Imperfection

An awareness of Saints’ ordinary human beginnings makes them attractive to people in simple human situations, especially those whose lives are lived in a continuous and unchanging world of subsistence or poverty, with little evidence to demonstrate that anyone outside their own communities or cultures gives them more than a passing thought, even less that anybody cares.

The attractiveness of shared experience brings people together and into communion with each other, and in a similar way, this natural gathering process brings them into communion with those who have gone before. A confraternity of present and past Christians is formed and this is the present and ongoing reality for us of the Communion of Saints.
Within this Communion we find ‘examples of holiness’ among the people with whom we associate; we are ‘awakened’ and ‘nourished’ by them as part of God’s gift to us through community, and, as stated in The Catechism, those same expressions of His love are clearly available to us through the exceptional examples of the Saints. They may have had no further need of purification when they died: they may have entered God’s presence in that moment, but perfection will have been bestowed during the transition rather than achieved while they still lived.

St John of The Cross is prominent among those who have provided guidance for people who long to approach God through a life of contemplative prayer. His writings deal with the attainment of union with God, and it is this that, through being frequently described as ‘perfection’, causes the confusion; it is a matter of degree and of context. It is the ultimate point of perfection in the human capacity for prayer, but not perfection itself. Only Jesus was perfect.
In his ‘Instructions and Precautions ...’ to those seeking to arrive at perfection, he wrote, ‘If any religious desires to attain in a short time to holy recollection, spiritual silence, detachment and poverty of spirit - where the peaceful rest of the spirit is enjoyed, and union with God attained ... he must strictly practise the following instructions. ... If he will do this ... he will advance rapidly to great perfection, acquire all virtue and attain unto holy peace.’
His use of the word ‘great’ does not add to the emphasis of perfection, but lessens it in keeping with his own awareness that he speaks of something - however lofty in this life – that is below the presently unattainable unity and perfection to which this life leads.
I have read that when St John was made a Doctor of the Church, the then Pope stated that his work should be regarded as a guide for anyone striving to live ‘a more perfect life’. ‘More perfect’ again points to coming close to the very best that we can do: not perfection, but a life as near to it as can be achieved; a perfect life, by its very nature must fall short of true perfection.

In her book ‘Ecstasy’, Marghanita Laski made comparisons of the times taken to attain the unitive state, the perfection of human prayer: - ‘St. Paul and St. Catherine of Siena each took three years, Suso sixteen years, St. Teresa thirty years, while that flaming thing which was the soul of Jesus burned its way to full expression in forty days of solitary communion.’
For me this is meaningless. From the moment of His conception, though Jesus was a man, He was something no other human being could ever be. He was the perfection of humanity: He ‘... is not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us, but has been put to the test in exactly the same way as ourselves, apart from sin.’ (Hebrews 4:15)
All others were and are sinners. ‘If we say, “We have no sin,” we are deceiving ourselves, and truth has no place in us.’ (1 John 1:8).
We have a maximum capacity for perfection somewhere below where Jesus was before He ever set foot in the desert.

This is why we should lay all else aside to follow Him. His disciples may look to the Saints and to Mary, His Mother, but they are examples of what can be achieved not the focus of the journey, and they constantly draw onwards, not towards themselves, but to a closer following of Christ. It is this alone that makes us Christians just as they were Christians through their own faith and following.
Mary’s instruction to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana, sums up her unending transference of all focus and devotion in the direction of her son. All who look to her must not linger, but must journey on in the direction she so clearly defines.

‘Do whatever he tells you.’

