Prayers for the End Times: Homily for the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

I don’t need to tell you that we commemorate the faithful departed on the second day of November. But perhaps it needs to be emphasized that Holy Mother Church dedicates the entire month of November to the memory of the departed, urging us to pray for the liberation of their souls from Purgatory. Like much that Holy Mother Church does, there is a logic to the placing of this month dedicated to the dead at the end of the year. To understand this logic, we need to pay attention to the words of the Gospel this morning. Speaking of the end times, when the Son of Man will come in glory, Our Lord says:

Learn a lesson from the fig tree.
When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves,
you know that summer is near.
In the same way, when you see these things happening,
know that he is near, at the gates.

Our Lord is asking us to pay attention to the natural world, in this case the fig tree, and signalling that just as we can read the signs of the natural world, we must be able to read the signs of the supernatural world. In today’s Gospel, the signs of the natural world clearly point to the supernatural:

the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light,
and the stars will be falling from the sky

And so it is, that when the days grow shorter, the nights longer, and when darkness seems to rule the natural world, Holy Mother Church turns our attention toward our own mortal lives and invites us to think of those souls who must be passing their time in the realms of darkness, in purgatory, and waiting for release into Heaven, the Kingdom of Light Divine. And look at the incredible mind of the church, where it is the penitential season of Advent that comes soon after this month of recollection, where we prepare for commemoration of the coming of Our Lord, in Christmas.

In the first reading we are made aware of the fullness of the teaching of the Church:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake;
    some shall live forever,
    others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.

For the Christian, mortal death is not the real death, rather the real death is that of the soul. The mortal death that we experience, along with illness, is the result of sin. As a result of original sin, our bodies are separated from our soul at the time of mortal death. And yet, as the first reading promises us, this is not the end, for mortal death is merely sleep. There will come a time, at the Final Judgement, when we will be resurrected, and be reunited with our bodies, and it is in these bodies that we shall either experience the glory of heaven, or the damnation of hell. As the first reading informed us: “some shall live forever, others shall be an everlasting horror and disgrace.” This damnation is the real death; to be separated from God for all time.

This is also what the psalm today teaches:

Therefore my heart is glad and my soul rejoices,
    my body, too, abides in confidence;
because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld,
    nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption.

Pay attention, however, to the word “faithful”. It is only the faithful who will not be abandoned to the netherworld.

The first reading also contains a similar message:

the wise shall shine brightly
    like the splendour of the firmament,
and those who lead the many to justice
    shall be like the stars forever.

 The words of the scripture are clear, therefore, it is only the faithful, the wise, and the just who shall enjoy the delights of heaven, or as the psalms say:

fullness of joys in your presence,
    the delights at your right hand forever.

And who are these faithful, the wise and the just?  Entry into heaven, into the presence of God is not simply open to those who are virtuous, or who are good people. The second reading, from the letter to the Hebrews, makes this quite clear, 

For by one offering
he has made perfect forever those who are being consecrated.

The offering being referred to here, dear brothers and sisters, is the offering Our Lord made of His own life, so that the effects of original sin which barred our communion with God may be erased and our relationship with God restored. Remember that it was only after the death and resurrection of Our Lord that the righteous who died before Him were able to enter Heaven. And so it is, that baptism alone, the consecration that is referred to in the reading from the letter to the Hebrews, that permits us to be made faithful, the wise and the just enough to enter heaven. 

It is baptism, dear brothers and sisters that allows us to enter into the Church. In turn the Church, which through the sacraments and its teachings, allows us to reach purgatory, and not hell. And it is the Church, that through its provision to us of the Eucharist - “the one offering” that gives us, as the Gospel acclamation says, “the strength to stand before the Son of Man” our Righteous Judge, and then enter heaven, where we will be reunited with our glorious bodies in the presence of God, His Mother, and all His Saints.

May Our Lord give us the grace to prepare for a blessed death, even as we continue to pray for the faithful departed.

Eternal Rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon them.

(A version of this homily was first preached in Concanim to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 17 Nov 2024.)

