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Homily for the 22nd Sunday of Year A

No-one can fail to see the reality of human sin: all we need to do is to turn on the television or the radio or open a newspaper and see just what terrible things human beings can do to each other and themselves.
       As part of the his proclamation of the Kingdom, Jesus has to tell his disciples what will happen – he will be taken and accused, tortured and mistreated, and killed, but also rise again so that we may know that death is not the end, that our earthly life is not all that there is. It should come as no surprise that faced with this the apostle Peter cannot take it in – he does not want it to happen. It’s a human response – we do not want such a thing to take place, it’s horrible, it appals us. As Jesus says to Peter, ‘You are setting your mind on human things not divine things’. The Cross is inevitable for the simple reason that God loves us that much.
       As Christians, those who follow Christ, we are to take up our Cross and follow him. In the Letter to the Romans, St Paul describes what love looks like in action – it is how we put our faith, what we believe, into practice in our lives – by living out the love and forgiveness which we have received, turning from the ways of the world but rather following the way of God.
       We should be under no illusion; it isn’t easy following the way of the Cross. We cannot do it on our own, we have to do it together, as a community, relying upon God – loving and forgiving each other. All the power, all the wealth in the world is worth nothing compared to finding true life in Christ. These worldly things cannot save us, they cannot give us eternal life, they cannot deal with human sin – only Jesus can do this. Only in Christ can we have life and life in its fullness. Only if we lose our life by following him, can we find what our human life can be.
       Thus, the church in following Jesus, offers a radical alternative to the ways of selfishness and sin, a radical alternative which has the power to change the world through being conformed to Christ. We can do this together, by living out our faith and encouraging others to do so, living out an example of radical love which is difficult and costly and wonderful.

       We do it through prayer, through our conversation with God, listening to God, we are nourished by the Word of God, the Bible, to know that God loves us, and how are to live out that love and forgiveness in our lives. We are nourished by the sacraments of the Church, by Holy Communion, so that the love which God shows to the world on the Cross can continue to be poured out upon us, so that we can be strengthened to live out the life of faith. It is food for our souls, so that we may be built up in love. Let us come to him, to be fed by him, fed with him, to have new life in him, so that he can continue to transform our human nature and conform us to his example. Let us take our Cross, as people ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven by the love of God on the Cross. 
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A thought for the day from Jean-Pierre de Caussade

Endeavour to become humble and simple as a little child for love of the Lord, in imitation of him, and in a spirit of peace and recollection. If God finds this humility in us he will prosper his work in us himself. Persevere in being faithful to grace for the greater glory of God and for the pure love of him. All consists in loving well, and with all your heart and in all your employments, this God of all goodness. When God grants us attractions and sensible devotions let us profit by them to attach ourselves more firmly to him above all his gifts. But in times of dryness let us go on always in the same way, reminding ourselves of our poverty and also thinking that, perhaps, God wishes to prove our love for him by these salutary trials. Let us be humble, occupied in correcting our own faults, without reflecting on those of others. Let us see Jesus Christ in our neighbours, and then we shall have no difficulty in excusing them as well as helping them. Besides, we must bear with ourselves also out of charity.

Abandonment to Divine Providence 2:6
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Walking on Water

Fear is a very human feeling, we acquire it through learning, and yet it can be overcome, if we trust in God. Christains in Iraq, China, North Korea & Palestine – they face real danger, real persecution (we’re safe and comfortable by comparison) – and yet they trust, they pray (and so should we) and we should do all that we can to help them.
Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds.
This morning’s Gospel carries straight on from the miraculous feeding last week, as Jesus goes to send the crowds back home, he sends disciples ahead so that they might be ready.
 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray.
Prayer is important, it is as important as the food we eat, the air we breathe, because it is about our relationship with God. Throughout the Gospels Jesus spends time alone, spends time close to the Father as this relationship is crucial. Where Jesus leads we should follow, follow his example.
When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them.
It’s getting dark, and the disciples are out in the middle of the lake, in deep water; will the boat sink, what can they do?
And early in the morning he came walking towards them on the lake. But when the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear.
But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’
The disciples cannot believe that they are seeing Jesus, so he encourages them, his presence can give them confidence.
Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ He said, ‘Come.’
As usual, Peter is the first to react, he takes the lead – Jesus speaks a single word to him, ‘Come’ he speaks it to each and every one of us as Christians, to come, to follow him, to be close to him, to live out our faith in our lives strengthened by prayer.
 So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came towards Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.
 And those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’
Peter listens to what Jesus says, and obeys him, and does something miraculous, something extraordinary, until he is distracted by the world around him, and becomes frightened, likewise we, in our lives can in the power of God do wonderful things, if we are not distracted by the cares of the world around us, if we listen to what Jesus tells us and do it.
Peter becomes frightened; he starts to sink, as do we all when the cares of this world overwhelm us. His reaction is to cry ‘Lord, save me’ which Jesus does, indeed, through his offering of himself upon the Cross he saves each and every one of us, taking the sin of the world upon himself so that we might be freed from sin, fear and death, that same sacrifice which will be made present here, so that we the people of God, can be fed by God, with God, with his Body and Blood to be strengthened to have life in him, to be close to him.
Peter is told off for lacking faith, because it is important, we need to trust God, to have faith in Him, so that He can be at work in us and through us.

At the end, once the wind has died down the disciples worship Him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’ The end of it all is worship, it is what we as humans and as Christians are for, to worship God, in our love and our prayer, so that all of our lives are an act of worship, drawing us ever closer to the source of life and love. So that all we say or think or do may give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to who whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion and power, now and forever.

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The Multiplication of the Loaves

Picture the scene: Jesus has just been told that his cousin, John the Baptist, has been put in prison and killed, he himself has just been to Nazareth, where he was rejected, by the very people who should have accepted him. The atmosphere is tense, is he safe, will he too be arrested and killed? It is not for nothing that this morning’s Gospel passage begins with Jesus withdrawing to the desert – to be alone, to pray, to be close to God.

          When the people hear where he has gone they follow him, they walk out from the towns into the desert, they can’t just cross the lake, they want to see him, and to hear him teach them. When he gets out of the boat he sees a great mass of people and he has compassion on them, he is moved by the sight of them, and their need. He heals the sick to show that the Kingdom of God is a place of healing, where humanity can be restored through an encounter with the divine. His actions as well as his words proclaim the power of God to heal and restore humanity. Despite the danger, his concern is for others.
          It is getting late, the sun is fast moving towards the West, and the disciples tell him to send the crowds away so that they can buy food, instead Jesus says that they do not need to go away, and tells the disciples to give them something to eat. The disciples obey him, but cannot see how five loaves and two fish can possibly feed the thousands of people who are out there to be close to Jesus.
          The five loaves are the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Books of the Law, the Torah, which show Israel how to live, and how to love God. The two fish are the Law and the Prophets, so that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. The law and the Prophets point to Jesus, the Word made flesh: they find their fulfilment and true meaning in Him. The hopes of Israel, for the future, for a Messiah, are fulfilled in Him. Just like Israel after crossing the Red Sea here the People of God are fed by God in the desert. There is so much food left over at the end that there is enough to fill twelve baskets, one for each of the disciples. What in human terms – five loaves and two fish – isn’t enough, is more than sufficient in divine terms, just like at the Wedding feast in Cana, here we see that the Kingdom of God is a place of joy and abundance, of generosity, which isn’t concerned with scrimping or with the ‘good enough’, it is a place of lavish excess. This is what the church is supposed to be like – this is meant to be the model for our lives as Christians.
          The multiplication of the loaves is then not some conjuring trick, meant to amaze us, or to show us how powerful God is, but a sign of God’s generous love for humanity – it is what God does for us, so that we can respond to it in a profound and radical way and thereby change the world. Jesus has been rejected by the people of Nazareth and he responds by feeding people until they are satisfied, they’ve had enough, and there’s still loads left over. Likewise God’s love and mercy are inexhaustible, and are shown to the world, and poured out upon the world in Jesus Christ and in his death upon the Cross for our salvation. 
καὶ καθὼς Μωϋσῆς ὕψωσεν τὸν ὄφιν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, οὕτως ὑψωθῆναι δεῖ τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων ἐν αὐτῷ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.
Οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλὰ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον. οὐ γὰρ ἀπέστειλεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν υἱὸν εἰς τὸν κόσμον ἵνα κρίνῃ τὸν κόσμον, ἀλλ’ ἵνα σωθῇ ὁ κόσμος δι’ αὐτοῦ.
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Jn 3:14-17
It is this self same sacrifice which Jesus, on the night before he died told his disciples to carry on doing in remembrance of him, so that the Church could continue to be fed by him and fed with him, as a sign of his love for us, so that we might have life and forgiveness in him. This then is our soul’s true food, our foretaste of heaven, our pledge of future glory, given to us so that we might have life in Him and have it to the full.
          Let us come to be fed with the living bread, the bread which came down from heaven, so that it may feed our souls, so that we can be healed and restored by him. Let us be moved by the lavish generosity of God, and encouraged to live it out in our lives, in our thoughts, our words, and our actions, so that all that we are, all that we say or think or do, will proclaim the truth of God’s saving love to the world, so that it too may enter into the joy of the Lord and come to the banquet of the Kingdom, where all are welcomed, and healed.
          The invitation is there, and as the baptised, those who are in Christ, we are to welcome others. God takes us, like the bread and the fish, and blesses us, so that we can can fulfil his will in our lives. Filled with his grace, we encourage others to share in it, so that they may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to who whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day from St Isaac of Nineveh

A zealous person never achieves peace of mind. And he who is deprived of peace is deprived of joy.

If, as is said, peace of mind is perfect health, and zeal is opposed to peace, then a person stirred by zeal is ill with a grievous sickness.

While you presume to stir up your zeal against the sickness of others, you will have banished health from your own soul. You should concern yourself with your own healing. But if you wish to heal those who are sick, know that the sick have greater need of loving care than rebukes.

Zeal is not reckoned among mankind as a form of wisdom; rather it is one of the sicknesses of the soul, arising from narrow-mindedness and deep ignorance.

The beginning of divine wisdom is the serenity acquired from generosity of soul and forbearance with human infirmities.

For he says ‘You who are strong should bear the infirmities of the weak’ (Rom 15:1), and ‘Put right transgressor with a humble spirit’ (Gal 6:1). The Apostle numbers peace and long-suffering among the fruits of the Holy Spirit. 

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Trinity III ‘Cast your burden on the Lord’

‘There’s just no pleasing some people!’ If one wanted to sum up the opening of this morning’s Gospel then it would be hard to find better words. It is a truth as true now as it was two thousand years ago: it’s a facet of human nature, and something which God can redeem. The people of Israel have had the last of the prophets, John the Baptist, who came to them preaching repentance and the forgiveness of sins, living a simple life in the desert. His message is too hard for people, they think he’s mentally ill or possessed by an evil spirit. When Jesus comes, a friend of tax collectors and sinners, someone who clearly enjoys a party, as we see in the wedding at Cana in Galilee where he turns 180 gallons of water into the equivalent of 1100 bottles of wine, he’s a glutton and a drunkard. If you’re harsh and abstemious, it’s wrong, if you’re the life and soul of the party, that’s wrong too. The people of Israel are not searching for a golden mean, the midway between two extreme positions; they are simply unable or unwilling to accept either the difficult moral demands or the all-consuming joy of the Kingdom of God. ‘Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds’ Both John the Baptist and Our Lord bear witness to the truth of the Kingdom of God in their lives and in their deaths, and those who take no offense at Him will be blessed (Mt 11:6).
       The Kingdom of God preached by John and brought about by Jesus is not something for the wise and the intelligent – it does not require intellectual effort or knowledge. Instead it needs to be received like a child, simply, humbly and with trust. The key to it comes when we say ‘Yes’ to God, when we accept that we are loved and redeemed by Him, that His Love can save us from our sins, from pride, from intellectual arrogance, of thinking that weknow better, of being judgemental and unwilling to accept the harsh message of the prophet or the joyous celebration of the Messiah. At the heart of our faith is the mystery of the Incarnation, it’s why we celebrate Christmas, because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. In Christ, God takes our humanity, so that He can redeem it.
       At the heart of this morning’s Gospel is the astounding statement “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, 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) Christ will bear the burden of our sins, the sins of the world, of the past, the present, and the future, upon Himself on the Cross. The message of the Gospel is to lay down your burden, to rest in the Lord, to bear Christ’s yoke and learn from Him. We do so with child-like trust in the God who loves us and saves us, we do so with humility, knowing our need of God, to cast ourselves upon his love and mercy. We cannot win our way to heaven, or gain salvation through our own efforts but rather in and through Christ, through our Baptism, nourished by His Word and His Body and Blood, so that we can have life in Him.
       There is something truly refreshing about the simplicity of the message – Christ says to each and every one of us, to the whole world, lay down your burdens and find life in all its fullness in Him.