(John 2:5)

Something close

It is the very ordinariness of the man or woman that makes the process of sanctification such a blessing. If humankind ever had another easier, even automatic way of achieving perfection, a way inherent in our very existence, it was lost to us at the very beginning, as the story of the Garden of Eden portrays.
It is their ordinary beginning that brings the saints into a meaningful relationship with the average Christian of today; it brings them into our everyday sphere of consciousness as people who lived lives in much the same way as we ourselves live, with struggle, hesitation and doubt. That which made them recognizable as Saints was drawn out of their living lives of faith amid distraction, temptation and the needs of others.
I do not mean to equate sanctification with perfection, though the completion of the process will inevitably take us there. But, within the bounds of this life, we can have no way of fully knowing what it is or of recognizing it, other than in the presence of Jesus Himself. Perfection can be a distinctly unhelpful word to us as we strive to be one of His disciples, following to the best of our ability, picking ourselves up repeatedly when we fall, and walking on in the unflinching knowledge that Jesus has done the complete and irreversible work of redemption for us; there is nothing required of us other than a constant turning towards obedience to His teaching and His will, and learning to see every person, every need and every situation through His eyes.

The persons we call Saints are those regarded as having lived beyond the normal limits of human life, with an achieved level of sanctification surpassing the expectation of those deemed best able to judge such things. But, just as true peace and truth are beyond our normal understanding of those words, so nothing is perfect until true perfection is attained. Whatever their assessed degree of sanctification, and however far they may have progressed, those we regard as Saints are unlikely to have achieved perfection in this life. But we revere them as though they had, and therein lies part of the reason for the wrong understanding of our devotion.
Those outside the Catholic Church believe those within it pervert the means of access to spiritual nourishment by praying to Saints instead of to Christ Himself. This is highlighted by the Catholic’s perceived relationship with the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.

It is as easy for Catholics to blame those outside their church for any failure to understand correctly, as it is for members of protestant and reformed churches (the same but with different emphases on reasons for being separated) to blame the Catholic Church and its individual members for what they see as a form of idolatry. And who are the people most to blame for much of the confusion?

The ordinary, devout but spiritually dilute Catholics who find an ordinariness, a simplicity, a poverty, an injustice or a persecution, in the Saints’ stories that closely parallels their own. But these understandable links of lifestyle and hardship are perverted by the elevation of the Saints to positions of prominence and adoration.
Their real power in our lives is in their having had their feet in the same mud and dust that we now tread, in their ordinary human origins, and in their successful journeying to become the persons God made them to be. It is not in statues, candles, or sanitized and beautified versions seen forever as beyond our world and our reach. They did not feel perfect and beautiful during their lifetime.

In her ‘Guidelines for Mystical Prayer’, Ruth Burrows has written, -
‘Our cowardice and our pride are past-masters at disposing of the saints. We don’t burn them: we put them on a pedestal, which is the same thing as putting them on the shelf. They do not challenge us any more. They are no longer men and women just like ourselves, flesh, blood, nerves; somehow they are quite special, they have been given what we have not. They did not really spring from our common stock. This flower of holiness is not of our soil. Those far above us do not challenge us, it is the one close to us who does what we do not do, becomes what we do not become, this is whom we fear, this is the one we must dispose of. What is more, we find vicarious satisfaction in seeing one of ourselves raised to a superhuman state. We like to think that this is what human nature really is.’

The line between valid appreciation and idolatrous promotion can be very narrow, and even low levels of Christian awareness and devotion make is easy to cross that line unawares. That tendency has been with mankind for a very long time.

‘The people of the Old Testament were tempted to make idols of wood, ivory or silver to hang from their camels’ saddles, while the people of the New Testament carry saints’ medals in their pockets instead of God in their hearts. The motive is more or less the same. We are too idle to make the effort to think of God as being beyond time and space, in His Transcendence and Mystery – it is so much more convenient to give Him a cheap face in order to replace His remoteness with something tangible, something close to us, something above all which will heal us when we are ill, enrich us when we are poor.’ (Love is for Living. Carlo Carretto)

- And this in spite of the fact that God Himself did ‘replace His remoteness with something tangible, something close to us ...’

He gave us Jesus.

Moments

The potential influence of particular moments on our understanding of ourselves, and of our journey is immense. That potential is roused from the apparently blank canvas of our lives when we first begin to notice these moments and give space to thoughts that they may have meaning for us. The potential is realized when their significance is no longer doubted, and when we begin to look for such moments in everything we do. They are - if we open ourselves to the possibility - one of the ways in which the Holy Spirit leads us towards the complete truth. We begin to live in the power of the Spirit when we are alert to such guidance and when we become capable of an appropriate and unhesitating response.

