#IVE LOST SO MANY DRAWINGS OF HIM HOLY CHRIST

[nova-rpv]

YALL GUESS WHAT I FOUND TODAY

the creature of all time, @galaxylover06's boy himself, death leech shado!!! and also baby shado but yk :3

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[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

14th September >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on John 3:13-17 for The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up’.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

John 3:13-17

God sent his Son so that through him the world might be saved

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

‘No one has gone up to heaven

except the one who came down from heaven,

the Son of Man who is in heaven;

and the Son of Man must be lifted up

as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,

so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost

but may have eternal life.

For God sent his Son into the world

not to condemn the world,

but so that through him the world might be saved.’

Gospel (USA)

John 3:13-17

So the Son of Man must be lifted up.

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Reflections (6)

(i) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

When we had our parish pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi about two years ago, I bought a wooden cross. It is a replica of the cross that spoke to Saint Francis in the church of San Damiano in Assisi. On that occasion Francis heard the Lord call on him to rebuild his church. It is really a painting on wood of Jesus on the cross. The image is very unlike the image of Jesus on the large crucifix in our side chapel. There it is very evidently the suffering Jesus that is depicted. On this cross from Assisi Jesus looks very serene. There is no trace of suffering in his face. It is almost like the glorious Christ on the cross with his arms outstretched to embrace all. That image is very appropriate for today’s feast. This is not like the feast of Good Friday, where we dwell on the sufferings of Jesus. This feast proclaims the triumph of Jesus on the cross. What was the nature of that triumph? It was firstly the triumph of life over death. Those who put Jesus to death did not have the final say, because God the Father raised him high, in the words of Saint Paul in today’s first reading. It was also the triumph of love over hatred. Human hatred for Jesus did not have the last word, because in and through Jesus crucified, the love of God for humanity was shining brightly. In the words of the gospel reading, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. It was also the triumph of mercy over sin. In today’s first reading, the people of Israel cried out, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord’. However, when they looked upon the bronze serpent they experienced the Lord’s life-giving mercy. When we look upon the face of the Lord on the cross, we too find mercy; we experience the cross as the throne of grace. Today’s feast celebrates the good news that God turned the tragedy of Calvary into a triumph for us all. Through the cross, God’s life-giving love and mercy was embracing us all. Today’s feast also reminds us that in our own personal experiences of Calvary, the Lord is present with us in a loving and merciful way, working on our behalf to bring new life out of our suffering and dying.

And/Or

(ii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

In the time of Jesus no one would have considered crucifixion a triumph. It may have been considered a triumph for those who were doing the crucifying; it certainly would never have been considered a triumph for the person crucified. Yet, that is what we are celebrating this morning. Jesus, in being crucified, triumphed. It was a triumph of love over hatred. As John the evangelist says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God so loved the world only Son’. Jesus revealed God’s love in all that he said and did, but he revealed God’s love most fully on the cross. John the evangelist would say that on the cross Jesus revealed God’s glory. That is why in John’s gospel Jesus speaks of his coming crucifixion as the hour when he is glorified. Authentic love is always life-giving and that is uniquely so of God’s love. As well as being the triumph of love over hatred, the cross of Jesus is the triumph of life over death. Jesus was put to death in the most cruel way but through his death he passed over into a new life and that life was offered to us all. The blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus in John’s gospel speaks to us of the life that flows through the death of Jesus. The cross has been celebrated in art as the tree of life. The triumph of the cross, which is the triumph of God and of Jesus over Satan and all the forces of evil and death, is a triumph in which we all share. From the cross Jesus draws all of us into the love and life of God. As he says in John’s gospel, when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself. We simply have to let ourselves be drawn.

 And/Or

(iii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. ‘Triumph’ suggests celebration, achievement, recognition. ‘Cross’ indicates suffering, humiliation, defeat. How could any one who ended up crucified ever be said to have triumphed. It is hard to think of a greater paradox that the phrase ‘the triumph of the cross’. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find that phrase in any way strange. When we look on the cross with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and the wisdom of God. What is this power that shows itself in such degrading weakness? It is of course the power of love, the power of a love that is greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Here was a divine love that became a human love in the life and death of Jesus, a love so powerful that it was in no way diminished by the experience of rejection, hatred, and all that was most sinister and corrupt in the human spirit. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of love over hatred, of life over death.The triumph of that Good Friday is a triumph in which we all continue to share. The light that shone in that awful darkness continues to shine on all of us. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives.

 And/Or

(iv) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The expression ‘exaltation of the cross’ would have made very little sense in the time of Jesus. ‘Exaltation’ suggested glory, honour, status, whereas death by crucifixion was the most shameful death imaginable. It was the complete absence of glory, honour and status. Why did the early Christians begin to speak of the death by crucifixion of Jesus as exaltation? They could only do so in the light of Jesus’ resurrection. In today’s second reading, Paul says that because Jesus ‘was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross’, God raised him high, or highly exalted him. In that sense, Jesus’ exaltation by God followed his death on the cross. Yet, the early church understood that Jesus was already being exalted by God as he hung from the cross. When people were doing their worst to Jesus, God was standing over his Son vindicating him, confirming all that his Son lived by and stood for. It was because Jesus was totally faithful to the work God gave him to do that he was crucified. What was that work that God gave Jesus to do? Jesus’ work was to reveal God’s love for the world. As Saint John says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son’. On one occasion in John’s gospel Jesus said, ‘my food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work’. According to that same gospel Jesus’ last words before he died were ‘it is finished’. Jesus’ work of revealing God’s love for the world, for Jews, Samaritans, pagans, was experienced as threatening by many, especially those in power. They crucified him to put a stop to his work. Yet, in killing Jesus they enabled Jesus to finish the work God gave him to do. If his life proclaimed God’s love for the world, his death proclaimed that love even more powerfully. His death revealed a divine love, a love that endured in the face of all the very worst that evil and sin could inflict on him. That is why we can speak of the exaltation of the cross. When we look upon the cross, we believing we are looking upon an explosion of love, the glorious revelation of God’s love, a love that is stronger than sin and death, a love that embraced the world and embraces each of us in a very personal way. We can each say with Saint Paul in his letter to the Galatians, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.

 And/Or

(v) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The discovery of the relics of the true cross by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, is dated to September 14, 320. The annual commemoration of that event has been celebrated since, in praise of the redemption won for us by Christ. No one in the time of Jesus would ever have put together the two words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’. Far from being a triumph, death by crucifixion was considered to be the most degrading and terrifying form of execution. It was a way for the Roman authorities to show its triumph over all those who dared to threaten Roman order and peace. Yet, as Christians, we have no difficulty in looking upon the cross of Jesus as a triumph. Rome did not have the last word when it came to Jesus, because God raised Jesus from the dead and he made him the cornerstone of a new community, which went on to include a future Roman Emperor, Constantine. Through the eyes of the resurrection we can see the cross of Jesus as the triumph of love over hatred, of Jesus’ love over the hatred of his enemies, of God’s love over the hateful rejection of his Son. This is how John in his gospel understood the cross of Jesus. It was the glorious revelation of God’s love for the world, in the language of today’s gospel reading. Jesus himself says that a man has no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. We venerate the cross because it is a powerful manifestation of a love that is greater than any human love. That is why the earliest Christians tended to depict the crucifix as a glorious Christ with arms outstretched reigning in love from the cross. This morning we celebrate a triumph in which we all share. We are all embraced by the love of God that shines through Christ crucified. The cross has become good news for us. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans expressed that good news very simply and very powerfully, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us’.

 And/Or

(vi) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find the phrase, ‘triumph of the cross’, in any way strange. When we look on the cross of Jesus with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and wisdom of God, the power of a love greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Our own capacity to love is very influenced by the extent to which our love is returned. It is not so with God. On the cross, Jesus revealed a love so powerful that that it embraced even those who brought about his death. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives. The Eucharist that we celebrate makes this love present to us in a special way. God so loves the world that he continues to give us his Son in the Eucharist. Not only are we the beneficiaries of the triumph of God’s love on Calvary, the triumph of the cross, but our own lives can reveal to others the triumph of the cross. The triumph of the cross shows itself in all kinds of simple ways, in the tolerance and humour we show to each other against all the odds, in the willingness to let go of old hurts, in the bearing of terminal illness with patience and dignity, in the fidelity to significant commitments when they become costly, in the loving service that endures even when it is not appreciated. We pray on this feast that the triumph of the cross would continue to take flesh in all of our lives.

Fr. Martin Hogan.

[weavingthetapestry]

Historical Objects: The Trinity Altarpiece

(Click image for better view. Inside panels are on the right, outside on left. Source- wikimedia commons)

The Trinity Altarpiece is one of the most remarkable objects to have survived from mediaeval Scotland. Produced by Hugo van der Goes in the 1470s, this triptych would have occupied pride of place on the high altar of Trinity Collegiate Kirk in Edinburgh. Though the centre panel is now lost, the wings survive including depictions of the Holy Trinity, angels and saints. Perhaps of more interest are the contemporary historical figures depicted: on the outside of the left-hand panel is pictured the provost of Trinity kirk, Edward Bonkil; on the inside left-hand panel King James III (r.1460-1488), accompanied by a boy who may be the future James IV; and on the inside right-hand panel James III’s queen Margaret of Denmark. A precious survival from a country where only a small percentage of mediaeval art survived the iconoclasm of the Reformation, and centuries of Anglo-Scottish, religious, and civil wars, the Trinity Altarpiece gives a rare glimpse into the vibrant cultural networks of a small European kingdom and the interests of its elites. 

This impressive piece was probably created by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, who was born in the mid-fifteenth century in the great city of Ghent, then a major European centre. Goes was first mentioned in 1467, the same year he was admitted to the painters’ guild of Ghent. Over the next decade he frequently undertook painting work (both practical and artistic) in Ghent and further afield. He served as both juror and dean of the painters’ guild during the mid-1470s, but by 1478 had retired to the Roode Klooster near Brussels, where he lived for the rest of his life. In later years one of his fellow novices at the Roode Klooster, Gaspar Ofhuys, wrote an account of Goes’ time there, which provides a valuable insight into his life and character. Goes often received visitors, including Maximilian, Archduke of Austria and other notable figures. He was also occasionally allowed to leave the monastery to undertake commissions and travel to some of the region’s cities. While returning from one such trip to Cologne, however, he suffered a fit of madness and attempted suicide. He briefly recovered only to die shortly afterwards, in 1482, tormented towards the end of his life by the thought of not finishing his art. Nevertheless he is now recognised as one of the most significant and talented Flemish painters of his time, despite his short career- and the difficulty of identifying his work. 

Most identifications of Hugo van der Goes’ paintings rest on similarities with the Portinari Altarpiece, the only work confidently attributed to him. Thus many of his purported works- which include the ‘Lamentation of Christ’ (now in Vienna), the ‘Adoration of the Kings’ (or the Monforte Altarpiece, now in Berlin), and others which only survive in copies made by his followers- cannot be certainly attributed, though as yet there is no real reason to doubt the Trinity Altarpiece. In any case the Trinity panels are clearly of the highest quality and represent an important contribution to Northern Renaissance art. Moreover, their existence sheds light on the networks of artistic patronage in mediaeval Europe and the links of one particular Scottish churchman and his royal patrons.

(The Portinari Altarpiece, also by Hugo van der Goes. The centre panel flanked by the inside of two wings gives some idea of how the Trinity Altarpiece would have looked when open, before the centre panel was lost. Source Wikimedia Commons)

While they are now appreciated primarily for their artistic value, these mediaeval altarpieces also had a practical purpose. As portable religious items they helped direct the spiritual devotions of their owners, while they also had worldly usefulness, prominently displaying the patron’s political, spiritual, and social networks. In triptychs, patrons and their family members were usually represented on the inside wings, like the royal figures in the Trinity Altarpiece. Here the king and queen of Scots- James III and Margaret of Denmark- are portrayed in rich costume, accompanied by Saints Andrew and George, and a young boy who probably represents their eldest son, James, Duke of Rothesay. Despite the prominence of the royal family however, the Altarpiece may owe its origin to a very different individual. When a triptych was not in use, the inner wings would usually close over a larger centre panel (the Trinity Altarpiece’s appears to have been lost) and the outside panels were often decorated with less showy ‘grisaille’ paintings. In the Trinity Altarpiece, however, these outer panels tell us even more about the work’s provenance. Portrayed on the left outer wing is the Holy Trinity (father, son, and holy spirit) and, on the right wing, kneeling in supplication before the Trinity, a churchman whose coat of arms identifies him as Edward Bonkil, first provost of Trinity Collegiate Church in Edinburgh- the man who probably commissioned this expensive work of art.

Trinity College Kirk, which stood beneath Calton Hill, was founded in 1460 as the pet project of Mary of Guelders, queen consort to James II of Scotland (1437-1460). Mary was not just the daughter of Arnold, Duke of Guelders but also the great-niece of Philip the Good, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, and as Mary was raised at her uncle’s court her marriage to James II strengthened Scotland’s traditional commercial and cultural ties with the Low Countries. A formidable woman, Mary headed the government after her husband’s premature death in 1460, as regent for her young son James III. She also had some reputation as a builder (her other major project was Ravenscraig Castle, the first castle in Scotland built specifically to withstand artillery fire, and she contributed to works elsewhere too). Though work on the church may have begun in her husband’s lifetime, it was chiefly Mary’s project and from 1460 onwards she took a keen interest in the foundation. Besides paying for its endowment and construction, she may have personally contributed to the creation of the college rules, stipulating that all the canons and boys should be capable of reading and singing in plain chant and descant, laying the foundations of Trinity’s reputation as a prestigious choral institution. Following her early death in 1463, she was also buried in the church, probably near the high altar, where the altarpiece likely stood and it has been theorised that the missing middle panel could have included a representation of the queen dowager herself, drawing attention to the church’s royal associations. However the altarpiece was painted after her death, and indeed the responsibility for commissioning this costly piece of art may not have lain with the royal family at all, although Mary’s son James III and his queen feature prominently on its inner panels. It has been argued by Lorne Campbell that we should instead look to the provost of Trinity, Edward Bonkil, portrayed on the right-hand outer panel of the altarpiece. 

(Bottom left- Trinity College Kirk, as it appeared in the nineteenth century. Source- Wikimedia Commons)

Edward Bonkil had been a close servant of the late Mary of Guelders, having been personally promoted to the position of provost of her lavish foundation. After the dowager’s death, however, he seems to have gradually fallen out of favour at court and it is suggested by Campbell that he may have commissioned the altarpiece partly with a view to currying favour with the young James III. Whether this is accurate or not, it seems highly probable that Bonkil was the main driving force behind the commission- not only does he occupy a privileged position on the outer wing of the altarpiece, but his features are much more detailed and exact than those of the royal family, suggesting that they were painted from life. As a member of a prominent Edinburgh merchant family, and having possibly served on embassies to Guelders and Burgundy, Bonkil had close connections with the Low Countries. Moreover he is not recorded in Scotland between 1473 and 1476, around the time that the altarpiece may have been painted, and so he could have travelled to Flanders personally to sit for the artist. Though it did not bring him renewed royal favour, if the altarpiece was commissioned by Bonkil it not only secured his legacy but has provided us with a rare and invaluable glimpse into the tastes and cultural connections of late mediaeval Scotland’s clerical elite.

Much of the altarpiece, including the likeness of Bonkil, is believed to have been painted in Flanders by Goes, and certain sections are even adapted from other works by Flemish artists, such as the ‘Madonna in the Church’ by Jan Van Eyck, which forms the backdrop to Bonkil’s panel, and a lost work by Robert Campin which influenced the representation of the Trinity. The faces of King James III and Queen Margaret however, may have been painted over by an unknown artist upon the altarpiece’s arrival in Scotland, to lend them some realism, though they are not of such high quality as the depiction of Bonkil. The portrayal of the young Duke of Rothesay- the future James IV- is probably even less true to life, as portrayals of children in late mediaeval art were more often symbolic than realistic and it is probable that Rothesay was an infant at most at the time of the painting’s creation. His appearance may allow us to tentatively date the work however, as he was born in 1473 and described as James III’s ‘only son’ until 1478-9, and neither of his younger brothers are portrayed in the painting. This place the period of production in the mid-1470s- a rare survival then, from an otherwise shadowy period in late mediaeval Scottish history.

(Edward Bonkil, Provost of Trinity Collegiate Church, who probably commissioned the altarpiece. Source- wikimedia commons)

Despite having been painted almost a century and a half earlier however, the panels from the Trinity Altarpiece were only recorded in written sources for the first time in 1617, when they were included in an inventory taken of the possessions of Anne of Denmark, queen of James VI of Scotland (James III’s great-great grandson and by now James I of England also). The inventory  of Queen Anne’s belongings was taken at the royal residence of Oatlands in Surrey, and it has been suggested that the Trinity Altarpiece was brought south after her husband’s last visit to Scotland earlier in 1617. It was to remain in England for many years thereafter, passing into the hands of Anne’s son, Charles I, by 1624, when it was erroneously described as a work by Jan van Eyck. The altarpiece was auctioned off during the Civil War but was reclaimed by the royal family after the Restoration, after which it was displayed in various English royal palaces, including Kensington and Hampton Court. In 1857, it returned to Scotland for the first time in over two hundred years when it was briefly transferred to Holyrood Palace during the reign of Queen Victoria. Over the next few decades it was shuffled around on several occasions, but was often on public display at Holyrood until 1912, when it was first briefly loaned to the National Gallery of Scotland, due to fears over its safety in the face of militant suffragette activity. In 1931, it again returned to the National Gallery, in whose care it remains today.

If anyone has a spare half an hour in Edinburgh some day, I highly recommend visiting the galleries, if only to see the Altarpiece. Flemish art of this period is both fascinating and beautiful and the Galleries are very fortunate to own a piece of such high calibre as the Trinity Altarpiece. As well as this, the culture of mediaeval Scotland has left few traces in the modern day: even the impressive Trinity Collegiate Church, the original home of the altarpiece, was largely demolished in the Victorian period to make way for Waverley Station, while many other pieces of art, books, buildings, music and historical sources have been lost to the ravages of war, iconoclasm, and time. The survival of such a beautiful and costly work as the Trinity Altarpiece, therefore, stands testament to a fascinating and complex past, as culturally vibrant as that of any other corner of mediaeval Europe, and just waiting to be uncovered.

(Source - Wikimedia commons)

Selected Bibliography:

“Charters and documents relating to the Collegiate Church and Hospital of the Holy Trinity, and the Trinity Hospital, Edinburgh, A.D. 1460-1661″, ed. J.D. Marwick

“Rotuli scaccarii regum Scotorum: the Exchequer Rolls of Scoltand”, eds. John Stuart and George Burnett, volumes 6, 7, & 8

“Hugo van der Goes and the Trinity Panels in Edinburgh”, C. Thompson and L. Campbell

“Hugo van der Goes’s Altarpiece for Trinity College in Edinburgh and Mary of Guelders, Queen of Scotland”, T. Tolley

“She is But a Woman: Queenship in Scotland, 1424-1463″, Fiona Downie

National Galleries of Scotland

[obannthepunished]

uhhhhhh notes HURT WEEK im pains

"They call me eagle-eye fjord where i come from." "maybe raven. i dont know." that theory about Fjord being the Hawker is suspicious rn (Apparently theres a third i missed whoops) sam apparently similar thoughts maybe bc Nott brings it up

Jester finally teaching kiri basic phrases, like "go fuck yourself"

Beau + Fjord taking first watch

Caleb checking out the dodecahedron

(Unrelated odd point: i have a current dislike/distrust for liam, which is bullshit bc... i love liam. and caleb and vax. but apparently smt is wrong.)

