Hope and death

‘Why all this commotion and crying? The child is not dead, but asleep.’ But they laughed at him. So he turned them all out and, taking with him the child’s father and mother and his own companions, he went into the place where the child lay. And taking the child by the hand he said to her, ‘Talitha, kum!’ which means, ‘little girl, I tell you to get up.’ The little girl got up at once and began to walk about, for she was twelve years old.

Mark 5:39 - 42

I've not lost a child, and it is my deepest hope that I will not have to endure such a loss, and yet I know many who have. I watched my grandfather bury my father, my mother bury a son, a brother bury his daughter. And I have some special friends who have lost their child through stillbirth or neonatal death. Despite the passing the years, the loss of a child is a wound that seldom heals and the rawness persists.

Death places huge, unexpected challenges before us. None of us can be shielded from death, nor can we escape it. In the history of humanity there have been many attempts to explain what lies beyond it. Some argue that death brings extinction of the self, others suggest a cycle of lives before reaching one’s highest potential or that there a continuation of the self after death. Still others proclaim a unity with creation that sees the self extinguished.

The Christian explanation is complex, for while it builds on the Hebrew experience it is strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. Christians link life after death to salvation: that is, because we are separated from God by sin, we need to be reunited with him. God took human form, the person of Jesus, to save humanity by the way he lived, died and the rose from death. His resurrection became a foretaste of what awaited the faithful. The Christian scriptures advise that on the last day all will be judged and the righteous will be raised. Many modern Christian thinkers propose that all humanity will ultimately be saved. In the post-modern world, our loved ones ‘live forever’ in our hearts.

Mark (5:21 - 43) relates two interconnected stories, both well known. One is known as Jairus’ daughter, and the other, the Woman who touched Jesus’ cloak. Each story is a story about life, hope and the healing power of Jesus. In Jairus’ daughter a court official asks Jesus to heal his desperately sick daughter. Before Jesus can get there, the girl dies. Jesus tells the family that she is only asleep and bids her to wake. Now what held Jesus up was that on his way to Jairus’ home, was a woman who suffered from terrible haemorrhaging touched Jesus’ cloak in the hope of being healed of her disease. Jesus asks that whoever touched him declare themselves. The woman steps forward and Jesus recognises her faith.

The raising of Jairus’s daughter, like the story of Lazarus is a clear reminder of God’s power over death, of the promise of eternal life, of the offer of salvation for those who have faith. Both these stories speak to our deepest need for hope, that there must be, that there is such hope and salvation.

But what do you tell the parent who has lost a child? How do you explain hope in the face of their hopelessness? Or ease the pain when a child is stolen from your heart? To bring consolation to the bereaved is Christian duty (cf Matthew 5:4), but it may well be that the promise of everlasting life in Christ will ease the torment of such a loss.

Peter Douglas

Mindfulness is being elevated into a form of secular salvation

by Carmody Grey

An artist I know was recently advised by a woman at his local parish that the new thing these days is “mindfulness”. He should start to develop Christian art around that theme, she suggested. He wasn’t enthused by the idea. But the woman was raising an interesting point. Mindfulness is taking off in the churches and in popular culture, and in the corporate and business world as well.

Mindfulness was one of the great gifts I received through many years of Zen training. The undisciplined mind can be a tyrant. Its circularity, its relentless narration and re-narration of events, leads to exhaustion and even despair. I learned to watch the mind: neither to follow thoughts, nor resist them.

Suspending judgement, suspending reaction, you discover that you have a choice about how you relate to the chatterings of your own mind. In that choice lies a freedom from the stories you tell yourself about the world, which leads not only to a radical self-acceptance, but to a liberating acceptance of others.

Mindfulness meditation is, quite simply, the best natural tonic for the troubled mind and body I have ever discovered. I rely on it daily. and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone. Mindfulness practices have always played a central role in Christian spirituality, and are surely indispensable in any serious commitment to contemplative prayer. But I am concerned about the way mindfulness is increasingly being elevated into a form of secular salvation. 