Such moments are scattered through our whole lives, and our childhood was almost certainly filled with them as part of the ‘first light’ which we had not yet totally lost amid the world’s distractions. The overall memory of wonder and innocence is, in part, the long-lived echo of those days of closer communication with God. Some childhood moments are clearly remembered as having significance; one such is quoted by Michael Paffard in his book, The Unattended Moment. Mary Antin, an American immigrant writing of her experiences as a tiny child in Poland wrote, “In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his plough. I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the bank for every turn. Suddenly he began to sing, a rude ploughman’s song. Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to fit it – a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. I sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention. I felt myself discovering things. Something in me gasped for life, and lay still. I was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me. For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartbeat I knew, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me. We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later …”

The background influence present to me during my formative years did not become more than a peaceful presence, though its effect on my life, and on my whole way of thinking and of seeing the world, has probably been far greater than my awareness would suggest. Of the people whose great names have been carved into the monastic and mendicant orders they founded, however, it was not Benedict that became most firmly lodged in my childhood and in my slowly maturing mind.
It was the image of the man with birds on his hands and arms that sat most beautifully in my innocence. Sunshine, trees, flowers, birds and bees, timid animals rarely and fleetingly seen: did we not all long to be at one with everything around us in the way portrayed in that image? St Francis of Assisi was entwined with my childhood in ways that Benedict and other saints were not.
But one thing common to them all was that I actually knew very little about any of them, and that was how it remained for years. When I did open a book on one of them for the first time in my adult life, I was already a changed man. Something momentous had happened to me and faith had burst into the reality of my life; I was no longer a Christian in name only. The process of transformation into the person God wills me to be has slowly continued, but the impact of the early part of the journey was immense. When one’s accustomed state (with hindsight) is one of apparent immobility, any sudden forward movement is unnerving and breathtaking: it destroys all certainty and feelings of stability in the same way that even a small earth-tremor can strip away every thread of a person’s confidence in their strength and physical significance. In both cases - the one physical, the other mental, emotional and spiritual - the undoubted security of standing upon solid ground is pulled from under one’s feet.

I had developed an insatiable appetite for reading spiritual and religious books as well as the Bible, and when I did choose one on the life of a particular person it was not surprising that it should be St Francis, though the unsuspected force with which that choice would speak to me has left me wondering whether I was guided that day to that particular book, on that shelf, in that second-hand bookshop.
Cardinal Newman wrote of his own experience, “Who can account for the impressions which are made on him? For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before. … After a while, I got calm, and at length the vivid impression upon my imagination faded away.” (John Henry Newman. Apologia Pro Vita Sua)
The lasting impression for me has not been the reading of the book, (‘Saint Francis of Assisi’ by Elizabeth Goudge) and it is neither a particular chapter or passage within it, nor any detail of his life story; it is opening the cover for the first time and reading the four simple words printed on an otherwise empty page.

Part One

Francesco Bernadone

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I was immediately grasped by something touching me so deeply that I could not move on from that page. I believe it was the first time that truth, the deeper absolute truth, had really registered within me in all its power and utter simplicity. ‘Veritas’, with its Dominican black and white, confronting me in the stark form of ink on otherwise blank paper. No shades of grey, no room for discussion or argument, no compromise, no doubt. Just a brief statement of fact: an absolute truth of such simplicity but of awesome significance to me in that moment; a moment that lasted a long time. I was held captive by those words, and once I could see them again after the cascades of emotion welling up from within had receded, my eyes and mind flitted from one line to the other and back again, ... Part One ... Francesco Bernadone ... Part One ... while tears continued dropping onto the page. I had encountered something that demanded my attention, and the fullness of the demand was more than I could unravel; it was also something that would not release me from its hold, and of which I could not let go. I remained with that page for several minutes, until finally, knowing I could go no further, I closed the book. I stayed with my intensely focussed thoughts for a while longer before leaving it where it lay, and strolling in the garden with this young man Francesco, of whom I had not heard before. The birds seemed more numerous and their singing was nothing if not a song of praise.

