The Papal visit – some personal thoughts

I recall one bright Saturday morning seeing a ‘Jumbo’ jet glide at low altitude over the Liberties escorted by a number of Irish airforce planes. It swooped in over the Phoenix Park where over a million people waved and shouted in joy and expectation. It was Saturday the 29^th September, 1979.  Many of my relations and friends, including my late parents, were there that morning. I was not there.

In the years and decades that followed, I made many journeys.  And so has Ireland.

In Limerick, the Pope said, among other things:

Ireland must choose. You the present generation of Irish people must decide; your choice must be clear and your decision firm…..This generation is once more a generation of decision…..May Ireland never weaken in her witness, before Europe and before the whole world, to the dignity and sacredness of all human life, from conception until death.

The Irish people did decide in 2018.

And here comes another Pope - very different in style, tone and emphasis to Pope John Paul II.  And he comes to a very different country battered by storms and scandals. A once confident – even arrogant – Church has been humbled. What was hidden in the dark has come to light and it shows a deep malaise. For all its goodness and truth, the Church – a body of weak and sinful people – is deeply, deeply wounded. 

There is something liberating about arriving in a modest Fiat 500 rather than by helicopter over the Phoenix Park. And it is certainly different to when the Papal legate arrived surrounded by cavalry from Dún Laoghaire to the Pro-Cathedral in 1932. The next time will it be by donkey?

Whatever one may think of the papacy (or indeed Christianity), times like these force a public discussion about matters of faith, church governance and much else.  The media and political establishment is right to take the Church authorities to task for its criminal handling of abuse in Ireland and abroad. Church authorities only have themselves to blame for this mess.  Yet, there is much that is true, beautiful, useful and good in the message of Christ and the witness of those who truly follow the wandering preacher from Galilee who continues to live in the hearts and minds of billions. For all its limitations, historical baggage and corruption, the Roman Catholic Church is part of something much, much bigger. It has much, still, to offer from its store of wisdom, diversity and goodness. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater!

What would I say to Pope Francis if I met him tomorrow when I will be in the Park?

I would say:

“Welcome back to Dublin, brother Jorge. Please, listen to the cries of your people seeking healing, justice, reform and voice. Act as Jesus would today in this place and do what it takes, in so far as you humanly can with God's help, to root out the evil that has been sown in the church.  And pray for me a sinner. That’s all”

The scandal of eucharistic living

“…Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” (John 6:54)

John 6:51-58 (Year B: 12^th Sunday after Trinity, 19^th August, 2018)

In the 1986 film, Mission, set in South America in the 1750s the Jesuit priest, Fr. Gabriel, leads the people forward as he carries the monstrance with the blessed sacrament against a barrage of gun fire from a joint Portuguese-Spanish army. The brutal and violent laceration of the people and the monstrance is a powerful cinematic sign of Christ’s body ripped apart in the poor and the oppressed (after Fr. Gabriel is cut down a little child picks up the monstrance and leads the procession. Only a handful escape into the jungle). Witness, community, persecution, violence, death, scattering, remnant and new life.  Flesh, Bread, Life.

Shock therapy applied today..

One way to apply some shock therapy in modern times is to explore the Eucharistic theme of John 6 in the concrete social reality.  Bishop Frank Weston, an Anglican bishop from Zanzibar in the early decades of the 20^th century, declared in the context of an Anglo-Catholic gathering in 1923:

The one thing England needs to learn is that Christ is in and amid matter, God in flesh, God in sacrament.

Weston went on to say the following:

But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums … It is folly – it is madness – to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children.

Such a challenging insight was not novel. Saint Ignatius of Antioch writing in a letter to the Smyrnaeans, not long after the Gospel of John was writtendown declared: 

Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heterodox in regard to the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead.

And writing two centuries later, Saint Basil the Great said:

The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked; the shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot; the money that you keep locked away is the money of the poor; the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.

(I am grateful for all of the above information to Rev Patrick Comerford and his very useful regular blog here).