       So let us come to Him, let us be fed by Him, fed with Him, to have life in Him. Let us take His burden and follow Him, learning from Him, freed from sin, freed from the ways of the world, from hardness of heart. Let us enter into the joy of the Lord, and encourage others to do so, so that they may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit, to who whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion and power, now and forever.
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Dying to Live: Trinity I

The death of Our Lord on the Cross reveals that we are meant to be perpetually dissatisfied here below. If earth were meant to be a Paradise, then He Who made it would never have taken leave of it on Good Friday. The commending of the Spirit to the father was at the same time the refusal to commend it to earth. The completion or fulfilment of life is in heaven, not on earth.
Fulton Sheen Victory over Vice 1939: 99
Living a Christian life is at one level a very simple thing: we follow Christ – we do what he told us to do, we fashion our lives after the example of His. We pray because he told us to, we read Scripture which finds its fulfilment and truest meaning in Him. We are baptised like He was, we come together to do just what He did with His disciples on the night before He died because he told us to ‘Do this’, so we do – to be fed by Himand fed with Himso that we may share His life, nourished by Him and given a foretaste of the heavenly banquet of the Kingdom of Heaven here and now.
          He calls us to follow Him by taking up our Cross and prizing our relationship with Him over all the things of the world. It’s a bit more tricky, it’s a bit more of an ask, in fact for many people it’s pretty much impossible – such are the enticements of the world, and the fact that the world around us wants us to relegate religion to the private sphere: it shouldn’t affect our lives, it’s something which one can take out of its neat little box and wear for an hour on a Sunday morning, like a hat or some gloves, and then forget about, having done one’s public duty.
          While this may be tempting, it simply will not do. We cannot truly follow Christ if we are not willing to lay down our lives for the sake of Him who died and rose again for us. Baptism and the Eucharist are free, but living out the faith will cost us our lives. And yet we should give them up gladly, even though the world may well deride us, call us fools. In the Gospel Christ says to His disciples, he says to us ‘Do not be afraid … have no fear of them … Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul’. We can laugh at those who pour scorn upon us for all that they promise is of this world, fleeting, and of no real value; whereas what Christ promises us is of God, will last forever, it is a glory which can never fade – it is ours and is offered to the whole world for free.
          To follow Him we need to die to sin, we need to turn away from all the selfishness which separates us from God and each other, and instead live out the radical love of the Kingdom – a love which forgives, a love which thinks of others before ourselves. It is no good seeing this in individual terms; it affects us as a society: we need to do this together – you and me, each and every one of us needs to live not enslaved to sin, but as slaves for Christ, whose service is Perfect freedom, freedom from the ways of the world and freedom to live the new life of the Kingdom of God, here and now.

          We are called as a church to live out our faith together, praying for each other, supporting one another, and relying upon God, and His grace, that unmerited kindness and free gift, which we do not deserve, but which has the power to transform us, to conform us to the pattern of His Son. This he pours out upon us in the Sacraments of His Church, so that we might be conformed to His will: fed by God, with God, to have life in Him. We can only do this if we rely upon God and do it TOGETHER, built up in love. 
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Dom Gregory Dix on the Eucharist

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

Dom Gregory Dix The Shape of the Liturgy, (London: 1945) 744
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Trinity Sunday

“One in essence, distinction of persons, such is the mystery of the Trinity, such is the inner life of God. The three angles of a triangle do not make three triangles but one; as the heat, power, and light of the sun do not make three suns but one; as water, air, and steam are all manifestations of the one substance; as the form, color, and perfume of the rose do not make three roses, but one; as our soul, our intellect, and our will do not make three substances, but one; as one times one times one times one does not equal three, but one, so too in some much more mysterious way, there are three Persons in God and yet only one God.”
Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Divine Romance)

Anglican Clergy can be strange. Amongst their peculiarities possibly the most galling has to be the habit of finding someone other than themselves: a curate, a visiting preacher, a lay reader, to preach this Sunday. On the First Sunday after Pentecost, since at least 1334 when it was granted an official place in the Calendar of the Western Church, and in some form since the Arian Controversy of the 4th Century, the Church has celebrated the mystery of God’s very self: a Trinity of Persons, consubstantial, co-equal and co-eternal.

I suspect that the problem lies with fact that the clergy themselves are frightened of the thought of preaching about a theological concept which they do not really understand, and which they fear their congregations will not either. I cannot claim to understand the mystery of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, but I’m certainly not going to patronise you by assuming that you cannot or do not wish to understand it. At the start of this morning’s Eucharist our worship began by invoking the Name of the Trinity and making the sign of the Cross, just as Christians have done for two thousand years. As Christians we are baptised in the name of the Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. We will soon say the Nicene Creed to profess our faith in the Triune God – it’s what makes us Christians and we express that faith in our worship of Almighty God. In the Offices of the Church, Psalms conclude with the Doxology: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. This is because we SAY what our worship DOES – we give Glory to God, who created us, who redeemed us, and who sanctifies and strengthens us. Thus we celebrate not a theological concept or philosophical proposition, but rather a relationship. When we say ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost’ we are expressing what we as orthodox Christians believe. You cannot truly worship God and deny the divinity of Jesus Christ, or the procession of the Holy Spirit, for what we say and believe affects our lives and our relationship with God.

At the end of his Second Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul says to them ‘The Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all’. They are words which we continue to use, to this day because they encapsulate our faith. We celebrate the fact that God the Father loves us, and spared not His Only Son for love of us, that His Son saves us by grace, through faith, so that we are built up in love, by the Spirit.

Our relationship with the Divine is intimate: the name Father speaks of a relationship, His Son taught us to pray to Him as Our Father, and dies for us, to heal us, restore us and save us from our sins, and sends His Spirit to strengthen us. This is the faith of our baptism, by which we enter the Church, in which we are nourished by Word and Sacrament, and which gives us the Hope of eternal life in the embrace of a loving God.

The words we use to worship God matter in that they express the faith which we believe, they form us into a community of belief where what we believe affects who we are and what we do. The gift of faith, and the life of love, and the hope of eternal life are something which we do not jealously guard but rather share with the world – we are called to make disciples, to share what we have received, so that others may experience the love of God.

And like all relationships, this goes beyond words, it is something which needs to be experienced, and which we can share. It is only in our experience of this relationship that we can begin to come to understand, and we will only do so fully when we experience this in heaven, in our contemplation of the beatific vision, when we see and experience the fullness of God’s love. So then let us prepare for this by sharing in God’s self giving love at this Eucharist – where God gives himself for us, to feed us, to strengthen us, to bind us together in love for one another and him, our bread for the journey which finds its end in the contemplation of God’s love in all its fullness, and which calls us to share with the world so that it may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.

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Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

God does not love us because we are lovely or loveable; His love exists not on account of our character, but on account of His. Our highest experience is responsivenot initiative. And it is only because we are loved by Him that we are loveable.
Fulton Sheen Rejoice, 1984, 9
One of the great things about the Christian faith is that we worship a God whom we can trust, who keeps his promises. The prophet Ezekiel looks to a future when God’s people are sprinkled with clean water and gathered together. It is a promise which finds its fulfilment in the Church – we are given a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone – a generous, loving heart, one filled with the love of God, and are called to share that love with others.
          The event which the Church celebrated on Thursday, and continues to celebrate today: Our Lord’s Ascension, can be a tricky one with which to come to terms. However, just as Jesus came to earth, by the power of the Holy Spirit and took flesh in the womb of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, to share our nature, and to heal and restore us, so now Our Risen Lord, having triumphed over death and hell, rises in glory to take our human nature into the Godhead, to point us to our ultimate destiny – eternal life  with God The words of the angels in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles also points to His second coming at the end of time. His words to his assembled followers apply to us as well – you be my witnesses to the ends of the earth and you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. Their reaction is to constantly devote themselves to prayer – they have an intimate relationship with God. They don’t simply say ‘Oh well that’s lovely, let’s get on with the rest of our compartmentalised life’ but rather they trust in God, they do what he tells them to do, and all of them pray together. In having prayer at the centre of their lives God can be at work in them, and through them in the world, in the power of His Holy Spirit.

          Thus, the prayer of Jesus before His Passion takes on a deeper significance in that it finds fulfilment in the day of Pentecost. We are called to pray, to stay close to God, nourished by Word and Sacrament, and in the power of the Spirit, poured upon us in our Baptism and Confirmation, to bear witness to Christ in the world. In the Eucharist we are fed by God, and fed with God, so that we can share His risen life, and experience the love of God, the love of God seen in Christ, who gives himself for love of us, as a sacrifice, where he is both priest and victim, to restore us and our relationship with God and each other. Having prayed and being nourished by the word of God we prepare to be nourished by God, to be strengthened to pray for His Holy Spirit, and to share the love of God with others, so that we grow together in love and unity.
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Easter V

Many people when they consider religion in general and the Christian Faith in particular are wont to see it in negative terms – religion is all about what you cannot or should not do. And it is worth considering that Jesus does give negative prohibitions, and the one thing he says more than anything else is ‘Do not be afraid’. As Christians fear should not be part of who or what we are – we are one with Christ who by His death and resurrection has restored our relationship with God and each other – as we are loved we are to love God and each other, the costly self-giving love shown to us by Christ.

We see this in the way in which Stephen, one of the first deacons, and the first martyr, prays for his murderers as they stone him to death, that God will forgive them. This is love put into practice – lived out in our life and death. Stephen bears witness to Christ, regardless of the cost – he proclaims His divinity, and His victory, and encourages us to do the same, so that following Stephen’s example and aided by his prayers we may be strengthened to live out our faith in our lives.

Our not being afraid comes from our belief in God – ‘believe in God and believe in me’ we can put our trust in the God who loves us and saves us. In trusting God our faith can grow and develop – in knowing that we are loved by God and that our eternal destiny is to be with God for ever we can grow and develop within the context of this loving relationship.
Christ says ‘I am…’ on seven occasions in John’s Gospel – it picks up God’s self-revelation to Moses in Exodus 3:14 – ‘I am who I am’ and tells us something about the nature of God. Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the Way – the way for us to live our lives, and the Way to heaven, the way to reconciliation to God and each other. He is the truth, the ultimate truth of God’s love for us, and the life – life in all its fullness, eternal life with Him forever. He shows us who and what God is, and what God does, for love of us, and believing and trusting in Him, we can live His risen life.

He feeds us with Himself in Word and Sacrament, He who is the Word of God, who is the Living Bread, so that we may have life and have it to the full. As our celebration of Easter, of His Resurrection turns towards His Ascension, and looks towards Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit so that the Church may live out its faith in His strength and power we can have hope. So let us live this love, fed by God, fed with God, healed and restored by Him, trusting in Him and living out His love in our lives – to proclaim His victory and to transform the world so that it may likewise live out this costly love and trusting in God may come to believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most meet and right all might, majesty, glory, dominion and power, now and forever.
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Easter II Year A

The Cross had asked the questions; the Resurrection had answered them…. The Cross had asked ‘Why does God permit evil and sin to nail Justice to a tree?’ The Resurrection answered: ‘That sin, having done its worst, might exhaust itself and thus be overcome by Love that is stronger than either sin or death.’
          Thus there emerges the Easter lesson that the power of evil and the chaos of the moment can be defied and conquered, for the basis of our hope is not in any construct of human power but in the power of God, who has given to the evil of this earth its one mortal wound—an open tomb, a gaping sepulchre, an empty grave.
Fulton J. Sheen Cross-Ways
This morning as we rejoice in the joy of the Risen Lord, as we are filled with joy, with hope and with love, we can reflect on what the Resurrection does: when Jesus comes and stands among the disciples he says ‘Peace be with you’ Christ’s gift to the world in His Death and Resurrection is Peace, the Peace ‘which passes all understanding’. He shows the disciples his hands and side so that they can see the wounds of love, through which God’s Mercy is poured out on the world to heal it and restore it. In this peace Christ can say to them ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ as the baptised people of God the Church is to be a missionary community – one sent to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ to the world, that it may share the joy and life of the Risen Lord.
          As well as giving the Apostles the Holy Spirit, ordaining them as the first bishops of the Church, we see that the power of the Cross to bring peace to the world is also the power to absolve sins – priests and bishops can absolve the people of God in God’s name, and by God’s power – this is what the Cross achieves – reconciling us to God and each other. The Church, then, is to be a community of reconciliation, where we are forgiven and we, in turn, forgive, where we are freed from sin, its power and its effects.
          When Christ breathes on the disciples and says ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ it is this gift of God’s Holy Spirit which transforms them from frightened people sat in a locked room in fear into the confident, joyous proclaimers of the Gospel, such as Peter in his sermon to the people of Jerusalem. In Peter’s sermon we see that all that Christ is and does is confirmed by Scripture – it is the fulfilment of prophesy, such as we find in Isaiah 25:6—9:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
          As the Church we know that Jesus is the Messiah, the one who gives freedom to Israel, a freedom from sin – a bringing to completion of what God started in the Exodus, in the crossing of the Red Sea – we too are free, freed by the waters of baptism, sharing in Christ’s Death and Resurrection.
          Thomas was not present with the disciples, he cannot believe in the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection unless he sees with his own eyes, and feels with his own hands – such is his grief, such is his love for Jesus. Our Lord says to him ‘Doubt no longer but believe’ which leads to his confession ‘My Lord and my God’. Blessed are we who have not seen and yet have come to believe, and through this belief we have live in Christ’s name, we have the hope of eternal life and joy with him forever.
          The disciples go from being scared and stuck in an upper room to missionaries, evangelists, spreading the Good News around the world, regardless of the cost, even of sacrificing their own lives to bear witness to the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that he died for our sins, and that he rose again, on this day for us, that God loves us and tells us to love Him and to love one another. It is a simple and effective message which people still want to hear – we need to tell it to them, in our thoughts, our words and our actions.
          The heart of our faith and the Gospel is forgiveness – no matter how many times we mess things up, we are forgiven. It is this reckless generosity of spirit which people find hard – to believe that they toocan be forgiven, by a loving God, and by their fellow Christians. That we can, despite our manifold shortcomings be a people of love, and forgiveness, and reconciliation. That God’s Grace will in the end not abolish our nature, but perfect it, that being fed by Christ, with Christ: so that we too may become what He is. That faced with the sad emptiness of the world, and its selfishness, its greed, we can be filled with joy, and life, and hope. That like the first apostles we too can spread the Gospel: that the world may believe.
It’s a tall order, perhaps, but one which God promises us. That is what the reality of the Resurrection is all about, it’s either nothing, in which case we are the most pitiable of deluded fools – idiots who are more to be pitied than blamed, orit is the single most important thing in the world. It should affect allof us, every part of our life, every minute of every day, allthat we do, all that we say, all that we are. This may not fit in with a reserved British mentality, we think we’re supposed to be polite and not force our views on others. But this simply will not do. We are, after all, dealing with people’s souls, their eternal salvation, it’s a serious matter. And what we offer people is entirely free, can change their lives for the better, and make life worth living.