I had opened the book to read about St Francis and had been shown an ordinary man.

I had been shown that St Francis could not have existed without that apparently ordinary man, that the end of a story is meaningless without the intricacies of the middle years, and, most importantly, there is no story to be told, there is no St Francis without the beginning. That beginning, that Part One, was the young man who had yet to think a single thought of his journey into life as Francis of Assisi: as the person he was meant to be.

The start of the life, the journey and the story was Francesco Bernadone; that same Francesco was the start of all we now know.

Whoever we are, and whatever we may have done or failed to do, we have the potential to become as God would have us be.

‘Meanwhile, let us go forward from the point we have each attained.’
(Philippians 3:16)

Deep within

“Peace I bequeath to you,
my own peace I give you,
a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.”
(John 14:27)

Above all else, it is peace that I consciously value. Anything damaging it, disturbing it, or distracting me from it, attempts far more than merely interrupting a peaceful existence: it tears at something deep within me, for that is where peace lies.
An external hush and the absence of conflict, so often mistaken for real peace, are clearly gentle, quiet, and calming: they contribute to unstressed living and a peaceful world, but that in itself is only a good start-point for finding the depths of true peace. It cannot be found in anything the world has to offer because it is not of this world: it is ‘a peace which the world cannot give’.

The Benedictine monks and nuns who have been on the fringes of my life for as long as I can remember, have ‘Pax’, peace, as their motto, and this has become increasingly meaningful to me with the passage of time. We are all particularly susceptible to the influence of whatever has been present during our formative years, and my own increasing awareness of this has revealed that I have been privileged to have such a long-term presence acting as a background guide throughout my life; but I have also become aware that I have had privileged access to only one facet of the truth.
What brought this home to me more than anything else was my first brief but real contact with another order, the Order of Preachers – The Dominicans. Their most frequently quoted motto is ‘Veritas’, Truth, and it was the impact of that word that first made me fully aware of my frighteningly narrow understanding of my faith, my sense of direction, my fellow Christians, and of what Jesus had done for me in living and dying as a man upon this earth. Everything that drags me down, tempts me and halts my hesitant progress towards real fulfilment was experienced and understood by Jesus himself; He has experienced everything that rises and falls, that surges and breaks in pieces in my life: He knows everything of the ebb and flow that goes on within me. This is all part of my own truth, and nobody can really know me without knowing everything about me, good and bad. Jesus does know me, through and through.

The peace that shadowed my childhood at Stanbrook, and formed a hushed background to my teenage years at Douai, drew me further into a quiet contentment with my own company. I began to withdraw too far from the people around me and from the supportive and edifying presence of my fellow Christians, until that word, ‘Veritas’, suddenly thinned my easy comfort by loudly proclaiming that my peace was nothing if not built upon truth. And (as with peace) the truth as the world normally understands it, even when ‘whole’ and ‘nothing but’, is only an outer cover of honesty that enables us to recognize and enter into the deeper reality and significance of truth.

“... when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, ...”
(John 16:13)

Both the peace of Christ and the truth of the Holy Spirit must make their home deep within us.
In chapters 13 to 17 of John’s gospel, during the Last Supper, Jesus presents us with a trinity of feeling, of experience, and of expression that parallels The Holy Trinity itself. He commands the apostles, and us, to love one another and pass on the Father’s love to each other just as He has personified it and passed it on to us. “I have loved you just as the Father has loved me.”(15:9)
With the peace of the Son and the truth of the Spirit combining within us and manifesting themselves as the love of the Father towards each one of us, we can become living expressions of the unity which is God Himself. How else shall the Christian Church be returned to the loving harmony for which Jesus created it, and to the clear expression of that togetherness which will lead the world to regard Christianity as synonymous with unity ?