In short, we do not have the luxury of worshiping a God detached from the struggles and sufferings of the world around us. We move from sacrament to world and back again because the world is the theatre in which sacramental action happens through us and others. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement wrote in 1935:

It is because we forget the humanity of Christ – present with us today in the Blessed Sacrament just as truly as when he walked with His apostles through the cornfields that Sunday long ago – that we have ignored the material claims of our fellow man during this capitalistic, industrialist era. We have allowed our brothers and sisters, our fellow members in the Mystical Body to be degraded, to endure slavery to a machine, to live in rat-infested holes. This ignoring of the material body of our humanity which Christ ennobled when He took flesh, gives rise to the aversion for religion evidenced by many…

Because Christianity is a ‘materialist’ religion..

Christianity is a materialist religion in the sense that God became material in human flesh and blood and thereby raised up all flesh to God. Moreover, we reach God together and not individually and sacraments are signs on the way pointing us upwards and forward as we touch, see and feel the presence of God. This is the heart of the message of John 6. The detour into chapter 6 of John’s Gospel in the middle of ‘Mark’s year’ has brought out, so far, a number of central Eucharistic themes of the entire story of Jesus (with two more Sundays to go in the company of John including this Sunday).

Back to the reality of bread..

‘I am the living bread’ declares Jesus. What does this mean to us today?  Bread is a basic part of our diet and has been down the centuries. With water, bread constitutes a normal element for restoring and fuelling our bodies.  In other words, bread gives and sustains life.  But our lives are sustained by more than mere bread. We live on the strength of love, affirmation, acceptance, challenge and positive relationship. ‘Not on bread alone’ does man live (Matthew 4:4).  However, if we enlarge our imaginations we can understand the words, the music, the conversation and the sights of everyday life as types of daily bread that nourishes our bodies and souls. In that sense the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, could speak of God’s Word as bread which can be consumed (Jeremiah 15:16). But, we need to eat in order to understand just as understanding precedes eating. Jesus had to bring the thousands forward from eating bread loaves and fish to eating the living word of God. We have to start somewhere and human hunger is an obvious starting place.

With ‘scandalous’ talk of flesh and blood..

But, Jesus did not just say I am giving you the living bread which is my flesh but he also says that he is giving you his blood. Not only is flesh scandalous to pious 1^st century years but blood is more than scandalous because it signifies the very life of one.  To share in the Eucharist is to share in the life of God’s own family while drawing into that family the great unwashed, the confused, the unwelcome and the marginalised.

This is what it means – concretely – to live eucharistically–  in full communion with God as a loving parent and with all of his children who are our brothers and sisters in the family of faith that invites everyone in.

We, too, can be transformed into bread broken for a world that hungers. Here is a short prayer based on a reading of John that I composed some years ago:

In the beginning was the Word
And the World became fleshAnd that flesh became bread;Which has now become usBroken for a united worldReturning to the source from it came

 (words above = 1,187)

Praying the rosary (as an Anglican)

Luke 1:46-55

What?

Yes, it is possible to pray the rosary as an Anglican regardless of your orientation on the ‘high’ or ‘low’ streams of Anglicanism – if you belong to this tradition. We, typically, associate the rosary with Roman Catholic piety.  For many of the Roman tradition, it is a distant memory of childhood when granny took out the beads before everyone went to bed. To hear it recited, today, at  funeral (the main place where it seems to have survived) one hears a babble of fast-moving words running into one another and hardly distinguishable – monotonous, repetitive and empty. Or, so it seems. Who knows what is going through the minds of those joining in or just listening. ‘who is so and so in the corner?’, ‘Aunt Nell looks poorly’, ‘Will there be a cup of tea afterwards?’.

But Anglicanism – what has it to do with the Rosary as we knew it and as we know it? There is no mention of the rosary in the Books of Common Prayer anywhere throughout the Anglican communion. The ‘mysteries’ of the rosary contain not a few theological bones to cause a middle-of-the-road Anglican to choke on. Moreover, the rosary is something that ‘they’ do and that is unknown among ‘us’. There are small bands of high Anglicans in places throughout the world that pray the rosary or some version of it but it is almost entirely unknown in the broad sweep of Anglican experience (one such place where I have prayed the entire Rosary in an Anglican Church is in St Mary Magdalene’s in Toronto).