Dodecahedron is Very Old, and has been shaped/polished Cay uses the haversack as a pillow

BEAU/FJORD Beau: "I think I messed up. I think I should apologise." I HURT? Oh beauregard. oh marisha. "i wanna try, I guess" F: I think he deserves that. He's been good to us. i regret not writing fic now 8(

"OOH, terrible" "YEP." "five" "five" (collective "ooh")

Nott + Jes second. they roll not great.

Tinkle tinkle "nnhnohfishnott"

Kiri is poofed up asleep aAW

trident goin for FRUMPKIN NOOO (pause whilst they look for range on dismissal)

Kiri wakes up "Go fuck yourself :("

Theyre waiting for fish head they could just reappear Frumpkin tho...

Jester is sacred flaming, Molly has a sword active + stabs, Caleb fire bolt, Nott fires an arrow, Fjord eldritch blast, Yasha stabby

Molly + Nott + Caleb miss Fjord hits, Beau hits, Yasha hits dunno bout jes

frumpkin poofs back but doesn't see anything else.

???? alarm lasts 8 hours, not until triggered yall it should still be up. they need to look up the spells smh

Nott messaging to tell yash to hide the bodies

LAst watch is Yash and Caleb i need to stop shortening names

Caleb asks Yasha for people advice :') He's writing it down... i love him Yashas advice is basically "Fucking Bathe" And cay confirms he keeps himself gross because people ignore him more that way 8( Baby

C: "Do you know what i miss? shaving." Y: "I could shave you right now with my sword. I've done it before, you know, to... not have hair on my arms-" Omg shes doing it omg theyre doing it omg I DONT HAVE TO DRAW FACIAL HAIR IN MY FANART ANY MORE FUCK <3333

cay forgets he has a dagger jesus fucking christ

i love everyone making comments + taliesins just amazed like, borderline heart eye emoji look at this whole scenario

M: (to Caleb) "Well done, she [yasha] likes you!"

Nott is Not Happy About Water N: I'LL STAY WITH KIRI everyone else: Convincing her to come N: I'll stay with kiri, and if there's any trouble... we'll see what happens

Fjord goes first, he sees, with his 60ft darkvision, architeture of room. mistly natural, some bits not.

Fjord botches his stealth roll but matt botches his perception even worse. and my thing crashed im so mad.

Fjord is Not a good swimmer. hes like. 30ft swimming speed. Things being left: Caleb's books (2) Molly's coat

travis willingham going "kiris gotta die" then dragging everyone who gasped through the dirt

beau gets fucking 37 on her stealth check Matt: "That's some vax numbers right there!"

The visual aid is... so extra. lights. smoke. what the fuck matthew. (note: when ur best friend is called matthew this is a phrase you say too much)

Surprise round for erryone but Molly and Yasha (purrsonally, i think they were too busy talking abt how beautiful cay is now ;3c)

everyone rolled shite for initiative tho

Caleb casting haste on molly O:

Fjord is very very adept at everything

everyone on crit role can do maths better than me 8(

the marrow fuck beau and fjord royally

watching call lightning forming + marishas face as she slowly realises :)

jes gets the first hdywtdt + crushes a fish with a lollipop

Caleb is taking blind potshots with the glove of blasting boyy. One even hits!

moll gets 3 attacks i love my beautiful devil child

N: Are you guys alive and do you need anything? you can reply to this message~ C: FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK N: oh,, alright.

Taliesin's relief when ashley actually hits is very good.

Beau goes down! D:

hi unrelated taliesin sticking his tongue out at sam fills me with indescribable joy

NEW: Horny twink gets double penetrated by feisty wet ones.

... which is to say two fish dudes stab molly.

Jes heals Beau, but we all know fine fucking well if she hadn't, Yasha would have done it on her next turn. still might since she's only on 11

Cay using dispel magic O:

Molly gets the second hdywtdt "I'm literally just a windmill at this point"

FJORD gets the third F: "I see Molly loojin' around, give him a little wink-" (murders) M: Fucking arsehole F: (witty comment) PEACE OUT (blinks out again)

"Sevens are scary" - Taliesin

Yash gets the next hdywtdt Xorhasian Neck Tie Jesus christ

I was right tho Yasha was seriously considering healing beau, it just takes her action

Two more fishfucks 8(

More call lightning

Sams flask says "lost my best friend over a bowl" and that hurtie

caleb is boutta die. Yasha is boutta die first lmao oh no. i love taliesin jaffe an inhuman amount. Yash gets pulled OVER beau and marisha makes like grabby hand motions which is VERY cute

ok NOW caleb boutta die. he Shield's, and then fragments "Caleb will remember this"

Beau looks at Yasha, looks at Caleb, and goes to CALEB (sobs) blasts a ki point and everything

Molly gets a nat 20 oh he's such a babe

Nott spending her turn justifying herself to Kiri

Fjord blinks back in and fucks up ANOTHER fishfuck

Yasha casting healing hands on HERSELF good.

"You dont have a printout of your character sheet????" "Oh yeah I do after you asked me nine times" liam wh

both yash and caleb are at ONE hp

B, spening her last ki point: HEYCALEBWESHOULDTALKLATER

Beau gets the HDYWTDT tho

Molly is Very Sick from losing haste

Caleb goes the fuck down Fails his first save

everytime tal says "im gonna try something weird"  i heart eyes emoji shame he cant do jack fuck though

Nott Burning Bolt shoots the fishfuck for 24 damage jeeeeez doesnt die but drops lightning

Fjord: (appears, fails, disappears)

if Caleb permadeaths i WILL cry

PLEASE YASHA PLEASE GOD JESTER PLEASE THEY KILL IT IM CRYING SO HARD no like literally i am actually crying bc matt very deliberately did that so that he didnt kill Caleb

Jester uses her pearl of power to regain a slot, and use it to cast prayer of healing for SHIT rolls.

Jester goes back to Kiri <333 baby. baby bird.

Matt mercer keeps using words ive only ever seen written and im ALWAYS ???? about their pronunciation

Fjord finds some L00t Like boxes and longswords and a pool of water with dozens of metallic objects mostly outlawed diety symols. changebringer moonweaver. others i forgot. stormlord. everlight. asmodeus ooh, bane strife emperor. and tiamat.

"a little black bird that's fluttering to try and get dry" fuck thats so damn cute. Marisha has the :D face

Calebs books are dry

wooden box + pool are magic. like. WITHIN.

Enchantment in the box. Molly collecting the moonweaver pieces

JESTER FINDS TWO SYMBOLS FOR THE TRAVELLER? HOLY SHIT Different make, pure silver one, burnished bronze another door arch with the road

Molly gets 12-13 symbols

Nott mage hands just so good even drunk

in the box is a blade, gold, jewel encrusted Molly shoves Nott aside to get it cause its a scimitar style

Caleb finds the arch-heart symbol? Takes one

Yasha takes 4 symbols for the storm god.

Bane/strife emperor symbol Fjord is curious about chained coffin he throws it into the pool. nothing happens.

JEster goes to pll it out and gets a big catseye yellow gem,  magical, but not a school of arcane magic. it has a line groove in it, very deliberate, an oval.

"something about that [orb] is very familiar"??? (Matt to Travis)

i was right about the orb being familiar

C: (abt the gold sword) This blade is called Summer's Dance C: "Mr. Mollymauk," M: "Mr. Caleb."

Blade allows user to cast Blink basically, and is stronk

official-europa replied to your post: uhhhhhh notes HURT WEEK im pains “They...

i think its probably misty step and not blink 

official-europa replied to your post: uhhhhhh notes HURT WEEK im pains “They...

on the sword i mean

caleb tries to ID the orb

fjord touches it "sky is moonlit + cloudless, clothes not your own, nor body, overcoat + human skin. thick calloused skin. left hand stone. look down, see body of previous owner, dead in blood. natural landmass seawater night. flash. right hand grasps falchion. voice booms. potential. jams the stone into gut, cCONSUME. vanishes into belly. looks into water. REWARD." "Vandrin."

i dont kn ow what the fuck is going on.??? everyone else sees this o shit

oh shit is the eye the symbol of Fjord's patron?

"he was my mentor, a captain of mine. a man named Vandrin." Y: What happened to Vandrin? F: I'm not sure. he captained the ship i worked on for many years, and their was an incident. an explosion, terrible weather, waves, "i was knocked overboard" when f woke up he was back on shore

"how did you survive" "I'm not entirely sure."

explosion was sabotage.

the pool is saltwater.

Molly shoves Fjord's head into the water

comes up "You okay???" "Do it again" "Tap three times when you're done!" Fjord drowns

they take as much as possible up and out and decide to dynamite everything in. dramatic exit..

They take the bodies down and lay them in the swamp to rest and decompose.

Beau tries to pull Caleb aside and he just stonewalls her until she actually apologises.

Caleb "I give beauregard a hug and say 'idont know what im doing. just. go with it." BEau very AWKWARDLY hugs him back Beau consulting Fjord, Caleb consulting Yasha The entire other side of the table clapping.

Beau: UH. GOOD TALK. FRIEND. (awkward silence) Beau: Seriously though. Friend? (pause) Caleb: Uh. Ja. (brb dying)

there is a single yellow eye on the hilt of the falchion.

episode END

[8147]

reading hamlet for the first time (act 5: the finale)

masterlist

none of you told me it was going to be this painful . none of you.

a5s1

“Ophelia’s dead.” “Enter CLOWNS!”

Like im sure this has a different meaning in EMA but im gonna make fun of it because it’s fucking hilarious. (future (present? (now past once more (?))) antares coming back to say i did look at nfs and yeah theyre gravediggers)

“First Clown: What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter? Second Clown: The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.” damn not even just this one quote but these are some depressing clowns

hamlet and horatio!

okay there’s something about all of hamlet’s skull talk that makes me uneasy. like, not even the topic, just something in the words and how earnestly and (pardon my pun) gravely hamlet’s speaking about this. and it’s almost a mournful tune, too. it’s a huge difference from his “we’ll all be eaten by the same worms” speech to the point that it’s almost haunting.

“HAMLET: I will speak to this fellow.” C O N F R O N T

“HAMLET: I think it be thine, indeed; for thou liest in't.” (incomprehensible scribbling)

HAMLET, NOT IN ENGLAND: oh yeah lol he was sent to england huh u know why lmao

wait. did the. did the pirate situation get resolved. before act V.

I mean i think hamlet mentioned something about three years but the pirates are so fucking glossed over like what the fuck

“First Clown: 'Twill, a not be seen in him there; there the men are as mad as he.” HOLY SHIT ROAST THEM JFC

“HAMLET: Let me see. (Takes the skull)” THIS IS THE SKULL SCENE! I fucking KNEW it was bullshit that holding the skull was in the to be/not to be speech. I saw it being presented as such like once or twice while reading and I KNEW IT

hm okay so hamlet picks up this guys skull, of someone he used to know, and sure maybe i could ignore the “those lips i have kissed” but then he goes on to mention alexander the great and i mean come on

but jesus like i feel like im not doing justice to the stuff hamlet’s saying. just, the gravity of it all. Its kinda hitting home a bit hard bc like ive had a crippling fear of what happens after death and being forgotten etc since i was like in fourth grade and this is @ing that phobia

like, with that julius ceasar thing. “O that that earth which kept the world in awe / should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw,” it’s so strange. like, every fucking human who has lived, whether they be emperors, murderers, inventors, peasants, or philanthropists- as long as they weren’t blind, they’ve all looked at the same sky. like. It doesnt matter what the fuck you did or didn’t. It’s wild.

“First Priest: No more be done: We should profane the service of the dead To sing a requiem and such rest to her As to peace-parted souls.” hey i get that there are cultural taboos around suicide but like this guy’s a dick it isnt even clear if it was suicide, like, she was so fucking crazy she might not have even known she was, y’know, in a lake or w/e

laertes, dude, my guy. maybe jumping into a grave is cosmic foreshadowing for something you don’t want to happen to you. js.

“HAMLET: [Advancing] What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I, Hamlet the Dane. (Leaps into the grave)” hamlet is NOT one to be out-extra’d (posting-antares here to say, wait, ‘whose phrase of sorrow conjures the stars? is this my aesthetic-speeches-summon-ghosts theory? probably not, but i havent mentioned it for a while)

“LAERTES: The devil take thy soul! (Grappling with him)” IN A FUCKING GRAVE. THEY ARE FIGHTING. IN A GRAVE.

all because hamlet doesn’t want to be out-extra’d. my god.

“QUEEN GERTRUDE: This is mere madness: And thus awhile the fit will work on him; Anon, as patient as the female dove, When that her golden couplets are disclosed, His silence will sit drooping.” Ah yes gertie just talk about the distraught and angry madman as if he isn’t there. that’ll diffuse the situation.

You know what? We still haven’t discussed the pirates.

a5s2

“HAMLET: So much for this, sir: now shall you see the other; You do remember all the circumstance?” If this isn’t gonna be about the pirates im gonna. scream.

“HAMLET: My fears forgetting manners, to unseal Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio,-- O royal knavery!--an exact command, Larded with many several sorts of reasons Importing Denmark's health and England's too, With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life, That, on the supervise, no leisure bated, No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, My head should be struck off.” god, though. imagine that. being exiled to another country by the person who killed your father, only to find out that they were going to have you killed, anyways. that’s fucking terrifying. jesus christ.

Damn this idea that pretty handwriting is ~beneath~ nobles confuses me so fucking much. I got called haughty once just because my main handwriting is cursive. I mean, they were right, but their evidence was circumstantial at best.

“HAMLET: That, on the view and knowing of these contents, Without debatement further, more or less, He should the bearers put to sudden death, Not shriving-time allow'd.” Hamlet’s Revenge. 

but also, what the fuck, dude. two wrongs dont make a right.

damn i kinda lost myself while reading but it really doesn’t sound like hamlet’s insane anymore. Like he’s… tempered himself. he doesn’t feel insane, just solemn.

“OSRIC: Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark. HAMLET: I humbly thank you, sir. Dost know this water-fly?” goddamn ROAST HIM HAMLET (also what a fucking mood)

Osric put on your fucking ha--

The wind is

The wind is northerly

“HAMLET: No, believe me, 'tis very cold; the wind is northerly.” I remember someone saying that this is important

Okay here: “HAMLET: I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

oh no

Osric just wear ur fucking hat u doof

“OSRIC: Exceedingly, my lord; it is very sultry,--as 'twere,--I cannot tell how. But, my lord, his majesty bade me signify to you that he has laid a great wager on your head: sir, this is the matter,-- HAMLET: I beseech you, remember-- (HAMLET moves him to put on his hat)” excuse me a WAGER

but alas all hamlet cares about is osric’s fucking hat

“HAMLET: What's his weapon? OSRIC: Rapier and dagger. HAMLET: That's two of his weapons: but, well.” hamlet u sarcastic little shit i love you

I mean so is horatio. I love him too.

This stuff with the competition is. not gonna end well. not at well.

“HAMLET: I do not think so: since he went into France, I have been in continual practise: I shall win at the odds. But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart: but it is no matter.”

hamlet no. listen to your heart or whatever. jesus christ don’t do it.

“HORATIO: Nay, good my lord,--” HAMLET LISTEN TO HORATIO

Ohhh hamlet

okay reading what laertes said, you know what? i’m giving laertes one last chance. please do not prove me a fool, laertes. 

everything is giving me mad anxiety. e v e r y t h i n g.

claud’s speech is insanely sketchy

“KING CLAUDIUS: [Aside] It is the poison'd cup: it is too late.” One, so that’s why it was sketchy. Two, the POISONED CUP?

IT’S TOO LATE?

Gertie’s. Dead.

Shit, shit, shit

“LAERTES: [Aside] And yet 'tis almost 'gainst my conscience.” YES! SO PLEASE! STOP FIGHTING!

“LAERTES wounds HAMLET; then in scuffling, they change rapiers, and HAMLET wounds LAERTES.” Oh no oh no oh jeez eheu they’re hurting each other, shit, fuck,

“LAERTES: ...woodcock…”

“KING CLAUDIUS: She swounds to see them bleed. QUEEN GERTRUDE: No, no, the drink, the drink,--O my dear Hamlet,-- The drink, the drink! I am poison'd. (Dies)” one, i love how claud is desperatley trying to stick to the plan, its almost adorable in a childish sort of way. two, oh god. ohhh god. gertie. 

Oh no. 

this is the bloodbath. THIS IS THE BLOODBATH.

BODY COUNT: 1

“HAMLET: The point!--envenom'd too! Then, venom, to thy work. (Stabs KING CLAUDIUS)” ...

BODY COUNT: 2

wait and hamlet’s on death row, as with laertes. Oh no.

“LAERTES: He is justly served; It is a poison temper'd by himself. Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet: Mine and my father's death come not upon thee, Nor thine on me. (Dies)’ oh my god already??? I haven’t even really accepted king claud’s death?? jesus christ??

My friend just sorta nudged me and asked if i was alright and i. I’m not. i’m in shock. goddamn. what?

BODY COUNT: 3

goodness thats three in like less than thirty seconds JESUS CHRIST

“HAMLET: Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.I am dead, Horatio.” that’s chilling. just, the poignancy. that’s so fucking spectral. i’m not okay.

“HORATIO: Never believe it: I am more an antique Roman than a Dane: Here's yet some liquor left.” No no no on no nononon NO NO oh my god are you going to-

“HAMLET: As thou'rt a man, Give me the cup: let go; by heaven, I'll have't. … If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.” hey i’m crying in study hall. i’m actually crying. what the fuck. I don’t cry unless i’m thinking about that one pair of 18th century shoes with the really good photo quality (transcribing-antares here. I fucking love those shoes. I’m looking at them right now and they’re so fucking beautiful. they look how velvet feels, which is odd, bc they're apparently silk. I don’t care they’re just so fucking lovely)

F O R T I N B R A S?

“HAMLET: O, I die, Horatio; The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit.” I’ve identified my emotion. Dread. pure, unadulterated Dread.

for all of you that’ve listened to the penumbra podcast: do you remember the concierge, right before final resting place, saying “you do realize you can just like, leave, and everything will be hunky dory and you won’t have to deal with the emotional consequences this episode will bring you” because i’m seriously considering doing that right now.

“HAMLET: The rest is silence. (Dies)” shit. (posting-antares here to say that i forgot to do the body count but honestly im crying while formating because of this goddamn fucking 400 year old play)

“HORATIO: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince…” oh god. horatio.