So let us be filled with the joy of the Resurrection this Easter, let us share that joy with others, may it fill our lives and those of whom we meet with the joy and love of God, who has triumphed and who offers us all new life in Him, that all that we do, all that we are, all that we say or think may give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, dominion and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day

From the Jerusalem Catecheses

The bread of Heaven and the cup of salvation 

On the night he was betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples and said: “Take, eat: this is my body.” He took the cup, gave thanks and said: “Take, drink: this is my blood.” Since Christ himself has declared the bread to be his body, who can have any further doubt? Since he himself has said quite categorically, This is my blood, who would dare to question it and say that it is not his blood?

Therefore, it is with complete assurance that we receive the bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. His body is given to us under the symbol of bread, and his blood is given to us under the symbol of wine, in order to make us by receiving them one body and blood with him. Having his body and blood in our members, we become bearers of Christ and sharers, as Saint Peter says, in the divine nature.

Once, when speaking to the Jews, Christ said: Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you shall have no life in you. This horrified them and they left him. Not understanding his words in a spiritual way, they thought the Saviour wished them to practise cannibalism.

Under the old covenant there was showbread, but it came to an end with the old dispensation to which it belonged. Under the new covenant there is bread from heaven and the cup of salvation. These sanctify both soul and body, the bread being adapted to the sanctification of the body, the Word, to the sanctification of the soul.

Do not, then, regard the eucharistic elements as ordinary bread and wine: they are in fact the body and blood of the Lord, as he himself has declared. Whatever your senses may tell you, be strong in faith.

You have been taught and you are firmly convinced that what looks and tastes like bread and wine is not bread and wine but the body and the blood of Christ. You know also how David referred to this long ago when he sang: Bread gives strength to man’s heart and makes his face shine with the oil of gladness. Strengthen your heart, then, by receiving this bread as spiritual bread, and bring joy to the face of your soul.

May purity of conscience remove the veil from the face of your soul so that by contemplating the glory of the Lord, as in a mirror, you may be transformed from glory to glory in Christ Jesus our Lord. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

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Good Friday


The green tree was Christ himself; the dry tree the world. He was the green tree of life transplanted from Eden; the dry tree was Jerusalem first, and then the unconverted world. If the Romans so treated him who was innocent, how would they treat the Truth that is in his Church; in an uneasy conscience perhaps he beckoned you to his confessional; in a passing prayer he called you to greater prayerfulness….You accepted the truth, you confessed your sins, you perfected your spiritual life, and lo! in those moments when you thought you were losing everything, you found everything; when you thought you were going into your grave, you were walking in the newness of life….The antiphon of the Empty Tomb was striking on the chords of your heart. It was not you who died; it was sin. It was not Christ who died it was death.
Fulton J. Sheen The Eternal Galilean
So much of the action of this week has taken place so that Scripture may be fulfilled. What God told the people of Israel through his prophets comes about in His Son’s death. It shows us in the clearest possible way that what we see in the prophetic descriptions is true.
          If the truth be told, the suffering, the rejection, torture, and death of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, is beyond our understanding. We stand silent before the Cross, unable to take the cruelty, the horror and the profound beauty of it. It is a mystery, the mystery of God’s love: an act of loving service, the power of silent love overcoming a world of political scheming, deception, self-interest and sin. The chief priests and elders can only think of a threat to earthly power; they fail to see that here, now, is the salvation for which they long. That God’s own son should come from heaven and die to save a sinner like you or me is extraordinary. We are shown today in the clearest possible terms how much God loves us: that there is no length to which he will not go to save us, to embrace us his prodigal children. The chief priests and elders think that they’re ridding themselves of an heretic, a potential troublemaker, a fool who claims to be the son of God and King of Israel. When Pilate asks “Quid est Veritas – What is Truth?” he does not wait for an answer, or understand that the source of all truth, the word of God incarnate, is stood in front of him: ‘est vir qui adest – it is the man who is present, who is standing in front of him’. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the whole world.
After scourging him the soldiers put a purple robe around our Lord, they crown him with thorns, and give him a reed for a sceptre. They think they’re being clever and funny: they’re having a laugh, mocking a man about to be executed, but this is God showing the world what true kingship is: it is not pomp, or power, the ability to have one’s own way, but the Silent Way of suffering love. It shows us what God’s glory is really like: it turns our human values on their head and inaugurates a new age, according to new values, and restores a relationship broken by human sin.
          In being raised upon the Cross, our Lord is not dying the death of a common criminal, but rather reigning in glory – the glory of God’s free love given to restore humanity, to have new life in him. His hands and feet and side are pierced, as wounds of love, to pour out God’s healing life upon the world. In his obedience to the Father’s will, he puts to an end the disobedience of humanity’s first parent. Here mankind who fell because of a tree are raised to new life in Christ through his hanging on the tree.  Christ is a willing victim, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Silent lamb led to his slaughter, the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep that have gone astray. At the time when the Passover lambs are slaughtered in the temple, upon the Altar of the Cross, Christ as both priest and victim offers himself as the true lamb to take away the sins of the whole world, offers his death so that we may have life, new life in Him.
          Death and hell, the reward of sin, have no power over us: for in dying, and being laid in a stranger’s tomb, Christ will go down to Hell, to break down its doors, to lead souls to heaven, to alter the nature of the afterlife, once and for all. Just when the devil thinks he’s won, then in his weakness and in his silence Christ overcomes the world, the flesh, and the devil. The burden of sin which separates humanity from God is carried on the wood of the Cross.
On the way to Calvary our Lord falls three times such is the way, such was the burden, so we too as Christians, despite being reconciled to God by the Cross, will fall on our road too. We will continue to sin, but also we will continue to ask God for his love and mercy. But those arms which were opened on the cross will always continue to embrace the world with God’s love.
We don’t deserve it, that’s the point, but it is there to help us become the people God wants us to be: to be strengthened, fed, healed, and restored by him: to die to sin and be raised to new life, and to share that life and love with others, that the world might believe and be saved through him. Christ pays the debt which we cannot to reconcile humanity to his loving and merciful Father. He shows us the meaning of true love: that we might live it out in our lives, forgiving one another, bearing our own cross, and living lives of love for love of him who died for love of us.

          We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life, and our resurrection, through him we are saved and made free.
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The Mass of the Lord’s Supper


Since our Divine Lord came to die, it was fitting that there be a Memorial of his death. Since he was God, as well a man, and since he never spoke of his death without speaking of his Resurrection, should he not himself institute the precise memorial of his own death? And this is exactly what he did the night of the Last Supper….His memorial was instituted, not because he would die and be buried, but because he would live again after the Resurrection. His Memorial would be the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets; it would be one in which there would be a Lamb sacrificed to commemorate spiritual freedom; above all it would be a Memorial of a New Covenant…a Testament between God and man.
Fulton J. Sheen Life of Christ
My brothers and sisters, on this most sacred night Our Lord and Saviour did three things: He washed his disciples’ feet, he instituted the Eucharist, and inaugurated the priesthood of the New Covenant. We have come together on this most holy night to enter into the Mystery of Our Lord’s Passion: to be with him in the Upper Room and in the garden of Gethsemane, and to prepare to celebrate his suffering and death – to behold the glory of the Lord and his love for the world he created and came to save.
          Obedient to the Old Covenant, Our Lord and his disciples prepare to celebrate the Passover: the mystery of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt to the new life in the Promised Land. While they are at table Our Lord lays aside his outer garments and takes a basin and a towel and washes the Apostles’ feet. He then says to them ‘Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.’ (Jn 13:12–16 ESV) God, who created the universe and who will redeem it, kneels and washes the feet of sinful humanity. This is true love in action. Only having done this can Jesus say ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’(Jn 13:34–35 ESV) What he says to his disciples he says to us here tonight. As Christians we are to love him and one another, we are to show this love in all that we say, or think, or do, so that the world may believe.
          Christ then takes bread and wine and blesses them and gives them to his disciples. Again, this would look and feel like the Passover celebration to which they were accustomed. Except that before he broke and distributed the bread he said ‘Take, Eat. This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And before the Cup was distributed he said ‘Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ He feeds his disciples with his own body and blood to strengthen them, to show them what he is about to do for love of them and of the whole world. When, earlier in his public ministry, he has fed people he taught them in the synagogue at Capernaum ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.  Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me.’ (Jn 6:52–7 ESV). ‘Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, ….  just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God’ [Dix The Shape of the Liturgy 744] Our Lord institutes the Eucharist, the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, to feed us, to nourish us, so that we may become what he is, that we may have a foretaste of heaven and the divine life of love, of the beatific vision of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Holy, Eternal and Consubstantial Trinity. It re-presents, it makes present again, here and now, the sacrifice of Calvary, where upon the Altar of the Cross, as both priest and victim, Christ sacrifices himself for the sins of the whole world. He is the Lamb of God, foreshadowed in the ram offered by Abraham and Isaac, in the bread and wine offered by Melchisedek. In the blood and water which will flow from his side we are washed and creation is renewed. Christ gives the Church the Eucharist so that his saving work may continue, so that people may be given a pledge and token of their eternal life in him.
          Christ sets apart his disciples so that they may be priests of the new covenant in his blood, so that they may continue to share in the offering of himself for their sins and those of the whole world. They are washed, and fed, and taught – prepared for the work of the Gospel: spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ and feeding his faithful with his body and blood. They are told to do this and they still do. Never have such words and actions had such a profound effect in all of human history. This is the glory of God: in transforming bread and wine into his very self for the life of the whole world – a sign of love and a pledge and foretaste of eternal life. This is love that we can touch and feel and taste – given for us so that we might have life in him.

So let us come to him, to be fed by Him, and with Him, healed and restored by Him, through the sacraments of the Church, his body, so that we may be prepared to share in his Passion and Death and to celebrate with joy the triumph of His Paschal victory, so that we and all the earth may give praise to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory dominion and power, now and forever.
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Palm Sunday Evensong

Gratitude is characteristic only of the humble. The egotistic are so impressed by their own importance that they take everything given them as if it were their due. They have no room in their hearts for recollection of the undeserved favours they have received.

Fulton Sheen On Being Human 1982: 325

In this evening’s second lesson we are given the parable of Lazarus and Dives. Jesus has been in the company of Pharisees, members of a religious elite, figures of authority, who have been described as ‘lovers of money’. It’s always slightly uncomfortable when clergy are faced with Our Lord’s views on religious authorities. His audience are selfish, avaricious, self-satisfied, and arrogant: we need to be careful that the Church never becomes like this.

The parable the has at its heart the important message that charity and generosity are at the heart of our faith. We see this charity and generosity above all in Our Lord’s life, his preaching, his healing, his miracles, his passion, and death. They act as a paradigm, an example for us to follow. We need to live our lives so that they look like his.

The rich man is singularly unable to do this. Even when he is in Hades he wants Lazarus to come and cool his tongue, and to go and warn his brothers: even now he’s still treating Lazarus like a servant – giving him orders, making him work for him, even in death he is still arrogant, and self-absorbed, he needs to learn humility, to know his need of God.

Quite rightly Jesus can say that the Rich Man’s brothers have the Law & the Prophets: as we know from our 1928 Prayerbooks that we hace Jesus’ own summary:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind, and all your soul, and with all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself – on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

It’s all about faith & action: putting it into practice in our lives, it’s exactly what Jesus is doing in Holy Week, in his passion and death, showing us how much God loves us and the lengths to which he will go to heal and restore humanity – for love of us, each of us, you and me.

How do we respond to this other than living it out in our lives: living out the same costly self-giving sacrificial love in our lives, so that we can be like Jesus, fed by him in Word and Sacrament, becoming ever more like Him. The world around us may not believe, it’s too selfish, too self-absorbed, to be like Jesus. The cost is too great, and yet it is what our faith is all about. Following Jesus means being like Him, doing what he did, and how he did it, so that we may be more and more conformed to him, living out our faith and drawing others to him so that the world may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit …

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Palm Sunday 2014

Most people rather like the idea of a Royal visit: crowds, flag-waving: a chance for a celebration, a bit of a do. Yet what we are celebrating is far more than that.
And so it begins: a week which begins with Our Lord and Saviour making a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, hailed as the Messiah, a cause for celebration and joy. It is a week which will see Him betrayed, arrested, tried and killed as a common criminal. Strangely enough, the world around us can still be just as fickle, just as quick to turn someone from hero into pariah. Lest we think that somehow we’re better, more advanced, more civilised, as though we’ve learned our lesson. The plain unvarnished truth is that we’re not. We need the annual reminder which the church gives through its liturgical year – a chance to be confronted by stark realities, and to be brought up short by them. What Christ says and does in this coming week He says to us, he does for us – to HEAL us, to RESTORE us, so that we can live His risen life here and now, as the people of God, fed by Him, fed with Him, sharing in His Death and Resurrection though our baptism, trusting in Him.

          In our pilgrimage through Lent, through our prayer, our fasting, we hope to increase our closeness to Christ, so that following Him, and meditating upon His Passion, we may be transformed by His love, following in His footsteps, entering into the mystery of God’s love poured out on the world. In the next few days we will go to the Upper Room, to have our feet washed, we watch and wait with Christ, we walk the way of the Cross, we gaze upon Christ crucified to see just how much God in Christ loves us – the lengths to which God will go to demonstrate that love, and make it a reality in our lives. Let us prepare to celebrate Easter: Our Lord’s rising from the tomb, His conquering death, so that we may have new life in Him. 
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Lent V Year A

As we continue our Lenten pilgrimage towards the Cross, towards the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, today we are given a glimpse of what they lead to, Easter and the Resurrection of Our Lord. It reminds us that what we are celebrating is God’s love of us. Our Faith, what we believe, is in a Saviour who dies for us, and who rises again, to show us that death is not the end, that we can have hope that this life is not all that there is, that we are called to something greater, something more lasting, eternity in God’s loving presence.
          The Old Testament reading this morning from the prophet Ezekiel points to a future, it finds its fulfilment in Christ, the fulfilment of all prophesy, to which all prophesy points, and finds its fullest meaning. It reminds us of the truth of scripture, found in him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. As those who are in Christ we can trust in a promise clearly signposted in Scripture, which finds its meaning in Him. As those who are baptised into His Death and Resurrection, we are filled with His Spirit to have new life in Him.
          At the heart of this morning’s Gospel is the encounter between Jesus and Martha, which ends as follows: ‘‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’’ Through our belief in Christ we may have eternal life in Him. We need to believe and trust in Him. He raises Lazarus to point to His own resurrection, to explain what will happen, to give people hope, to strengthen their faith and to help them to live out His love in their lives. As we prepare to enter the mystery of Our Lord’s Passion and Death, we can do so filled with hope, with our faith renewed and strengthened, and with a firm resolve to live out the costly self-giving love of Our Lord in our lives.