Just as the peaceful example of the Benedictines in my life has played its part in leading me close to Christ, so the deep-rooted truth behind the vocation of the Dominicans will have done the same for those with longer associations with them.
Though written with reference to preachers, the following speaks well of the transforming effect we can all have on others if we allow God to take possession of our innermost being. We will never abandon ourselves to His will if we always linger at the very edge, clinging to some part of ourselves that we believe to be essential to our knowledge of who we are. We must place our whole being in His hands if we are to find the reality of our calling.

‘We religious ... in our corporeality, can make Christ present in our way. The preacher brings the Word to expression, not just in his or her words, but in all that we are. God’s compassion seeks to become flesh and blood in us, in our tenderness, even in our faces.
In the Old Testament, we often find the prayer that God’s face may shine upon us. This prayer was finally answered in the form of a human face, Christ’s face. He looks at the rich young man, loves him and asks him to follow him; he looks at Peter in the courtyard after his betrayal; he looks at Mary Magdalene in the garden and calls her by her name. As preachers, flesh and blood, we can give body to that compassionate look of God. Our bodiliness is not excluded from our vocation.’ (Sing a New Song. Timothy Radcliffe OP)

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Rising above

The wide open spaces of truth can only be opened up for us when their existence has been revealed to our previously blank and unseeing gaze. The veil which had so effectively obscured them from our hearts and minds, and thus from our sight, is gently wafted aside by the breath of the Holy Spirit as part of an ongoing process of spiritual awakening. Our increasing awareness draws towards and beyond the obscuring curtain of unbelief that so effectively excludes us from the vastness of possibility lying beyond our mundane routines, repetitious desires, and imagined certainties. Drawn into a world of wonder, new horizons invite us to linger, and to journey into the ever brightening light. We are led into opening up these spaces for ourselves: into seeking and searching, and into a deeper unravelling of our vague recognition and experience in the presence of something we cannot fully comprehend but which we sense to be wrapped in truth. Seemingly random glimpses draw us further into the freedom of that space, whether through the spoken or written word, through the attitudes or actions of others, through flashes of inspiration, or through the limitless ways of God’s revelation in the world and in our lives.
In following the Spirit’s lead beyond the mists of confusion and uncertainty that have caused us to hold back, we rise sufficiently above our cluttered surroundings to see that there is an alternative to being anchored in the harbour of our familiar and comfortable life. We cannot break free of our links with the world, but we catch a glimpse of another way of living that is not confined and permanently moored by those links; we can rise yet further above our worldly selves, to discover the previously implausible possibility of breaking free from the hold of animal instincts and selfishness which form some of the links in our anchor chain.

We can think of Christ as the keystone in a structure that would otherwise collapse in ruins: a tower of solid and weighty stone built in defiance of the force of gravity, with the apex of the arch – the keystone – as the high point from which to survey the world around us, but without Jesus as a real presence in our lives we have merely placed Him aloft as a figurehead pointing into the wind while our boat remains firmly chained to the spot. He will lead the way if we will simply respond to His invitation to follow Him, but what do so many of us do? We confine His image safely within our minds and within our church buildings while disregarding the hand outstretched towards us. He would unchain us and raise us above all forces that hold us down. He would lift us into those wide open spaces where we would have the potential for learning the truth, the truth that enables us to see our daily ground-level days as they really are, and as He would have us see them.

Without a superior force working to strengthen our resistance and to lift our thoughts and desires above the world in which we live, the pressure of living in this world inevitably leads us to comply with our natural tendencies. The curve of a dam holding back the immense pressure of water behind it, in the same way as the keystone ties the whole arch together and turns gravity against itself, demonstrates the very power that would tear down these structures actually strengthening them and holding them together, but the tension is colossal. All the energy is expended on resistance, on remaining immovable; nothing is being achieved, and nobody is going anywhere. This is what we do as individuals, with our own self-selected religious frameworks, and it is what we can so easily do collectively with our unthinking or uninformed adherence to particular denominations, church buildings, selected individuals, or preferred forms of service, worship, or other prayerful expression.
It is time to trust in God’s promises, to let go and let God; time to end the blinkered life whether it be one of resistance or of selfish liaison with the superficial attractions of our physical existence. He will raise us above such struggles, and in so doing will reveal the reality and the truth concealed in the world around us; we shall recognize Him more clearly in the people we meet, and through that recognition shall more truly come to know ourselves.
Let us allow Him to raise us up, that we may have the truth revealed to us, and know ourselves to be among The Lifted.

'Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Deliverance?
Where is this deliverance to be found?
Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation;
he is bound with us all for ever.

Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense!
What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow.'

(‘Gitanjali’. Rabindranath Tagore)

The Catholic in me (3)

Despite nearly eighteen months without direct reference to it, my involvement and affinity with the Catholic Church has not been hidden from view. My lifelong awareness of, and continuing attraction to Stanbrook Abbey and its community of Benedictine nuns has been mentioned more than once, and my use of quotations from scripture known to be excluded from the Protestant Bible (Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus/Sirach) have also pointed to my allegiance.
The Benedictine Order has influenced my life in an unbroken litany of harmonies from my very early years. Stanbrook was the start-point, and now, many years later, it is firmly embedded as an unobtrusive but constant link to both my past and my future. Overlapping with this for some forty years, and taking its place for much of that time, has been the presence and undeniable influence of Benedictine monks from the monasteries at Douai and Downside. Both as parish priests, and, while a pupil at Douai School, as teachers and extraordinary examples of what we boys had the potential to become, they have wandered quietly through my years leaving a trail of unsolicited and, for the most part, unspoken guidance. As my parish priests their value has been appreciated while they were with us, but where my schooldays are concerned it is definitely hindsight that speaks; it is not that I failed to value them at the time, but my realization of their example is very much the product of a mature person’s reflections. Even as I write this I am drawn into an undefined sense of quiet and contentment that has brought a half-smile to my face. I cannot quite unravel it, though that is because I never really try to do so: I know there is no need, nothing to be gained: at a deeper level I am aware that I already understand, and searching for a way to describe and somehow capture it is a futile and wasteful exercise. Knowing that my recognition of such example is only made possible through having matured in a way that enables me to see it, brings to consciousness an inbuilt awareness that the focussing and refining of that enabling was itself conceived in the very example I am now able to acknowledge. It is one of those slowly turning meditations on life that at first appears to be a loop; once recognized as such I relax into a knowing expectation of the curve bringing me round to the point where I can believe I know what comes next, and can settle into the repetition: a new mantra with which to ride the comfort of my days.
How is it that I never seem to learn that I should presume nothing in my journey towards my God, and in my faltering steps towards becoming the person I should be ? It is not a meditative loop; it is a contemplative spiral that takes my feeble grasp of The Holy Spirit’s work in my life on an effortless learning curve, riding a thermal of spiritual warmth that carries me from my low-level and gentle perplexity to a higher level of awesome grace-filled awareness.

No matter how often I see them, I find it difficult not to stop when I see a buzzard wheeling in the skies above me. I watch in admiration of the raptor in my sight, but my mind is always edging back to a pair of Golden Eagles in the Scottish Highlands.
My son and I watched in wonder as they circled not far above us just off the edge of a cliff, wings unmoving in their display of utter mastery of their element. Our presence, far from disturbing them, seemed almost to be their reason for the display, as though God had whispered to them, “Show them what you can do. Let them see what happens when my creation becomes what it was made to be.” And so they did. After a few minutes, and having begun to climb away, one of them angled its wings slightly and at once moved away from above the cliff in the direction of the mountains on the other side of the valley. In no more time than it takes me to speak the words, its speed rapidly increased, and without a single wing-beat, it continued accelerating away, receding to invisibility in an astonishingly short space of time. We remained spellbound, unable to say anything much other than, ‘Awesome!’ For that truly was what it was. Something deep within me still suggests that God made the air because He had already crafted the Golden Eagle.