“Good night sweet prince…”

(yet again tis transcribing-antares here to say that im fucking sobbing right now, the shoes are no match for this, and ‘goodnight sweet prince’ is actually never going to leave my head.) (editing-antares here to say im fucking crying again god fucking damn it) (posting-antares back again saying that this fucking line. this line. my god.)

“HORATIO: What is it ye would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.” oh, horatio. god. that isn’t something said without tears staining your skin and a bitter tone hard-won, not that its possession is a victory.

oh my god. this can’t. no. this can’t end like this. What. no. people must have rioted. No. no!!

i typically hate it but i would GLADLY accept a deus ex machina right about now!!

okay my friend just took my phone away from me and shut it off because i kept on trying to scroll past the end

jesus christ

okay so i’m not going to be okay for like, several eternities, so im going to play the sims until i. until i die, probably. my god.

masterlist

[pamphletstoinspire]

MARY THE CHURCH AT THE SOURCE - PART 9

WRITTEN BY: JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER AND HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

________

IV

THE CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH

“Whoever would boast, let him boast in the Lord.” Whoever would offer best wishes and congratulations, let him likewise do it in the Lord. He is the one who through his shepherds distributes his gifts to the Church as he wills. And, even in the Church’s hands, these gifts remain, thanks be to God, his. If they were ours, we would be crushed by the feeling of our impotence. He has called us and has built us up on the foundation of Peter, who denied him, and of Paul, who persecuted him, so that—amid tears and with contrite hearts, without which there is no priestly office—we may speak and act openly and in the joy of the Holy Spirit,

We are only stewards, and we are doubly dispossessed: for the sake of the Lord who sends us and for the sake of the Church to which he sends us and which we love because she is his bride. On this feast how could we not speak of this object of our love? Is it not the most delightful subject? The Church. Not, however, in her failure, her scandals, her inner conflicts, in the water that goes up to her neck. Rather, the Church insofar as she is proof against all this, in the unsurpassable breadth on account of which we hail her as the Catholica.

Our topic, then, is the catholicity of the church. The catholicity of the Church will always remain a paradox and, for very many people, a scandal. How could an entity that is as limited, even more, as fallible, as this empirical Church claim for herself a universality that does not leave out anything human or divine? How could she claim a universality of living truth, of true life?

The non-believer will object that universality could consist only in the sum of all of humanity’s genuine experiences, of all its cultures and historical epochs, whereas the Catholic Church is only an infinitesimal fraction of that sum! The believer will object that, if anyone, it would be the God-man who could lay claim to universality, since he cannot be convicted of any sin, the fullness of Godhead dwells bodily in him, and he recapitulates everything in heaven and on earth. Not, however, the Church, which blasphemes if she tries to identify herself with her Lord.

We may draw a twofold, a priori conclusion from what we have just said. A church that claims to be catholic would have to have a very special relationship to the universal experience of humanity and a very special relationship to the God-man. Only on the basis of this twofold relationship (whose possibility we do not yet see) could she legitimately be called the Catholica, and not a Christian sect.

We will briefly survey the first relation, which will by its inner logic bring us to a more thorough discussion of the second.

Anthropological Catholicity

Biblical faith is one: from Abraham to Jesus and Paul. There are not two ways of believing. Abraham is the archetype that Israel set as a seal over its history: departure from one’s own world, blind trust in the God who promises tremendous things but shows nothing of them, worse still, who starts things off, who gives the son of the promise, and then demands the gift back on Moriah. God so outweighs any other considerations that he can demand, not only faith, but blind faith, faith that does not waver if God seems to contradict himself openly. Later on, an entire people journeying through the wilderness will be trained in this kind of trust. And the desert journey continues even after the taking of the land, even in the exile and beyond: again and again the prophets train Israel in this letting go, this refusal to grasp, this trust and hope.

Jesus brings nothing other than this faith, but he does so as the “author and finisher of faith” who embodies it in person. He himself is pure trust that goes so far as the night of abandonment by the Father, without assurance, no longer understanding, in absolute preference of another’s will. What he does and lets be done he imparts with plenary authority. His preaching is nothing but training in this fundamental act, which he both demands from man and coaxes from him at the same time. “I believe, help my unbelief.” He entices man to make the leap and stretches out a hand to strengthen him for it. And so we realize: In him we can make the leap, he himself is the leap, from man to God—and, therefore, first from God to man. “In Deo meo transiliam murum” [in my God I will leap over the wall] (2 Sam 22:30). “Nihil cepimus; in verbo tuo autem laxabo rete” [we have caught nothing, but at your word I will lower the net] (Lk 5:5). The disciples do not really realize this until after the Resurrection. God himself stretched forth his hand to Jesus, indeed, Jesus himself is God’s hand stretched out to man.

When Paul lives henceforth “en Christo” and preaches accordingly, he is proclaiming, not some strange new doctrine, but, as he himself knows, the very consummation of Abraham’s faith in Jesus the Christ. He, Jesus, is, in fact two things: the Word of God and its fulfillment, hence, the new and eternal covenant between God and man.

Now this fulfillment is two things at once: first, it is the fulfillment of the fundamental act of the creature as such; second, it is the fulfillment of God’s promises.

The fundamental act of the creature is religio. Religio is the act of relating myself back to the Absolute, which I am not, winch I do not even know, and which above all I do not control, but to which I owe my being and which I prefer to everything that is not absolute. “Je préfere l’Absolu” [I prefer the absolute] (Claudel) is the origin of the wisdom of India, of China, ultimately, of the religion of every nation that has had the wisdom to understand that any defiance any questioning of God, who is always right, is sheer stupidity.

Religio is often clouded by magic, but even magic can have something touching about it, insofar as it expresses the surmise that, when man is in trouble, the Divinity cannot remain unmoved. Any world view that fails to go back to and unfold from, this fundamental act does not deserve to be called love of wisdom, philo-sophia. Biblical faith is not as one Christian sect believes, antithetical to this fundamental act of spiritual nature; rather, it is its unique fulfillment—though one awakened and empowered by God And because the Catholic Church acknowledges the rootedness of her faith in the catholicity of the religious mind, she has a prima facie claim to this title. But there is also a second element.

God does not so much lead Abraham back to the Alpha, the origin (re-ligio), as forward to the Omega, the future fulfillment. Israel is, today as always, the alternative to religio: hope in the God who is coming. This is the other side of mankind’s religious experience, and there is no third. Admittedly, a broad segment of contemporary Israel has given up the presence of divine guidance and has retained only prophetism, radical departure into the future, historical transcendence into Utopia.

Jesus Christ is called Alpha and Omega: he has not only bound us back to our lost beginning, the Father, but has also set us in motion toward his absolute future. He alone is the force that binds together the beginning and the end, the force that can reconcile in itself, as the higher third, the two divergent world views: past and future, Buddhism and Marxism. For only in him is God presence, and so he alone can be the way back to the origin and ahead toward the consummation. Buddha, in pure faith, prefers the lost, bygone origin to everything present, to all apparent being. Marx, in pure hope, prefers the absolute goal to everything present, to all that actually exists. Christ alone establishes absolute love. This love, looking out from the present being of the world, which is affirmed by God, embraces at one and the same time both the beginning and the end.

The catholicity of Christ’s message and of the Church he founded lies in this one-of-a-kind, absolutely inimitable synthesis. And this synthesis works only because the double leap—from man to God and from God to man—works. The angels ascend and descend above the Son of Man; heaven and earth are reconciled in the God-man. Believing in Christ, who was and who is to come, the Church not only secures the religio of the pagans, but also the Utopian hope of the Jews: the total, catholic horizon of human religious thought.

Christological Catholicity

But does this synthesis of the religious act automatically give the Church the right to call herself “catholic”? Is not the synthesis of Christ, Alpha and Omega, so unique that it rules out any participation in his catholicity a priori? Yet what is Christ; what is the New Covenant? Verbum Caro! We have moved beyond the old antithesis: “Omnis caro foenum. . . . Verbum autem Domini manet in aeternum” [all flesh is grass. . . . But the Word of the Lord abides for ever] (Is 42:6, 8), from the word that speaks at man to word-flesh. And so to faith-flesh. The flesh now has the word It is not the mind alone that makes every act of faith that prefers God and hopes in him, but the whole man, down to the foundation of matter.

I

There is no getting away from it: flesh means man and woman, spousal love, mother and child. Otherwise flesh is not really present. If we want to do justice to the incarnation [Fleischwerdung] of the Word of God, we have to be attentive to woman. The fundamental act can no longer be just faith in a word or hope in a promise. It now has to be love for the origin that descends in an act of love. It has to be consent of the whole man down to the deepest fibers of his flesh. If these fibers were not an echoing readiness, how could the Word become flesh? If it becomes flesh, it has to emerge from the deepest foundations of life. And this deepest depth has to receive the Word, not as an empty abyss in pure passivity, but with the active readiness with which a feminine womb receives the masculine seed.

The fundamental act—let us think back to it for a moment—was to prefer the Absolute. The Absolute is right no matter what; our part is to let it have its way (Zen!). Today there is a foolish controversy going on about the primacy of orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Which comes first, which is really decisive? The answer is easy: Neither of them. Neither doxy nor praxy, neither merely thinking something is true nor rushing headlong into action. In the beginning is God’s Word, who intends to become flesh. His is the praxis; my part is to let him have his way in me, to consent, to say Yes down to the deepest recesses of my flesh. True, this is an action, but it is an action that responds to what God does; true, it is faith, yet not in a proposition, but in God’s personal action in me. And if this Yes were not free, totally free, down to the unconscious layers of our being, it would not be human assent. But where could man get a Yes that was so free, without spot or wrinkle, without the slightest even unconscious restriction, if not as a gift from the hand of God?

But are we not talking about two different acts: God’s bestowal of this freedom (perhaps upon some pure passivity) and, then, our appropriation and active exercise of this freedom? Do these acts not differ in the way that Protestants, say, distinguish between justification and sanctification: in the former, God (in Christ) acts sovereignly on me, while in the latter his action (in the Holy Spirit) enters into me? Something like this two-step process may happen in the case of the sinner, but not in the case of the original Incarnation. In order to have his Word become flesh, God needs an a priori Yes that allows everything.

And it really is a someone who, with perfect creaturely freedom, becomes the womb and bride and Mother of the incarnating God. This someone’s fundamental act is neither a Buddhistic surrendered unfree self-being into the abyss of the absolute nor a Marxist self-endowment with freedom by which man becomes his own creator. Rather, it is the act of receiving from the God who gives himself unconditionally the gift of receiving him unconditionally.

The foundation of the Church’s catholicity is this fundamental act that takes place in the chamber of Nazareth—and in it alone. This catholicity is the unconditional openness of the ecce ancilla which, by giving God unlimited room beforehand, is the creaturely counterpart of God’s infinitely self giving love.

Those who think that the Church started later—with the vocation of the Twelve, for example, or with the bestowal of supreme authority on Peter—have already missed the heart of the matter. They can never go beyond an empirical or sociological reality that cannot be qualitatively different from the synagogue. Even the “infallibility” of office then hangs perilously in the air. It has nowhere else to put down roots than the fallibility of the human beings who exercise it.

Now, where does this bride “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph 5:27), this “pure virgin” who is to be betrothed to Christ (2 Cor 11:2) exist, if the universal, catholic Yes that we must expect her to give is not real somewhere, not simply an ideal, an approximation (like all our Yesses), or an eschatological hope (so that the Church would become genuinely catholic only in eternity)? How could the Catholica come into being anywhere if her inmost reality were not created at the very first instant of the New Covenant—as the Mother of the Child, the Mother who has to be a virgin in flesh and in spirit so that she can be the incarnate, catholic consent to the unconditional penetration of the divine Word into the flesh?

We can anticipate three conclusions from this.

1. The Marian or catholic fundamental act is so original that it is beyond contemplation and action. The Yes that founds the Church and all Christian existence in the Church is both prayer to God and cooperation with God’s engagement for man. Prayer in the Church should strive to give form to this Yes: as adoration, as thanks, as petition that works within and concretizes God’s gracious will, and at the same time as consent that goes along with everything that God is doing in the world, as readiness to be used, to be used up, in God’s work.

2. The Marian or catholic fundamental act is beyond childhood [Unmündigkeit] and adulthood [Mündigkeit]. At its origin it has to be childlike and dependent, since only the “childlike” are called blessed, whereas the mystery of the Father is concealed from the wise and the clever and the grownups. And precisely these children, who are overshadowed, not by their own spirit, but by the Holy Spirit, are the ones who are fruitful and adult in the Christian sense. They bear responsibility, but it is not theirs. It is God’s. They do not carry out a mission of their own, which must needs be limited, like a horse wearing blinders. No, they act within the unlimited, universal, catholic mission of Jesus Christ.

3. The Marian or catholic fundamental act is beyond understanding and not understanding. When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you. Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand, certainly as far as participation in failure and derision, Cross and Godforsakenness—but just how far and in what form? At the same time, this Yes is the sole, nonnegotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding, of all theology and ecclesial wisdom. You cannot understand a Lord in whom “all the promises of God find their Yes” (2 Cor 1:20) alongside of this Yes. Christian truth is esoteric in the sense that it can be discerned only from within, in being carried out in faith and action, not from outside, from a box seat in the theater. Nor by a partial identification (with the reservations that implies), but only out of a total, universal, and, therefore, catholic identification with God’s ways in the flesh.

II

The Catholic Church, whose qualitative foundation is laid in the house of Nazareth, takes on her outward, visible dimension in the course of the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ. Nazareth makes the idea of “becoming flesh” necessary for, and relevant to, the Church. A purely spiritual Church, an ideal Church, an invisible Church—all these are a priori uncatholic, because they do not take seriously the totality of man, who is both clay from below and breath breathed from above.

The distinctive substance of the New Testament came into being in Nazareth: enfleshed faith. And because a Church must come into being in order to guard Christ’s heritage and to guarantee his presence and relevance for all times, a nail, a stake, has to be driven into the flesh of the world’s history. It has to be palpably obvious, downright coarse, impossible to interpret away or to overlook. It has to be as painful as a nail of the Cross, handwriting on the wall warning all ages that God’s Word has become flesh, that it is not merely a word in individual consciences or merely paper you can purchase in a bookshop or merely an ethico-political plan of action that every generation is free to refashion to suit its needs. An awl in the flesh, an indelible reminder, a nail driven in so deeply that it can no longer be removed from the flesh of history Everything else can be hung on this nail. The nail is [ecclesiastical] office.

It would be so nice if we could dehistoricize the Gospel and put it on some humanistic common ground: “Christianity not Mysterious” (John Toland); “Christianity as Old as Creation” (Matthew Tindal); Christianity as an idealistic religion of reason (from Lessing to Hegel, from Strauß to Harnack). Unfortunately, we have learned two things since then: that we cannot detach Jesus from the culture of his time and its historical horizon—we have been warned against that, from Overbeck to Albert Schweitzer; and, simultaneously, that we know Jesus only through the testimonies of the primitive Church, that an abstraction from the records of the first Christians’ faith leads to a dark void. We know, in other words, that the game is up with idyllic, professorial, so-called “objective” portraits of Jesus.

But let us joyfully make the most of the (for scholarship sobering and depressing) insight that we cannot have Christ without his Church! That she alone preserves his legacy and his image, an image of which she, the bride, bears the imprint and which the Bridegroom’s Spirit has shaped out of her faith. The reciprocity of the Christ-Church relationship is as indissoluble as that of the relationship between mother and child.

Incarnate office is the ecclesial counterpart of Mary’s enfleshed Yes in the Church. Everything hangs, as if on a nail, on the election and empowerment of the Twelve, with Peter at their head. That this nail was hammered in by Jesus himself is beyond doubt. The Twelve, humiliated by betrayal, denial, and flight regroup in obedience after Easter, fill out their thinned ranks, and take over their assigned mission. Then the stupendous phenomenon of Paul appears on the scene, and his loving struggle with the Corinthian community establishes the archetype of a Church functioning according to the mind of Christ—in the divergence [Auseinandersetzung] and convergence [Ineinandersetzung] between office and community. Paul, who enters into an already formed tradition and explicitly hands it on—faith and morals—is certainly no innovator when it comes to exercising the authority of his office. The innovators are the Corinthian charismatics, and Paul calls them to order with all imaginable zeal, with his entire Christ-consecrated missionary existence.

The major Pauline letters have two foci: first, the order of redemption in Christ: the doctrine of justification and sanctification, above all in the Letter to the Galatians and the Letter to the Romans. Second, the order of the redeemed in the hierarchically [amtlich] constituted Church: the doctrine of the Church in the dramatic tension [Auseinandersetzung] between office and community, above all in First and Second Corinthians. The Reformers appropriated only the first half of Paulinism, whereas the Counter-Reformation unfortunately failed to exploit the full power of the second.

This second half is more dramatically relevant today than ever, yet there is nothing essential in contemporary assaults on the principle of hierarchical office, in the protests of the latest clerical and lay charismatics, that Paul’s ecclesiology (especially at the end of the Second Letter to the Corinthians) does not anticipate and correct. Paul orders and governs Church affairs, establishes ecclesiastical law, and lays down rules for the relationship between the strong and the weak. Above all, he shows that if the charismatic does not unceasingly transcend itself toward the Lord’s unity, it ceases to be catholic. And it is the function of the Church’s office to demand and enforce this transcendence. As a “ministry of Christ” [Dienstan Christus] in the Church, ecclesial office is the efficacious sign Christ himself has established to show that the body is alive only when it is governed and quickened from above itself, by the head.

The Church is a living body, and a body has a structure. Now, the Church’s structure is essentially her office, understood as a function for the sake of the organism. We totally miss the point when we disparage the structure of a living body with the term “institution”. The higher an organism is, the more developed and complex its organization. The rigid skeleton serves flexibility; the living flesh would be nothing but a shapeless mass without the body’s hard and tough parts.

The Church is primarily, not a sociological organization, but the living flesh of Christ that is fed by his Eucharist. It follows that the Church’s office and everything that goes with it—sacraments, tradition, the Bible, Church law and Church discipline, and so forth—is pneumatic. It goes without saying that in the New Testament pneuma is not the opposite of Incarnation; rather, it is its cause and, from another point of view, its enduring effect. The Christian should reflect for a moment: Are there any Christian goods he does not owe, directly or indirectly, to what he perhaps contemptuously dismisses as “institution” or the “establishment”? The real saints were all aware of this debt, and it is characteristic of them that they always remained in the organism of the Church, drew their life from her and added new organic tissue to her.

The objection that the Church structure depicted in Paul’s letters cannot serve as a model for the postapostolic period because later officeholders no longer possess the fullness of apostolic authority does not hold water. If this were the case, then a vital portion of the New Testament canon would have no more than antiquarian value for us. Paul makes a point of calling, not only himself, but also his collaborators and successors “servants of Christ”, “co-workers of God”, and he demands (in Corinth, no less) the very same reverent reception, the very same obedience for them as he does for himself Moreover, there is scarcely any interval of time between the pastoral letters, where we see these successors actively exercising their office, and the marvelous Letter of Clement, where Rome wields this same office with strength and delicate modesty by Rome in relation to Corinth.