How to Read the Good Book: Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

The first reading this Sunday offers us the opportunity to learn at least one way in which we can making our reading of the Bible richer. Now reading the Bible is an excellent way of getting to know Our Lord. But we need to remember that we are not required to read the Bible only as we might a good book. Rather, given that it is the Good Book, we are also required to meditate on what we read. This reading and meditation will be made easier if we utilise a technique which I would like to share with you. 

When reading the Old Testament, we need to bear in mind that this portion of the Bible is filled with what are called types, and these types prefigure Christ, or are signs that point to Christ. These types prepare people for Christ, and are completed by Our Lord, who gives them a fullness they don’t otherwise contain. Further, these types are useful only to the extent that they point to Christ.

Let us take the example of the encounter between the prophet Elijah and the widow. Elijah asks the widow for some bread, and she responds that she does not have anything to spare, since she will make something for herself and her son with the flour and oil that remains, and then, with their stock of food exhausted, will await death. 

Elijah’s response is an assurance that if she gave him bread, not only would she have some bread left over for herself and her son, but the oil and flour would not run out until the rain came and ended the drought! She believed, did as requested, and as a result, the flour and oil lasted for an entire year.

Now let us look at this scenario again. What does the prophet Elijah need and ask for? Bread! We can already see that this is type, a prefiguring of the Eucharist, which is also – supernatural – bread. And what is the cost of the bread? If the widow takes the flour and oil that she has and uses it to make bread that she will give to the prophet, she, and her son, will die! Meaning, this gift of bread will cost her her life! And what else does she use to prepare the bread? The two pieces of wood that she was collecting when she met Elijah. The wood, as we should see already, and as St. Augustine points out, is a prefiguring, or a type, of the Cross, the wood on which the Christ, in obedience and charity like the widow, gave up His life, so that He might become for us the Bread of Life.

If the preparation of this bread allowed the widow to have food for a year, then the Eucharist allows us to live for eternal life. So, we can see how this is a type, it points to Christ, but whereas Christ offers us life eternal, this bread offers life for a limited period.

And then there are also the multiple times the feeding of the multitude is prefigured (Mt 14:20; Mk 6: 43; Lk 9:12–17; Jn 6:13; Mt 15:37; Mk 8: 8). Elijah assures the widow that if she gives him bread then she will be able to “prepare something for yourself and your son.” 

We should also remember that this encounter between the prophet and the widow can be read in the context of the exodus of the Israelites and their journey in the desert. If the desert is a place without water, then the prophet Elijah, the widow and her son, are suffering the effects of drought, when there is no water available. In other words, they are in a desert like situation, and just as God sent manna in the desert to feed the Israelites through the entire period of the exodus, so too, he provides for them through the period of the drought. We too are provided with the Eucharist to get through the desert, which is this world, and to the promised land, our home in heaven.

Indeed, the widow in this encounter could well be a prefiguring of ourselves, the Church, which was preached to the Gentiles, who did not know the God of Israel, but listened, believed, added their sufferings to those of Christ, and were rewarded with Bread from Heaven.

I must add that this is acquired only after we have been reading the Bible, or at least the lectionary, regularly. But I assure you, my dear brothers and sisters, that as you persist at reading the Good Book, this skill will – with the Grace of God – develop. The next step, after recognising the signs and prefigurings, is to pause when we see that there are so many meanings associated with the words we are reading. Collect all these associations and let the words we are reading become heavy with these associations. Pause, and meditate, and then let the Holy Spirit do the job of revealing their message to you. In this step, we must be like our heavenly mother, who as the Gospel of Luke tells us; “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Lk 2:19).

May the Holy Spirit and Our Heavenly Mother always guide your reading of the Good Book.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful on 9 Nov 2024 at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda.
Image reference: “Virgin Annunciate”, Antonello da Messina, c.1475, Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, Palermo, via wikipedia.)

Raining Manna on our Hearts: Homily for the Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

We have recently received a papal encyclical, Dilexit Nos, where the Holy Father, Pope Francis has contemplated the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion that I am particularly fond of. This is, perhaps, why when I read the Gospel for today, all I could do was focus on the word heart which occurs in the Gospel reading.

As you have just heard, Our Lord was asked which was the greatest of all the many commandments which the Jews had to obey, and He responded:

The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.