Even amongst many Roman Catholics, today, the rosary is seen as a relic of a past piety that does not sit easily with a more contemporary spirituality or liturgy. The rosary was never, strictly speaking, part of the official liturgy of the Roman Catholic church. It emerged many centuries ago as a formula well adapted to a mainly illiterate population that ‘followed’ the mass said in Latin by a priest on the other side of the alter rails. The full rosary – comprising 15 decades (until Pope John Paul II added another five) – contained no less than 150 ‘Hail Marys’ – the same number as Psalms. While monks and clerics recited or sung the psalms from start to finish every week, the laity and, eventually, most religious and priests recited the rosary as an extra. It became associated with a strong devotion to Mary – the Mother of Jesus and therefore the Mother of God (though some Protestants are awkward with the latter expression it is a pretty good translation of ‘Theotokos’ – the subject of an Ecumenical Council in the 4^th century and the deliberations of which have never been disputed by Anglicans).

In other words Mary was not just mother of Jesus in his humanity but Jesus as God and Man. Think about that. To deny that is to be a Nestorian heretic!

Nowadays, the recitation of the rosary has been known to happen at ‘pro-life’ rallies and other manifestations of opposition to the ever advancing secularism of our times. Some even see in the rosary a type of spiritual ‘weapon’ to invoke the powerful intercession of Mary to counter the forces of evil.  A symbol of resistance to progress and a bade of reaction?  Historically, the rosary was associated with the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 when the Christian forces put down the ‘Turks’ (or the Muslims to be less polite). Enough said! This sounds like a spiritual cover for a narrow denominational sectarianism if not downright Islamophobia! Or, is it?

Why do people say the Rosary and what does it contain? It is made up of 15 (or 20 if you prefer) ‘mysteries’. Each mystery comprises the following prayers:

• The Apostles Creed (all of which is undisputed across orthodox catholic and reformed Christian churches West and East).
• The Our Father
• Hail Mary made of the salutation of the Angel Gabriel in Luke 1:28 and Elizabeth in Luke 1:42 and rounded off with a request ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’.
• Glory be to the Father etc.

Now, apart from the request directly addressed to Mary to pray for us, the rest is entirely biblical or solidly liturgical (as in the doxology, Glory be…).  While Anglicans, in keeping with reformation traditions, do not pray directly to the saints (we pray to God the Father in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit), there is absolutely no rejection of the idea that the Saints in Heaven actually pray for us (including one imagines the late Roman Catholic grannies and others who were do faithful to the rosary). So, if a saint can pray for us what is wrong with slipping in a ‘direct communication’ for them to put in a word for us, too? This may be done privately one one’s own or in semi-private amongst mature adults after the main service is complete (such as happened to me recently in Toronto).

The ‘mysteries’ (isn’t that a wonderful way to call it?) are mainly taken from events in the life of Jesus (and Mary) including the annunciation to Mary, the visitation to her cousin Elizabeth, the birth of Jesus right through the passion of Jesus, his resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit. All very biblical material and very much integrated into the liturgical cycle of Anglican prayer books across the worldwide communion. There are two ‘mysteries’ that might unsettle Anglican sensitivities – the ‘Assumption of Mary body and soul into Heaven’ (the Orthodox Catholic Churches use the term ‘Dormition’ or ‘Going to sleep’ to describe what happened when Mary reached the end of her earthly journey) and the crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth. The first of these two was the made the subject of a binding Papal dogma in 1950 (although one suspects that most Roman Catholics are unaware of this nowadays) much to the consternation, at the time, of Protestants including Anglicans seeking closer unity with the Church of Rome.