Of course, the successors do not have the apostles’ Church-founding functions and the special powers belonging to them. Nor do they need them, for the structure has already been established and must only be kept alive. In the same way, the founder of an order receives special powers along with his unique mission. Yet this does not mean that abbots or other superiors will not succeed him.

Hierarchical office serves the charismatic dimension. It exists in order to awaken and foster personal and social life as well as to prune it for the sake of growth, indeed, to demand sacrifices from it, just like the vinedresser: “Every branch of mine that . . . bear[s] fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (Jn 15:2). Paul does this expressly when he calls for difficult sacrifices on the part of the so-called “strong”; they are not only to put up benevolently with the weak; they must set aside their own judgment when the welfare of the whole—to which these weak believers also belong—is at stake: “We who are strong ought. . . not to please ourselves. . . . For Christ did not please himself, but, as it is written, ‘the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.’ For whatever was written in former days was written for our [the strong’s] instruction” (Rom 15:14; emphasis added). And Paul is ready to face anyone, especially self-assured charismatics, with weapons that are powerful, not in an earthly sense, but genuinely (in other words, pneumatically) so. He will wield these weapons to destroy pseudo-theological “arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). He does so, though, in virtue of the “authority which the Lord has given me for building up and not for tearing down” (2 Cor 13:10). For when Paul takes “every thought captive” in order to lead it “to obey Christ”, he redirects a theology gone astray in a fancied freedom back to the Yes of perfect faith. This Yes gives the only true Christian freedom: incarnate pliancy to the incarnating Word of God.

Precisely at this point the catholicity of office comes into view. Hierarchical office is a permanently estabhshed principle in the Church whose essential function consists in preventing the inevitable particularity of a charism or an association of charisms from becoming self-enclosed. Indeed, office compels openness to something indefinitely greater than the charismatic club. It thus has the formal dimensions of the Marian Yes: everything, really everything, that God wills—however much it may transcend my horizon.

Once again let us draw three conclusions from what has been said. These will guide us along the way of further reflection.

1. Hierarchical office is, as has been said, the nail driven into history upon which the Church hangs. It is the guarantee of the Church’s fleshliness. As such, office is the ever new presence of the origin through all ages. It is more than a memory of the origin; it is its immediate presentation. More than a memoria, it is a real praesentia. It is this as pure service, as a self-effacement for the sake of one’s function, which is the necessary condition of acting and speaking with the authority of Christ. Just as Christ himself became the slave of God and of all men in order to act and speak in the authority of the Father, so too it is the task of hierarchical office to represent the unity of the head within the structure of the organism. Not to be this unity, but to embody it efficaciously in virtue of the will of the Founder. Now, without the unifying Petrine office, this representation would remain historically abstract and disincarnate. Solovyev understood this point perfectly. Individual groups and particular churches (each one with or without a leader) must come together in a common spirit.

One might make a virtue of ecumenical necessity and say that the point of convergence is Christ, who is enthroned above the whole history of the Church and her pluralism. Nevertheless, this would still leave the point of unity unincarnate within history, here and now, and the great words of institution in Matthew (16:18), Luke (22:32), and John (20:3-10; 21:1-19) would, needless to say, be unfulfilled. But another thing would remain unfulfilled as well: the sole historical guarantee that the necessary pluralism of theological schools, pastoral practices, and Spirit-kindled charisms can genuinely be integrated in a concrete unity and be understood as members of the one Lord. The office that is centrally unified in the pope is thus the guarantee and the decisive test that the unpredictable plurality of manifestations of Christian life is the fullness of a universal, Catholic unity.

2. Hierarchical office is, as was said, authority as pure service, hence, as an enduring sign that points away from itself to the Lord. It disappears, thus letting the Lord appear. For this reason, it is extremely misleading to call the priest alter Christus, for there is only one. In his sacramental and pastoral activity, the priest leaves the doing and the saying to the one Christ; but he has power to do precisely that. And even teaching, preaching, and the formulating of dogmas are always a pointer, a fragmentary explanation. Never a mastery of the full truth that is Christ. But precisely for this reason they can be an authentic guarding of the deposit of faith against usurpers who use theology to rationalize Christ’s living truth, as if they could master it like some philosophical system. What the Magisterium guards is, not a hoard of formulas, but the mystery to which all formulas can only point. On the other hand, it would not be the office it was instituted and founded to be if all it could do was point and were not, at crucial critical moments, a reliable, “infallible” marker in the fog.

3. Insofar as ministerial office is a representation that points to something else, it has to take its own bearings by what it points to. But it points both to Christ (and the triune God who appears in him) and to Christ’s immaculate bride, the pure vessel of the Holy Spirit: the Church that is integrally holy in Mary.

Peter and Mary are not identical. Thus, before Peter enters upon his office, he must be humiliated by the Lord in a way he will never forget, so that he will not mistake himself for the wrong person. So, too, Peter and all official ministers must always listen to the Spirit working and creating in the Marian Church and must also obey this Spirit, who speaks out of the saints and the authentic charismatics.

At the end of the fourth Gospel, even after Peter’s solemn installation in office, there remains a diastasis between him and the disciple whom Jesus loved, whose destiny is an un-revealable mystery that rests in the Lord’s hands alone. The Gospel of love ends with a great tribute to the Petrine office, but it subordinates this office to the service of a love that it,’ the office, can never fully oversee.

The duality of Mary and Peter, of the subjective holiness of the heart and the objective holiness of the structure, maintains the distance between body and head in the catholicity of the Church. And so in the empirical Church there are two critical organs: the office, which examines and criticizes the charisms to test their catholicity, and the sanctity that in the pure spirit of the Gospel, of Mary’s Yes, can and must criticize office.

~

We saw (in the first part) that there was an anthropological catholicity in the Church’s faith. The fundamental act of the New Testament—hoping, loving faith—retrieved in a unique synthesis all the basic religious attitudes possible to humanity: “binding oneself back” to the origin in self-surrender and the forward-driving quest for a promised future fulfillment. In the second part we saw a deeper, christological catholicity in the Church’s fife. In this context we also saw that the Marian-Petrine Church, by her pure readiness to receive and her pure representative service can genuinely become the fullness of him who fills all in all (Eph 1:23).

However, the two principles of the Church’s catholicity interpenetrate and complement each other. After all, the Marian “handmaid” lives a life of pure service and thus has the same fundamental gestalt as the Petrine office. In the same way, office is to be a pure pointer to the Lord, just like Mary’s whole existence. Both services are supernaturally fruitful. And Christ’s Cross-oriented life is the inner form of both, albeit only by the grace of the Resurrection. But one thing, at least, should be clear: Mariology and the doctrine of office are not side chapels of Catholic dogmatics; rather, they are central, integrating aspects of ecclesial catholicity.

Seen from the outside, the Church is a society of individual persons having the same or similar belief who submit themselves to certain sociological requirements and rules of the game. Seen from the inside, the Church is the communio sanctorum. This communion is based on the Eucharist, which makes the Church one body and one spirit, even as the Eucharist is based on the trinitarian communio and circumincessio of the Divine Persons in the one nature. This ultimate ground of the Church’s being enfolds—without jeopardizing or sublating the person—the pure juxtaposition of individuals characteristic of peoples or states. It thus enables instead an osmosis of destinies and activities, which become more catholic and universal the closer they are to the destiny of Christ. The whole body is thus ultimately drawn to follow the destiny of the head. And in this body there is nothing abstract, no “principles”, “structures”, “institutions”, that lead an ideal, destinyless existence outside of the persons in whom they are realized.

Mary is the principle of all Yes-saying, of all fruitful obedience as a person, and as such she is the Mother whose heart is pierced by a sword, who cries out in travail between heaven and earth. She really stands at the foot of the Cross—where she is joined to the Petrine Church through John.

Peter receives office after his bitter tears and is afterward (the bitterness remains) honored with crucifixion. He is allowed to suffer a reverse image of his master’s death. Precisely for this reason office attracts abuse like a magnet, so much so that it becomes a sewer for every man: “peripsema heos arti” (1 Cor 4:13). The hate, not only of the world, but also of the charismatics in the Church, pursues it; just as the slogan in Corinth was once “freedom from Paul” [Los von Paul], so always, and once again today, it is “freedom from Rome” [Los von Rom]. “The death of Jesus in our body”. And this absolutely in substitution: “So death is at work in us, but life in you” (2 Cor 4:10-12).

The principle of office is always incarnate in the officeholders: in them life inclines toward death and ruin, but without the gates of hell being able to overcome it. Paul’s ship founders, and yet all are brought safely to land on planks. It is good that office is spat upon today, that Judas is betraying it again in every possible way, and that many ostensibly faithful people flee the specter of the “establishment”. The more recognizably the head full of blood and wounds shines through the face of office, the more inwardly genuine official existence will be and the more credible it will again become for its time.

The Church can understand herself only in her Lord. There is no self-understanding of the Church. Mary understands herself in her child. Paul understands himself en Christo. However, today’s world seeks its self-understanding by giving itself its own meaning.’ The Church will never be able to do that. She will always let the Lord give her her own meaning and will penetrate it ever more deeply in a humble love that says Yes to service: “Respexit humilitatem ancillae suae” [he has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden].

________

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

I. “Mein Wort kehrt nicht erfolglos zu mir zurück!” Homily preached at the opening liturgy of the spring plenum of the German Bishops’ Conference in Stapelfeld, Germany, March 6, 1979. In Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Maria: Kirche im Ursprung (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1980), 7-14. First publication of the pieces in this volume in the appendix to German Bishops’ Conference, ed., Maria, die Mutter des Herrn (Bonn); vol. 18 in the series Pastoral Letters of the German Bishops.

II. “Erwägungen zur Stellung von Mariologie und Marienfrömmigkeit”, ibid., 15-40.

III. “Die Zeichen der Frau: Versuch einer Hinführung zur Enzyklika ‘Redemptoris Mater’ von Papst Johannes Paul II”, in Maria: Gottes Ja zum Menschen (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1987), 105-28.

IV. “ ‘Du bist voll der Gnade’: Elemente biblischer Marienfrömmigkeit”, in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Peter Henrici, ed. Credo: Bin theologisches Lesebuch (Cologne: Communio, 1992), 103-16.

V. “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine. . .”, The text was written to open the Marian congress held on the seven-hundredth-year anniversary of the Holy House of Loreto, 1995.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

I. “Maria in der kirchlichen Lehre und Frömmigkeit”, in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Maria: Kirche im Ursprung (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1980), 64-79.

II. “Die marianische Prägung der Kirche”, in Wolfgang Beinert, ed., Maria heute ehren: Eine theologisch-pastorale Handreichung (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1977), 263-79.

III. “Empfangen durch den heiligen Geist, geboren von der Jungfrau Maria”, in Wilhelm Sandfuchs, ed., Ichglaube: Vierzehn Betrachtungen zum Apostolischen Glaubensbekenntnis (Würzburg: Echter Verlag), 39-49. Also in Brückenbau im Glauben: Vierzehn Betrachtungen zum Apostolischen Glaubensbekenntnis (Leipzig: St. Benno Verlag, 1981), 44-45.

IV. “Das Katholische an der Kirche”. Lecture given on September 13, 1972, for the Vocations Week of the Archdiocese of Cologne and on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the episcopacy of former Archbishop Josef Cardinal Frings and of the tenth anniversary of the episcopacy of Joseph Cardinal Höffner and Auxiliary Bishop Augustinus Frotz, edited by the Archdiocesan Press Office; Kölner Beitrage, 10. (Cologne: Wienend Verlag, 1972), 19 pages.

________

THE END

[pope-francis-quotes]

16th April >> Pope Francis' Urbi et Orbi Easter Message to the city of Rome and to the World. Dear Brothers and Sisters, Happy Easter! Today, throughout the world, the Church echoes once more the astonishing message of the first disciples: "Jesus is risen!” – "He is truly risen, as he said!” The ancient feast of Passover, the commemoration of the liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery, here finds fulfilment. By his resurrection, Jesus Christ has set us free from the slavery of sin and death, and has opened before us the way to eternal life. All of us, when we let ourselves be mastered by sin, lose the right way and end up straying like lost sheep. But God himself, our shepherd, has come in search of us. To save us, he lowered himself even to accepting death on the cross. Today we can proclaim: "The Good Shepherd has risen, who laid down his life for his sheep, and willingly died for his flock, alleluia” (Roman Missal, IV Sunday of Easter, Communion antiphon). In every age, the Risen Shepherd tirelessly seeks us, his brothers and sisters, wandering in the deserts of this world. With the marks of the passion – the wounds of his merciful love – he draws us to follow him on his way, the way of life. Today too, he places upon his shoulders so many of our brothers and sisters crushed by evil in all its varied forms. The Risen Shepherd goes in search of all those lost in the labyrinths of loneliness and marginalization. He comes to meet them through our brothers and sisters who treat them with respect and kindness, and help them to hear his voice, an unforgettable voice, a voice calling them back to friendship with God. He takes upon himself all those victimized by old and new forms of slavery, inhuman labour, illegal trafficking, exploitation and discrimination, and grave forms of addiction. He takes upon himself children and adolescents deprived of their carefree innocence and exploited, and those deeply hurt by acts of violence that take place within the walls of their own home. The Risen Shepherd walks beside all those forced to leave their homelands as a result of armed conflicts, terrorist attacks, famine and oppressive regimes. Everywhere he helps these forced migrants to encounter brothers and sisters, with whom they can share bread and hope on their journey. In the complex and often dramatic situations of today’s world, may the Risen Lord guide the steps of all those who work for justice and peace. May he grant the leaders of nations the courage they need to prevent the spread of conflicts and to put a halt to the arms trade. Especially in these days, may he sustain the efforts of all those actively engaged in bringing comfort and relief to the civil population in Syria, prey to a war that continues to sow horror and death. May he grant peace to the entire Middle East, beginning with the Holy Land, as well as in Iraq and Yemen. May the Good Shepherd remain close to the people of South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who endure continuing hostilities, aggravated by the grave famine affecting certain parts of Africa. May the Risen Jesus sustain the efforts of all those who, especially in Latin America, are committed to ensuring the common good of societies marked at times by political and social tensions that in some cases have resulted in violence. May it be possible for bridges of dialogue to be built, by continuing to fight the scourge of corruption and to seek viable and peaceful solutions to disputes, for progress and the strengthening of democratic institutions in complete respect for the rule of law. May the Good Shepherd come to the aid of Ukraine, still beset by conflict and bloodshed, to regain social harmony. May he accompany every effort to alleviate the tragic sufferings of those affected by the conflict. The Risen Lord continues to shed his blessing upon the continent of Europe. May he grant hope to those experiencing moments of crisis and difficulty, especially due to high unemployment, particularly among young people. Dear brothers and sisters, this year Christians of every confession celebrate Easter together. With one voice, in every part of the world, we proclaim the great message: "The Lord is truly risen, as he said!” May Jesus, who vanquished the darkness of sin and death, grant peace to our days. Happy Easter!

[olusegundare]

Fasting

TOPIC: FASTING

Devotional Thought: "To advance/grow in faith, spiritual exercise is required, and one of suce spiritual exercises is fasting…"

Bible: Matthew 6:16-18

Memory Verse: “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting” Mt. 17:21

INTRODUCTION

We have been hearing about this, fasting, for long this therefore makes many of us think it is of no need studying this crucial aspect…

A.     TYPES: two types:

                                i.            Believers,

                              ii.            Unbelievers: This study is centred on believers’ type of fasting

B.      WHAT FASTING IS NOT

1)      It is not dieting,

2)      It is not designed to punish flesh (I Kings 22:27)

3)      It is not some kinds of work commanded by Christ but it is recommended

4)      It is not to manipulate or dudge drudgery

C.      WHAT IS FASTING?

Ø  Prayer and fasting go hand in hand most of the times (Lk 2:37; 5:33)

Ø  It is “tsom” in Hebrew and “nesteia” in Greek.

Ø  “tsom” means not to eat while “nesteia” means no food.

Ø  Combining thede two words together we can say fasting means deliberately abstaining from food

Ø  The followings are the meanings of fasting as given by teachers:

1.       It is abstaining from all or some kinds of foods/drinks especially as a religious observance (Dan. 10:3)

2.       It is a willing abstinence/reduction from some or all food, drink or both for a period of time,

3.       It means reducing foods/drinks that one takes for a certain period,

4.       It is giving up something in order to replace it with something else, specifically replace it with prayers,

5.       It is a means of bringing flesh into submission to the Lord so he can strengthen us to have mastery over ourselves,

6.       Scripturally speaking, fasting is abstaining from food, drink, sleep, sex to focus on spiritual growth

7.       It is denying the flesh what the flesh desires so as to glorify God, enhance our spirit and go deeper in our prayer life,

8.       It is temnporarily giving up something in order to better focus on God (I Cor. 7:5)

9.       It is fixing our gaze/focus on God (Jud, 16_Samson)

10.   Christians fast is a lifestyle of servant living (Jn 13:13ff)

11.   Believers fast is a sacrificial lifestyle before God (Isa. 58)

12.   It is abstinence from iniquity and illicit pleasures (Isa. 58)

D.     WHY ABSTAINING FROM FOOD?

Satan enticed our fore parents in the garden with food and thereby drew them to himself.