“The now”, people say, “is all that exists”. I hears this nostrum everywhere: the present moment alone is real; dwelling in the past or in the future is a spiritual pathology. No one envies the wandering mind, addicted to rehashing the past, worrying about or hankering after the future. But to hold absolutely to the unreality of the past and the future is a form of quietism, a denial of time and history. When mindfulness is practised as a denial of time, it becomes Gnosticism. 

Christianity cannot be translated into a philosophy of the pure present. Brother Roger of Taizé observed: “Jesus did not say, Be yourself. He said, Be with me.” The Gospel does not offer us an escape from the vicissitudes of history. It actually exposes us more to history, for it draws us into the drama and uncertainty of a relationship which unfolds through time.

I once heard a Dominican friar say that the reason Thomas Aquinas was such a great thinker is that he was able to explain the truth in propositions, with no reliance on fables or stories. I almost choked on my tea. God chose story above any other form to tell us who he is.

Human beings are creatures of memory and anticipation. Each one of us knows ourself and others only by the constant recuperation of beginnings, and anticipation of endings. That is how we have an identity at all. In the fragile memory and faltering hope of God’s people – their griefs, regrets, longings and fears – are sanctified the memories and hopes of every person.

Perhaps most revealingly, the contemporary cult of mindfulness expresses one of the aspirations most dear to the modern world: the escape from suffering. Mindfulness is supposed to be the cure of all suffering, and, indeed, its power to ease pain is extraordinary.

It is true that memory of the past and anticipation of the future are forms of suffering in the sense that they are uncomfortable reminders of our fragility, our participation in a very imperfect story over which we do not have total control. Richard Rohr, a passionate advocate of mindfulness, warns that to seek an absolute wholeness in this life is a kind of idolatry.

Mindfulness in our cultural discourse seems to hold out the promise of an avoidance of the pain of this endemic incompleteness, of the risk and discomfort of being creatures in time.  But Christianity does not allow us to avoid this risk, this discomfort. Every Sunday, we memorialise history’s terrible ambiguity – the death of an innocent man. In doing so, we discipline ourselves not to seek a false escape from the darkness of history.

But this is not, in the end, a bleak practice. For what we solemnly commemorate in the Eucharist is God’s faithfulness to us through time, a faithfulness which turns our stories into stories of resurrection. Christianity is not redemption from time. It is the redemption of time. ­Mindfulness is invaluable; but it is not everything.

Carmody Grey is assistant professor in Catholic theology at Durham University. This article was published in The Tablet on 21 June 2018

Herald John

To keep his promise, God has raised up for Israel one of David’s descendants, Jesus, as Saviour, whose coming was heralded by John when he proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the whole people of Israel. Before John ended his career he said, “I am not the one you imagine me to be; that one is coming after me and I am not fit to undo his sandal.”

Acts 13:23 - 25

Usually blazing pathways is something that few us achieve, except the odd entrepreneur or political whiz here and there. When you look at people who have changed the market place, the face of politics, or any particular sphere of knowledge and learning, they possess a number of common traits.

• Timeliness of the message or action,
• A deep, single-minded commitment to the idea,
• An immense fortitude and persistence, and
• An enormous capacity for work

Great leaders often possess these traits, either famous or infamous. You need only to imagine Churchill, Roosevelt, U Thant, Dag Hammarskjold or on the other hand the likes of Joseph Stalin, Nicolai Ceausescu, Sadam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi. These traits can be used for good or evil. In business we need only look to the Forbes rich list where you would find Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and our own Gina Rinehart. Whether negatively or positively these people had or have an incredible impact, they are to be admired or feared.

What then can we make of John, son of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah? Even in his mother’s womb, the pathway had been set for him:

"What, then, will this child be?”

For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.

Luke 1:66

This child would, one day, herald the Saviour by proclaiming a baptism of repentance. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t powerful, but his message was so clear, so precise and in the end he paid the price for the vanity of Herodias’ daughter.

The path he laid is remembered every Advent and time and again we are reminded of the importance of preparation. Success in any venture is grounded in good preparation. From the beginning of John’s ministry, of preaching, of his eremitic life, he completed the foundation for the arrival of the ultimate revelation of God’s plan for his people – Jesus.