Guess what – in some parts of the Anglican Communion the 15^th August (in addition to the 8^th September which is the birthday of Mary and is marked everywhere throughout the Communion) is marked as a special feast day of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now that sounds suspiciously Roman especially when it seems to be just added alongside another Marian feast day only three weeks later. Would the latter not be enough? Such ‘excesses’ as on the 15^th August, I hasten to add, are not practiced in the Church of Ireland!

Like the first, the second of these ‘add-on’ mysteries just emerged in the course of time and there is no clear scriptural evidence for it though there is some evidence of an emerging devotion to Mary and belief in her powerful intercession among Christians in the first millennium. ‘

(‘Unfortunately, many Christians moved the knowing of God largely into the realm of argumentative words, which narrowed the field of truly knowing and actually experiencing.’ Rev Richard Rohr - the Center for Action and Contemplation)

Whatever one may think of these matters is it not time to leave the rosary to the side as one of those quaint pietistic devotions of another era which, in our modern day sophistication, we have outlived? Would it not be better to just focus on the liturgy of the Eucharist, the daily office of prayer and other prayer forms as well as individual sacred reading (‘lectio divina’ to use a fancy term) and quiet contemplative prayer? I for one might have thought so until very recently. Then, one day I spent a day in an Emergency Department in a public hospital. It was not a life-threatening experience (as it turned out). But, it did help to unlock some memories and needs. Something stirred deep within me. To be honest it was all happening at a challenging time politically and socially in Ireland. Need I say more? (It is known that James Connolly, no ally of the Roman Catholic Church throughout his life, died while clutching rosary beads in front of a British firing squad on 12^th May 1916. Death focusses the heart).

Somehow I need to connect, again, with something or someone from my distant past. I needed to touch something physical like beads (or the ‘worry beads’ used by Buddhists!). I needed to let my analytical left hand brain take a little rest while the intuitive and feminine within me found new expression. Suddenly, I found myself, little by little, praying the rosary. I couldn’t believe myself! And why not?!  This was a little private thing between me and God (and Mary) and my deceased parents and uncles and aunts who were still present somehow in my life as memories but also as persons who had gone to God and were and still are with me in a mysterious way. Moreover, I felt part of a chain of prayer from North to South and from South to North as I look across the sea to the lovely Mourne Mountains. I was connected into an international current right now in this place grounded in a quiet trust and uplifting in the presence of the God-bearer – the feminine face of God’s kindness and care in the here and now. I was doing this as much for others as myself. Someone, somewhere is touched by a simple desire to let the mysteries of the life, death and resurrection of the one Saviour, Jesus Christ, whose intercession for us is all sufficient. Mary is our sister and our mother (both are true) and she helps us to realise the truth of:

• Grace alone!
• Christ alone!
• Scripture alone!

In no way does this contradict the trilogy of:

• Scripture
• Tradition
• Reason

(and I must insist, also, experience).

Mary was not a preacher. But, she spoke with her life and still does of trust, belief, repentance, healing, following and mission. ‘Grant we beseech, thee, that by meditating on these mysteries of the most holy Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise through the same Christ our Lord’ (prayer sometimes added at the end of the Rosary).

Now, what works for one may not work for another. It worked for me and I could not stop doing it!!

The slow, steady, recitation of Hail Mary’s interspersed with a short recall of the mystery after the word ‘Jesus’ (who for us was born, died, risen etc) calmed my mind and helped heal my memories. It was like the formation of a link in a chain reaching down from heaven to earth and up to heaven as I listened to the gentle waves breaking against the rocks on the seashore at sunset in the place where I live. In the gentle and steady flow of words there is no need to analyse or to over-think. It just flows. And there is a curious peace, calm and courage to face whatever lies ahead. Something is released deep within and there is a sense of healing. No kidding.

Is any of this Anglican, you may ask?

I have just made it Anglican for myself!

Collect for Birth of the Blessed Virgin (Book of Common Prayer of the Church of Ireland):

Almighty God, who looked upon the lowliness of the blessed Virgin Mary  and chose her to be the mother of your only Son: Grant that we who are redeemed by his blood may share with her in the glory of your eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Postscript

Give it a try yourself for a few days and see how you feel about it!