1.       To have victory/control over flesh,

2.       So that our minds focus what we are praying on…We need to know that Eve lost focus because of food and that is what Satan is doing today, drawing our hearts to what will injure us

3.       When we are full, temptations toward false belief come­-M. Kuckey.

E.      WHO CAN FAST? Everyone…, because we can all give up something eg Television (Jonah 3:7ff; Est. 4:16)

F.      AIMS/PURPOSE OF FASTING:

Fasting is neither a commandment nor compulsory in the bible, but it is highly recommended for us to do. Beneath are the aims/purposes:

                                i.            To develop closer walk with God (Am. 3:3; Ps. 24)

                              ii.            To focus on God

                            iii.            To remove our focus from things of the world,

                             iv.            It is a way to demonstrate to God and ourselves that we are serious about our relationships with Him,

G.     BENEFITS/USES OF FASTING

1.       Helps us to gain deeper fellowship with God,

2.       Helps us to subdue the flesh,

3.       Helps to elevate our emphasis on spiritual matters/things,

4.       Helps us to grow spiritually,

5.       It is a spiritual atomic bomb that the Lord has given us to destroy the strongholds of the evil ones (II Cor. 10:4)

6.       Helps us to usher in a great revival (Mt. 9:14-15),

7.       Helps us to get ready for spiritual harvest (Acts 13:1-4; 14:23),

8.       Encourages us to be humble,

9.       Helps us to loose the chains of injustice,

10.   Assists in untying the chords of yokes (Isa. 10:27)

11.   Assists in freeing the oppressed (Mt. 17:21)

12.   Encourages in providing for those who are hungry (Mt. 25:34-46)

13.   Encourages in providing for the poor,

14.   Gingers one to cloth the naked,

15.   It makes us stronger to withstand the temptation of the flesh most especially temptation of food,

16.   Physically it helps to alleviate some symptoms of depression,

17.   Medically,it helps our immune systems. The white Blood cells breaks down quickly to produce new ones,

18.   It detoxifies, that is removing waste products,

19.   Politically it can be used for protest, during hunger strike (non violent)

20.   It can increase life span,

21.   So that our voices could be heard in heaven (Isa. 58:4)

22.   It makes us afflict our souls (Isa. 58:3)

23.   It shows us what should be done (Acts 13:1-4)

H.     CLASSES OF FASTING

                                I.            CONDITIONAL FASTING:

a)       Lack of food at home (Gen. 21:14ff; I Sam 30:11-12)

b)      For fear of death (I Kings 18:13; Acts27:33)

c)       Bad dream which makes one lose appetite (Gen. 40)

d)      At the war front (I Sam. 14:27)

God do answer this kind of fasting because He said He is the one providing for ravens of the field the animals that do not work…as such He will provide for those whom conditions forced to embark on this kind of fasting by providing for them (Mt. 6:26-29; Ps. 147:9)

                              II.            AUTHORIZED FAST: by kings, Head of parastatals etc (Jon. 3:7ff; Est. 4:

                           III.            GOD AUTHORIZED FAST: Ezekiel etc (Ez. 4:5-7)

                           IV.            SELF WILLED FAST: beneath are some of the things that leads us to this kind of fast:

a)       Happiness: Acts 13:1-4;

b)      Unhappy/Sadness: 1 Sam. 1:13ff

c)       Apprentice (II Kings 2:3; Lk 6:40)

I.        TYPES OF CHRISTIAN FASTS

1.       Absolute fast (dry fasting): 24 hours, continue for days, (My 4)

2.       Water fasting: Allows drinking of water but nothing else,

3.       Partially restrictive fast-Limited to some particular foods/substance eg fruits (Dan. 1:8)

4.       Intermittent fasting

5.       Intercourse fasting: Limits/restricts sexual intercourse

6.       Others: Television, internet, business etc (Dan. 10:3)

J.        COMMONEST TYPE: Abstenance from food

K.     WHEN WE CAN FAST

1.       Period of calamity (Joel 36:9; Joel 1:14)

2.       Repentance period (Jonah 3:7; Neh 9:1)

3.       When we want to humble ourselves (I Sam. 7:6)

4.       When a loved person is sick/nigh death (II Sam. 12:22)

5.       When we want God to change evil handwriting (Est. 4:3; Col. 2:14)

6.       When a loved one is imprisoned/in trouble (Dan. 6:18; Acts 12:5)

7.       When God’s promises have not been fulfilled etc(Dan 9:3)

8.       As a remembrance of sad events (Zech. 8:10

a)       When Jerusalem was besieged in the 10th month (II Kings 25:1)

b)      When Jerusalem was conquered in the 4th month (II Kings 25:3-4)

c)       When the temple was destroyed 5th month (II Kings 25:8-9)

d)      When Gedaliah, governor and Jews were killed-7th month (II Kin. 25:25)

9.       When we want to worship God (Lk 2:37)

10.   When we want God to bring to remembrance good records about us (Est. 6:1; Mal. 3:16)

11.   When we want God to erase/cancel curses on us (Gal. 3:13)

12.   When we are being punished for sins of our parents/siblings etc (Ezek. 18:1-4)

13.    

L.      WHAT FAST CAN CAUSE:

1.       Feeble body,

2.       Body weakness (Ps. 109:24)

3.       Bone aches/pains, (Ps. 6:2)

4.       Vertigo

5.       Restlessness (I Sam. 14:27-29)

6.       Etc

M.   ADVICE:

v  It must be limited to a set of time/period,

v  Check your capability, if cannot continue stop,

v  In disease conditions eg ulcer, diabetics etc apply wisdom,

v  In hard work smaller/light food taken,

v  Carry your spouse along

N.     QUESTIONS

1.       Check for examples of religions fastings eg Budha, etc

2.       Check for examples of those who fasted in the bible

 PRAISE OF THE WARRIORS

A) DEFINITIONS:

Praise is words that show approval/admiration of sb/sth

-Praise is the expression of worship to God

Warrior: is a person who fights in a battle/war

B) When do warriors sing Praises?

-Not before going to battle,

-Not at battle front (2 Tim. 2:4)

-After the battle & they win

C) Phases of Singing Praises

Phase I: Zero Praise

Phase II: Half Praise

Phase III: Full Praise

D) Who can be warrior?

-All males,

-18 plus, -Rarely ladies

E) History

-Israelites were Shepherds,

-Trained alongside (Gen. 14:14)

-Training diminished on getting to Egypt (Gen. 47:6; Ex. 5:8)

F) God's Decision: Train them Himself (Ex. 13:17-18)

-Why?

1) To Possess the land

2) To be established,

3) For future,

4) To Learn Discipline (Ex. 15:24)

5) Boldness (Judg 7:3; 2 Tim. 1:7)

6) Precision (Lk 14:31; 1 Sam. 17:49)

7) Timely, no African time

8) Learn Respect (Ex. 20:12; Lev. 19:3; Eph. 6:1-3)

9) Etc

G) Presently

-No Physical war except North,

-Spiritual now (Eph. 6:10ff; 2 Cor. 3:3-6)

-Those being enrolled now: All above 12 years

-Requirement for enrolment: Salvation

H) When can we sing Praises now?

-Salvation

-Established in Faith,

-Suffering for Christ,

-Fill with Holy Ghost

-At Old age

I) When we sing Praises today

-When we have Victories,

J) As Royal Shepherds

-Army of the church, for protection, Orderliness

-As we act Physically, balance it with Spiritual (Neh. 4:17)

-Our praises would be meaningful when saved

K) How To Praise:

- Songs/Hymns/Psalms/Clapping etc. (Eph. 5:19; Ps. 92:3)

[romancatholicreflections]

14th September >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflection on John 3:13-17 for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: ‘God loved the world so much’.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

 Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

 John 3:13-17

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

‘No one has gone up to heaven

except the one who came down from heaven,

the Son of Man who is in heaven;

and the Son of Man must be lifted up

as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,

so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost

but may have eternal life.

For God sent his Son into the world

not to condemn the world,

but so that through him the world might be saved.’

 Gospel (USA)

 John 3:13-17

So the Son of Man must be lifted up.

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

   For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

 Reflections (6) 

 (i) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find the phrase, ‘triumph of the cross’, in any way strange. When we look on the cross of Jesus with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and wisdom of God, the power of a love greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Our own capacity to love is very influenced by the extent to which our love is returned. It is not so with God. On the cross, Jesus revealed a love so powerful that that it embraced even those who brought about his death. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives. The Eucharist that we celebrate makes this love present to us in a special way. God so loves the world that he continues to give us his Son in the Eucharist. Not only are we the beneficiaries of the triumph of God’s love on Calvary, the triumph of the cross, but our own lives can reveal to others the triumph of the cross. The triumph of the cross shows itself in all kinds of simple ways, in the tolerance and humour we show to each other against all the odds, in the willingness to let go of old hurts, in the bearing of terminal illness with patience and dignity, in the fidelity to significant commitments when they become costly, in the loving service that endures even when it is not appreciated. We pray on this feast that the triumph of the cross would continue to take flesh in all of our lives.

And/Or

 (ii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

In the time of Jesus no one would have considered crucifixion a triumph. It may have been considered a triumph for those who were doing the crucifying; it certainly would never have been considered a triumph for the person crucified. Yet, that is what we are celebrating this morning. Jesus, in being crucified, triumphed. It was a triumph of love over hatred. As John the evangelist says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Jesus revealed God’s love in all that he said and did, but he revealed God’s love most fully on the cross. John the evangelist would say that on the cross Jesus revealed God’s glory. That is why in John’s gospel Jesus speaks of his coming crucifixion as the hour when he is glorified. Authentic love is always life-giving and that is uniquely so of God’s love. As well as being the triumph of love over hatred, the cross of Jesus is the triumph of life over death. Jesus was put to death in the most cruel way but through his death he passed over into a new life and that life was offered to us all. The blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus in John’s gospel speaks to us of the life that flows through the death of Jesus. The cross has been celebrated in art as the tree of life. The triumph of the cross, which is the triumph of God and of Jesus over Satan and all the forces of evil and death, is a triumph in which we all share. From the cross Jesus draws all of us into the love and life of God. As he says in John’s gospel, when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself. We simply have to let ourselves be drawn.

 And/Or

 (iii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. ‘Triumph’ suggests celebration, achievement, recognition. ‘Cross’ indicates suffering, humiliation, defeat. How could any one who ended up crucified ever be said to have triumphed. It is hard to think of a greater paradox that the phrase ‘the triumph of the cross’. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find that phrase in any way strange. When we look on the cross with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and the wisdom of God. What is this power that shows itself in such degrading weakness? It is of course the power of love, the power of a love that is greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Here was a divine love that became a human love in the life and death of Jesus, a love so powerful that it was in no way diminished by the experience of rejection, hatred, and all that was most sinister and corrupt in the human spirit. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of love over hatred, of life over death.The triumph of that Good Friday is a triumph in which we all continue to share. The light that shone in that awful darkness continues to shine on all of us. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives.

And/Or

 (iv) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The expression ‘exaltation of the cross’ would have made very little sense in the time of Jesus. ‘Exaltation’ suggested glory, honour, status, whereas death by crucifixion was the most shameful death imaginable. It was the complete absence of glory, honour and status. Why did the early Christians begin to speak of the death by crucifixion of Jesus as exaltation? They could only do so in the light of Jesus’ resurrection. In today’s second reading, Paul says that because Jesus ‘was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross’, God raised him high, or highly exalted him. In that sense, Jesus’ exaltation by God followed his death on the cross. Yet, the early church understood that Jesus was already being exalted by God as he hung from the cross. When people were doing their worst to Jesus, God was standing over his Son vindicating him, confirming all that his Son lived by and stood for. It was because Jesus was totally faithful to the work God gave him to do that he was crucified. What was that work that God gave Jesus to do? Jesus’ work was to reveal God’s love for the world. As Saint John says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son’. On one occasion in John’s gospel Jesus said, ‘my food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work’. According to that same gospel Jesus’ last words before he died were ‘it is finished’. Jesus’ work of revealing God’s love for the world, for Jews, Samaritans, pagans, was experienced as threatening by many, especially those in power. They crucified him to put a stop to his work. Yet, in killing Jesus they enabled Jesus to finish the work God gave him to do. If his life proclaimed God’s love for the world, his death proclaimed that love even more powerfully. His death revealed a divine love, a love that endured in the face of all the very worst that evil and sin could inflict on him. That is why we can speak of the exaltation of the cross. When we look upon the cross, we believing we are looking upon an explosion of love, the glorious revelation of God’s love, a love that is stronger than sin and death, a love that embraced the world and embraces each of us in a very personal way. We can each say with Saint Paul in his letter to the Galatians, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.

And/Or

 (v) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The discovery of the relics of the true cross by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, is dated to September 14, 320. The annual commemoration of that event has been celebrated since, in praise of the redemption won for us by Christ. No one in the time of Jesus would ever have put together the two words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’. Far from being a triumph, death by crucifixion was considered to be the most degrading and terrifying form of execution. It was a way for the Roman authorities to show its triumph over all those who dared to threaten Roman order and peace. Yet, as Christians, we have no difficulty in looking upon the cross of Jesus as a triumph. Rome did not have the last word when it came to Jesus, because God raised Jesus from the dead and he made him the cornerstone of a new community, which went on to include a future Roman Emperor, Constantine. Through the eyes of the resurrection we can see the cross of Jesus as the triumph of love over hatred, of Jesus’ love over the hatred of his enemies, of God’s love over the hateful rejection of his Son. This is how John in his gospel understood the cross of Jesus. It was the glorious revelation of God’s love for the world, in the language of today’s gospel reading. Jesus himself says that a man has no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. We venerate the cross because it is a powerful manifestation of a love that is greater than any human love. That is why the earliest Christians tended to depict the crucifix as a glorious Christ with arms outstretched reigning in love from the cross. This morning we celebrate a triumph in which we all share. We are all embraced by the love of God that shines through Christ crucified. The cross has become good news for us. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans expressed that good news very simply and very powerfully, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us’.

 And/Or

 (vi) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find the phrase, ‘triumph of the cross’, in any way strange. When we look on the cross of Jesus with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and wisdom of God, the power of a love greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Our own capacity to love is very influenced by the extent to which our love is returned. It is not so with God. On the cross, Jesus revealed a love so powerful that that it embraced even those who brought about his death. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives. The Eucharist that we celebrate makes this love present to us in a special way. God so loves the world that he continues to give us his Son in the Eucharist. Not only are we the beneficiaries of the triumph of God’s love on Calvary, the triumph of the cross, but our own lives can reveal to others the triumph of the cross. The triumph of the cross shows itself in all kinds of simple ways, in the tolerance and humour we show to each other against all the odds, in the willingness to let go of old hurts, in the bearing of terminal illness with patience and dignity, in the fidelity to significant commitments when they become costly, in the loving service that endures even when it is not appreciated. We pray on this feast that the triumph of the cross would continue to take flesh in all of our lives.

 Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ieJoinus via our webcam.

Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC.

Facebook: St John the Baptist RC Parish, Clontarf.

Tumblr: Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin.

[catholicwatertown]

Pope delivers his Urbi et Orbi message

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Easter Sunday gave his tradition Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) message from the central loggia of St Peter's Basilica. In it he prayed that Risen Lord would walk beside those who are marginalized who are victimized by old and new forms of slavery. The Holy Father also prayed the Lord would bring peace to the Middle East, come to the aid of Ukraine, shed his blessing upon the continent of Europe and  build bridges of dialogue in Latin America. 

Below is the English language translation of the Pope's Urbi et Orbi message

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Happy Easter!

            Today, throughout the world, the Church echoes once more the astonishing message of the first disciples: “Jesus is risen!” – “He is truly risen, as he said!”

            The ancient feast of Passover, the commemoration of the liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery, here finds fulfilment.  By his resurrection, Jesus Christ has set us free from the slavery of sin and death, and has opened before us the way to eternal life.

            All of us, when we let ourselves be mastered by sin, lose the right way and end up straying like lost sheep.  But God himself, our shepherd, has come in search of us.  To save us, he lowered himself even to accepting death on the cross. Today we can proclaim: “The Good Shepherd has risen, who laid down his life for his sheep, and willingly died for his flock, alleluia” (Roman Missal, IV Sunday of Easter, Communion antiphon).

            In every age, the Risen Shepherd tirelessly seeks us, his brothers and sisters, wandering in the deserts of this world.  With the marks of the passion – the wounds of his merciful love – he draws us to follow him on his way, the way of life.  Today too, he places upon his shoulders so many of our brothers and sisters crushed by evil in all its varied forms.

            The Risen Shepherd goes in search of all those lost in the labyrinths of loneliness and marginalization.  He comes to meet them through our brothers and sisters who treat them with respect and kindness, and help them to hear his voice, an unforgettable voice, a voice calling them back to friendship with God.

            He takes upon himself all those victimized by old and new forms of slavery, inhuman labour, illegal trafficking, exploitation and discrimination, and grave forms of addiction.  He takes upon himself children and adolescents deprived of their carefree innocence and exploited, and those deeply hurt by acts of violence that take place within the walls of their own home.

            The Risen Shepherd walks beside all those forced to leave their homelands as a result of armed conflicts, terrorist attacks, famine and oppressive regimes.  Everywhere he helps these forced migrants to encounter brothers and sisters, with whom they can share bread and hope on their journey.

            In the complex and often dramatic situations of today’s world, may the Risen Lord guide the steps of all those who work for justice and peace.  May he grant the leaders of nations the courage they need to prevent the spread of conflicts and to put a halt to the arms trade.

            Especially in these days, may he sustain the efforts of all those actively engaged in bringing comfort and relief to the civil population in Syria, prey to a war that continues to sow horror and death.  May he grant peace to the entire Middle East, beginning with the Holy Land, as well as in Iraq and Yemen.

            May the Good Shepherd remain close to the people of South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who endure continuing hostilities, aggravated by the grave famine affecting certain parts of Africa.

            May the Risen Jesus sustain the efforts of all those who, especially in Latin America, are committed to ensuring the common good of societies marked at times by political and social tensions that in some cases have resulted in violence.  May it be possible for bridges of dialogue to be built, by continuing to fight the scourge of corruption and to seek viable and peaceful solutions to disputes, for progress and the strengthening of democratic institutions in complete respect for the rule of law.

            May the Good Shepherd come to the aid of Ukraine, still beset by conflict and bloodshed, to regain social harmony.  May he accompany every effort to alleviate the tragic sufferings of those affected by the conflict.

            The Risen Lord continues to shed his blessing upon the continent of Europe.  May he grant hope to those experiencing moments of crisis and difficulty, especially due to high unemployment, particularly among young people.

            Dear brothers and sisters, this year Christians of every confession celebrate Easter together.  With one voice, in every part of the world, we proclaim the great message:  “The Lord is truly risen, as he said!”  May Jesus, who vanquished the darkness of sin and death, grant peace to our days.

            Happy Easter!

(from Vatican Radio)

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[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

12th November >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on Luke 17:20-25 for Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time: ‘The kingdom of God is among you’.

Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time  

Gospel (Except USA)

Luke 17:20-25

The kingdom of God is among you

Asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was to come, Jesus gave them this answer, ‘The coming of the kingdom of God does not admit of observation and there will be no one to say, “Look here! Look there!” For, you must know, the kingdom of God is among you.’

He said to the disciples, ‘A time will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man and will not see it. They will say to you, “Look there!” or, “Look here!” Make no move; do not set off in pursuit; for as the lightning flashing from one part of heaven lights up the other, so will be the Son of Man when his day comes. But first he must suffer grievously and be rejected by this generation.’

Gospel (USA)

Luke 17:20-25

The Kingdom of God is among you.

Asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, Jesus said in reply, “The coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.”

Then he said to his disciples, “The days will come when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. There will be those who will say to you, ‘Look, there he is,’ or ‘Look, here he is.’ Do not go off, do not run in pursuit. For just as lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer greatly and be rejected by this generation.”

Reflections (7)

(i) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

In the time of Jesus, people thought of the kingdom of God as a future reality, as something that would come to earth at the end of time. The Pharisees in today’s gospel reading ask Jesus when exactly this will happen. They had heard him say, ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’. They wanted Jesus to be clearer about the timing of its arrival to earth. In reply, Jesus makes the striking statement, ‘you must know, the kingdom of God is among you’. Jesus was saying to them that the kingdom of God had already arrived in and through his ministry. It hadn’t arrived fully. As Jesus goes on to say to his disciples in the gospel reading, the day of the Son of Man has yet to come. It is only then that the kingdom of God will come fully. However, the kingdom of God is already present in all that Jesus was saying and doing. It would further break into our world through his death, resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit. The risen Lord would say to us today what he said to the Pharisees, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’. It is among us when God’s will is being done as it is in heaven, when believers’ lives are shaped by the Holy Spirit, when people relate to God and to one another in the same loving way as Jesus did, when people live the values of the beatitudes and put the Sermon on the Mount into practice, even at great cost to themselves. In the first reading, Paul called on Philemon to create an opening for the coming of the kingdom of God by welcoming back his runaway slave no longer as a slave but as a brother in Christ. The kingdom of God is among us. Each one of us in our day to day lives can make visible the presence of the kingdom of God by living the gospel message in the power of the Spirit. Then we will put new heart into one another, in the words of today’s first reading.