          But we can only hope to do this if we do it together: supporting each other through prayer, nourished by the sacraments, by meeting together regularly to be fed with Word and Sacrament, so that we can be strengthened, built up in love, together, in the power of the Spirit, to live out the love of God in the World, so that it may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day from Mother Mary Clare SLG

The only way we can know the Spirit of God is by complete humility. He does not propound theories for us to follow. Rather, he helps us in the going, in the doing, in the self-loss, in the throwing of our whole selves into following the naked Christ, ourselves naked. Then things can happen, for the Holy Spirit is power whereby we may learn to hear truth.
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Lent IV Year A


As we celebrate motherhood, the love and nurture of mothers, the selflessness and devotion for which everyone one of us has great cause to be thankful, we need to remember that Christian motherhood finds its greatest expression in the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and is rooted in the motherhood of the Church, which nurtures us in our faith, which cares for us, so that we may grow in our faith and develop into fully-grown adult Christians, regular in our prayer and our attendance Sunday by Sunday, formed evermore into the likeness of Christ, fed by Him with Word and Sacrament, nourished and nurtured by Him.
          In this morning’s Gospel we see a man in need, it is not question of his sin, or his parents’ sin, but rather of a human being in need of healing, like each and every one of us. He wants to see, while those around him, who can see display blindness. He is told to go and wash in the pool of Siloam, he obeys and is healed. The Pharisees cannot agree as to who or what Jesus is; the man can state that Jesus is a prophet, but it does not end there. The Pharisees insist on questioning the man again, he can only reply ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen.’ When he meets Jesus again, he can say regarding the Son of Man ‘tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus tells him that he is speaking to him, and he says ‘Lord I believe’ and he worshipped him.  We see a man on a journey of faith, like each and every one of us, who experiences the healing presence of God in his life, and is brought to a deeper faith in God. He is nurtured, and through his belief, his trust in God, his life is changed.
          As we continue our Lenten pilgrimage, through prayer, fasting and works of charity, we prepare ourselves and our lives to celebrate the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, we should be encouraged that at its heart what we celebrate is the self-giving love of God, poured out on the world to heal us, to restore our humanity, so that we like the blind man may see, so that we may understand what God does for us, so that we may have life in all its fullness in Him. We need to have faith and trust in Him, nurtured by the Church, built up in love, fed by God, fed with God, so that we can have a foretaste of heaven, and the joy of eternal life with Christ, healed and restored by Him. This is no private matter, something we put on for an hour on Sunday morning, but rather an all-encompassing reality which has the power to change our lives and transform the entire world, a world in need of the healing love of God, to turn from the blindness of this world to the new sight of the Kingdom, a place of nurture and healing, where we can all experience the love of God, shown to us in Christ, who gave Himself for love of us, so that we might see, so that we might be fully alive, encouraged and built up in love, and sharing that love with others in everything which we say, or think, or do, so that the world may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day from Sr Mary Clare

Today we can easily become paralysed by a sense that there is nothing we can do in the face of so much suffering, such a lack of love and justice in man’s relationship with man, but the Cross of Christ stands at the heart of it all, and the prayer of Christ, now as always is the answer to man’s need.
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Lent I Year A


This morning’s Epistle from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans really hits the nail on the head – humanity is sinful, it isn’t comfortable to be reminded of this, in fact the world around us would much rather forget this fact, but Lent is a time for facing home truths, for being confronted with the truth about the human condition – we’re not as good as we think we are. If this were the whole story then I suspect that we could and indeed should feel utterly miserable and wretched. Thankfully it isn’t – our vocation as Christians is to be joyful, even when we are penitent, for the simple reason that we can have hope in Christ, that in our baptism we share in His life, death and resurrection. Paul can rejoice in the ‘abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness’ poured out by God in Christ, who on the Cross takes our sins upon Himself, who pays the debt which we cannot, who restores the relationship between us and God, and between ourselves. The Sacrifice of Calvary is re-presented here, today, so that we, the people of God can be fed by God, fed with God, healed and restored, and given a foretaste of heaven.
            As we undertake the spiritual journey of Lent we spend forty days in prayer, in penitence, and fasting, so that we may celebrate with joy Our Lord and Saviour’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. We enter the desert of repentance, turning away from sin, turning to God, to love Him, to trust Him, to ask Him to heal us and restore us. We do what we do because Christ has done it before. At the start of His public ministry, Jesus goes to pray and fast, and we follow His example. He was led by the Spirit, as God Incarnate He is God, and His life demonstrates the unity of the Trinity. He’s been fasting for forty days, he’s starving – he’s a human being, he isn’t some superhero who is immune to human feelings. He is tempted by the devil to turn the stones around Him into bread; it is the temptation to be relevant, a temptation into which our contemporary church seems all too willing to give. His reply to the devil, that man does not live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God, reminds us that as Christians we are fed by Word and Sacrament, nourished by God so that we may grow in faith.
            Christ is taken to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and told to throw Himself down – it is the temptation to be spectacular, again something which the contemporary church seems rather keen on. But nothing should be done for show; we are to follow Christ simply and humbly, trusting in Him. The devil wants to put God to the test, it is an act of disobedience, contrary to the humble obedience which sees us live trusting in God, relying upon Him, formed by Him.
            Christ is tempted to turn away from God the Father, to worship a false god. He is offered much in material terms – all the world and its splendour – wealth and power – a huge temptation for humanity, and one into which many people give. The Church too has given in, and continues so to do. We have to be weak, powerless and vulnerable, so that God can be at work in us, as we humbly worship and serve Him. It may look foolish in worldly terms, but that is the point – we’re not meant to be conformed to the world, but as we seek to grow in faith, in humility, and obedience, we allow God to be at work in us – taking us and refashioning us.
            So as we undertake to follow Christ in our Lenten pilgrimage we do so in our weakness, so that we may rely upon God, and Him alone. We do so joyfully, knowing that Christ’s victory which we will celebrate at Easter is total and complete – it is justification and life for all.
Let us pray that we may receive grace to follow Christ so that we may prepare to celebrate His Death and Resurrection and sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for Quinquagesima


“Three important scenes of Our Lord’s life took place on mountains.  On one, He preached the Beatitudes, the practice of which would bring a Cross from the world; on the second, He showed the glory that lay beyond the Cross; and on the third, He offered Himself in death as a prelude to His glory and that of all who would believe in His name”
Fulton Sheen The Life of Christ 1970: 158
The world around us has a good idea of what it thinks glory is: most of the time it looks like success and triumph, just think of people winning a gold medal at the Olympics, people waving flags – a bit like St Davids on St David’s Day but a lot more noisy.
Rather than concentrate on human ideas of glory, this morning’s readings give us a glimpse of God’s glory. In the Book of Exodus we see Moses going up Mount Sinai to receive the Law, the Ten Commandments – to show Israel what to believe and how to live. Moses spends time in the closer presence of God, so that when he comes back down the mountain he is shining.
Jesus takes his closest disciples with him to show them something of the glory of God, he appears with Moses and Elijah to show them and us that Jesus is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets; he is the Messiah, and the Son of God. Peter responds in a moment with a very human response, he knows that it is good to be here and it helps to change his life. When God speaks he tells us three things about Jesus: he is the Son of God, he is loved and we should listen to him – what he says and does should affect us and our lives – we have to be open to the possibility of being changed by God. Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone about this until after he has risen from the dead. The detail is important: Jesus will suffer and die upon the cross, taking our sins upon Himself, restoring our relationship with God and each other – this is real glory – not worldly glory but the glory of God’s saving love poured out on the world to heal it and restore it.
That is why we are here this morning – to see the self same sacrifice here with our own eyes, to touch and to taste what God’s love is really like – to go up the mountain and experience the glory of God, what God is really like, so that God’s love may transform us, given a foretaste of heaven, and prepared to be transformed by God. This is true glory – the glory of the Cross, the glory of suffering love lavished upon the world. The Transfiguration looks to the Cross to help us prepare for Lent, to begin a period of fasting and prayer, of spiritual spring cleaning, of getting back on track with God and each other, so that we may be prepared to celebrate Our Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, to behold true majesty, true love and true glory – the kind that can change the world and last forever, for eternity, not the fading glory of the world, here today and gone tomorrow, but something everlasting, wonderful.
So let us behold God’s glory, here, this morning, let is touch and taste God’s glory, let us prepare to be transformed by his love, through the power of His Holy Spirit, built up as living stones, a temple to God’s glory, healed, and restored, reconciled, and given a foretaste of eternal life with him, so that God may take our lives and transform us, so that everything that we say, or think, or do, may proclaim him, let us tell the world about him, so that it too may believe and trust and have new life in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed, as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day from Mother Mary Clare SLG


You are dedicated to love and reconciliation. Your life is directed to that end, and you must learn to stand at the Cross. It is a long learning, a long road, but a sure road if it is up the hill to Calvary.

It is a road on which you, by being stripped of all self, may mediate to the world the dawning knowledge of the glory that descends.

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Sexagesima Evensong


Paul had to begin with the Cross and then retrace his steps backward to Calvary. To him and to his people, the prophetic connection between suffering and glory were repugnant. The Jew and the Greek both had a horror of death; to the Greek there was a physical aversion; to the Jew it was a moral shame. And yet the glorified Christ began Paul’s conversion with the Cross—at that very point where all national characteristics were assailed. He had to see Christ repersecuted, recrucified, renailed. And when he asked who it was who questioned, there flashed the vision, ‘I am Jesus, Whom you are persecuting’ (Acts 26:16)
Fulton Sheen Those Mysterious Priests 1974: 10
There is something truly wonderful in the fact that one of the foremost persecutors of the Early Church, Saul of Tarsus, is converted and becomes the Apostle to the Gentiles. It reminds us of the fact that no-one is beyond God’s reach, that a second chance, a fresh start, and a new beginning is on offer for each and everyone who turns to Christ. The Gospel is truly Good News, and the saving work of God in Christ Jesus, Our Lord and Saviour, is something which we should both celebrate and share, with everyone whom we meet, at all times, and in all places.
        As a result of his conversion experience upon the road to Damascus, the man who had clamoured for the stoning of Stephen now prizes Christ above all else. When he writes to the church in Colossae he begins by singing the praise of the God who loves him and who saves him.
        Christ is the image of the invisible God, the God whom we cannot see, cannot know, and cannot understand becomes visible and vulnerable in the person of Christ Jesus – he is born as a baby in Bethlehem, he needs his parents love and care. He is tempted, but he resists in order to show us how to live our lives. He preaches the Good News of the Kingdom, calling humanity to repent for the Kingdom is close at hand, he heals the sick to show us what God’s love is like in action. But most of all, He suffers and dies for us – he pays the debt which we cannot. God is Christlike and in Him is no un-Christlikeness at all – Jesus shows us who and what God is. He is the invisible made visible, the incomprehensible made comprehensible, the remote made personal. He is the only-begotten Son of God, begotten not made, consubstantial, co-eternal, and co-equal divinity. As the Word of God He is the creative force through which the World was made, God spake and it was done, it is through the Word of God that all Creation springs into being. All that there is owes its very existence to God – the God who suffered and died for love of us.
        As well as stressing the supreme majesty of Christ, Paul is at pains to stress how it is that in Christ all things hold together – this is the cohesive power of God: to unite, to hold together, to reconcile, to redeem, to love. Christ is the head of the body, the Church. We are all baptised into Him, into His Death and Resurrection, we are nourished by Him in Word and Sacrament, we are fed by Him, fed with Him, with His Body and Blood under the outward forms of Bread and Wine, to share His Divine life, and to be given a foretaste of Heaven, so that our lives and souls may be transformed by Him, so that we may grow together in Unity and Love, which is His Will. He is the beginning and the end of all things, the Alpha and the Omega, firstborn from the dead so that we might share His risen life. We honour Him, we honour God, in our praise and worship, and in our lives when we live out our faith, when we live as God wants us to, so that in all things God might be pre-eminent – so that God is the most important thing in our life.
        For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell – he is true God and true man: two natures, two wills, united without change, division, confusion, or separation. ‘Was pleased to dwell’ for such are the loving purposes of God – and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. This is the heart of our faith, and the Good News of the Gospel, God became man for our sake. And if we want to know how much God loves us, we can see in Christ – God loves us this much (extends arms) the arms of God are flung wide upon the Cross to embrace the world with God’s love – this is what it takes to reconcile to himself all things on earth or in heaven. This is the price God pays for love of us – for you and me, each and every one of us, everyone who has ever lived, or who will ever live. In this God makes peace by the blood of His Cross, this is true glory, this is how God reigns in majesty, and shows that He is supreme, and over all things, through dying the death of a common criminal, through suffering for our sake, and so we can say with St Paul in his Letter to the Galatians “We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection; through him we are saved and made free.” (Galatians 6:14) Add ImageTo him be all glory, now and forever,