Just as watching Buzzards reminds me of those Eagles, so remembering the Eagles leads me to dwell on God’s longing to lift us above all that weighs down our spirits: He would carry us on those Eagles’ wings into the unpolluted airs of faith, and hope, and trust, there to point us in the right direction, that we may fly as bidden in answer to our vocation.
We are all called in some way. The Benedictines who have influenced me throughout my years were called to the religious life and to the priesthood, just as others have been called to other monastic orders and to the secular priesthood, but each one of us is called to something.
You and I, thinking of ourselves as ordinary, unexceptional, unqualified, unworthy and incapable of making any real contribution to God’s work in the world, must learn to see ourselves differently. Every one of us has something to offer, something in our makeup put there by God and which is of value to His mission, His people and His Church. The laity are no longer to sit meekly in the pews, accepting and absorbing in their weekly routines without waking, and discovering and carrying their gifts into the light where they can be seen and recognized, and where they can bear fruit. Most people never sit in the pews today, and what possible argument can be found to persuade them to do so? How little of apparent relevance to their own lives is found in anything related to that word ‘Church’, and, in the tangled mass of different and separate groups all professing to be Christian, where on earth is the truth?

In his book, ‘Sing a New Song’, Timothy Radcliffe OP, then Master of the Dominican Order, wrote, ‘Western culture is marked by a profound suspicion of all teaching, since it is equated with indoctrination and bigotry. The only valid truth is that which one has discovered for oneself or which is grounded in one’s feelings: ’If it feels right for me, then it is o.k.’ But teaching should liberate us from the narrow confines of our experience and our prejudices and open up the wide open spaces of a truth which no one can master. ... Doctrine should not indoctrinate but liberate us to continue on the journey.’
That is what I have found in my church life. ‘The wide open spaces of a truth which no one can master’ have been opened up for me, not by the teaching of individuals, and not by the teaching of the Catholic Church; nor have ‘the narrow confines of (my own) experience’ yielded anything truly worthwhile other than a heightened awareness of the gulf between myself and that which I seek. The teaching has been there, but the power and the influence have more surely come through the learning: the awakened receptiveness to that un-masterable truth which has shadowed all who would follow Jesus, from the time when He walked the dusty roads of Palestine to the present day. That learning rests confidently on the Catholic Church’s adherence and united commitment to the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ: teachings that have been at the centre of its doctrine for two thousand years. I have been blessed with the freedom to walk along my path without a need for anything other than the truth: that truth which liberates us ‘from the narrow confines of our experience’, and from denominational differences. It is the truth which grants access to the meaningful experience beyond restrictive limits and rigid conformity: the experience of Jesus as a living friend, and the subsequently confirmed awareness of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives.

The Catholic in me (2)

Those who react in an instinctively adverse way to Catholicism and any mention of the word Catholic are in a minority, but even allowing for the amplifying of my awareness of their existence brought on by recent recollections, I know that minority is not as small as I would wish. In Great Britain and Ireland, and, to a lesser but still appreciable extent, in The U.S.A. and other English speaking parts of the world, the existence of such feeling is bolstered by the historical baggage we have carried from the Irish ‘Troubles’. This of course is a two sided coin, with strong anti-protestant feelings also having become part of the mindset of some Irish Catholics. But having mentioned this I now veer away once more; it would not be helpful to delve further. This is not meant to be a place for me to scribble whatever comes into my head regarding that history, or politics, or religion.
I could do that if I so wished, but my intention and my desire is to use it only as an expression of that which flows within me: that fullness of feeling and overflowing that steers me through my days and makes my daily living in this world such a gentle joy. That is what I long to be able to give, and what I would wish to become part of every person’s life.

More often than not, there is a discomfort to be overcome whenever a person admits openly to being a Christian for the first time. The pause in conversations that may follow, or the slightly awkward air about the people with whom we are speaking, is frequently taken to be the mild expression of distaste at what we have said, as though we have done something unpleasant or inappropriate. We feel that we may have created one of those view-changing moments for them, and it will take a while to find out if they will distance themselves from us. But with repeated admissions of our faith we become accustomed to hearing ourselves speaking aloud the words we have held silent within us for so long, and we come to appreciate that the apparent awkwardness of some hearers looks the same whether they wish we had not spoken, whether it is of no consequence to them, or whether they are delighted to hear us say it, but do not know how to respond.
There are many who may be helped to overcome their own discomfort, unvoiced admissions or questions, by hearing us say just a few words in a matter of fact way: no pronouncements or preaching, just making it known when the opportunity arises, that we believe in God, that we are Christians, that our lives revolve around our faith, and that life is so much richer because of it.