And/Or

(ii) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

Sometimes we can miss something of great significance. It is there before us but we do not see it. In this morning’s gospel reading the Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God was to come. In reply Jesus says to them, ‘You must know, the kingdom of God is among you’. They failed to see that the kingdom of God was present to them in and through the person of Jesus. They were not alert to the signs of God’s kingdom in the ministry of Jesus. The kingdom of God was there but in a less dramatic form than they expected it. The gospel reading reminds us that the Lord is present in our lives in more ways than we realize. His presence does not always admit of observation in the words of today’s gospel reading. It will often be un-dramatic, without fanfare. Yet the Lord is really present especially in the words and deeds of people that build up and heal and bring life. The Lord has assured us that we will never be without his presence. What we need are eyes to see and ears to hear, the eyes and ears of faith. Like the disciples earlier in Luke’s gospel we need to pray, ‘Increase our faith’.

 And/Or

(iii) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

I like that poem by Joseph Mary Plunkett which begins, ‘I see his blood upon the rose and in the stars the glory of his eyes’. All of nature spoke to him of Jesus. He recognized the Lord in the wonder and diversity of God’s creation. He had a keen eye, a spiritual eye. The Pharisees in the gospel reading this morning lacked that keen eye. They asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was to come, yet they were blind to the signs of God’s kingdom already present to them. As Jesus says to them, ‘You must know, the kingdom of God is among you’. Jesus was referring to all that was happening in his ministry, all that he was saying and doing. The God of life was powerfully at work in the ministry of Jesus and yet many people could not see that; instead they felt threatened by him. The God of life continues to work powerfully among us in and through the risen Lord, in and through the Holy Spirit. What Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit is there to be observed in people’s lives, the first fruit of the final harvest of the kingdom of God. We need eyes to see the signs of the kingdom in our midst. We come before the Lord in our blindness, asking him to help us to see.

 And/Or

(iv) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

The question that the Pharisees put to Jesus shows a preoccupation with the future coming of the kingdom of God. ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ In response, Jesus directs their focus from the future to the present. The kingdom of God, the days of the Son of Man, may not have come in all its fullness and the timing of that future coming can never be calculated. Yet, the kingdom of God is to some extent already present, in and through the ministry of Jesus, ‘You must know’, Jesus says, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’. Jesus would say the same to us today. The present is not all God would want it to be. That is why Jesus teaches us to pray in the prayer he gave us, ‘thy kingdom of God’. Yet, the seeds of God’s kingdom are already present among us. The rule of God is already working itself out in the lives of those who are seeking to live by the values of Jesus, who strive to walk in his way and to live by his truth. Those seeds are present in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. We need eyes to see the many signs of how God is working among us through his Son and the Spirit. Recognizing those seeds will give us confidence that the final harvest will come. In the words or Paul’s letter to the Philippians, we can be confident that God who has begun this good work among us will bring it to completion.

 And/Or

(v) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

Many people ask questions of Jesus in the course of the gospels. Jesus does not always answer the question in the way that people might expect. In this morning’s gospel reading, the Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God was to come. They heard him proclaim, ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’, and they wanted him to set a date for its coming. It was a ‘when’ question, but Jesus did not give a ‘when’ answer. Yes, there will be a time in the future when the kingdom of God will come in all its fullness, when the Son of Man will come in great power and glory. However, Jesus does not go down the road of calculating the timing of this future event. Rather, he draws attention to the here and now. The kingdom of God in all its fullness may be a future reality, but there is a sense in which it is already a present reality. As Jesus says to his questioners, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’. The kingdom of God is in your midst, if only you had eyes to see it. It is present in what Jesus is saying and doing. The kingdom of God is present among us today, because Jesus, now in his risen form, continues to move among us, in word and in deed. The kingdom of God may be hidden, like the mustard seed in the soil or the leaven in the flour, but it is here among us in all its transforming power. When we feel low in ourselves or we feel discouraged about the state of the church, we need to repeat to ourselves those words of Jesus in today’s gospel reading, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’.

 And/Or

(vi) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

In the gospel reading, the Pharisees ask Jesus when the kingdom of God was to come, and Jesus replies that it is already here, ‘you must know, the kingdom of God is among you’. The kingdom of God was already present in and through the ministry of Jesus, in his preaching and teaching, is his healing of the sick, in his seeking the lost, in his including the excluded. Jesus goes on to acknowledge that the kingdom of God has not yet fully arrived. That will only happen when, as he says, the day of the Son of Man comes, when the Lord comes again in glory at the end of time. However, in many respects this future is already present, even if not fully present; the coming rule of God is already at work in the here and now through Jesus, our risen Lord. Jesus could teach us to pray, ‘Father, thy kingdom come’, while also declaring, ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’. We all might be tempted to ask the question the Pharisees ask in the gospel reading, ‘When will the kingdom of God come?’ We are very aware that the world in which we live, with its various earthly kingdoms, is a long way from being the kingdom of God; we easily recognize that God’s will is not being done on earth as it is in heaven. Yet, Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ question invites us to be attentive to the signs of God’s kingdom that are already among us. Wherever God’s love that filled the life of Jesus finds some expression in any human life, there the kingdom of God is present. It is above all when we are tempted to become discouraged at the state of our world that we need to become more attuned to those signs of God’s kingdom that are all around us.

 And/Or

(vii) Thursday, Thirty Second Week in Ordinary Time

The question asked of Jesus by the Pharisees in today’s gospel reading, ‘when is the kingdom of God to come?’ implies that the kingdom of God has not yet come. However, at the core of Jesus’ preaching was the proclamation of the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. The reign of God’s powerful love was already at work in all that Jesus was doing and saying, in his healing the sick, his gathering of the new community that included the outcasts, in his forgiving sinners, in his powerful words which both consoled some and disturbed others. That is why, in response to the question of the Pharisees, Jesus says, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’. The risen Lord would say the same to us today, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’. Wherever the Spirit of Jesus is alive and active, the kingdom of God is there. It is there when those who had been made to feel unwanted are given a sense of home, when the sick and the suffering experience a compassionate and healing presence, when those who seek the Lord, without perhaps always realizing it, are helped to find him, when those burdened by a sense of past failures are helped to experience God’s unconditional love and forgiveness. In the first reading, the kingdom of God would be present if the church that meets in Philemon’s house did what Paul asks, receiving back the runaway slave Onesimus as a brother in Christ, as if he were Paul himself. There are so many ways we can help to make a reality the words of Jesus in today’s gospel reading, ‘the kingdom of God is among you’.

Fr. Martin Hogan.

[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

31st December >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on John 1:1-18 for  Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas: ‘The Word was made flesh’.

Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

John 1:1-18

The Word was made flesh, and lived among us

In the beginning was the Word:

and the Word was with God

and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things came to be,

not one thing had its being but through him.

All that came to be had life in him

and that life was the light of men,

a light that shines in the dark,

a light that darkness could not overpower.

A man came, sent by God.

His name was John.

He came as a witness,

as a witness to speak for the light,

so that everyone might believe through him.

He was not the light,

only a witness to speak for the light.

The Word was the true light

that enlightens all men;

and he was coming into the world.

He was in the world

that had its being through him,

and the world did not know him.

He came to his own domain

and his own people did not accept him.

But to all who did accept him

he gave power to become children of God,

to all who believe in the name of him

who was born not out of human stock

or urge of the flesh

or will of man

but of God himself.

The Word was made flesh,

he lived among us,

and we saw his glory,

the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father,

full of grace and truth.

John appears as his witness. He proclaims:

‘This is the one of whom I said:

He who comes after me ranks before me

because he existed before me.’

Indeed, from his fullness we have, all of us, received –

yes, grace in return for grace,

since, though the Law was given through Moses,

grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God;

it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart,

who has made him known.

Gospel (USA)

John 1:1-18

The Word became flesh.

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came to be through him,

and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be through him was life,

and this life was the light of the human race;

the light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness has not overcome it.

A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world,

and the world came to be through him,

but the world did not know him.

He came to what was his own,

but his own people did not accept him.

But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God.

And the Word became flesh

and made his dwelling among us,

and we saw his glory,

the glory as of the Father’s only-begotten Son,

full of grace and truth.

John testified to him and cried out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘The one who is coming after me ranks ahead of me because he existed before me.’” From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace, because while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son, God, who is at the Father’s side, has revealed him.

Reflections (5)

(i) Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

We are in the last few hours of this year. As each of us looks back over the year just ending, we will all have our own personal feelings and memories. Hopefully, there will be much in the past year for which we can each give thanks to the Lord. For many, the year will have had its dark and difficult moments, and at those times our prayer will have taken the form of the prayer of petition, a prayer for the Lord’s help. Every year has its light and shade for us all. As we end one year and are about to begin a new year, today’s gospel reading gives us that wonderful statement, ‘the Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we have seen his glory’. God became human in the person of Jesus, his Son. God could not get any closer to us than that, and having become human flesh through his Son, God has remained in the flesh of our lives, the stuff of our lives, through his Son, who is now risen Lord. Wherever the journey of life takes us, God is journeying with us through his Son and the Holy Spirit. Even in the darkest moments of our life journey, the light of the Lord’s presence is shining, a light that darkness could not overpower, in the words of today’s gospel reading. As we head into a new year, we do so in the knowledge that the true light who enlightens all people has come into the world and is constantly coming into our personal world. The gospel reading invites to keep opening our hearts and our lives to that enduring light of the Lord’s loving presence, so that, like John the Baptist, we can become witnesses to the light before others.

And/Or

(ii) Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

New year’s eve is often a time when we look back on the past year. For many, the past year will have been a difficult one. The economic situation of the country has left many without a job and forced others to emigrate whose preference would have been to stay at home. Some will have lost a loved one during the year and are struggling to come to terms with the loss. As well as looking back on the struggles and pains of the year, new year’s eve can also be a time to look back in thanksgiving, a time to name the graces and gifts that have come our way and have enhanced our lives. No matter what we have been through, we all have something to give thanks for; we have all been graced in one way or another. It is that graced dimension of our lives that this morning’s gospel draws attention to. The greatest grace and the source of all other graces is the Lord’s presence to us. That grace is memorably expressed in this morning’s gospel reading as, ‘The Word was made flesh and he lived among us, and we saw his glory’. Jesus who was God became flesh as we are flesh, and as risen Lord remains with us until the end of time. The gospel reading also declares that ‘from his fullness we have, all of us, received – yes, grace upon grace’. We are invited to keep drawing grace upon grace from the fullness of the Lord’s loving presence. That realization keeps us thankful for the past and gives us confidence as we face into the future.

 And/Or

(iii) Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

Tomorrow we begin a new year. There is something hopeful about the beginning of a new year. It is a time of new beginning. Nature itself is on the verge of a new beginning. Even though we are in mid-winter, we know that each day is now that little bit longer than the previous one. With the lengthening of the daylight, there comes an emergence of new life. Today’s gospel reading reflects this moment of new beginning with its growing light. The gospel reading’s opening words are ‘in the beginning’. It then goes on to speak of a light that shines in the darkness, a light that darkness cannot overpower, a true light that enlightens everyone. The gospel reading, of course, is referring, not to the light of the sun, but to a different quality of light. It is the light of the Word who was with God in the beginning. Because this Word became flesh, his light has become accessible to us. This is a light that envelopes all our living. We live and move in this special light of the Lord’s loving presence. Later on in John’s gospel, Jesus says of himself: ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life’. Most of us have known our own personal experiences of darkness. A darkness of spirit, of mind or of heart can engulf us. Because of some unexpected event,we can be suddenly plunged into some dark and difficult space that we had not anticipated. It is to these kinds of situations that today’s gospel reading can speak most powerfully. ‘A light shines in the darkness, a light that darkness could not overpower’. The evangelist is declaring that there is no human darkness which the light of the incarnate Word cannot and does not penetrate. The Lord is always present to us, full of grace and truth, inviting us to receive from his fullness. This invitation makes us hopeful as we head into a new year.

 And/Or

(iv) Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

This is New Year’s Eve. At midnight, a new year begins. It is a time of new beginning. The gospel reading for this New Year’s Eve is itself a beginning, the opening verses of the gospel of John. The first verse of that gospel reading, the first verse of the fourth gospel, speaks of a beginning. ‘In the beginning was the Word’. Before all things came into being, before anything was created, the Word was. This Word was God’s self-communication, a self-communication that was so complete and perfect that it was itself God, ‘the Word was God’. It was this Word that became flesh, according to our gospel reading. This self-communication of God became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because we recognize in this child the fullest possible self-communication of God. Jesus is the fullest Word that God could have spoken to us. We speak, we communicate, not just by our words but by the way we relate, by the way we live and, even, by the way we die. God spoke to us through the life of Jesus, and through his death and resurrection. God has said everything he wants to say to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, his Word. God and his Son, together, have sent us the Holy Spirit to help us plumb the depths of all God has said to us through Jesus. As Jesus will later declare in this fourth gospel, the Holy Spirit ‘will guide you into all the truth… he will take from what is mine and declare it to you’. The Holy Spirit enables us to keep hearing the Word that is Jesus in all its richness, to hear it as a word for us here and now. At the beginning of this new year, we invite the Spirit to open us up more fully to the truth of this Word that God spoke in the beginning and that became flesh in the person of Jesus.

 And/Or

(v) Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas

Today is the last day of the year, the end of the year. Yet, today’s gospel reading does not speak about an ending but a beginning. The opening words of the gospel reading, which are the opening words of John’s gospel, are, ‘In the beginning was the Word’. When was this ‘beginning’ that is being referred to here? It is difficult to locate it in time, because the reference is to that mysterious moment before creation began. The Word was with God, in the beginning, before God created the universe. The reading goes on to say that God then created everything through the Word, ‘through him all things came to be’. If all things came into being through the Word, then, in some way, all that exists is itself a word; it speaks to us of God. Those opening verses of John’s gospel are a wonderful statement about the fundamental goodness of all creation, the capacity of all creation to reveal something of God to us. Yet, those verses are only preparatory to the even more wonderful statement that follows a few verses later, ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. The person of Jesus is God’s Word become flesh. If all creation can speak to us of God, Jesus is the supreme and full revelation of God. He alone, in the words of the gospel reading, is full of God’s grace and truth, God’s gracious love and faithfulness. Jesus is the pinnacle of God’s good creation. Jesus speaks to us of God more powerfully than anything or anyone else in all creation. He is the fullest revelation of God’s love for the world. God calls out to us through Jesus to receive from the fullness of his love that resides in Jesus. We can all say, in the words of the gospel reading, ‘from his fullness, we have, all of us, received’. We spend our lives receiving from that fullness of God’s love in Jesus. No matter where we are on our life journey, there is always more to be received. It is in receiving God’s love present in Jesus that we are empowered to give that love to others. We are called to keep giving out of what we have received.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  revmartinhogan@gmail.com

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie  Please join us via our webcam.

Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC.

Facebook: St John the Baptist RC Parish, Clontarf.

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14th October >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on Luke 11:29-32 for Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time: ‘There is something greater than Solomon here’.

Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Luke 11:29-32

As Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be a sign

The crowds got even bigger, and Jesus addressed them:

‘This is a wicked generation; it is asking for a sign. The only sign it will be given is the sign of Jonah. For just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. On Judgement day the Queen of the South will rise up with the men of this generation and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and there is something greater than Solomon here. On Judgement day the men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation and condemn it, because when Jonah preached they repented; and there is something greater than Jonah here.’

Gospel (USA)

Luke 11:29-32

This generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah.

While still more people gathered in the crowd, Jesus said to them, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. At the judgment the queen of the south will rise with the men of this generation and she will condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and there is something greater than Solomon here. At the judgment the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because at the preaching of Jonah they repented, and there is something greater than Jonah here.”

Reflections (9)

(i) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

In the gospel reading, people ask Jesus for a sign. They wanted a more powerful sign that he had given them so far, in order to take him seriously and believe in him. We can all have a tendency to look for signs from the Lord. We are always looking for great clarity and certitude when it comes to our relationship with the Lord. If only he would give us a clear sign, then we would know what to do. Yet, in response to the people’s request for a sign, Jesus tells them that God has already given them a sign. Jesus himself is the sign, someone who is greater than the great wise man Solomon and greater than the prophet Jonah. Jesus is saying the same to us today. God has given us the gift of his Son. He is the sign, the sacrament, of God. He makes God present to us in a way no one else who lived on earth has ever done. There nothing greater that God can give us. In giving us Jesus, God has given us all we need for our journey through life. In his gospel, the evangelist John says of Jesus, ‘from his fullness, we have all received’. There is no fuller sign that God can give us than the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the sending of the Spirit. There is a fullness, a richness, there that we can never exhaust in this life. We are always receiving from the Lord’s fullness. No matter how much we have received in the past, there is always more to be received into the future, and more again in eternity. The Lord who is present to us in all his fullness is always inviting us to draw life from him anew. We need no other sign than him.

And/Or

(ii) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time 

This morning we began reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. We will have a semi-continuous reading from this letter for the next four weeks. The letter to the Romans is one of the great documents of the New Testament. Paul wrote it towards the end of his missionary life, and it expresses the fruit of his efforts over many years to grasp what God had done for us in Christ and the implications of that for how we live. For us today, the church of Rome, the diocese of Rome is the most important church or diocese throughout the world, because the bishop of that Diocese is the Pope, who is the supreme pastor of the church. When Paul was writing to the church in Rome, the most important church was the church in Jerusalem. Rome was the capital of the Empire, but Jerusalem was the first church, the mother church of all the churches. However, Paul was very aware that without the Lord Jesus Christ there would be no church anywhere, whether in Rome, Jerusalem or anywhere else. The good news is about the Son of God, as Paul says in this morning’s reading. In the gospel reading Jesus says about himself, ‘there is something greater than Solomon here… there is something greater than Jonah here’. The church exists to lead us to that someone greater, to help us to encounter him and to grow in our relationship with him. We pray that over the coming month our listening to Paul’s letter to Romans would nourish our relationship with the Lord and open us up more fully to his call and presence.