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Homily for Sexagesima


‘Set your heart on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness’
In the Gospels over the past few weeks Jesus has been telling us quite a lot about how we should live our lives. This concentration should alert us to two facts: it is important and it isn’t easy. How we live our lives matters, as it is how we put our faith into practice and also it forms our moral character: we become what we do. Living a Christian life isn’t a matter of giving our assent to principles, or signing on the dotted line, it’s about a relationship with God and each other, which we demonstrate not only by what we believe, but how our beliefs shape our actions. 
The call to holiness of life is rooted in the goodness of the created order: God saw all that he had made and it was good. The path to human flourishing starts with the response of humanity to the goodness of God shown in the goodness of the world. It continues with the hope which we have in Christ that all things will be restored in Him, for in this hope we were saved. 
Living out our faith in the world can be a tricky business: we cannot serve both God and money. A world which cares only for profit and greed, for the advancement of self, is surely a cruel uncaring world which is entirely opposed to the values of the Gospel. The Church has to speak out against poverty, injustice, and corruption, in order to call the world back to its senses, to say to it ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is close at hand’. The kingdom is the hope that we will live in a world where the hungry are fed, the naked clothed, and all humanity lives in the peace of God. Christianity is a radical faith which looks to nothing less than the complete transformation of the world – you may see us as idealistic, as dreamers not rooted in reality, but this Kingdom is a reality here and now, and it’s up to us to help advance it. 
Such is the power of advertising that we are forever being bombarded with enticements to buy new clothes, to diet, to celebrate, to spend money so that it makes us happy, but also so that we feel guilty, we take out loans to finance our extravagance. Against this we need to hear the words of Jesus ‘Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing’. But, I hear you cry; you’re wearing fine clothes, and standing in a pulpit telling us about this. Indeed I am, but priests and deacons wear beautiful vestments not to point to themselves, not as a display, put to point us to God, the source of all beauty, to honour Him, in all that we do or say, to remind us why we are here today, to be fed by God, to be fed with God, in Word and Sacrament, so that we may be strengthened and transformed. A God who loves us so much that he died for us on the Cross, the same sacrifice present upon the altar here – given for us to touch and taste God’s love, this is the reality of God’s love in our lives.
So how do we respond to it? This is the kingdom of God, right here, right now, we’re living it, and we need to trust the God who loves us and saves us, and live out our faith in our lives, we need to embody the values of the Kingdom, and help others to live them so that we can carry on God’s work. Every day when we pray the Lord’s Prayer we say ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. As we look towards Lent let us all encourage each other to do God’s will in our lives so that we may hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom and do His will, living out our faith in our lives, helping each other to do this and inviting others in to share the peace and love and joy of the Kingdom, so that the world around us may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed, as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Year A (Septuagesima)



Septuagesima, roughly seventy days before Easter, or three weeks before the start of Lent, reminds us that in the Church names and time are important things: they are used to divide and to mark, to draw our attention to things. Historically, the countdown to Lent is a chance to change our focus, with Candlemas our celebration of Christmas drew to a close, and we began to look to the Cross, to Our Lord and Saviour’s Passion. So we begin the countdown to our Lenten observance of prayer and fasting, we begin to get ready to prepare for the most solemn part of the Christian Year: Holy Week and Easter. It’s the Church’s equivalent of an advanced warning – we need to be on the lookout, we need to be prepared, rather like dealing with the current spate of bad weather and power cuts.
What we do and how we do it are important things, and they matter – there are times when we make the sign of the Cross, when the names of the Trinity, the Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit are mentioned, we bow our heads at the name of Jesus, and we bow or genuflect to altars and aumbries, from which we are fed with the Body and Blood of Christ to honour the God who loves us and who saves us. Many of us may have received flowers or other tokens of affection this week – they demonstrate in a physical way the feelings which we have inside. The church’s ritual is just like this – it enacts what it represents and allows us to make a physical demonstration of the faith which we have inside us. The gestures are not empty; rather they are full of meaning, and full of faith.
What we say, and what we do matter. For a start being a Christian isn’t something we just do for an hour on a Sunday morning, without any connection to the other 167 hours in a week. We enter the Church through baptism, and through prayer and the sacraments, being fed with the Word of God and His Body and Blood, we can be transformed to be like the one who saves us, and who loves us. It doesn’t cost us any money, it’s free, it’s all gift – the grace of God, poured out on us, on you and me, to heal us and to restore us. You’d be a fool to turn this down, wouldn’t you?
It is free, but with it there comes a commitment: a commitment to Christ and His Church, to living our lives in a way which is recognisably Christ-like. This morning’s Gospel tells us that we need to be careful – even the words which we use matter. To be a part of the Christian community has as its basis and starting point reconciliation: reconciliation to God and each other – we need to confess our sins, our faults, and our failings to God, and using the ministry of a priest. It isn’t something which we should leave to the secular courts, or the law of the land, because what is at stake is the state of our souls and our relationship with Christ and with His Body, the Church.
All of our life matters, even the smallest thing, even a glance. It matters because we are what we do, and what we do helps to form our moral character – we get used to it, it becomes normal and instinctive, it is how we put our faith into practice in our lives. It’s not easy, it’s difficult, and I’m not standing here as a moral super-hero telling people off, but rather as a sinner redeemed by God’s love and mercy, who knows that it’s something which we cannot do alone, we need God, and we need each other – it’s a community effort, and through God’s mercy, and our prayer and support we can be built as living stones as a temple to God’s glory. We can do it together, we are doing it, but we need to keep on trying, together – living simple, transparent lives, letting our ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and our ‘No’ be ‘No’, so that the whole of our lives together proclaims the faith of our hearts, that we are set free to live the life of the Kingdom here and now, that we are prepared to keep renewing our commitment to God and each other, so that the world around us may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed, as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Year A


A friend of mine, who doesn’t go to church or call themselves a Christian once said to me ‘There’s something strange about Christians’ I agreed with them as they had, however unwittingly, stated a profound truth: we should be something other, there should be something strange, or unusual about us – to be a Christian is to be profoundly counter-cultural and to stand up for something profoundly different to the world around us.
What we believe as Christians and how we live our lives are intrinsically linked: our actions should be grounded in our beliefs, and they should be a demonstration of our faith in our lives. In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus says that we are the light of the world: we should not be hidden under a bushel, hiding away our faith as a matter of private devotion which does not affect our lives, so that it cannot be seen by others. By putting a light on a stand it can shed its light around and shine in the darkness. By living out our faith in our lives we let our light shine, so that others may both follow our example and give glory to God for the life of a faithful Christian.
            In Matthew’s Gospel we have over the last few weeks been following the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, he has preached repentance, for the Kingdom of God is at hand, he has called disciples, he has healed the sick, and now in the Fifth Chapter he has shown the world how God wants us to live in the Beatitudes. We are to be poor in Spirit, to know our need of God, to rely up Him, rather than ourselves, we are to show mercy, to be pure in heart, peacemakers, and for all this we shall be persecuted. It was all going rather well up to that last point, but it is an uncomfortable truth that in living out the faith of the Gospel in our lives will cause us to face persecution and ridicule. We will be hailed as hypocrites whenever we fail, and fail we will – but surely a hypocrite is someone who fails but who denies it, who carries on as if nothing has happened, whereas Christians are open about it – we confess our sins, our failures, our shortcomings, we seek God’s mercy and rely upon Him, in His love and grace to heal and restore us, to help us onward in our journey of faith.
            Jesus calls us to live the life of the Kingdom, here and now – it’s radical, it’s dangerous, and it has the power to completely change the world – the values of the Kingdom are radically counter-cultural in that we do live our lives by the values of the world, but rather those of the Kingdom of God: love, mercy, forgiveness, generosity, there is no place here for fear, greed, anger, or the like. We are called to live like Jesus, to live in Him, to enter into new life in Him, through Baptism, to be fed by Him in Word and Sacrament – to be fed with Him, with His Body and Blood, to that He shared our human nature might transform us, might give us a foretaste here on earth of Heaven, to prepare us for life with Him. That is why we, the people of God are here, today, to feed in this sacred banquet, our souls’ true food. From the start of Jesus’ public ministry He talks about persecution and rejection, even now He is looking to the Cross, to Calvary, where the relationship between the human and the divine is healed and restored. That sacrifice is present, here, today, under the outward forms of bread and wine, to heal us, to restore us, to strengthen us so that we can live out our faith in our lives.
            Christ calls the disciples, he calls us to be salt, salt which enhances the flavour of food, which preserves it, and saves it from decay. We are called to show through the living out of our faith in our lives that to be in Christ is to have life in all its fullness, all its richness, in Christ who loves us and saves us we can be freed from sin, we can turn away from the moral decay of the world around us, to live the life of the Kingdom here and now, so that our faith and lives proclaim the truth of God’s saving work, in us, the holy people of God, ransomed, healed, restored forgiven, and fed with the bread of angels, to invite the world to share in the heavenly banquet and sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for Candlemas

Today the Church celebrates the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and commonly called Candlemas. We are not quite so used to ideas of ritual purity inherent in the Thanksgiving for a woman after Childbirth, which used to be described as the Churching of Women. The Holy Family go to the Temple to give thanks to God and to comply with the Law: they demonstrate obedience, they listen to what God says and do it – as such they are a model for all Christian families to follow.
            When they go to the Temple the Holy Family encounter Simeon, a man of faith and holiness, devoted to God, and looking for the consolation of Israel, he knows that he will not die until he sees the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed, and the Saviour of the World. As he takes the child Jesus in his arms he prays ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared : before the face of all people; To be a light to lighten the Gentiles : and to be the glory of thy people Israel.’ The promise made to him by, revealed through His Holy Spirit has been fulfilled in the six-week-old infant in his arms. As Christ was made manifest to the Gentiles at Epiphany, so now His saving message is proclaimed, so that the world may know that its salvation has come in the person of Jesus Christ. Simeon speaks to Our Lord’s Mother of her Son’s future, and the pain she will endure. Before he dies Simeon is looking to the Cross, the means by which our salvation is wrought, the Cross at which Mary will stand to see humanity freed from its sin through the love and mercy of God, through grace, the free gift of God in Christ. So as Candlemas concludes our Celebration of Christmas, of the mystery of the Incarnation, so to it points to that which gives it its true meaning: the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
            That is why we are here this morning, to be fed by Christ, to be fed with Christ, truly present in His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity – God whom we can touch and taste. A God who shares His Divine Life with us, so that we can be transformed by Him, built up as living stones as a temple to His Glory, given a foretaste of Heaven here on Earth. This is our soul’s true food, the bread for the journey of faith, a re-presentation of the sacrifice which sets us free to live for Him, to live with Him, through Him and in Him.
            The significance of what is happening is not just recognised by Simeon, but also by Anna, a holy woman, a woman of prayer, a woman who is close to God – she to recognises what God is doing in Christ, and she proclaims it, so that God’s redemption of His people may be known. Let us be like her, and let all of our lives, everything which we say, or think, or do, proclaim the saving truth of God’s love to the world. Let us burn, like the candles which God has blessed to give light and warmth to the world, so that it may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.

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Homily for Epiphany III Matthew 4:12-23


Epiphany III Mt 4:12-23
If you go to S. Paul’s Cathedral in London or the Chapel of Keble College, Oxford, you can see one of the most popular and reproduced works of Religious Art: Holman Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World. It shows our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ standing at a door with a lantern. The door has no handle; it needs to be opened from the inside: Jesus may be the Light of the World, but he does not force himself upon us, we have to welcome Him into our hearts and our lives. His coming into the world which we celebrate at Christmas, which was made manifest to the world at Epiphany, was not the entry of a tyrant, forcing himself upon the world, but as a vulnerable and loving baby, entirely dependent upon the love and care of others, God comes among us. His coming is foretold by the prophet Isaiah, He is the light of the nations, and a cause of great joy: to be a Christian, to follow Christ is not be filled with the joy and love which comes from God, we can be serious, but should never be miserable, our vocation is to live out our faith, in love, and hope, and joy.
There is nothing worse than to see strife and division amongst Christians, as S. Paul found in Corinth: it has no place in the church, it isn’t what God intended for us, it’s not how things should be; it has to be resisted, wounds have to be healed, transgressions forgiven. It’s part of how we live out our faith in our lives. If we turn to the words of this morning’s Gospel we see Jesus saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” To repent is to turn away from what separates us from God and each other, it is to turn to God in Christ, to be close to Him in Word and Sacrament, to be fed by Him, to be fed with Him, with His Body and Blood, so that we might share His divine nature, so that we might be given a foretaste of heaven, so that we may be strengthened to live out our faith in our lives, so that the world may believe – the Kingdom is close at hand, and Christ calls us, the baptised people of God, to share in the work of His kingdom. He asks that we follow Him, that we go where He goes, that we do what He does – it sounds easy enough, but it’s not, it’s something which we need to do together, and while I can help you to do it, I cannot without your help, your prayers, your love, and your support. As Christians we are inter-dependent, we rely upon each other.
We need to be like those first disciples who heard what Jesus said, who listened, and did what He told them, who were close to Jesus, so that our faith is a reality in our lives, strengthened and fed by Him who is the greatest medicine for our souls, who comes to us here, this morning in His Body and Blood, to heal us, to restore us and strengthen us to follow him, so that the world may believe and and sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Christmas Midnight Mass 2013

We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice.

