#linked with good deeds rather than malicious gossip

[odettecarotte]

Subjective need and their desire to live a purposeful and meaningful life explained the presence of two wealthy white women in the heart of the Negro quarter. For Helen and Hannah, slum reform provided a remedy for the idleness of the privileged, a channel for the intelligence and ambition of college-educated women, and an exit from the marriage plot and the father's house. No longer girls at thirty, they had eluded the conscription of wife. Without a Mr. to shield them from the dangers of life or prohibit them from associating with bad elements, they charted a path through streets peopled by Negroes, Russian Jews, Italians, thieves, prostitutes, sodomites, thugs, and anarchists. In the slum, they avoided the indictment: spinster, surplus woman, invert, and listened for the sounds of their name-Miss Parrish and Miss Fox-linked in good deeds rather than malicious gossip.

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

What many people do not know is that social work was founded by white lesbians who essentially wanted to evade heterosexual marriage by becoming secular nuns enforcing the norms of the white overculture in the slums.

This book does an excellent job at demonstrating just how much these kindly women were responsible for the incarceration of "wayward" young Black women.

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 4th Sun after Octave of Easter (Dominican rite)

James 1:22-27; John 16:23-30

If we’re to believe what we read online – something to be done with caution, I know – then there has reportedly been a recent upsurge of interest in prayer. According to Google, more people have been searching for ‘prayer’ online. Also, according to a survey published at the end of April, one in twenty adults in this country have started to pray during the lockdown, despite not having prayed before, and a similar percentage had watched an online prayer service. Anecdotally, even according to regular church-goers, a good number have said online that they’ve been praying more than ever before. Certainly, I have noticed an upsurge of interest in the Rosary, and there have been websites and YouTube channels (including my own for the Dominican Order) launched to promote and link up groups who are praying the Rosary. Here in the Rosary Shrine in London, for example, we started to livestream the Rosary at 8pm every week day. All this has been a wonderful effect of these difficult days of uncertainty.  

The Lord says in today’s Gospel: “Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name.” (Jn 16:23) So, given the crisis that we’re facing, it seems fitting that we should respond with prayer, and indeed, more prayer. We turn to God and ask him to stop this pandemic and take away its ill effects, as the Holy Father has done every day since the crisis overwhelmed Italy. And yet, what will happen with our newfound enthusiasm for prayer if we do not get what we ask for, or at least not in accordance with our particular timetables? Didn’t Jesus say that the Father will give us anything we ask for? But, while we’re at it, what about all those other things we wanted? That new job, or that new house, or even, that new girlfriend? Shouldn’t we ask the Father for these things too because Jesus says we will get what we ask for?

But is prayer really about simply getting what we want? Is prayer like making a purchase from a vending machine: we put prayers in, and out comes the thing we asked for? Is this what Jesus says in the Gospel?

In the short passage from St John that we hear in today’s Liturgy, Jesus in fact uses one phrase repeatedly: “in nomine meo”, ‘in my name’. We are to pray in his name, so that we will receive in his name. What does this mean? Firstly, to give someone your name, at least in the Biblical context, is to entrust yourself to them; it is to enter into a relationship with him. Hence, we have been baptised into the name of the Holy Trinity, for baptism places us in an intimate relationship with God: we belong to God, and God dwells within us. To pray to God the Father in the name of Jesus, therefore, means to pray to God as the Son prays to his Father.

Therefore, in genuine Christian prayer, we ourselves enter into a relationship with God the Father, and not just any relationship, but the relationship of God the Son to God the Father. In fact, Jesus says that when we pray and ask in his name, he no longer will need to pray to the Father for us, on our behalf. Why not? Because, as we heard last Sunday, the Holy Spirit has been given to us, and the Holy Spirit dwelling and active in us has made us truly, by grace, the adopted sons and daughters of God the Father. Therefore, it is the Spirit active within us who moves us to pray to the Father; it is the Spirit who causes in us a relationship of filial love for the Father; it is the Spirit who empowers us and enables us to pray to the Father in the name of the Son. As St Paul says: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God… [for] you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry [in our prayers], "Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God”.

True prayer, therefore, is deeply relational. Indeed, prayer is an expression of the relationship of the Son with God the Father. This is a relationship of deep trust in God’s goodness, in his wisdom and love, and therefore, the Son obeys the will of the Father and he understands that God, in his providence, will wisely give his children whatever is good, whatever is necessary for their final good, namely, for their salvation. For salvation is that which God desires above all for his children, since, as I said two Sundays ago, salvation is nothing less than an eternal relationship of love and friendship in union with God. This is what we mean when we speak of ‘heaven’ – it is relational and not locational.

