The Day of the Lord! Homily for the Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; even for those of us who live close to the Equator, the days are short by the month of November. Dusk comes quickly and the nights are longer. There is a sense of foreboding, the sense of the coming of the end of time. It is appropriate then, that Holy Mother Church dedicates the month of November to the memory of the souls in purgatory. But, it is not just the death of those before us that the Church wishes to draw to our attention. Through its placement at the end of the calendar year, when the days are shorter, the nights longer, and where in northern climes nature begins to take on a deathly pallor, Holy Mother Church seeks to turn our own minds to the inevitable fact of nature, that we too will die! “Memento Mori!” the Church whispers to us, “Remember your death!”

And because the Catholic Church does not operate only within the realm of the natural, but the supernatural as well, it draws to our attention, not just the inevitable end of our own individual lives, but the impending destruction of all the earth, when the rigtheous judge will come to take stock of our actions and those of the rest of the world.

Listen, to the penultimate stanza of the hymn Dies Irae, once part of the liturgy for the commemoration of All Souls, and of requiem masses:

Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favílla
Iudicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce, Deus

Ah! that day of tears and mourning,
From the dust of earth returning
Man for judgement must prepare him,
Spare, O God, in mercy spare him.

If all the certainties of this world are condemned to be burned away, and come in judgement before the King of Righteousness, it behooves us to get our acts in order before it is too late. This, is what the month of November is for, as we pray for the dead.

But Holy Mother Church does not deal in unnecessary terror and depression. Her message is always one of hope. Placed at the end of the calendar year, this month of recollection on death, is the appropriate ante-chamber before we enter into the penitential and preparatory period of Advent; the period when we prepare for the coming, or the returning, of the light into the world!

Christmas, as well you know, is not merely a celebration of the birth of Our Lord; that is to say, the celebration of a past event. It is a celebration of the fact that there is now a light in the darkness, and that – thanks to the Resurrection – this light, like the natural light over the course of the months from Christmastime, will only get brighter!

November is, therefore, only the start of a longer journey that we will embark on, one that will end with the joy of Easter. In the months that are to come, we will enter into a syncopated rhythm, first the restraint and abstinence of Advent, followed by the celebrations of Christmas, the lull of Ordinary time (or the Sundays after Epiphany as per the older tradition) and then, once again, the discipline and rigour of Lent, until finally the joy of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday!

With this longer period in mind, there is a case to turn November into an ante-chamber for Advent. A time not necessarily of fast, but one of somber reflection, turning away, and not just through our prayers for the faithful departed, from the ephemeral bright lights of the world, to the certainties of the eternal. We will not be alone when taking up this challenge; some of our monastic brethren have begun what is known as monastic lent, right after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14. They will have just one meal a day until Easter.

Whilst not making a call for all of us to take up the monastic Lent, I am making a call for a greater embrace of austerity and asceticism in our lives. In the Gospel today Our Lord cautions us:

Stay awake and be ready!
For you do not know on what day your Lord will come.

We do not indeed know the day of the final judgement, when the world will be reduced to ashes. But we do know, how to prepare ourselves and be ready for that day. Let those with ears hear, and those with hearts prepare!

(Image reference: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (detail), El Greco, 1586 – 1588, Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo.)

The Lord Among His Saints: Homily for the Solemnity of All the Saints

            See what love the Father has bestowed on us

Brother and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the world will agree with us when we say, love makes the world go round. Where the world will probably disagree with us is the understanding of the kind of love that makes this movement happen. To them, love will be what the Greeks would call eros, a physical, sexual, desire. For Christians, this love in Greek terms, would be agape the self-sacrificing love that found its truest expression on the Cross of Our Lord; “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15: 13.)

Today, on the Solemnity of All Saints, we celebrate this agapic love, for this is what marks the saints, their self-sacrificing love for God, a love that drove their entire lives and has ensured that they are now in heaven. Following the two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbour, they now spend their time in heaven, in the divine presence, ready to respond to those who petition them for their prayers.

The saints are ready to respond to our prayers, for the reason contained in the formula of the Creed: “the communion of saints.” As §948 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us:

the term “communion of saints” …. has two closely linked meanings: communion in holy things (sancta) and among holy persons (sancti).”

Through baptism, we all share in the promises of heaven, and through baptism, we too are made one in nature with the saints who are in heaven. As the first letter of St. John teaches us today:

See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.

By virtue of this sharing in holy things, therefore, the saints are ever ready to respond to our cries for help, to aid us on the path to heaven. As the Gospel from last Friday taught us:

Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern,
would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?

Like parents, they respond to our prayers, and offer up prayers of their own, so that we may be pulled out from the cisterns (of sin) that we fall into.

If we are already, in principle, in communion with the saints, it behooves us, to be holy ourselves, because we too are part of God’s holy ones. Listen, again, to the words of St. John in his first letter:

Beloved, we are God's children now

And what does it take to become holy?

In his book The Spiritual Combat – prized by a number of saints – Lorenzo Scupoli (1530-1610) indicates that the genuine spiritual life, i.e. the life of holiness, consists in: firstly, “the knowledge of the goodness and the greatness of God, and of our nothingness and inclination to all evil;” secondly, “the love of him and the hatred of ourselves;” third, “subjection, not to him alone, but, for love of him, to all his creatures;” fourth, “entire renunciation of all will of our own, and absolute resignation to all his divine pleasure;” and finally, “willing and doing all this purely for the glory of God and solely to please him, and because he so wills and merits thus to be loved and served.”

