lake, surrounded by trees and woods.

The rhythm of each day is clearly marked with classes all morning, and study all afternoon and evening. Three times each day we pray together in the chapel, with Mass as the high-point

It is 7am. Off to breakfast, prayer and classes.

young priests!

Two years ago I arrived at Mundelein University in Chicago for a six week study stint as part of a sabbatical.  I am now back for further study in the Master's Degree programme at the Liturgical Institute.

The student group for this programme numbers around 30.  A diverse bunch; young people with families, religious sisters and priests.  Among the priests I suspect I am one of the oldest.  

I recall that when I arrived here in 2010 I had come from the celebrations to mark the close of the Year of the Priest in Rome.  I looked back at my first blog entry from Mundelein at that time.  It was very positive: the world is full of young priests!

study

I was not a good student at high school. On a good day my exam results reached average.  Many of my teachers taught me what I had to learn, but no one thought of telling me how to learn it.  

Tonight I leave NZ for two months study leave at the Liturgical Institute at Mundelein University in Chicago.  Some of you who have been reading this blog for a couple of years will remember that I was there two years ago.

There have been a few things to organise in the week since I discovered that I was definitely to study this year.  Now I am at the airport in Auckland, about to board the flight.

The blog will continue with regular updates while I am away.

Please keep me in your prayer.  I pray daily for all readers of this blog, whoever and wherever you may be.

Corpus Christi newsletter

Weekly newsletter for the Catholic Parishes of the Hurunui District and the Chatham Islands.  Feast of Corpus Christi.


http://www.catholichurunui.co.nz/newsletter_10_June_2012.html

Corpus Christi

Orvieto is a beautiful settlement where all roads lead to the magnificent medieval Cathedral. The ‘treasure’ of this church is the corporal onto which the host was said to bleed during a Mass in the year 1263.

In this Middle-Age era of scepticism and instability, reports of the miracle spread rapidly and widely as a message of hope and confidence in the reality of Jesus present in the form of bread and wine. What Christians knew to be true was verified once again. The people were delighted.

The pope of the time was Urban IV. He had set up his home not in Rome, but in Orvieto. The Papal Palace is just beside the Duomo in the town. The miracle above happened in the nearby town of Bolsena, so it was probably only hours before the pope heard about it.

When he heard the wonderfully positive response of the people to the miracle, he too saw the event as a direct communication from God. The following year he proclaimed the feast we celebrate today: Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ.

Eight hundred years later, on the other side of the world, we celebrate this feast that is the heart of our Catholic faith. God is with us. We are never alone and therefore have no cause to ever feel lonely.

God is available to us in every Mass in the most tangible and simple elements of bread and wine. The disciples of Jesus knew as they left the Last Supper, that something remarkable had happened at their table. They did not understand at the time why Jesus had told them to “do this in memory...”. But after his Resurrection three days later, and six weeks later filled with the Pentecost Spirit, they knew that Jesus had in fact gifted them with the fulness of Himself.

As they began to meet weekly ‘in memory of Him’, they did exactly as Jesus had instructed them. They took bread and broke it. They took the cup and proclaimed the blessing. They ate and drank what they knew to be His body and His blood. In doing this they realised that they were partaking of the food of life. This nourishment was the source and summit of their existence.

Within a few years, as the flailing Roman Empire desperately grasped at power, Christians were seen as a threat. Those who professed Jesus as their saviour, and who gathered for the Eucharist, were persecuted and often put to death. In the midst of this antagonism Christians became more committed to Jesus, and Christianity spread throughout the world.

God prevailed in the lives of this persecuted little group. Despite every opposition their community flourished throughout the Empire. Over the dark and difficult ages that followed, Christianity flourished. Twelve hundred years later St. Francis and St. Dominic proclaimed this life of Christ in ‘real presence’ in the Eucharist.

Forty years after the death of Francis and Dominic, just down the road from their home towns, the Bolsena miracle  renewed human understanding of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

After the Reformation, when many began to see the Eucharist as simply a symbolic ritual, Catholics continued to know that in receiving communion, they were taking the reality and fullness of Jesus into their lives. Catholics showed their conviction in this reality by receiving communion only after much prayer and reflection. This was no token ritual for them, but a conscious and active participation of God in a person's life. The natural response to such an overwhelming divine love is a personal conscious and active participation in the life of God.

It is significant that at the Last Supper, Jesus instructed his disciples to “remember”. “Do this in memory of me”.  He would have known how easy it is for humans to forget what is essential and to become preoccupied with what is less necessary and even trivial.

Weekly participation in the celebration of the Eucharist has throughout Christian history been the sign that one is seeking to live the life of Christ fully. 

Today, when we pass through the doors to enter a Catholic Church, we are expressing our desire to enter the life of Christ more fully. A Catholic church is not a 'community venue' but a holy place, consecrated to use only for prayer and worship. 

When we enter a Catholic church we are silent and still. As we enter we bless ourselves with the waters of baptism. When we arrive at our seat we genuflect to the reality of Jesus present in the tabernacle. In the moments before Mass begins we remember our need for God. In every Mass we are reminded of God’s desperate desire to live with and in us in every moment.

As the Word of God is proclaimed we recall what we have missed during the week. We remember that we need to know God is with us in every moment of the week ahead. Without this active memory, we can never feel as though we are truly alive.

The most basic of elements, flour, water and grape are brought forward as bread and wine. Now the Eucharistic Prayer is prayed and the substance of these humble gifts becomes the reality of Jesus Christ.

This is an even more wondrous event than a miracle. A miracle happens only when God chooses. But God has given us the power to choose the time and place of each Mass.  Jesus allows Himself to be given to us. God allows Himself to be consumed by us. In this moment we cannot doubt that Jesus is with us, for without own eyes we have seen Him make His home in our bodies.

When we recall that this is in fact what is happening, our healthy response is humility, gratitude and veneration. 

It is appropriate that in the moments before we receive communion we make a physical act of preparation, the Sign of the Cross or a dignified bow before the God who is eager to give us all that we desire. 
   

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Pope Benedict XVI Corpus Christi Homily 2011