However, there is another way of praying, and I fear that oftentimes beginners in prayer, especially those who might have decided to try it out during this time of pandemic, will conceive of prayer in this manner. This is the prayer of the consumer, of the kind who sees God as essentially a benevolent Santa Claus type figure; a vending machine, basically. This was the kind of prayer which pagans and non-Christians commonly practised, and which sadly, Christians sometimes lapse into when they don’t consider carefully what Jesus has shown us, and what he has taught us about prayer. In the consumerist type of prayer, there is no intimate relationship of love and trust. Rather, the relationship, if there is any at all, is that of a client and a patron – it is merely transactional, or can even be an exploitative relationship: give me what I ask for and I will give you my attention, or this monetary offering, or some other thing.

But Jesus reveals that the Father desires much more. He desires our love. And so, Jesus teaches us, through his own example, that prayer is about trusting God, obeying God, conforming our will to God’s, and surrendering to the grace of the present moment. Jesus therefore taught us to pray to our Father, saying, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, let what we want be conformed to your will, let us be conformed to you and shaped by you, who are all Good and all Loving. Thus Jesus himself prayed in the moment of his agony: “Not my will but yours be done” (Lk 22:42), and at the Cross, he surrendered himself into the hands of his Father. This, therefore, is what it means to ask and to pray to the Father “in nomine meo”, in my name, in Jesus’s name.

Hence St Thomas Aquinas says that “The starting point of prayer is desire for eternal life… and this persists in all the other works we do in due order, because all of them should be ordered towards obtaining eternal life, and so the desire for eternal life persists virtually in all the good deeds we do”. In a similar way, St James in today’s epistle, says that we must persevere in good deeds, for our faith is relational, and so what we believe is enacted in what we do for God and for one another – there is an in-breaking of heaven into our lives now.

If we read the whole letter of St James – something I highly recommend – why does St James stress the danger of words and caution us to “bridle the tongue”? We live in an age when everyone believe he’s entitled to his opinion, and indeed, many broadcast their thoughts and opinions – often ill-informed ones – quite freely and candidly. In the course of doing so, under the mistaken idea that they have a right to say whatever they want, people have fallen into the sins of calumny, detraction, and slander. That is to say, they have attributed malicious intent to others, they have gossiped about them and assassinated their characters, and they have thus prevented good from being done. I am sorry to say that this kind of activity is in evidence on Twitter and other forms of social media, and it is prevalent even among Catholics. And many have failed to hold their tongues and restrain their judgements, particularly when the Pope or a bishop or a priest does not say what they want them to say, or do as they think they should do. Indeed, they think that they are speaking out in the name of religion; they cite St Catherine of Siena to justify what they think is a good and needful deed. Clearly, the relationship here has broken down, and there is no filial trust, but rather, the relationship has tragically become transactional, consumerist, and even exploitative at times.

This situation can be healed, of course, but only if we each examine our own prayer lives first, and then we ask God to heal our relationship with him, and we allow him to also heal our relationships with other people. For as St James warns: “the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God… If any one thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this man's religion is vain.” (Jm 1:20, 26) Therefore we begin my bridling the tongue, that is to say, we turn, in silence, to God and pray. Pray for the situations that have hurt us or concern us, pray for those involved, and especially, pray for your enemies and for their conversion. As St Augustine says, we should pray that our enemies should die to sin and error, and so become our friends, and we should pray for a “good will that makes you good”. The unbridled tongue, and so much of the twittering online that this entails, does not lead to a good will but in fact damages relationships.

Conversely, true religion, St James says therefore, heals relationships and indeed, builds a relationship of love where it has been diminished. As he says: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (Jm 1:27) Orphans are those who have lost their fathers; widows have lost their husbands. In both cases, a relationship that ought to be there, although it survives beyond the grave, has been lost in some sense. There are also countless spiritual orphans and widows in our world and within the Church - many are lonely and looking for love, for genuine community.

True religion, therefore, is found in works of compassion that seeks to mend and heal the broken and wounded relationships of our sinful world. True religion flows out of a life of true prayer, prayer which heals and strengthens our relationship of loving trust in God our good and wise Father. For if we pray in the name of Christ, then we shall believe that all things are held in God’s providence and wisdom, and it seems to me that much of the bickering we observe online flows from a lack of faith in the Father’s gracious and inscrutable governance of all things. And, finally, true religion is caused by the power of the Holy Spirit whom the Risen Christ has sent into our hearts – true religion is found in love; and prayer leads to an increase in love.

Therefore, as a 7th-century Christian antiphon put it: “Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est”, ‘Where true charity is dwelling, God is present there… Let us strive to keep our minds free of division; may there be an end to malice, strife and quarrels, and let Christ our God be dwelling here among us.” Amen.