Pope Paul VI, speech, Dec. 23, 1965
The people of Israel longed for salvation: they hoped that God would deliver them as he had from Egypt and Babylon – he had done so in the past, he would do so in the future, but in a way which they could neither expect nor fully understand. The prophesy of Isaiah speaks of light shining in darkness – a time of hope, of new beginnings, of comfort amidst tribulation. It is a light which will shine with the coming of Jesus Christ, the Light of the World, a light which the darkness cannot overcome. His coming brings joy and peace, the promise is fulfilled. The promise is fulfilled and yet humanity clings to greed, and lust and selfishness.
The world can seem deaf to the message which was proclaimed over two thousand years ago – there was no room in the inn, no comfort or luxury; but in a stable, surrounded by animals, by shepherds, poor, hungry, shunned by ‘polite’ society, God comes to earth, he meets humanity not in a blaze of glory and triumph, but as a vulnerable baby, who needs a mother to feed him, who needs other to provide him with warmth and security. The Word of God, through which everything was created, lies silent and helpless. Here we see real love – open, vulnerable, all gift, holding back nothing, but risking all to come among us, to heal our wounds, to save us, to show us how to live.
All the tinsel, and excess, all the consumerism, and even the ignorance and unbelief of the modern world cannot cover up the sheer wonder of this night. ‘God does not give us explanations; we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is and it remains for us a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations; he gives up a Son. Such is the spirit of the angel’s message to the shepherds: “Peace upon earth, good will to men … and this shall be the sign unto you: ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.” A Son is better than an explanation. The explanation of our death leaves us no less dead than we were; but a Son gives us a life, in which to live.’ [Austin Farrer Said or Sung pp. 27, 28]
The Son gives us a life in which to live, and gives us himself to us in bread and wine so that we might share his divine life, so as the shepherds hurried to meet him, let us too long for that divine encounter, let us long to be fed by him, fed with him, so that we can share his life, life in all its fullness. It is not something for us in purely spiritual terms, but rather to form our lives: who we are and what we say and do.
When the Holy Family came to Bethlehem there was no room for them. As we celebrate the birth of Our Saviour we have to ask ourselves: Have we made room for Himin our lives? Have we really? If we haven’t, then no fine words can make up for it. We have to let our hearts and our lives be the stable in which the Christ child can be born. We have to see him in the outcast, in the stranger, in the people which the world shuns, and we have to welcome them, and in welcoming them to welcome Him. This is how we live out His love in our lives. This is the meaning of Christmas – this is the love which can transform the world, it is radical and costly. It terrified the might of the Roman Empire, and showed human power that it was as nothing compared to Divine Love. Soul by individual soul, for the past two thousand years, the world has been changed by living out the love shown to the world in this little vulnerable child. So let us receive the greatest gift which has ever been given and share it with others, living it out in our lives, regardless of the cost, so that the world may believe and sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Something to ponder in Advent

“If you have never before prayed [with] Mary, do so now. Can you not see that if Christ himself willed to be physically formed in her for nine months and then spiritually formed by her for thirty years, it is to her that we must go to learn how to have Christ formed in us?”

Fulton Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary,Garden City NY 1953

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Homily for the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King (Yr C)


The death of Our Lord on the Cross reveals that we are meant to be perpetually dissatisfied here below. If earth were meant to be a Paradise, then He Who made it would never have taken leave of it on Good Friday. The commending of the Spirit to the Father was at the same time the refusal to commend it to earth. The completion or fulfilment of life is in heaven, not on earth.
Fulton Sheen, Victory over Vice,1939: 99
Today the Church celebrates the last Sunday before Advent as the Solemnity of Christ the King, before we start Advent, the season of preparation for our yearly remembrance of Our Lord’s birth in Bethlehem; we stop to ponder his majesty, his kingship, and what this means for us and for the world. As someone of the House of David, it is good to start by looking back. Just as the Lord said to David ‘You shall be shepherd of my people Israel’ (2Sam 5:2) this also looks forward to Christ the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep. In him we see true kingship, and true sacrifice.
          In this morning’s epistle, St Paul praises his Lord and Saviour as ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.’ (Col. 1: 15–20). It places Christ before and above everything, it sets the scene for our worship of him.
          Jesus Christ shows the world his kingship when he reigns on the Cross. It bears the title ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ but those who are standing by cannot understand – if he is the Messiah, who saved others, why isn’t he saving himself? His kingship is not marked by self-interest, he rules for the sake of others, or as St Paul puts it ‘making peace by the blood of his cross’. Thankfully in Luke’s Gospel the penitent thief can say to him ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ (Lk 23:42). He recognises Jesus’ kingly power, he acknowledges it, and puts himself under it. We need to be like him. We need to acknowledge him as our Lord and King; we need to recognise who he is and what he does. We need to, the whole world needs to, acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.
          Jesus’ kingship is not the ruthless exercise of power by a dictator; it is rather shown by sacrificial self-giving love, to reconcile God to all things. It is costly, and his body still bears the wounds of love, transfigured, and glorious, so that we can have confidence in whom we worship. As he gives himself for us on the Cross, he gives himself to us under the forms of bread and wine; he feeds us with himself, so that our nature may transformed, and given a foretaste of heaven. So let us worship Him, let us adore him, let us acknowledge his universal kingship, the Lord and Redeemer of all. What looks like defeat is God’s triumph, it opens the gates of heaven, it inaugurates God’s kingdom of peace and love, into which all may enter. So let us enter, and encourage others to do so, enter into the joy of the Lord, that they may believe and to sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for All Saints of the Order of St Benedict

There are two things that we need to know about all the Saints of the Order of St Benedict: that there are lots of them, and that they’re all on our side – they’re praying for us. When we consider the saints, especially in large numbers there can be something decidedly off-putting about it: we’re filled with a sense of our own inadequacy, that we’re not good enough, that we’re not up to the task – sainthood isn’t for us.

And so I would like to begin by spending a few moments considering the portion of the Rule which is appointed to be read today, from the second half of Chapter 35 – it concerns those appointed to serve at table for the week. It is quite mundane and practical: they are to eat early, before they serve the brethren so that they do not grumble and it isn’t too hard for them. Before they begin or finish their week of service they are to give thanks to God. It is this reliance upon God which undergirds all that they do from start to finish which provides us with an important spiritual lesson: in knowing upon whom we can rely we can be truly thankful, we can be built up in love, with generous, thankful hearts.

That is why in the Prologue to the Rule our Holy Father St Benedict expresses his aim as follows: Constituenda est ergo nobis Dominici schola servitii – we have, therefore to establish a school of the Lord’s service. It is a school: somewhere where things can be both taught and practised, it is a place to learn to serve God and others. To love and to serve God and our neighbour is we are all called to by virtue of our baptism; it is how we live out our faith in our lives. This then is the path to heaven, for saints are sinners who, through God’s love and grace, keep trying, who stay close to Him.

So, as we keep trying, we can do so in the knowledge that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:39). That’s what the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection achieve: a relationship of such depth, such love, which has such power to heal and transform our human nature. For all things are possible with God (Mk 10:27) this is why the first word of the Prologue is Ausculta ‘Listen’ we listen so that we might learn; in listening we focus our attention on what really matters so that we can sit lightly to the things of this world, all the superficial stuff that the world tells us is important or valuable, so that we might discard it and concentrate on what really matters. Our listening informs what we are, what we do, and what we shall be.

So as we sing the praises of those who have followed in the footsteps of St Benedict,  let us imitate them,  in the Lord’s service, strengthened by Word and Sacrament – fed by God, fed with God, so that our nature may be transformed,  so that through prayer and service we may honour the God who created us, who redeemed us, and who sustains us, so that we may live out our faith so that the world may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.

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Homily for the 31st Sunday of Year C


Humility is not self-contempt but the truth about ourselves coupled with a reverence for others; it is self-surrender to the highest goal.
Fulton Sheen Thoughts for Daily Living, 1955: 121
Last week the Gospel presented us with two people, a Pharisee and a tax-collector: one was a religious expert, a pillar of society, the other someone hated and despised. And yet, on the inside they were completely different – one was self-righteous, arrogant and full of himself, the other knew his need of God’s love and mercy. They show us what not to be and what we should be, and this week we see another one.
          Zacchaeus is a chief tax collector; he is someone who was hated, who has got rich by over-charging people. He starts off just being curious – he wants to see what all the fuss is about, he wants to see Jesus. He can’t see over the crowds so he climbs up a sycamore tree. When Jesus sees him, he tells him to come down quickly as Our Lord has to stay at his house today. He hurries down and welcomes Jesus with joy, he’s glad to see Him, to welcome Jesus into his house.
          The crowd are a bit miffed – they say, ‘Ooh … look at Him, what’s he going to that man’s house for?’ They just can’t see beyond outward appearances, they judge him – they just see a sinner, they don’t see someone who wants to see Jesus and love Him. The simple presence of Jesus has a transformative effect on Zacchaeus, he gives away half of his property to the poor and promises to repay those whom he has defrauded and to give them compensation. The Son of Man has come to seek out and save the lost – to show people that there is another way. This is the love of God in action – this is what happens on the Cross – God shows us the transforming power of His love, love shown to the un-loveable, so that they might become lovely.
          It is an idea which can be found in scripture – this morning’s first reading shows us that God is loving and merciful, and that God’s love and mercy can have an effect on our lives, if we trust in Him, if we invite Him in, so that his transforming love can be at work in our lives, and ‘may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfil every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.’ (1Thess 1:11–12) It is through God’s grace, an undeserved gift, that people like Zacchaeus can be transformed, transformed by God and for God, and what was true for him is true for us, here, today.
          That is why, as Christians, we pray, why we come to Mass each and every week to be fed by word and sacrament, so that God’s grace and transforming love may be at work in us, transforming our nature, making us more like Him. Everything that we say or think or do in our lives needs to be an outworking of our faith, so that our exterior life and our interior life are in harmony with each other – so that our lives, like St Paul’s, may proclaim the Gospel. This is what we are called to, and how we are to live. Unless we start from the point where we know our need of God and rely upon him, where we too make that space where God can be at work in us, in our souls and our lives, we are doomed.
          Is this the kind of life we really want to lead? Is this really the path of human flourishing? Or are we called to something better, something greater, something more lovely? So let us put our trust in the God who loves us and who saves us, let us know our need of him and his transforming grace to fill our lives and transform all of his creation so that the world so that it may believe and be transformed to sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Trinity XXI Evensong


For the joy of the Lord is your strength
Living as we do in difficult and uncertain times it is all too easy to become downcast, to let the cares of the world, our worries and our frailties get us down. It can be all too easy not understand quite what God may have in store for us. We can be like Mary and Martha perplexed at why Jesus does not come immediately, why he goes away, only to return once they fear all hope is lost.
In such moments which happen to us all from time to time, we can trust that our vocation as Christians is one of JOY, a joy which comes from the Lord. The following words of Fulton Sheen are helpful in reminding us of this:
Lightness of spirit is related to Redemption, for it lifts us out of precarious situations. As soon as a priest goes in for revolutionary tactics in politics he becomes boringly serious. This world is all there is, and therefore he takes political involvements without a grain of salt. One rarely sees a Commissar smile. Only those who are ‘in the world, not of it’ can take events seriously and lightly. Joy is born by straddling two worlds – one the world of politics, the other of grace.
Those Mysterious Priests 1974: 238
In this evening’s first lesson we see the people of Israel celebrating. They are told to ‘Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord’ (Neh. 8:10). There is something about feasting and rejoicing which is good for the soul, the Christian faith should never be dour or miserable, we proclaim Good News to all the world. There is also the instruction to give to those who have not. Our faith is something which needs to be put into action – it requires a generosity of spirit, of showing love and care to all those around us – to care for the spiritual and physical well-being of our fellow men and women. This generosity and care, like that of God for us, forms the church into a community of love, a place where people may have an encounter with the living God, and through His Holy Spirit receive joy and peace.
As Christians it is up to us to help make this a reality here and now. We live in the expectation of Our Lord’s Second coming, so surely we should be doing what he tells us, living out our faith in the world, so that it may believe. Our lives need to be attractive, and filled with joy, freed from the cares of this world, freed to sing God’s praise, freed to share his love with others.
As people rooted in the joy and generosity which characterise the love of God, shown to us in Christ Jesus Our Lord, we can all be truly joyful, knowing that the joy of the Lord is our strength. Our strength as the people of God comes from Him who saves us out of love, who commands us to feast (as well as fast) a feast we celebrate day by day and week by week when we feed on the Sacrament of Our Lord’s Body and Blood in Holy Communion, to be strengthened body and soul to love Him and serve Him, and to live out His joy in our lives. It really is the most wonderful thing, it should leave us with beaming smiles and joyous expectation to share the love and joy with others. So let is live out our vocation, to be joyous Christians, servants of  a loving God, to the praise and honour of his name.
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St Isaac of Nineveh on the Mercy of God


 

As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mind of God.

Just as a strongly-flowing fountain is not blocked by a handful of earth, so the compassion  of the Creator is not overcome by the wickedness of his creatures.

Someone who bears a grudge while they pray is like a person who sows in the sea and expects to reap a harvest.

As a flame of fire cannot be prevented from ascending upwards, so the prayers of the compassionate cannot be held back from ascending into heaven.
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A thought for the Day

It is easy to find Truth; it is harder to face it, and harder still to follow it. 

Fulton Sheen Lift up your Heart, 1942:106

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Homily for the 25th Sunday of Year C

True generosity never looks to reciprocity; it gives neither because it expects a gift in return, nor because there is a duty or an obligation to give. Charity lies beyond obligation; its essence is the ‘adorable extra.’ Its reward is in the joy of giving.

Fulton Sheen Way to Inner Peace, 1955: 108
‘What shall I do?’ (Lk 16:3) As Christians we are charged with nothing more than the transformation of the entire world and its conversion to Christ. In this we do the will of him ‘who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.’ (1Tim 2:4) It is something which is rooted in prayer, which should characterise our lives, which fills our hearts with love so that we may lift ‘holy hands without anger or quarrelling’ (1Tim 2:8). We live such lives so that our faith is lived out, and that it may be attractive, inviting and so that it may convert the world.
            The world around us is cruel, selfish, and unfair. Profit is everything. The behaviour criticised by the prophet Amos is still widespread. It is something which we have to combat as we live out our faith. In Amos’ prophesy we hear ‘we will buy the helpless man for silver’ (Amos 8:6) and we know that he was bought for thirty pieces of silver. This was his price; he was bought and suffered for us, to take away our sins, to transform the world, giving Himself out of love so that humanity might share His Divinity.
            Such is the generous love that redeems the world, giving ‘Himself as a ransom for all’ (1Tim 2:6). This too is the generosity which we see in this morning’s Gospel. It’s something of a shock to the system to see Our Lord condoning unjust or immoral behaviour. He has been charged with wasting his master’s possessions, so he goes to the people who are in debt to his master and writes the debts off. He shows a generosity and love which is reckless, which does not count the cost. At one level he does what he is accused of doing and is commended by his master. We’re expecting him to be condemned for acting like this, and yet he is praised. It reminds us that we are called to be generous, even to the point of being reckless, sitting lightly to the things of this world, and holding no store by wealth, or position, or influence, but instead giving it away, sharing it with others. If we cannot serve God and money, then as Christians we are to serve God. In this we can show that we are faithful in small things and hope to receive a place in the eternal dwellings.
 