And so, we have this commandment which I would like to focus on today: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.”

How does one love the Lord Our God with all our heart? In Dilexit Nos Pope Francis teaches us that classical Greek culture – which we are heirs to – treated the heart, not only as the core of the body, but the soul and spirit as well (§3). You will notice that there is also something of this meaning in the commandment – we first hear of the heart, and then as if to indicate what the heart means we are told that it means with all our soul, our mind, and our strength – in other words, the heart is the core of all these things. Pope Francis also teaches that biblically, the heart is the place where there is no “deceit and disguise” (§5). To love God with all our heart, therefore, is to love Him above all things, not privileging other things – fame, pleasure, power, wealth – before him.

But this does not answer the question, how do we love Him with all our heart.

To answer this question, I would like to turn to the Arabic word for heart, qalb, and the many other words it operates as a root for. The heaving movement of the heart allows for the root qalb to be used for ploughing and turning over. Indeed, so powerful is the sense of this movement and turning, that qalb is also the root for the word that we in India know well, Inquilab, revolution.  From this use in turning and ploughing, we can now see the heart not merely as an organ, but as soil which needs to be turned over – as one discussion on this word observed, the business of the heart (qalb) is to be turned (maqlub) so that it gives up and becomes free. We need to plough our hearts to see if there is anything else that we love above God. And if there is such a thing, then we need to weed it out of the field of our heart. Weed out those stones that make our heart stony and throw them away. Pull out those thorny weeds in our hearts and, to use imagery that Our Lord used, cast them into the fire (Mt 13:30). This is what we need to do with our hearts, plough it, and turn it over, preparing it like soil which needs to be turned over before it can receive, both the rain, as well as seed. 

And what is the rain and the seed that this prepared heart will receive? There are so many phrases that one could pull out from the Bible which speak of the rain that God provides to water the earth, and cause grain to grow. Take, for instance, this verse from Job (5:10):

He gives rain on the earth
    and sends waters on the fields;

Or these lovely verses from Psalm 65:9-10:

You visit the earth and water it,
    you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
    you provide the people with grain,
    for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
    settling its ridges,
softening it with showers,
    and blessing its growth.

But the rain he sends, is not merely water – which could be read as the stream of water that flows from the Sacred Heart of Our Lord (Dilexit Nos § 104, 174, 219). There is another object that he rains down on us. Listen to this phrase from the book of Exodus where God tells Moses:

I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day…. (Ex 16:4)

God was true to his word to Moses and sent manna in the desert to the Israelites throughout the forty years of their wanderings in the desert. But this manna, was merely a shadow, a prefiguring, to use the technical word, of a more substantial bread that we can receive every day, but most certainly every Sunday: the Eucharist – the daily bread we pray for in the Our Father.

This is the seed that is rained down on our hearts. If we have ploughed the soil of our heart well, and one could well think of a good confession as a part of this act of ploughing, this holy seed plants itself in our hearts and makes our hearts a little bit more like the Sacred Heart of Jesus; the heart of the Son who loves His Father, and who loves us. A heart, that burns with love for us.

And there is some more good news! When we hear the phrase “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart”, we should remember that “this in no way”, as Dilexit Nos teaches us, “implies an undue reliance on our own abilities” (§30). Remember that the desire to love God has already been implanted in our hearts by our creator. As St. Augustine famously teaches “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” All the restlessness of our hearts, my dear brothers and sisters, is the restlessness that our hearts have to return to Our Father, and it is the Son, who through the gift of His Body will take our hearts to the Father, if only we do our bit, which is to turn over our lives, and to plough the field of our hearts – the act of sacramental confession. And even to do this bit, he provides us the graces we need. Indeed, we should know that when we plough our hearts, it is He who is holding the plough, and it is He who yokes Himself to the plough as He shares the burden with us, because He has promised us:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Mt 11: 28-30) 

Let us then, my dear brothers and sisters, turn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and say, and I would like you to repeat after me: “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee.” And again, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in Thee.”

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 2 Nov 2024.
Image Credit: “Manna Falling from Heaven”, Nüremberg Bible, 1400s.)