 And/Or

(iii) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

In this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus speaks of himself as greater than King Solomon and greater than the prophet Jonah. Indeed, Jesus was greater than all the spiritual leaders of Israel prior to him, whether they were priests, prophets or kings. In a way, Jesus is reminding his contemporaries just how fortunate they are to have witnessed his coming. In the previous chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus had said to his disciples, ‘Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see but did not see it, to hear what you hear but did not hear it’. That same beatitude could be spoken to all of us. We have all lived to see and to hear someone greater than Solomon and greater than Jonah. Today’s gospel invites us to keep growing in our appreciation for the gift that God has given us in his Son, Jesus. We shown our appreciation of this gift most of all when we respond to Jesus as generously as the Queen of Sheba responded to King Solomon and as the people of Nineveh responded to the prophet Jonah. We show that we treasure the gift that is Jesus by placing him at the centre of our lives.

 And/Or

(iv) Monday, Twenty Eighth week in Ordinary Time

In this morning’s gospel reading, people come to Jesus looking for a sign. He replies that the signs they are looking for are actually there in front of their eyes if only they could see them. The people of Nineveh took Jonah more seriously than some of the people of Jesus’ generation were taking him, and, yet, there were far more powerful signs of God’s presence in the life of Jesus than in the life of Jonah.‘There is something greater than Jonah here’. The queen of Sheba took Solomon more seriously than some of the people of Jesus’ generation were taking him, and, yet, there were far more powerful signs of God’s presence in the life of Jesus than in the life of Solomon. ‘There is something greater than Solomon here’. In looking for some striking, spectacular, signs from Jesus, many of his contemporaries were missing the signs that were staring them in the face. In looking for the extraordinary, we too can miss the richness in the ordinary. In many ways Jesus was very ordinary. ‘Is not this the son of the carpenter?’ the people of Nazareth asked. When Jesus spoke about God’s kingdom, the ways of God, he did so in very ordinary terms, the sower going out to sow, the man robbed on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the father whose son left home in a very selfish fashion, the weeds that grow among the field of wheat. These were scenes from ordinary life. Jesus was saying, the signs of God’s presence are to be found there in the ordinary stuff of life, for those who have eyes to see. This morning we pray for eyes to see the many signs of the Lord’s presence in our day to day lives.

 And/Or

(v) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

This morning we begin reading from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. For the next four weeks our first reading will be taken from that letter, a letter that can be dated to about the year 57 AD. Paul had never been to Rome at the time of writing. This was the only church he wrote to that he himself had not established. Yet, when we think of Paul today, we think of the city of Rome, because it was there in that city, the capital of the Empire, that Paul was executed for his faith in Jesus. He likely lost his life in the persecution of the church in Rome that resulted from the emperor Nero blaming the great fire of Rome on the Christians. Paul’s letter to the church in Rome went on to become one of the most significant texts of the New Testament. In the opening verses of his letter, Paul addresses the church in Rome as God’s beloved, called to be saints. No doubt Paul would address the church here in Clontarf in the very same terms if he were alive today. We are God’s beloved, because, as Paul will say later on in his letter, God has demonstrated his love for us in the death of Christ. As people who have been greatly loved by God, we are called to be saints. Paul held that everyone was called to be a saint. Indeed, he understood that in virtue of our baptism we are already saints and our calling is to become who we really are. What is a saint for Paul? A saint is someone who is alive with that love of God which has been revealed in the death of Christ and poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

 And/Or

(vi) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

This morning’s gospel reading suggests that many of Jesus’ contemporaries did not really appreciate him. They wanted to see some dramatic sign from him if they were to believe in him. ‘This is a wicked generation; it is asking for a sign’, he said. We will always have a hankering after the spectacular and the unusual when it comes to the life of faith. Yet, that is not normally the way that God seems to work. In many ways, there was something very ordinary about Jesus. ‘Is this not the carpenter’s son?’ the people of Nazareth asked. He was too ordinary for them to take him seriously. If Jesus did something really spectacular, that would make them sit up and take him seriously. That was the temptation Jesus had to battle with at the beginning of his ministry. Satan tempted him to do spectacular signs so as to win a following, turning stones into bread, throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. This was not the way of Jesus. He revealed God in very ordinary ways, most of the time, sharing table with the excluded, feeding the hungry, caring for and healing the sick, feeding people’s spirits with his teaching, gathering a new kind of community about himself that brought together people who did not normally mix. For those who had eyes to see, someone greater than Solomon or Jonah was present. The Lord is present to us in very ordinary ways today too. He is alive where people are cared for and looked after, where the broken are healed, where the lonely are given companionship, where the spiritually and physically hungry are fed, where love endures even in the face of suffering and loss.

 And/Or

(vii) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

In the gospel reading, Jesus draws on the Jewish Scriptures to show how people from beyond Israel, pagans, were sometimes more responsive to God’s messengers than God’s own people were. The Queen of the South, who was a pagan, came to Jerusalem to hear the wisdom of Solomon. The people of the pagan city of Nineveh repented in response to the preaching of the prophet Jonah. Jesus declares that something greater than Solomon and greater than Jonah is here, and, yet, many of his contemporaries do not take him seriously. They come to him looking for some sign from him to prove his credentials. Jesus is indeed greater than Solomon and Jonah, greater than all the wise people and prophets of Israel, and he is here among us, today. He is not just ‘here’ to his contemporaries but ‘here’ to believers of every generation. The gospel reading challenges us never to take the wonder of our faith for granted. God became flesh in Jesus, not in Solomon or any of the prophets, and Jesus, God with us, has given us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink. Someone greater than Solomon and Jonah is ‘here’ in this Eucharist. Unlike the Queen of the South in the gospel reading, we don’t have to come from the ends of the earth to find him, because he has come from heaven to find us and to be with us where we are. The only response we can make to such a privilege is one of thanksgiving and the place where we give thanks above all is in the Eucharist. Saint Paul would remind us that such thanksgiving must flow over into our lives so that the life we live becomes an act of thanksgiving to God’s gracious love for us in Christ.

 And/Or

(viii) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is exasperated with his contemporaries because they fail to take him seriously. They look for a sign from him, while being indifferent to all that he is offering them through his words and deeds. Jesus reminds his hearers that, in the Scriptures, the people of Nineveh took the prophet Jonah seriously and the Queen of the South took Solomon seriously. Yet, Jesus’ own contemporaries do not take him seriously, even though, as Jesus says, ‘there is something greater than Solomon here... there is something greater than Jonah here’. Jesus is indeed greater than Jonah and all the other prophets of Israel; he is greater than Solomon and all the other wise people that appeared in Israel since Solomon. Jesus is the Son of God; he is God in human form. There is such a richness and depth to Jesus’ identity that we never fully grasp him in this life. There is always more to Jesus than we can conceive. There is always something greater to him that we have not yet come to appreciate. In his letter to the Ephesians Paul speaks about the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and yet he prays that we would come to know this love of Christ. This knowledge Paul prays for us to have is not just knowledge of the mind but of the heart. We are always on a journey towards this knowing the love of Christ because it is always greater than we imagine.

 And/Or

(ix) Monday, Twenty Eighth Week in Ordinary Time 

The Jewish Scriptures are full of memorable and striking figures. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus mentions two such figures from the Jewish Scriptures, a king and a prophet, Solomon and Jonah. People responded to their presence and their message. Jesus highlights in the gospel reading that even people from outside of Israel responded to their message, the people of Nineveh in the case of Jonah and the Queen of Sheba in the case of Solomon. Yet, as Jesus bewails, some of his own Jewish contemporaries were not responding to him, even though he was so much greater than Solomon and Jonah. It seems that not everyone appreciated the significance of this carpenter’s son from Nazareth. In a sense, we have an advantage over Jesus’ contemporaries. They were in the middle of Jesus’ story, or even at the beginning of it. We, however, can look back over the whole story of Jesus from his birth to his death, and we can do so in the light of his resurrection and with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Strange as it may seem, we are in some ways even more privileged than Jesus’ contemporaries. We can more easily appreciate the extent to which Jesus is indeed greater than Solomon and greater than Jonah, indeed greater than all the kings and prophets of Israel. We know that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is good news for all of humankind. Our life-long calling is to keep growing in our appreciation of and in our responsiveness to what Paul calls in today’s first reading the good news ‘about the Son of God’.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  revmartinhogan@gmail.com

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie  Please join us via our webcam.

Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC.

Facebook: St John the Baptist RC Parish, Clontarf.

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14th September >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on John 3:13-17 for The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: The ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son’.

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

John 3:13-17

God sent his Son so that through him the world might be saved

Jesus said to Nicodemus:

‘No one has gone up to heaven

except the one who came down from heaven,

the Son of Man who is in heaven;

and the Son of Man must be lifted up

as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,

so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost

but may have eternal life.

For God sent his Son into the world

not to condemn the world,

but so that through him the world might be saved.’

Gospel (USA)

John 3:13-17

So the Son of Man must be lifted up.

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Reflections (5)

 (I) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find the phrase, ‘triumph of the cross’, in any way strange. When we look on the cross of Jesus with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and wisdom of God, the power of a love greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Our own capacity to love is very influenced by the extent to which our love is returned. It is not so with God. On the cross, Jesus revealed a love so powerful that that it embraced even those who brought about his death. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives. The Eucharist that we celebrate makes this love present to us in a special way. God so loves the world that he continues to give us his Son in the Eucharist. Not only are we the beneficiaries of the triumph of God’s love on Calvary, the triumph of the cross, but our own lives can reveal to others the triumph of the cross. The triumph of the cross shows itself in all kinds of simple ways, in the tolerance and humour we show to each other against all the odds, in the willingness to let go of old hurts, in the bearing of terminal illness with patience and dignity, in the fidelity to significant commitments when they become costly, in the loving service that endures even when it is not appreciated. We pray on this feast that the triumph of the cross would continue to take flesh in all of our lives.

And/Or

(ii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

In the time of Jesus no one would have considered crucifixion a triumph. It may have been considered a triumph for those who were doing the crucifying; it certainly would never have been considered a triumph for the person crucified. Yet, that is what we are celebrating this morning. Jesus, in being crucified, triumphed. It was a triumph of love over hatred. As John the evangelist says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Jesus revealed God’s love in all that he said and did, but he revealed God’s love most fully on the cross. John the evangelist would say that on the cross Jesus revealed God’s glory. That is why in John’s gospel Jesus speaks of his coming crucifixion as the hour when he is glorified. Authentic love is always life-giving and that is uniquely so of God’s love. As well as being the triumph of love over hatred, the cross of Jesus is the triumph of life over death. Jesus was put to death in the most cruel way but through his death he passed over into a new life and that life was offered to us all. The blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus in John’s gospel speaks to us of the life that flows through the death of Jesus. The cross has been celebrated in art as the tree of life. The triumph of the cross, which is the triumph of God and of Jesus over Satan and all the forces of evil and death, is a triumph in which we all share. From the cross Jesus draws all of us into the love and life of God. As he says in John’s gospel, when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself. We simply have to let ourselves be drawn.

 And/Or

(iii) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’ don’t normally belong together. ‘Triumph’ suggests celebration, achievement, recognition. ‘Cross’ indicates suffering, humiliation, defeat. How could any one who ended up crucified ever be said to have triumphed. It is hard to think of a greater paradox that the phrase ‘the triumph of the cross’. Yet, as Christians, we don’t find that phrase in any way strange. When we look on the cross with the eyes of faith, we don’t simply see the tragic ending of a good man’s life. We behold what Paul called the power and the wisdom of God. What is this power that shows itself in such degrading weakness? It is of course the power of love, the power of a love that is greater than any human love, the love spoken about in today’s gospel reading. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. Here was a divine love that became a human love in the life and death of Jesus, a love so powerful that it was in no way diminished by the experience of rejection, hatred, and all that was most sinister and corrupt in the human spirit. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of love over hatred, of life over death. The triumph of that Good Friday is a triumph in which we all continue to share. The light that shone in that awful darkness continues to shine on all of us. The love that burst forth from the hill of Golgotha two thousand years ago continues to flow into all our lives.

 And/Or

(iv) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The expression ‘exaltation of the cross’ would have made very little sense in the time of Jesus. ‘Exaltation’ suggested glory, honour, status, whereas death by crucifixion was the most shameful death imaginable. It was the complete absence of glory, honour and status. Why did the early Christians begin to speak of the death by crucifixion of Jesus as exaltation? They could only do so in the light of Jesus’ resurrection. In today’s second reading, Paul says that because Jesus ‘was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross’, God raised him high, or highly exalted him. In that sense, Jesus’ exaltation by God followed his death on the cross. Yet, the early church understood that Jesus was already being exalted by God as he hung from the cross. When people were doing their worst to Jesus, God was standing over his Son vindicating him, confirming all that his Son lived by and stood for. It was because Jesus was totally faithful to the work God gave him to do that he was crucified. What was that work that God gave Jesus to do? Jesus’ work was to reveal God’s love for the world. As Saint John says in this morning’s gospel reading, ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son’. On one occasion in John’s gospel Jesus said, ‘my food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work’. According to that same gospel Jesus’ last words before he died were ‘it is finished’. Jesus’ work of revealing God’s love for the world, for Jews, Samaritans, pagans, was experienced as threatening by many, especially those in power. They crucified him to put a stop to his work. Yet, in killing Jesus they enabled Jesus to finish the work God gave him to do. If his life proclaimed God’s love for the world, his death proclaimed that love even more powerfully. His death revealed a divine love, a love that endured in the face of all the very worst that evil and sin could inflict on him. That is why we can speak of the exaltation of the cross. When we look upon the cross, we believing we are looking upon an explosion of love, the glorious revelation of God’s love, a love that is stronger than sin and death, a love that embraced the world and embraces each of us in a very personal way. We can each say with Saint Paul in his letter to the Galatians, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.

 And/Or

(v) Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The discovery of the relics of the true cross by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, is dated to September 14, 320. The annual commemoration of that event has been celebrated since, in praise of the redemption won for us by Christ. No one in the time of Jesus would ever have put together the two words ‘triumph’ and ‘cross’. Far from being a triumph, death by crucifixion was considered to be the most degrading and terrifying form of execution. It was a way for the Roman authorities to show its triumph over all those who dared to threaten Roman order and peace. Yet, as Christians, we have no difficulty in looking upon the cross of Jesus as a triumph. Rome did not have the last word when it came to Jesus, because God raised Jesus from the dead and he made him the cornerstone of a new community, which went on to include a future Roman Emperor, Constantine. Through the eyes of the resurrection we can see the cross of Jesus as the triumph of love over hatred, of Jesus’ love over the hatred of his enemies, of God’s love over the hateful rejection of his Son. This is how John in his gospel understood the cross of Jesus. It was the glorious revelation of God’s love for the world, in the language of today’s gospel reading. Jesus himself says that a man has no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. We venerate the cross because it is a powerful manifestation of a love that is greater than any human love. That is why the earliest Christians tended to depict the crucifix as a glorious Christ with arms outstretched reigning in love from the cross. This morning we celebrate a triumph in which we all share. We are all embraced by the love of God that shines through Christ crucified. The cross has become good news for us. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans expressed that good news very simply and very powerfully, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us’.

Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  revmartinhogan@gmail.com

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie  Please join us via our webcam.

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[frmartinshomiliesandreflections]

28th June >> Fr. Martin’s Gospel Reflections / Homilies on Luke 15:3-7 for The Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus: ‘I have found my sheep that was lost’.

Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Gospel (Europe, Africa, New Zealand, Australia & Canada)

Luke 15:3-7

There will be rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner

Jesus spoke this parable to the scribes and Pharisees:

‘What man among you with a hundred sheep, losing one, would not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the missing one till he found it? And when he found it, would he not joyfully take it on his shoulders and then, when he got home, call together his friends and neighbours? “Rejoice with me,” he would say “I have found my sheep that was lost.” In the same way, I tell you, there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over ninety-nine virtuous men who have no need of repentance.’

Gospel (USA)

Luke 15:3–7

Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.

Jesus addressed this parable to the Pharisees and scribes: “What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it? And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.”

Reflections (8)

(i) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

The image of God in today’s first reading from the prophet Ezekiel is of a shepherd who cares deeply for his flock. The shepherd says of his flock, ‘I will look for the lost one, bring back the stray, bandage the wounded and make the weak strong. I shall watch over the fat and healthy’. That image of God as a caring shepherd continues into today’s responsorial psalm, one of the most often prayed and sung of all the psalms, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want’. It was above all this aspect of God that Jesus came to reveal most fully. Jesus was the Shepherd God in human form. Jesus spent his ministry doing what God said he would do in that first reading. He looked for the lost one; he brought back the stray; he bandaged the wounded; he made the weak strong and he also watched over the healthy and well. In the parable that Jesus spoke to the scribes and Pharisees in today’s gospel reading, he was portraying his own ministry. The portrayal of the shepherd in that parable was Jesus’ own self portrait. He was like the shepherd who was prepared to leave the ninety nine in the wilderness and go in search of the one who was lost, and who kept looking for the lost sheep until he found him, and then he lifted the lost upon his shoulders and took him home. This image of Jesus as the shepherd with the lost sheep draped across his shoulders had a great appeal in the early church. The first images of Jesus, which we find on the walls of the catacombs in Rome, depict him in this way. The image of Jesus with the sheep draped across his shoulders was as popular in the early centuries of the church as the image of Jesus displaying his sacred heart became many centuries later. Both images speak to us of the tender love of the Lord for the weak and vulnerable, for the lost and abandoned. In our own moments of weakness and abandonment, we can open our hearts to the love of the good shepherd, the love of the sacred heart. Indeed, in today’s second reading, Saint Paul tells us that God has poured this love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Today is the feast of God’s love for us in our weakness. It is a feast that invites us to open our hearts to this caring love poured out upon us unconditionally. In receiving this love we are, at the same time, empowered to share something of this same love with others,

And/Or

(ii) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

During the last Eucharistic Congress here in Dublin in 1933, I have been told that one of the banners that could be seen hanging from the flats in Gardiner Street read, ‘God bless the Sacred Heart’. It is a striking indication of the significance of the place of the Sacred Heart in the lives of people at the time, especially in the lives of those who were struggling. Many of us will have grown up with the image of the Sacred Heart in the house. One of the strong memories I have as a child is the picture of the Sacred Heart in the kitchen of my grandmother’s house here in Clontarf, with a little red light in the form of a cross lighting in front of it. It always seemed to be on; it think it was left on permanently even during the night. Again it was another indication of how significant that image of the Sacred Heart was for people. Here was an image of Christ that spoke to people. It is an image that is very much rooted in the gospels. It is only John’s gospel who gives us the scene that we have just heard read in the gospel reading, the piercing of the side of Jesus and the resulting outpouring of blood and water. In John’s gospel, ‘water’ is always a symbol of life. You may remember Jesus’ offer of living water to the Samaritan woman, and his promise to her that whoever drinks the water he gives will never be thirsty again. The water Jesus offers can quench the deepest thirst of the human heart because it is the water of eternal life, the water of God’s life, of God’s love. God’s love is life-giving, as the fourth evangelist declares, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’. That life-giving love of God became flesh in Jesus. The water of life that pours from the side of Jesus, from the heart of Jesus, on the cross is the symbol of God’s love present in Jesus, a love which, according to Paul in our second reading, ‘is beyond all knowledge’. The love which pours from Jesus on the cross draws us powerfully to the Lord - as Jesus said earlier in John’s gospel, ‘When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself’. Today’s feast calls on us to allow ourselves to be drawn to the heart of Jesus from which pours God’s life-giving, renewing and healing love.