But was he great? Undoubtedly so. He lived his message, he was faithful to his calling, he gave everything he had and proclaimed the coming of the Lord until his last breath. And to recognize his role in our story of faith, this coming Sunday is set aside as the Solemnity of Birth of St John the Baptist. In the General Roman Calendar his birth is ranked among the great feast days of the church.

Peter Douglas

THE SACRAMENT OF EMMA

 

by Kevin Bates SM

It’s about 2.30 at St Peter Chanel Church on Sunday afternoon. I have with me two dear family friends from Melbourne, Carole and Maree. They’ve joined us for morning Mass and we’ve shared an enjoyable lunch. I’m showing them around the Church when a figure emerges from the sacristy.

It’s a woman and I can’t hear what she is saying straight away. She wears a floppy hat and rubber gloves and is carrying a bucket. As she gets closer I see it’s one of our parishioners, Emma, and on further questioning she replies: “I’m just here to clean the toilets!”

There are frequent weddings at St Peter Chanel, often on Sundays, and so maintaining the loos is an important part of our hospitality. Even given all that, it is a startling moment to see this young mother arriving in such a matter-of-fact way as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be cleaning the church toilets on Sunday afternoon!

No one sees her, except for the three of us who just happened to be there at the time. No one would know she’d been there. No fuss she makes and the gift she gives is made with silent grace.

Along the same lines, this past week at our three Confirmation ceremonies, Gabrielle, Karen Ralph and Pat provided the music each evening. Kia, Bobby, Heidi and Sarah pitched in when they could as well. Once again the gift of music was given with no fuss or drama. Karen even put off a trip to Canberra on the final evening, just so she could sing for God’s children.

Every week there are parishioners quietly visiting homes and hospitals, all the while keeping us mindful of those who need our prayers. 

Sacraments take so many forms and if we are alert we will see these seemingly little revelations of Jesus everywhere. As they say, it’s not rocket science, but my goodness it is something to reverence and celebrate.

The raw materials of the Sacraments of the Church are pretty unspectacular when you think about it. A little piece of bread broken, a dab of oil here and there, a drop of water, a brief blessing, all serve reveal the breaking-through into our world of the eternal Word of God.

These Sacraments serve to alert us to the presence of God in all the other simple words and actions that mark our days. Jesus once mentioned that a simple drink of water given in love would be enough to remind us of the presence of God’s Kingdom.

In a world where only the extraordinary, the spectacular, the awesome, command our attention, we have God working quietly behind the scenes, showing us that our lives make their best sense when love is at work.

This love does not need advertising, expensive trappings or adulation. This love simply is! It reaches into every corner of our lives. Love enriches and deepens our times of joy and transforms our suffering selves into candidates for resurrection.

Love sometimes startles and unmans us with its humble acts of service. Sometimes love has been and gone and we haven’t even noticed. Sometimes the symptoms of our joys or sufferings so overwhelm us that we fail to notice the lessons, the inklings of the sacred that they bring with them.

Jesus often enough challenges us to be on our game, to be alert, to have our lamps lit, to read the signs of the times. He’s clearly encouraging us to make the most of the gift of each moment, each day.

What a thankful heart will grow from this attentiveness. What a tranquil spirit would breathe through us into our world. What grace would come to bless this world where anger, hatred, fear and violence become the normal way of relating.

Let’s be on the lookout this week so that the “Sacrament of Emma” in whatever form, reaches our heart. 

Marist Father Kevin Bates is Parish Priest of Holy Name of Mary Parish, Hunters Hill including St Peter Chanel Church, Woolwich Peninsula. This first on his Facebook page on 14 June 2018. Used with permission.

 

Mustard seed

He also said, ‘What can we say the kingdom of God is like? What parable can we find for it? It is like a mustard seed which at the time of its sowing in the soil is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet once it is sown it grows into the biggest shrub of them all and puts out big branches so that the birds of the air can shelter in its shade.’