Imitatio Christi: Homily for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Taking a child, he placed it in their midst,

and putting his arms around it, he said to them,

“Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;

and whoever receives me,

receives not me but the One who sent me.”

This Sunday I would like to focus on the words “one child such as this.” Too often, this phrase is taken to mean that children are automatically models for emulation, that they are naturally pure. But this is to misunderstand Christian teaching.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions, famously points out that even an infant, leave alone a child, is sinful in its desires. “[I] Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother” (1.7.11). Anyone who has been to school, or is involved in the schooling of children, will also know that children can be little monsters, especially towards those who are weak, or perceived as different.

Our Lord, Himself, in fact, offers examples of childhood, and children, that take away from our romanticisation of children and childhood. Listen to these words from the Gospel according to Luke (7: 31-32)

To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are

like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,

‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

    we wailed, and you did not weep.’

Our Lord is clearly disapproving of petulant, childish behaviour, and is demanding something more from us, adults and children both.

So, what does it mean, when Our Lord says:

 “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name…”?

The answer lies in the qualifier “such as this” that immediately follows the reference to the child. This is to say, that it is not simply to children that Our Lord is referring, but to a particular quality that pertains to a child.

To understand what this quality might be, let us return to St. Augustine and his reflections on the sinful nature of infants in his Confessions. Somewhat rounding up his discussion on this point he concludes: “The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence.” While the child may possess, as we all do, a will that has a tendency towards evil, its innocence lies in the weakness of limb that prevents it from realising its will.

Weakness, we should remember is a physical characteristic prized by Christian thinkers. Take, for example, St Paul who in his first letter to the Corinthians (1:27) writes:

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.

And in his second letter to the Corinthians (12: 9-10) clarifies this point when he writes that Our Lord said to him:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.

So, this is what Our Lord meant when he placed his arms around that child! We need to be humble, weak like that child, a dependent who placed all its trust in its parents, just as we, must depend on, and place all our trust in, God Our Father.

This reference to the child can go deeper, however, for Our Lord is also saying that to receive that child is to receive Him. So, there must be some more links between the figure of the child and Our Lord.

These links, my dear brothers and sisters, lie in the virtues that Our Lord was the paragon of. The first and second readings offer lists of the various virtues that Our Lord embodied, and we must strive to embody. Gentleness, and patience, compliance or obedience, justice, and the strength to admonish sinners, and finally mercy.

All of these virtues, brothers and sisters are virtues of the strong, because it takes courage to be gentle and patient in an age when might is right.  It is easy to be patient and gentle when everyone around us is being sweet, but it is difficult to be patient and gentle when people are angry and violent. We must be compliant, or obedient. Obedience is particularly a virtue of the strong, because it requires strength of character to acknowledge our error when we are corrected; especially by those charged with teaching us what is right and wrong. It takes courage be just, and above all, it takes courage to admonish sinners and know that they will come for you with everything they have - even if your admonishment is not in words, but through the example of your life. But the good Christian places his trust in the Lord, and rests in the knowledge that we will not be abandoned, as in the words of the psalm today:

Behold, God is my helper;

the Lord sustains my life.

Strangely enough, dear brothers and sisters, this strength comes to those who are weak in the spiritual sense, that is, those who acknowledge that without God, without the Spirit, they are nothing, and that all good, strength, and courage, comes from God.

It will take time for us, dear brothers and sisters, to cultivate these virtues. Until then let us welcome those in whom we can recognise these virtues, above all the virtue of humility, for in doing so, and in allowing them to correct and chastise us, even if only through their actions, we will be welcoming Christ and the One who sent Him.

(A version of the homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda.

Image reference: ‘Vision of St Augustine, detail of the St Barnaba altarpiece, Sandro Botticelli, c.1488, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, via Meister Drucke)

Health for the Body Politic

Some months ago, while reading Moral theology after Humanae Vitae: fundamental issues in moral theory and sexual ethics, my eyes fell on a phrase the author, the famed moral theologian Rev. Vincent Twomey SVD, quoted from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians “No one hates his own flesh but nourishes it and cherishes it” (Eph 5:29).