As Catholics we may be conscious of having another layer of awkwardness to overcome; we may have grown accustomed to admitting that we are Christians, but among people we do not know, we still hold back from saying we are Catholics until we have some idea of their own allegiances, if any. This second hurdle should not be there at all, and thankfully, in most minds, whether giving or receiving the information, it does not exist. It is a low level but inbuilt fear generated in some people by the incidents (like the one I have described) and the shocks of meeting those who have a clearly anti-Catholic mindset. We must always ensure that our perspective is aligned with reality, not skewed by the unreliable gauge of their utterances, whether in quantity or loudness.
As a result of the few incidents in my own life, I have to include myself among those who have encountered that second hurdle, not so much through a fear of finding myself in similar situations again, as through the feelings of inadequacy I have already mentioned: not having the answers, not knowing enough about the Church of which I consider myself a part.
My writing here could be taken as evidence of that; until recently I have not mentioned anything directly related to Catholicism and have not made it known that I am a Catholic. I admit that this has been deliberate, but the reasons are not as they may seem.

I have always been very aware of those people who are just out of reach: those who are searching and seeking and longing, but who, in spite of seeing something they want in the Christians and the church communities around them, are unable to approach us.
Are you one of those people? It is you, and others like you, who have been very much in my mind from the moment I thought of creating this blog, and because of my first hand experiences, and having no way of knowing what influences you may have had in your own lives, I have been niggled by the thought that some of you may easily be turned away by any mention of a specific church or denomination, Catholic or otherwise.
I now feel somewhat differently though I am unsure as to why. Perhaps it is a natural growth of openness resulting from the effects upon me of having thought and written here for nearly eighteen months: a sense of having got to know someone better that enables me to relax more in your company, as though I have been actually walking and talking with you.
That is precisely how I got to know Jesus better; I relaxed, and as everything seemed to begin falling apart around me, He was right there beside me. We became inseparable friends when, for a period, He walked every step of my journey with me.
In this case however, unlike my meeting with Jesus, I have not met anyone, and I am unable to overrule the thought that this whole process may be a Spirit-led venture, as much for my own benefit as for anything else. After all, the one person this has helped me to come to know a little better is myself.
Is that not what God wants from us all? To find our true selves and to live life in all its glorious fullness?
We were born to become the persons God made us to be, and in doing so, to give glory to Him who created us and who sustains us in all that we do.

There is a ‘Search Blog’ button at the top of this page. Presumably there is one on every blog, but until now I had failed to notice it. That in itself is like the presence of God in our lives: always there, so quick, so willing, and so able to answer our questions and to find and yield the very things we are searching for; not standing out from the crowd, unobtrusive and quietly waiting for us to come to Him. Unseen and unrecognized until we look with different eyes, and then un-missable and unforgettable.
I searched my own blog for the words below, and the results relate to all that I have written here before 30th April.
In a total of 87 posts the word ‘Catholic’ appeared in only one (20.02.08), and that arose only through writing about the word ‘separatist’ in relation to Northern Ireland. 'Christian’ was written in 7 posts, ‘Christ’ in 14, ‘Holy Spirit’ appeared in 19, ‘Jesus’ in 27, and ‘God’ was included in 66 posts.
Being a Catholic is important to me, but in the present context, I think that result is not too far from the way it should be.

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God is all, and all is God’s? Yes!

Jesus is alive and present among us? Yes.
The Holy Spirit teaches and guides us? Yes.
I believe that Jesus is Christ? Yes.

I call myself a Christian? Yes.

I am a Catholic? Yes.