            This sort of behaviour looks completely mad in the eyes of the world, but we are not to conform ourselves to the ways of the world, but rather to those of the Kingdom of God. This is how we can transform the world around us, and conform it to God in Christ. It starts with our baptism; it continues with prayer, with reading Scripture and receiving Holy Communion, so that God’s grace may be poured out on us, to transform our human nature, so that His Kingdom may be a reality, so that the world may believe and be saved. So let us live out our faith, practising the same generosity which God poured out on us, shedding His Blood to take away our sins. Let us transform the world so that it may turn away from the ways of greed and selfishness and put its trust in the true riches of the Kingdom. If ‘no servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money’ (Lk 16:13) we have to choose between money and God. We cannot take it with us when we go, we cannot put pockets in our shrouds; money is no use once you’re dead, other than for buying you a fancier coffin or a grander funeral. Let us rather love God, and fashion our lives after the generosity which God shows to us, sparing not even His only Son, who died for our sake, so that we might live, and have eternal life in Him.
It is this generous God who comes to us today in Word and Sacrament, to heal us and restore us, to give us life in him. He entrusts to us the true riches of the Kingdom so that we may share them recklessly, generously with the world so that it may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.

 

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The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Let those who think that the Church pays too much attention to Mary give heed to the fact that Our Blessed Lord Himself gave ten times as much of His life to her as He gave to His Apostles.
Fulton J Sheen The World’s First Love 1956: 88

It is a fair thing to say, and I am certainly not embarrassed to admit the fact, and hopefully she is not too embarrassed to hear it, but I love my Mum! I am lucky to be the son of such a lovely lady, and in an ideal world, all of us would like to or are able to say a similar thing. It is a relationship of love, of nurture, and support, which gives rise to human flourishing; it is a building block of human society, it is something fundamental, which should be both valued and celebrated.
As great as human motherhood is, in the Church we celebrate something even greater: the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the mother of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, the world’s Redeemer, who entrusted her to the world, and the world to her care, as He hung on the Cross at Calvary. As such she is the mother of the Church, the Queen of Heaven and Earth and the Queen of Peace. Today the Church celebrates the birth of the one of the Saviour of the World was born. She is one special lady! We cannot praise or honour her enough for the simple reason that her saying Yes to God at the Annunciation undoes the No of Eve in the Garden of Eden. She is obedient,  and likewise her husband, S. Joseph, when he hears the angel’s message, trusts and obeys. In them both we see true love and obedience, a model for humanity in how it relates to itself and to God.
Mary (and Joseph) listen and obey, which brings about the birth of Him who restores humanity’s relationship with God and ourselves, who gives us the hope of heaven,  who gives Himself out of love, sharing our human nature so that we might share His divinity. That is why we have come here this morning, to he nourished by Him, and with Him, with His Word, with His Body and Blood, under the outward forms of bread and wine, so that through grace, the free gift of God, He might transform our nature so that we might share His nature.
It really is the most wonderful news – the good news of the Gospel, that God loves us, dies for us, and rises again, so that we and all who turn to Him can be saved, and have life in its fullness. It is not without its cost, as Our Lady found out, in the prophecy of Simeon a sword would pierce her own soul when she saw her Son dying on the Cross. Yet here too she is obedient, she has been told that he will save His people from their sins. Here too she trusts in God, and through her trust snd obedience we can enkoy the fruits of her Son’s saving work. This is something which we can and should celebrate: the fruits of her obedience and trust. It should encourage us to imitate her and be obedient to God, to trust Him, and fo what He tells us to do. She is the model Christian, living the model Christian life; she receives the reward promised by her Son in her Assumption, sharing His risen life and glory at His right hand in Heaven. She shows the world what it means to be obedient to God and to trust in Him,  and what the rewards of God’s promises are.
It is not easy to be like her, to be obedient to the will of God: more often than not humans are more inclined to follow their own will, their own desires or pleasures, because they want to, and because such self-gratification is all that matters. In our modern capitalist consumer society we are taught want things and to get them, even if we have to borrow to get them. It is enticing,  but where does all this self-gratification lead? Nowhere! Other than death and emptiness: you cannot simply buy your way into heaven. You can pay to have your body frozen, but it cannot save your soul: nothing we can say or think or do can. It’s that simple,  and thanks to the obedience of the woman whose birth we celebrate today, we are given something which money cannot buy: the love of God poured into our hearts, restoring our lives and relationships, forgiving our sins, helping us to become the people God wants us to become,  to prepare us to share the joy of paradise, in God’s presence for ever.
Such a wonderful free gift should have a serious effect upon our lives, who and what we are, and how we live our lives here and now. If we are willing to accept the free gift of God, we have to accept that it has consequences for who and what we are, and yet we know that the service of God is perfect freedom: we are not faced with tyranny or oppression but love and mercy. Do let us live, following the example of the Blessed Virgin Mary and aided by her prayers, so that we may transform our lives and the whole world, so that it too may believe and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for the 21st Sunday of Year C


To the bad conscience God appears always the God of wrath. The boy who broke the vase by throwing a ball at it says to his mother: ‘Now Mummy, don’t get mad.’ Anger is not in the mother; anger is in the boy’s projection to his mother of his own sense of justice. Anger is not in God; anger is in our disordered selves.
Fulton Sheen Preface to Religion,  1946: 50
The Cross of Calvary stands at the crossroads of three prosperous civilizations as eloquent testimony to the uncomfortable truth that the successful people, the social leaders, the people who are labelled niceare the ones most capable of crucifying the Divine Truth and the Eternal Love.
Fulton Sheen Peace of Soul, 1954: 69
Growing up is probably best described as not an easy or indeed a pleasant process. Learning right from wrong, what to do and how to do it, takes time and invariably involves mistakes. The problem comes not from making mistakes themselves but rather from not learning from them. Learning lessons requires humility – knowing that you do not know everything, that you have much to learn, that you are not the finished article but rather a work in progress. That through God’s grace working in you, you may become something greater, something better than you are. 
This recognition of one’s limitations and failings opens up a space where God can be at work in our lives, transforming us to live the Divine life of Love. This is the narrow door of this morning’s gospel: narrow because if we have a sense of our own self-importance or our worth which is too big then we cannot enter – our sense of who and what we are gets in the way. It’s not enough to have eaten and drunk in God’s presence, to have been around when he taught in our streets – it’s a question of engagement – are you a bystander or have you been fed by God, with God, and through the grace of the sacrament lived out your faith in your life – living out the love of God in your life? Have you been around when the Gospel has been taught, or have you both listened to it and lived it out in your life?
It isn’t an easy thing to do – it is costly, difficult, and hard and it is something which we need to do together. That’s after all what the Church is for – it’s a collection of sinners trying to live in response to the love of God which has been poured out on us. It’s something which we have to do together – loving each other, loving our enemies, living out forgiveness as we have been forgiven and loved by God. It’s a radically different way of life to that which the world would encourage us to practice. It isn’t easy, it’s really difficult, and we willfail at it, but that’s the point! The point is not that we fail and that’s it, but that we keep trying, loving and forgiving, together, built up as the body of Christ, humble enough to let God be at work in us, transforming our nature by his Grace – making us the people of God, living out his love in the world.
We have come here this morning to be fed by Word and Sacrament, to be nourished by God, with God, to have false ideas of who and what we are stripped away, and recognising our dependence upon God and each other, to try and live out our faith – to grow in holiness together as the people of God, loved, healed, and restored by him – and through this to grow up into the full stature of Christ and to transform the world that it may reflect more fully the glory of God. The Gospel really is this radical, it’s not nice, or comfortable, it’s challenging and difficult, and utterly wonderful, releasing people from the slavery of this world and its false ideas to live in the freedom and love of God.
We have to look to Jesus and to His Cross to see God’s love for us. What is shameful in the eyes of the world, we can see as glorious – true love which gives regardless of the cost, which forgives sins, which heals and restores broken sinful humanity, which gives us the hope of heaven. This is grace the free gift of God, giving Himself who shared our humanity so that we might share His divinity, strengthened by Word and Sacrament to live out our faith.
The world cannot understand this, it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t logical, it shouldn’t happen. But it does, and it calls the world to something different, something radical and world-changing, which can re-form human society in the image of God and His Love. It will be hard: the world will laugh at us and our feeble attempts to follow God. Yet, we believe in a God who loves us, and who would never laugh at us, or belittle our feeble efforts to follow Him and conform ourselves to Him. So may the fire of God’s love be kindled in our hearts and lives, that we may be ablaze for Him, aflame with love for God and neighbour, love our enemies and our friends, and lets us change the world, not just this village, or this county, but all of God’s creation, all of humanity, that they may know God’s love and that it may rule in their hearts and lives.
God takes the initiative in Christ to help us to have life in its fullness – it’s not a life without rules, or discipline, it isn’t easy, it’s costly and difficult, but it is good and rewarding. It may not feel like that, we may struggle to experience its goodness or even its rewards in this life, but it prepares us for an eternity with God, in his closer presence. Humility is the key – in it we recognise our utter dependence upon God, our own sinfulness, our need to be loved and to share that love with others. God loves us not because we are loveable, but that through His love we might become lovely. So let us hasten to enter through the narrow gate, so that God may continue to transform our human nature, that his saving love and power may be at work in our hearts and our lives, so that we can transform ourselves and all the world so that it may believe and sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for the 20th Sunday of Year C


… it has been said that Christianity does not suit the modern man, therefore scrap Christianity. Now let us say, Christianity does not suit modern man, therefore let us scrap modern man
Fulton Sheen Philosophies at War, 1943: 98–99
We are more than used to seeing Christianity as a religion characterised by love: love of God and love of neighbour, which is quite right. It can be all too easy for this to be transformed into a religion of niceness, but at no point in the Sermon on the Mount does our Blessed Lord say ‘Blessed are the nice, for they will have a nice warm fuzzy feeling deep inside’. We are not called to like people but to love them. It is costly and difficult, and the religion of nice offers us syrupy sentiment in place of costly love. It plays down the cost and difficulty of living a Christian life, and offers us something superficial and worthless.
It is difficult when we read passages like this morning’s gospel. Our Lord comes not to give peace but division. Given the massive strides made in the last fifty years towards Christian unity and healing the wounds of our past and divisions, this can sound shocking or even wrong. And yet what Christ comes to bring will cause division because it forces people to make a choice – do we wish to follow the ways of the world or the Gospel? These two can never be reconciled – only in the City of God can we see the rule of love. Only by choosing Christ over the world can His love rule in our hearts and our lives. It is a difficult and a costly choice – we will face ridicule, we will be considered fools, who have chosen a hard and difficult path over the easy path of the ways of the world.
People have always rejected Christianity, ignored it, or treated it with contempt, because it is difficult and costly, it asks a lot of us, and what it offers can be easily mocked – when we proclaim it by our words and actions we have to expect to be treated like Jeremiah and thrown down a well, what we stand for is dangerous and awkward, a truth which the world does not wish to hear. It isn’t as though living the Christian life is easy – we will fail often, we will be like Jeremiah sinking in the mud – but the love and grace of God can lift us up, this can heal and restore us, and help us to continue our pilgrimage through this life and the next.
We are, as this morning’s epistle puts it, surrounded by ‘so great a cloud of witnesses’ martyrs, those who have borne witness to the faith, the saints whose life and prayers can strengthen and inspire us – they show us the path we should tread. We have to look to Jesus and to His Cross to see God’s love for us. What is shameful in the eyes of the world, we can see as glorious – true love which gives regardless of the cost, which forgives sins, which heals and restores broken sinful humanity, which gives us the hope of heaven. This is grace the free gift of God, giving Himself who shared our humanity so that we might share His divinity, strengthened by Word and Sacrament to live out our faith.
The world cannot understand this, it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t logical, it shouldn’t happen. But it does, and it calls the world to something different, something radical and world-changing, which can re-form human society in the image of God and His Love. It will be hard: the world will laugh at us and our feeble attempts to follow God. Yet, we believe in a God who loves us, and who would never laugh at us, or belittle our feeble efforts to follow Him and conform ourselves to Him. So may the fire of God’s love be kindled in our hearts and lives, that we may be ablaze for Him, aflame with love for God and neighbour, love our enemies and our friends, and lets us change the world, not just this village, or this county, but all of God’s creation, all of humanity, that they may know God’s love and that it may rule in their hearts and lives.
That is why we have come here, today, to be fed in word and sacrament, to be fed by God, to be fed with God, with His Body and Blood and His Word, so that it may nourish us and prepare us for heaven, so that it can transform our human nature and fill us with the Divine life of love and forgiveness, which we can start living out here and now and change all the world, so that it may believe and be transformed to sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day

A great burden is thrust upon all men who call themselves religious. In this fatal hour, all of their energies should be spent recalling man to his spiritual destiny …. Let those who call themselves Catholics, or Protestants, or Jews recall that the function of their religion is to intensify the spiritual life of man and not to empty the vials of bitterness into hearts, stirring up one against another. It is not to the politicians and the economists and the social reformers that we must look for the first steps in this spiritual recovery; it is to the professed religious.

Fulton J Sheen, Way to Happiness, 1954: 168-9
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Trinity XI Evensong

To be worthy of the name Christian, then, means that we, too, must thirst for the spread of the Divine Love; and if we do not thirst, then we shall never be invited to sit down at the banquet of Life.