Too often, and principally among us who dare to presume our holiness, we think of ourselves as perfect. The first step on the road to holiness, Scupoli therefore warns us, is to grow in appreciation of our own capacity for wickedness. Having grown in this knowledge, we must reject our very selves, and our own desires, until we can live, not for ourselves, but for others. In this task, that great line from the Lord’s prayers bears repeating, over and over again:

              Your will be done.

And then, live our lives, not for our own pleasure, but for the pleasure of God, taking delight in serving Him, and Him alone.

In his presentation of Scupoli’s book, the late Fr. Jonathon Robinson of the Toronto Oratory, points out that “The Spiritual Combat is a work directed toward the practice of the ascetical life.” The ascetical life, he points out, can be said to represent:

All those elements of the spiritual life that involve an organized campaign against the sinful aspects of the self, and against exterior temptation, as well as positive efforts directed towards the perfection of our own spiritual activities.

In this way he points out that asceticism is broader than the external and physical austerities that we take up. Austerity is about the ordered effort to imitation Him, who gave His life on the cross so that we might live. It is also about following in the royal path of the cloud of witnesses, the saints, who imitated Him before us, and even now are at ready to help us if only we call them by name.

Too rarely, however, do we call them by name, my dear brothers and sisters, and if we do, it is for temporary and material benefits. The saints can relied on for greater aid and support and we must hasten to this task.

All God’s holy angels and saints, pray for us!

(A version of this homily was first preached to the Catholic residents at Aaji Care Home for Assisted Living, Old Goa.)

Image reference: The Saints in Procession (detail from The Triumph of the Sacred Heart), Luc-Olivier Merson, 1911 (?), Basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, Paris.)

Love of the Neighbour: Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

My dear brothers and sisters in Our Lord Jesus Christ; this Sunday, through the lectionary, Our Lord places before us the commandment of love for our neighbour. Building on this injunction, a commandment that we have an obligation to comply with, Holy Mother Church teaches us in the Catechism:

Even if it does not contradict the provisions of civil law, any form of unjustly taking and keeping the property of others is against the seventh commandment: thus, deliberate retention of goods lent or of objects lost; business fraud; paying unjust wages; forcing up prices by taking advantage of the ignorance or hardship of another. (CCC no. 2409)

These teachings help us to engage with a scenario that played out in the shadow of the venerable Sé of Goa some weeks ago. After playing football all day long with other members of the Cathedral parish, two blue-collared migrant men borrowed the bike of a friend, another migrant worker. Slightly inebriated these two men charged down the wrong side of a one-way street and rammed into the recently purchased vehicle of another parishioner, a local. Outraged, and because he had not purchased an insurance, the violated man, snatched the key of the scooter that the two errant men were on, and indicated that only after they coughed up a substantial sum - arbitrarily arrived at – to repair the damage to his new vehicle, would he return the key to them.

This scenario is an apt description of situations encountered in many parts of the world. As law and order breaks down – more so in Goa than any other part of the world, I imagine – one can understand the frustration of people, who can no longer rely on the state agents of law enforcement – in this case the police. And so, they take the law into their own hands.

But what does the morality of Our Lord teach us? Already, before His incarnation, he spoke of this through the words of the Prophet Isaiah which we hear in the first reading:

You shall not molest or oppress an alien

The (not only) trouble with the Goan parishioner’s action was that the bike, whose key he had illegally and illegitimately impounded, did not belong to these two men, but to a third person, who was now deprived of his property for no reason other than the fact that he had loaned his bike to his friends. As Our Lord says, through the prophet Isaiah:

If you take your neighbor's cloak as a pledge,
you shall return it to him before sunset;
for this cloak of his is the only covering he has for his body. 
What else has he to sleep in?

There are pressures in the life of a migrant that those who have the privilege of not having to migrate, or the opportunity to live as expats, may never understand. It is for this reason that we must take care that we never molest or oppress the alien, whether through the law, or outside of it.

There is, however, a parallel obligation on the migrant: to follow the law, and to love the community that accepts them.

Speaking at the Autumn Plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference in September this year, Bishop Erik Varden had some veryilluminating words to deal with the complex scenario that accompanies the overwhelming wave of migration that has overtaken so many parts of the developed world – and it not unknown in in India either. Bishop Varden pointed out that as Christians “it is our duty to extend a helping hand to those in need, to open our doors to the homeless, to share our material wealth with the poor.” However, he went on to elaborate, the Catechism also teaches us that immigrants are:

obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens (CCC no. 2241).

Creatively drawing on the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict, he pointed out that:

St Benedict sets a radical standard. He decrees that all guests — who will chiefly be paupers and homeless folk — must be received as if they were Christ himself. As soon as they knock on the door, the porter is to exclaim ‘Deo gratias!’ and ask for their blessing. The abbot is to wash their hands and feet. Every kindness is to be shown them. The community must exert itself to meet their needs. Such is the law of Christian hospitality (RB 53, 66).  

But this is for guests; for those who wish to stay, St. Benedict’s approach is different. They are to be kept waiting for a while, and are to be read the rule, repeatedly, to not only indicate the norms of the community to which they wish to belong, but to internalise their importance. As Bishop Varden puts it:

to belong to a community is a trying, demanding business. It requires generosity and determination. It calls for a will to nurture fellowship of intent.

And so we have it; one has an obligation to love the alien, but one has also the obligation to respect the community one belongs to and to which one wishes to join.

The words from St. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians offer us the ideal to which we are all – natives and aliens – are called to live:

in every place your faith in God has gone forth,
so that we have no need to say anything. 
For they themselves openly declare about us
what sort of reception we had among you,
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.

May Our Lord grant us the wisdom to discern the way of love.

(Image reference: Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples (detail), Nicolas Bertin, c. 1720 and 1730, Art Institute of Chicago.)