Twomey was addressing the question of gender dysphoria, the situation where people claim to experience distress due to a mismatch between their gender identity— i.e. their personal sense of their own gender—and their sex assigned at birth. Relying on this phrase from St. Paul, Twomey argued that “to hate one’s own flesh is the limit of self-contradiction to which our freedom tends, it is the point at which our assertion of ourselves against nature becomes an attack upon ourselves.”

Now, I do not wish to debate the question of gender dysphoria here, but the quotation from St. Paul stayed with me and has returned to me repeatedly. I realised that there is more that this phrase can offer us, than merely a reflection on gender dysphoria.

For example, the phrase can be used to reflect more broadly about our relationship with society. To the Catholic it is not unusual to see the entire Church as a single body. There have been centuries of teaching on this point, where all Christians are seen as members of Christ’s mystical body. Once again, this teaching can be traced back to St. Paul, this time in his first letter to the Corinthian : “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ…. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:12, 23).

Modern nationalism most certainly took this Christian teaching and made it its own. From my own childhood I recollect little musical performances at school days where students were dressed up as parts of the body, which started out all happy and cooperative, but then went on to refuse this cooperation, resulting in the collapse of the body. Indeed, I believe the Films Division even made a short, animated film on this idea.

Before it was taken by modern nation-states, however, the Catholic Church was teaching that the family is the first natural society, the basic unit of society. If one can argue for secular society in fact operating, and needing to operate as a body, the same thing can most certainly be said of the family unit. Which is why it makes sense for us to assert that one cannot, and must not, hate members of our families, whether natal or those united through marriage, because this is to, whether one recognises it or not, hate one’s own self. Our selves are not isolated, autonomous entities, but twined with those of others, and a happy, self-satisfied life rests on our having loving relationships with those we are intimately related to. To hate one’s parents, siblings, spouses (former or otherwise) or in-laws, is to lay the ground for profound unhappiness. Worse, to inculcate this dislike in own’s offspring is to perpetuate a cycle of hatred which will spin onward into time even as they will not realise where these dark feelings and responses come from.

Having said this, I must hasten to add that pious moralising on your personal lives is not my intention here. I am still building the base for the heart of my argument to come. The argument I seek to make is to suggest that if convivial relationships with those in our family, and larger society, yes, even the nation-state, are critical to our personal well-being, not to mention that of the larger system, then it is critical that we also look further afield to ensure this well-being.

I refer to the way in which early 20^th century nationalists inculcated a spirit of vengeance towards the European powers they were ranged against. To be fair, some of the Indian nationalist leaders, like Gandhi and Nehru, held fraternal feelings towards the British, specifying that their contest was solely against the governmental powers which they sought to liberate India from. Nevertheless, the project of crafting a culture for independent British-India, seems to have rested on systematically getting rid of European influences in our body-politic (the socio-political body).

This project only gained momentum with the emergence of post-colonial theory which provided a veneer of respectability to this project which essentially rested on refusing to recognise that for better or for worse, the European was as much a part of us, as we were (are?) part of the European. The post-colonial project rested on an attempt to tear away these influences, to liberate a precolonial sensibility, or craft a postcolonial culture.

Understandably, this project of cultural decolonization was also turned against others who were seen as colonizers prior to the British – the Mughals and pre-Mughal Turko-Afghan rulers of the subcontinent, and closer home, the Portuguese (who established themselves in the subcontinent well before the Mughals did).

One cannot, however, right a wrong, by committing another wrong, and we can see the error of this, and the truth of St. Paul’s teaching, by looking at the world around us. Almost unawares we have slipped into a horrid world which can be recognised in the famous phrase of Thomas Hobbes, Bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all.

As St. Paul, and his Master before him, taught, Love is the answer. We need to recognise that for good, or for bad, the persons and cultures we demonise are our own flesh. To launch campaigns of hate – no matter how sophisticated or disguised they may be – is to eventually wind up hurting our own flesh. If there is one thing each of us can do at this moment, it is to pause and find a way to nourish and cherish what we have rejected, and the madness that if not checked will only escalate and destroy us all.

(A version of this text was first published in the O Heraldo on 17 Sept 2024

Image reference: 'Study for St. Paul preaching in Athens, Raphael, between 1514 and 1515, Uffizi Gallery, via Wikimedia. )