Fulton Sheen The Rainbow of Sorrow, 1938: 70

Living a Christian life can never be said to be easy, or without its surprises. To put it simply it makes demands of us: that we live out our faith in our lives, that we put what we believe into practice so that it affects the world around us. It is not easy, as Mother Mary Clare slg puts it:


You are dedicated to love and reconciliation. Your life is directed to that end, and you must learn to stand at the Cross. It is a long learning, a long road, but a sure road if it is up the hill to Calvary. It is a road on which you by being stripped of all self, may mediate to the world the dawning knowledge of the glory that descends.
The essence of the good news of the Gospel is that we are new creatures. In the Transfiguration we see the meaning of the new creation in the light of the Holy Spirit, the perfection of man which cannot be held by death but goes through death to the victory of union with God. God draws us not merely into the dark cloud, but into the tremendous stillness of the height of Calvary and through Calvary to the dawn of the new day.



Thus we can see how divine glory is deeper and more profound than human glory, it aims not at glorifying itself but rather in sharing that glory with others, as a sign of the generous self-giving love which speaks of God’s nature. It is this love which comforts us in our affliction and strengthens us to endure patiently all that this world may throw at us.
Thus we can say with confidence the words of the prophet Isaiah from this evening’s first lesson: ‘“Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation.” With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.’ (Isa 12:2–3). Just like the vision of messianic peace with which Chapter 11 starts, where the wolf lies down with the lamb, here the prophet looks forward to the peaceful reign of the Kingdom of God. That hope is fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, and we, his body, the Church are called to live this out in the world, for great in our midst is the Holy One of Israel. In the feast of the Transfiguration which the Church celebrated on Tuesday we see a glimpse of God’s glory and greatness, the hope to which we are called. It is a glory which is shown to the world most fully in His death on the Cross, which stands as a signal for the peoples, a contradiction which is the antithesis of human glory, which rises from the tomb at Easter – ‘on him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again’ (2Cor 1:10) ‘for all the promises of God find their Yes in Him’ (2Cor 1:20).

This is the source of our confidence as Christians – the victory of Christ over death, sin, and the world. We cannot be shaken in this, it is complete and total. It is why we share the good news with others, why we live out our faith in our lives, as a sign of this victory and of the love of God which has been poured into our hearts. What the world sees as terrible cruelty, the slaughter of an innocent man as Christians we can see as the greatest and most pure expression of God’s love, the love which saves and redeems us and all humanity. It is recognising the fact that God loves us, and that his love can transform us, through His Grace, and give us the promise of heaven and sharing His Divine Life – that our human nature may be perfected through His Love. This is what Christ comes to bring, the reason why we celebrate the Incarnation where God takes our flesh to redeem it, the God who gives us His flesh so that we may have life in Him. This simple truth has shattered the world for nearly two thousand years, it has overpowered human empires, totalitarian regimes cannot expunge it, the modern world may turn its back on it, but it is the only lasting cure for spiritual hunger, this supernatural food, this pledge of immortality. This free gift which demands that we share it, and give our lives in His service; this is the greatest consolation for which we could ever ask or receive. So, fed by it, may its divine love transform our human nature, and may we share the gift with others that they may believe and transform the world that it may sing praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.


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Sermon for Evensong (Trinity X)


‘Remorse  is the negative presence of God in the soul, as grace is the positive presence of God. Remorse is incomplete, for it is self-disgust divorced from God; but remorse can become sorrow, and then hope, the moment the soul turns to God for help.’
Fulton Sheen Lift up your Heart 1942: 17
“Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.”’
But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
We all of us sin, a lot, in what we think or say or do, or indeed do not say or think or do. If we say that we have no sin then we deceive ourselves. The simple fact is that I am a miserable sinner; I am to be pitied for the wretched way in which I do or do not do things. I am no better or worse than any of you, we’re all the same in this, and yet somehow God has called me to serve him, and to say this to you, and he calls each one of us to live out our baptism in our lives.
Possibly the hardest thing to learn is the fact that God loves us: he heals us, and restores us. Most of us if the truth be told struggle with this world-shattering truth – God loves us. We don’t feel worthy of the love, that we are good enough to be loved in the first place, or that we can do anything back.
It is, I suspect, the work of a lifetime and beyond to try and come to terms with the fact that God loves us, that he gives himself for us, that he loves us so much that he opens his arms on the Cross to embrace the world with his healing love. This is what Grace is, the free gift of a generous God, who loves not because we ARE worthy of His love, but that through His love, we may BECOME worthy of it. His grace perfects our human nature, and because we are loved and forgiven, healed and restored in Christ, we can love and forgive others; we can share in Our Lord’s work of healing and reconciliation. God takes the initiative so that we do not have to, he does what we cannot so that our nature may be transformed by him, but first it needs to be accepted, so that it can transform us, and we can then transform others, and eventually transform the whole world.
This is exactly what the Church has been doing for the last two thousand years, saving it, one soul at a time, showing the world that God loves it, and helping it to experience that love as a reality in its life, the one true reality. It all started with a young girl in Nazareth hearing the words ‘Hail, full of grace the Lord is with you’ this is how much God loves us, a God who takes a risk, and uses ordinary unsurprising people to be extraordinary, to do extraordinary things and live extraordinary lives. It is strange and surprising, and it’s not what we would expect to happen, but that’s just how God works. He can take the raw material that in earthly terms is not terribly promising and do things with it. God uses us the people of God to serve him in the Church and the World, to make us saints who may enjoy his closer presence for all eternity.
God loves us, so that we can love each other and love Him, with a love that is costly and pure and generous, a love which forgives the sins of others just as we ourselves have been forgiven. This is the love that can change the world, by transforming our human nature, perfecting it by the Grace of God, rather than abolishing it, so that we can have life in all its fullness, so that we can be prepared for a life of beatitude in Heaven in the closer presence of God.
It is this radical revolutionary love which lies at the heart of the good news of Jesus Christ, it is from this gospel love that the Church’s concern for the world, and politics, and social action flows, for these are not an end in themselves, but a means of bringing about the Kingdom of God among us in all its fullness. We are called as Christians to participate in something radical, revolutionary, and world-changing, something which scared the Roman Empire, and which has outlived it; it is by no means perfect, or the finished article – that’s the point: the Church is a work in progress called to transform the world. It will fail, it’s made up of human beings like us; the Church has been failing ever since Peter denied Our Lord three times, and it will continue to do so, as it cannot rely upon itself and its own strength, but rather upon the God who loves us, who heals us and restores us. In his strength and his truth, we may live out our faith, our hope, and our love, and through His grace transform the world that it may sing praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday of Year C: A Sermon about Stuff


The poor in spirit are those who are so detached from wealth, from social position, and from earthly knowledge that, at the moment the Kingdom of God demands a sacrifice, they are prepared to surrender all.
Fulton J Sheen The Cross and the Beatitudes, 1937: 54
There is a profound difference in quality between the possessions that we need and use, and actually enjoy, and the accumulation of useless things that we accumulate out of vanity or greed or the desire to surpass others
Fulton J Sheen Way to Happiness, 1954: 45
The world around us tells us constantly that if you want to be happy, to be yourself fully and most really then what you need is more stuff: a new car, a mobile phone. It’s the latest model – it’s been improved, you can’t do without it! The world tells us this and we listen, we take it in and we do what it says. We all of us do this, I’ve done it myself. It says you can have what you want TODAY, we’ll even lend you the money for it and charge you an interest rate which is usurious and wrong. It will make you and your family happy, in a way that nothing else can.
Nothing could, in fact, be further from the truth. Salvation by stuff has never and will never work. It leaves us empty, craving more and more, never satisfied. Hence Our Lord’s teaching in this morning’s Gospel: ‘Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.’ (Lk 12:15) Wanting more stuff is never a good idea; Our Lord tells us this and warns us against it, and we do not listen.
So He tells us a parable – there’s a man who’s got loads of stuff, he’s well-off in worldly terms, he has done well. All he’s interested in is keeping his stuff, building bigger barns into which to put stuff, so that he can sit back, and relax and take life easy.
Then he dies, quite suddenly, and learns that important lesson: you can’t take it with you when you go – you can’t put pockets in your shroud, and when you are dead then stuff doesn’t really help you. It may buy you a swankier funeral, a more expensive coffin, a more expensive hearse to transport your dead body, but basically you are dead, and even if you spend thousands of pounds having your head frozen in liquid nitrogen, you are still dead. Money and stuff can’t help you with that. It has never been able to, nor will it. So Our Lord encourages us to be rich towards God, and to turn away from the world and its vanity.
In St Paul’s letter to the Colossians, just after this morning’s second reading finishes we read this:
 ‘Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.’ (Col 3:12–17)
This is the life which stores up treasure in heaven, when we have ‘Set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth’ (Col 3:2) This is what a Christian life really looks like, when lived out in the world. This is the sort of radically different life which can and does both change and transform the world: offering it a way that is different to the way of stuff. It is the way of love and forgiveness, of knowing that as Christians that we are loved and forgiven, no matter who we are or what we’ve done. That we can be a community which lives out this radical love and forgiveness in the world to offer it a new way of being, which turns the ways and values of the world on its head. It is that radical, that revolutionary, and that revolution has to start right here and today. We are listening to Our Lord speaking to us through His Scriptures; he calls us to live this life for our own good and the glory of the God who made us, the God who loves us, and the God who saves us: to be free from the tyranny of stuff and sin, and to live for him.
This then is what the Church is meant to look like, and be, and live out in the world, like a lamp set upon a lamp stand or a city upon a hill, shining, attractive, a light amidst the darkness of this world, a radical alternative, life in all its fullness. So let’s live it, together.
That is why we have come here, today, to be fed in word and sacrament, to be fed by God, to be fed with God, with His Body and Blood and His Word, so that it may nourish us and prepare us for heaven, so that it can transform our human nature and fill us with the Divine life of love and forgiveness, which we can start living out here and now and change all the world, so that it may believe and be transformed to sing the praise of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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Homily for 17th Sunday of Year C: Luke 11:1-13



Prayer is helplessness casting itself on Power, infirmity leaning on Strength, misery reaching to Mercy, and a prisoner clamouring for Relief.
Fulton J Sheen Life is Worth Living, 1954: 213
‘Lord teach us to pray’ the disciples ask Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. Their words are our words, we want to know how to pray, what to say to God, how to have a conversation – one that is meaningful and has value. They ask the Lord, and he shows them what to do and what to say. 
The prayer starts with the word Father, it defines our relationship, our connection. It presupposes love, as a parent has for a child. It continues with the petition that the name of God, Our Father, may be hallowed, kept holy. It is the loving response of a child to a parent. In stressing holiness it puts God in his proper place, it ensures that things are done properly. Then the prayer looks forward, ‘your kingdom come’ it looks for the coming of God’s kingdom, which goes hand in hand with ‘your will be done’ God’s kingdom is tied up with doing God’s will, the responsibility is ours to do it. We then pray that we may be fed, that we may be nourished, that we may have bread for the journey of faith.  This feeding goes with the petition that our sins may be forgiven, in the same way that we forgive those who sin against us. The two are linked – feeding and forgiveness, and so they should be in our lives. As people who are forgiven and forgiving we pray that we may not be led into temptation, that we may continue as forgiven and forgiving people.
It is a model of what to say to God, what to ask for, and how to ask for it. It is concise and profound, it is not lengthy or wordy; it does not ramble or drone on for ages. It says what needs to be said, it defines our relationship with God and each other, it defines our spiritual life as one where we are fed and forgiven. It characterises what we are doing here today, to seek God’s forgiveness and forgive others, and to be fed by Word and Sacrament, to do God’s will and bring about God’s Kingdom, a kingdom of love and forgiveness, which looks radically different from what might be if humanity were left to its own devices – it calls us forward to something greater, something more wonderful, than we can imagine. And yet it is a reality – God forgives our sins , giving his life for us, nailing our sins to the Cross, suffering in his flesh so that we who have died with Christ in our baptism may also share His risen life, fed by Him, fed with Him, with His Body and Blood, transformed by the sacrifice of Calvary, loved redeemed and nourished, forgiven and forgiving, to transform the world so that it may be conformed to God’s will, that His name may be Holy, so that all creation may sing His praise. So that the Church, which is Christ’s body, may bring about God’s kingdom and do God’s will. 
It is a generous response to a generous and loving God, it takes people who know their need of God, and shows how those needs are satisfied at the deepest possible level. We ask God to teach us how to pray, and he shows us in a way which both defines and transforms our spiritual life and all of creation, conforming them to the will of God, helping to bring about the Kingdom of love and forgiveness which is shown to us in the person, teaching, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the giving of His Holy Spirit, to nourish us and transform us and all the world, so that it may believe and be transformed to sing God’s praise and give glory to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed as is most right and just all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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A thought for the day from Mother Mary Clare

He who prays stands at that point of intersection where the love of God and the tensions and sufferings we inflict on each other meet and are held to the healing power of God.
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A thought for the day from Mother Mary Clare

Today we can easily become paralysed by a sense that there is nothing we can do in the face of so much suffering, such a lack of love and justice in man’s relationship with man, but the Cross of Christ stands at the heart of it all, and the prayer of Christ, now as always is the answer to man’s need
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A Thought for the Day from S. Theresa of Avila

When I see people very anxious to know what sort of prayer they practise, covering their faces and afraid to move or think, lest they should lose any slight tenderness and devotion they feel, I know how little they understand how to attain union with God, since they think it consists in such things as these.

No. Our Lord expects works from us!

If you see someone sick whom you can relieve, never fear losing your devotion; have compassion on them; if they are in pain, feel it as if it were your own, and, when there is need, fast so that they may eat, not so much for their sake as because you know your Lord asks it of you.

This is the true union of our will with the will of God.

If someone else is well spoken of, be more pleased than it were yourself; this is easy enough, for if you were really humble it would vex you to be praised.

If you possess fraternal charity, I assure you that you will attain the union I have described.

The Interior Castle 5:3, 11