Mark 4:30 - 32

Words can be so useless in conveying the things that really matter. We struggle with the words that express affection, desire, intimacy, love in all its incarnations - philos, eros and agape, sadness, sorrow, condoling, joyfulness, enthralment, rapture. For although the words do and can exist, calling them to mind, articulating them at the right time and place can be very challenging. Little wonder that our ancestors in faith resorted to mythic retellings whose meaning could be unpeeled, poetry to please the ear, song to celebrate and mourn, epic narratives that establish God's hand in human history and in the prophetic yearnings of the post-Exilic period which ultimately gave rise to the Apocalyptic genre.

Parables are an oral literary device that Jesus employed to represent the Kingdom of God in a way that would break into the ordinary lives of those who listened. They appealed to his down-to-earth listeners who could easily relate to the rural, agricultural imagery and who could find the use of simile and analogyaccessible. Twenty centuries after these parables were first uttered, these parables still draw the listener, still challenge, still make us wonder.

There are movements, ideas, compositions, ideologies in our world today that began as the idea of one person and have mushroomed exponentially into extraordinary gifts (or curses) to humanity. Good things possess an innate capacity to flourish. As the mustard seed germinates in rich soil it takes root and grows into a great tree. And that is what the Kingdom of God is like. It begins small, it takes nourishment, rain, sun and slowly but surely grows into fullness. Here is something greater than anything constructed by a human being, a gift to us so profuse, so generous, so extravagant. Jesus' parablelising is a gateway to understanding the Kingdom, not completely, but the seed is nevertheless planted - in me, through me, with me and when it germinates its potential is almost unimaginable. To reach that potential I need to be nourished with the Word of God, be guided by the Holy Spirit and supported by a strong trunk of faith.

But one of 37 (different) parables to be found in the Synoptics, the Parable of the Mustard Seed reminds us to see God and HIs Kingdom in the ordinary and everyday - and - that if we wish to be effective bearers of Good News, that we can do no better than use the best means to communicate it to the world. If not parables then iPads, tweets, Podcasts - and most of all, lives lived in love, gratefulness and joy.

Peter Douglas

Francis' views on man's relationship with nature are uncannily prefigured in the works of Taylor Coleridge

by Malcolm Guite

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Laudato Si' and the Ancient Mariner

Since it was published on 18 June three years ago, Laudato Si’ has gained a wide readership well beyond the Catholic Church. It’s an astonishing document in many ways, and no global figure has offered a clearer or more compelling analysis of our current ecological crisis and of the possible ways forward than Pope Francis.

The Pope directs his words to all of us, not just Catholics, or even Christians. As he says at the outset: “In this encyclical, I would like to enter into dialogue with all people about our common home” (3).

What is largely neglected is that this dialogue is not only with scientists, thinkers and readers of our own time, but with figures from the past. I am struck in particular by an unlikely but uncannily fruitful meeting of minds between the twenty-first-century Argentinian Pope and a nineteenth-century English poet, critic and theologian, for the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge anticipates and confirms some of the most intriguing insights of Laudato Si’.

Indeed, one could see Coleridge’s most celebrated poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, first published in 1798 in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, when Coleridge was 26, as a parabolic or embodied expression of many of Pope Francis’ key ideas.

Coleridge tells the tale of a journey that starts in high hopes and good spirits, but leads to a terrifying encounter with human fallibility, with darkness, alienation, loneliness and dread, and then, through repentance and a transfigured vision, arrives at a new reverence for nature and a profound experience of prayer, before coming home to a renewal of faith and vocation.

This would prove to be the trajectory of Coleridge’s own life, but it also contains and illustrates many of the elements in the Pope’s account of what has become of humanity: how we have been alienated from and are destroying our common home, and how we might recover.

One of the most important questions that Coleridge raises, both in the “Rime” and in his later theological writing, is, “what is our proper relation to the natural world?” Is it a sacred web of exchange of which we are only one small part, or is it simply an agglomeration of “stuff”, which we can use at will for our own purposes?