 And/Or

(iii) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

The image of the Sacred Heart was one of the most popular images of Christ for a certain generation of Catholics. It spoke to them of the love of Christ, a love which showed itself on the cross. The pierced heart of Christ in the image proclaimed that ‘greater love’ Jesus speaks about in the gospel of John. ‘No one can have greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’. People who looked at that image in their homes experienced that love of Christ in a very personal way, just as Paul did when he said, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’. This morning’s second reading gives us one of the shortest and, yet, most profound statements about God in all of the Bible, ‘God is love’. It goes on to state that ‘God’s love was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son’. Jesus is the supreme revelation of God who is love. All authentic love is life-giving and that is uniquely true of God who is love and of Jesus the revelation of that love. God sent his Son so that we could have life through him, according to our second reading. In the gospel reading, Jesus uses the image of ‘rest’ to speak of that love. He invites all who are burdened to come to him and to find rest, to find life. Even a slight inkling of the tremendous love of God for us can have a transforming effect on us. In the words of the second reading, it can empower us to love one another as God has loved us.

 And/Or

(iv) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

We think of Saint Paul as a great missionary, a great teacher, a great letter writer. He was also a man of deep prayer, and his letters give us access to the content of his prayer, the way that he prayed, who he prayed for. Clearly, prayer was at the heart of his life as a missionary, a teacher, a pastor, a letter writer. This morning’s second reading gives us one of the most beautiful of all Paul’s prayers. In that prayer, Paul prays that God would give the power through the Spirit for our hidden self to grow strong. Our hidden self growing strong is equated there with Christ living in our hearts through faith. When Christ lives in our hearts, then our hidden self, our core, grows strong. Today we celebrate the feast of the Sacred Heart, the heart of Christ, his hidden self, but that reading from Paul puts the focus on our heart, our hidden self. Paul’s prayer is that Christ would live in our hearts. In a sense Paul seems to think of all of us, all of the baptized, as called to have a sacred heart, a heart in which Christ lives through faith. To speak of the sacred heart of Christ, of Jesus, is to speak of his loving heart. Paul refers in that reading to the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge. We never fully grasp the extent of Christ’s love in this life. His love was most fully revealed, most accessible to us, on the cross. The blood and water flowing from the side of Christ that the gospel reading refers to suggests the outpouring of his life-giving love, a love stronger than death and sin. This is the love that is beyond all knowledge; it is more than our minds can grasp. All we can do is place ourselves before this love in our poverty, surrender to this love in faith. If we can do that, Christ and his love will begin to live in our hearts through faith, and our hearts will reflect something of his sacred heart. Something of his love will flow from our human hearts to bring life to our world.

 And/Or

(v) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus                                                                           

We celebrate the feast of the Sacred Heart on the Friday after the Second Sunday after Pentecost. My parents’ and grandparents’ generation and the generations before them often had an image of the Sacred Heart in their homes, very often with a little red light burning in front of it. There have been many representations and images of Jesus over the centuries, but here was an image, the image of the Sacred Heart, that spoke powerfully to people. It was an image that somehow brought Jesus close to people. This image with its little red light before it was a powerful reminder to people that the Lord was present to them in a very personal and loving way at the heart of their lives, with its trials and tribulations. We use the image of the heart to express human love; it is a very frequently seen image around Saint Valentine’s Day. The image of Jesus with his pierced heart prominently displayed speaks to us of a divine love, of God’s love revealed in Jesus, especially in his death. The second reading this morning makes the very simple but profound statement, ‘God is Love’ and then declares that God’s love was revealed for us when God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life. That is what we are celebrating today, God’s life-giving love for us revealed in his Son. It was this love that people somehow felt touched by in and through the image of the Sacred Heart. Having been touched by God’s love through the image of the loving heart of Jesus, people felt a desire to respond to that love in some way. That is what Jesus calls for in the gospel reading today when he turns towards the crowd and says to them ‘come to me’. It is the invitation of a love that is greater than any human love, and that promises a gift that is greater than any human gift, the gift of ‘rest for your souls’. Our souls are restless, Saint Augustine said, until they rest in God. Because Jesus is God’s love in human form, he can give rest to our restless souls if we come to him. That is the invitation of today’s feast, ‘come to me’ and it is addressed in particular to ‘all you who labour and are overburdened’.

 And/Or

(vi) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Some of the features in our church stand out more clearly ever since the church was painted. I think that is especially true of our lovely stained glass windows. The central stained glass window is depicts Jesus revealing his sacred heart to Saint Margaret Mary. In the left panel an angel holds a scroll which reads, ‘Behold this heart’. We also have an altar to the Sacred Heart. We think of the heart as the seat of emotions but in the time of Jesus it was understood as the seat of the will or desire. Of course, love is not primarily a matter of the emotions, but is rather rooted in the will, in our desire. I decide to love someone and very often that will be accompanied by strong emotions but not always. The shepherd in the gospel reading is an image of Jesus. When one of his hundred sheep went missing, he decided to go looking for it because it was his will that the sheep would not be remain lost; he wanted to bring it back into communion with the flock. In celebrating the feast of the Sacred Heart we are celebrating the Lord’s will, his desire to love us. Jesus identifies his will with God’s will and he declares in John’s gospel, ‘the will of him who sent me is that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me’. Jesus loves us so much that he will do everything to ensure that we remain in communion with him and with other disciples. That is the message of the parable in today’s gospel reading. The Lord is constantly searching for us, seeking us out, because he wills, he desires, our love. He says to us, in the words on our stained glass window, ‘Behold this heart’. His love, his heart, is a given. We are always before his loving heart. It is then that our will, our desire, comes into play. In that sense we are not like the sheep in the parable, passively waiting to be lifted up and brought home. The Lord waits for us to return his love. We can only do that with the help of the Holy Spirit. Paul tells us in our first reading, ‘the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit’. God pours his own love into our hearts so that we can love him back, so that we can desire him as he desires us, will what he wills, live as he wants us to live. Today’s feast reminds us of that fundamental calling.

 And/Or

(vii) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

The symbol of the heart is one of the most frequently used symbols of love in today’s culture. We only have to think of the many tee-shirts with ‘I love Dublin’ or whatever on them, with the heart standing in for the word ‘love’. Of course, the symbol of the heart comes into its own in the run up to Saint Valentine’s Day which celebrates romantic love. The symbol of the heart has also been a very central symbol within the Christian tradition for generations. We have traditionally spoken of the ‘Sacred Heart’, meaning the heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart has been understood as a symbol of the powerful love of Jesus, the love of God made visible in Jesus. This love of Jesus’ heart, of God’s heart in Jesus, is what Paul refers to in this morning’s gospel reading as ‘the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge’. For Paul, the breadth and the length, the height and the depth of the Lord’s love cannot be grasped by the human mind. There is always more to this love than we can ever understand. In this morning’s gospel reading, the blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus as he hung from the cross was understood by the fourth evangelist as a symbol of the love of Jesus, the love of God, that flowed from Jesus’ heart as he hung from the cross. As the fourth evangelist expressed it earlier in his gospel, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’. The traditional symbol of the Sacred Heart is of a heart pierced, a heart that suffered and was broken out of love for us. If Valentine’s day is a celebration of romantic love, today’s feast is a celebration of God’s love revealed in Jesus, especially in his death on the cross. We are prone to letting each other down; we fail in love in various ways. The Lord’s love for us is reliable, unconditional and total. This is what the image of the Sacred Heart proclaims. If we can open our hearts fully to receive this gift of the Lord’s love, then, in the words of Paul in today’s second reading, Christ will live in our hearts through faith, and his love will flow through us to touch the lives of those we meet.

 And/Or

(viii) Solemnity of The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

The image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is well represented in our parish church, both on one of our side altars, which is dedicated to the Sacred Heart, and in the lovely stained glass window over the altar. Devotion to Jesus under the image of his sacred heart has been very strong in the Irish church. There was a time when it was quite common to see a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with a light before it in people’s homes. I remember very well that image with the light before it in my grandparent’s kitchen here in Clontarf. There was something about that image and the little light which spoke powerfully to people. It somehow conveyed a sense of the Lord’s loving presence at the very heart of their lives. Here was the Lord present in people’s homes, in their kitchens, conveying a sense of his personal love for them, inviting them to trust in his love and his care for them. The image of the Sacred Heart touched people’s own heart. Their experience of the Lord’s loving heart drew from their hearts a loving response. It was a heart to heart relationship with the Lord that sustained people in life, especially in the struggles of life. That remains the essence of today’s feast. It is a feast of love, of the Lord’s love for us and of our love for him in response. Today’s readings remind us that this love of the Lord is especially sensitive to all those in greatest need of this love, what the first reading calls, the lost, the stray, the wounded, the weak, what Saint Paul in the second reading refers to as ‘sinners’ and the gospel reading as the ‘lost’. It is to the Sacred Heart we can turn whenever we find ourselves belonging to any of those categories, and, we belong there all the time in one way or another. Today’s feast reminds us that the Lord’s love for us is unconditional. It is not a response to our goodness; it makes us good. It is not a love that waits for us to seek it out; it is a love that is constantly seeking us out. Today’s feast invites us to keep on trusting in God’s loving initiative towards us through his Son and the Holy Spirit, regardless of where we find ourselves in life. It is a feast that prompts us to cry out with Saint Paul, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’.

  Fr. Martin Hogan, Saint John the Baptist Parish, Clontarf, Dublin, D03 AO62, Ireland.

Email: sjtbclontarf@eircom.net or  frmartinhogan@gmail.com

Parish Website: www.stjohnsclontarf.ie  Please join us via our webcam.

Twitter: @SJtBClontarfRC.

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[pamphletstoinspire]

Saint Veronica Giuliani Feast Day - July 9th - Latin Calendar

Last Words of St. Veronica:

" I have found Love, Love has allowed Himself to be seen! This is the cause of my suffering. Tell it to everyone, tell it to everyone!"

Address of Pope Benedict XVI during the general audience Dec. 15, 2010 in Pope Paul VI Hall

Veronica was born on December 27, 1660, in Mercatello, in the valley of Metauro, to Francesco Giuliani and Benedetta Mancini. She was the last of seven sisters, an additional three of whom embraced the monastic life. She was given the name Ursula. She lost her mother at 7, and her father moved to Piacenza as superintendent of customs of the duchy of Parma. In this city, Ursula felt a growing desire to dedicate her life to Christ. The call was ever more pressing, so much so that at 17 she entered the strict cloister of the monastery of the Capuchin Poor Clares of Citta di Castello, where she would remain the whole of her life.

There she received the name Veronica, which means "true image," and, in fact, she would become a true image of Christ Crucified. A year later she made her solemn religious profession. The journey began for her configuration to Christ through much penance, great suffering and certain mystical experiences linked with the Passion of Jesus: the crowning of thorns, the mystical espousal, the wound in her heart and the stigmata. In 1716, at 56, she became abbess of the monastery and was confirmed in this role until her death, which occurred in 1727, after a most painful agony of 33 days that culminated in a profound joy, so much so that her last words were: "I have found Love, Love has allowed Himself to be seen! This is the cause of my suffering. Tell it to everyone, tell it to everyone!" (Summarium Beatificationis, 115-120).

She left her earthly dwelling on July 9 for her encounter with God. She was 67 years old; 50 of those years she spent in the monastery of Citta di Castello. She was proclaimed a saint on May 26, 1893, by Pope Gregory XVI.

Veronica Giuliani wrote much: letters, autobiographical reports, poems. However, the main source to reconstruct her thought is her "Diary," begun in 1693: a good 22,000 handwritten pages, which cover an expanse of 34 years of cloistered life. The writing flows spontaneously and continuously. There are no cancellations or corrections, punctuation marks or distribution of material in chapters or parts according to a pre-established plan. Veronica did not wish to compose a literary work; instead, she was obliged to put her experiences into writing by Father Girolamo Bastianelli, a religious of the Filippini, in agreement with the diocesan bishop Antonio Euctachi.

St. Veronica has a markedly Christ-centered and spousal spirituality: Hers is the experience of being loved by Christ, the faithful and sincere Spouse, and of wanting to correspond with an ever more involved and impassioned love. She interpreted everything in a key of love, and this infuses in her a profound serenity. Everything is lived in union with Christ, for love of Him, and with the joy of being able to demonstrate to Him all the love of which a creature is capable.

The Christ to whom Veronica is profoundly united is the suffering Christ of the passion, death and resurrection; it is Jesus in the act of offering himself to the Father to save us. From this experience derives also the intense and suffering love for the Church, and the twofold way of prayer and offering. The saint lived from this point of view: She prays, suffers, seeks "holy poverty," as "dispossessed," loss of self (cf. ibid., III, 523). Precisely to be like Christ, who gave his whole self.

In every page of her writings Veronica entrusts someone to the Lord, strengthening her prayers of intercession with the offering of herself in every suffering. Her heart dilated to all "the needs of the Holy Church," living with longing the desire of the salvation of "the whole world" (ibid., III-IV, passim). Veronica cried out: "O sinners...come to Jesus' heart; come to the cleansing of his most precious blood...he awaits you with open arms to embrace you" (Ibid., II, 16-17). Animated by an ardent charity, she gave care, understanding and forgiveness to the sisters of the monastery. She offered her prayers and sacrifices for the Pope, her bishop, priests and for all needy persons, including the souls in Purgatory. She summarized her contemplative mission in these words: "We cannot go preaching around the world to convert souls, but we are obliged to pray continually for all those souls who are offending God...particularly with our sufferings, that is with a principle of crucified life" (Ibid., IV, 877). Our saint conceived this mission as a "being in the middle" between men and God, between sinners and Christ Crucified.

Veronica profoundly lived participation in the suffering love of Jesus, certain that "to suffer with joy " is the "key of love" (cf. ibid., I, 299.417; III, 330.303.871;IV, 192). She evidences that Jesus suffers for men’s sins, but also for the sufferings that His faithful servants had to endure in the course of the centuries, in the time of the Church, precisely because of their solid and coherent faith. She wrote: "The Eternal Father made Him see and feel at that point all the sufferings that His elect would have to endure, His dearest souls, that is, those who would know how to benefit from His Blood and from all His sufferings" (ibid., II, 170). As the Apostle Paul says of himself: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body, that is, the Church" (Colossians 1:24).

Veronica even asks Jesus to be crucified with him. "In an instant," she wrote, "I saw issue from his most holy wounds five shining rays; and all came to my face. And I saw these rays become as little flames. In four of them were the nails; and in one of them was the lance, as of gold, all red hot: and it pierced my heart, from one side to the other...and the nails went through the hands and feet. I felt great pain; but, in the very pain I saw myself, I felt myself all transformed in God" (Diary, I, 897)

The saint was convinced she was participating already in the Kingdom of God, but at the same time she invoked all the saints of the Blessed Homeland to come to her aid on the earthly journey of her self-giving, while awaiting eternal blessedness; this was the constant aspiration of her life (cf. ibid., II, 909; V, 246). In regard to preaching of the time, not rarely centered on "saving one’s soul" in individual terms, Veronica shows a strong "sense of solidarity," a sense of communion with all brothers and sisters on the way to heaven, and she lives, prays and suffers for all. The earthly, penultimate things, instead, although appreciated in the Franciscan sense as gifts of the Creator, were always relative, altogether subordinate to the "taste" of God and under the sign of a radical poverty. In the communion sanctorum, she clarifies her ecclesial donation, as well as the relationship between the pilgrim Church and the heavenly Church. "All the saints," she wrote, "are up there through the merits and the Passion of Jesus; but they cooperated with all that the Lord did, so that their life was all ordered...regulated by (his) very works" (ibid., III, 203)

In Veronica’s writings we find many biblical quotations, at times indirectly, but always precise: She shows familiarity with the sacred text, from which her spiritual experience is nourished. Revealed, moreover, is that the intense moments of Veronica’s mystical experience are never separated from the salvific events celebrated in the liturgy, where the proclamation and hearing of the Word of God has a particular place. Hence , sacred Scripture illumines, purifies and confirms Veronica’s experience, rendering it ecclesial. On the other hand, however, precisely her experience, anchored in sacred Scripture with an uncommon intensity, guides one to a more profound and "spiritual" reading of the text itself, to enter into the hidden profundity of the text. She not only expresses herself with the words of sacred Scripture, but she also really lives from these words, they become life in her.

For example, our saint often quotes the expression of the Apostle Paul: "If God is for us, who is against us?" (Romans 8:31; cf. diary, I, 714; II, 116.1021; III, 48). In her, the assimilation of this Pauline text, her great trust and profound joy, becomes a fait accompli in her very person: "My soul," she wrote, "was connected to the divine will and I was truly established and fixed in the will of God. It seems to me that I could never again be separated from this will of God and turn to myself with these precise words: nothing will be able to separate me from the will of God, not anxieties, or sorrows, or toil, or contempt, or temptations, or creatures, or demons, or darkness, and not even death itself, because, in life and in death, I will everything and in everything, the will of God" (Diary, IV, 272). Thus we have the certainty that death is not the last word, we are fixed in the will of God and so, really, in everlasting life.

In particular, Veronica shows herself to be a courageous witness of the beauty and the power of Divine Love, which draws, pervades and inflames her. It is crucified Love that imprinted itself on her flesh, as in that of St. Francis of Assisi, with the stigmata of Jesus. "My Bride," the crucified Christ whispers to me, "the penances you do for those who are in my disgrace are dear to me...Then, detaching an arm from the cross, he made a sign to me to draw near to his side...and I found myself in the arms of the Crucified. What I experienced at that point I cannot recount: I would have liked to remain always in his most holy side" (ibid.., I,37). This is also an image of her spiritual journey, of her interior life: to be in the embrace of the Crucified and thus to be in Christ’s love for others.

Also with the Virgin Mary, Veronica lived a relationship of profound intimacy, attested by the words she heard Our Lady say one day and which she reports in her Diary: "I will make you rest on my breast, you are united with my soul, and from it you were taken as in flight to God" (IV, 901).

St. Veronica Giuliani invites us to make our Christian life grow, our union with the Lord in being for others, abandoning ourselves to his will with complete and total trust, and to union with the Church, Bride of Christ; she invites us to participate in the suffering love of Jesus Crucified for the salvation of all sinners; she invites us to fix our gaze on Paradise, the goal of our earthly journey, where we will live together with so many brothers and sisters the joy of full communion with God; she invites us to nourish ourselves daily from the Word of God to warm our hearts and give direction to our life. The last words of the saint can be considered the synthesis of her passionate mystical experience: "I have found Love, Love has let himself be seen!"

St. Veronica was a mystic not of the Medieval Age; she was also a Capuchin Poor Clare nun. December 27, 2010 was the 350th anniversary of her birth. Citta di Castello, the place where she lived the longest and where she died, as well as Mercatello — her native country — and the Diocese of Urbino, Italy celebrate this event joyfully.