When the Mariner shoots the albatross and the whole ship’s crew judge the deed, solely on the grounds of whether the slaying brings them good or bad weather, they have taken an instrumental rather than a sacral view of nature. The albatross is not considered to have an intrinsic value, or rights, in itself, but is merely an instrument that might assist human beings for their own ends. If the bird was useful for the human agenda then it would be right to preserve it: but if it hinders an immediate human goal then it is right to kill it.

In one sense, the terrible curse that falls on the ship and its crew and the dreadful experience of loneliness and alienation suffered by the Mariner are a consequence of this instrumental view of nature, but in a deeper sense the instrumental view is, itself, the curse, and there can be no blessing or release until the Mariner experiences a radical conversion of heart and mind, in which he can look out from the deck of the ship at the other living things around him and simply bless them and love them for themselves, without any reference to a private or even purely human agenda.

This transformation finally occurs in part IV of the poem, when at last the Mariner looks out at the other marine creatures that he had despised as “a thousand slimy things” and sees them, in the light of the moon and in the light of God’s grace, as they truly are, “Happy Living things”, and blesses them. We will suffer the terrible out-workings of instrumentalism at both an emotional and a spiritual level until we also have that moment of seeing creatures as they are and, like the Mariner, finally learn that:


He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Laudato Si’ makes precisely the same point, that each creature is an end in itself and an expression of God’s goodness, not something that is simply there to serve humanity: “Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection … Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things” (69).

In a passage that echoes one of the great Coleridgean themes – that all things can be perceived as part of God’s own language and utterance to us – Pope Francis says: “God has written a precious book, whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe” (85). In “Frost at Midnight”, Coleridge writes of nature as:


The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters,
who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Another essential point in the argument of Laudato Si’ is that everything we do is inter-related, just as all creatures are interrelated in the ecological system. It is an insight summed up by the phrase “integral ecology”. It follows that, as Pope Francis puts it, “to commit a crime against the natural world is a sin against ourselves and a sin against God” (8). The entire plot of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and much of its suggestive symbolism is a poetic expression of this very insight.

Indeed the following comment in Laudato Si’, where Francis quotes Pope St John Paul II, could be read almost as a commentary on the plot and meaning of the “Rime”: “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble, for ‘instead of carrying out his role as a cooperator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature’” (117).

A further crucial insight in the encyclical is of course that care for the environment and care for the poor and marginalised are inseparable: eco-justice and human justice must go hand in hand. This is true too of Coleridge’s whole approach. He was closely involved in the campaign against the slave trade, but what is less well known is that in later life as the industrial revolution took hold he campaigned against child labour in the new factories. And though the Mariner’s own repentance and conversion are achieved through his dawning realisation of his place in the web of other creatures, the mission he then takes up is to humanity itself, not just the wedding guest of the tale, but to countless others, calling for a renewal and a reverence for all God’s creatures, including our fellow human beings.

Finally, as Pope Francis calls us to turn away from a purely instrumental approach to nature to a deeper, communal relationship with it, he concludes that the proper focus, and fullest embodiment of such a return is in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist: “The Eucharist joins Heaven and Earth; it embraces and penetrates all Creation. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration: in the bread of the Eucharist, ‘creation is projected towards divinisation, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself’. Thus, the Eucharist is also a source of light and motivation for our concerns for the environment, directing us to be stewards of all creation” (236).

Coleridge reflected throughout his life on the radical inclusion of all creatures in God’s love, and in Christ the Logos, as the one in whom, through whom and for whom all are uttered forth. And, remarkably, like Francis, Coleridge too found the focus of that inclusion in the Eucharist.

Coleridge imagined his Mariner as a man on a mission: passing “like night from land to land”, and searching for the person who most needs to hear his tale. Laudato Si’, too, is intended, to “pass like night from land to land”, and with “strange powers of speech” to alert us, and turn us in a new direction.

Coleridge’s wedding guest woke “a sadder and a wiser man”; the reader of Laudato Si’ will return to the world certainly wiser, but not sadder. Rather, they will be quickened with vision and hope. 

Malcolm Guite is a poet, singer-songwriter and Anglican priest living in Cambridge. He is also the author of Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Published in The Tablet on 6 June 2018.