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25th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B

Imagine four persons in a room: The first is a powerful dictator who rules a country.

His word commands armies and his shifting moods intimidate subordinates.

He wields a brutal power.

Next to him sits a gifted athlete at the peak of her physical prowess, a woman whose quickness and strength have few equals.

Her skills are a graceful power for which she is much admired and envied.

The third person is a rock star whose music and charisma can electrify an audience and fill a room with soulful energy.

Her face is on billboards and she is a household name.

That’s still another kind of power.

Finally, we have too in the room a newborn, a baby, lying in its bassinet/crib, seemingly without any power or strength whatsoever, unable to even ask for what it needs.

Which of these is ultimately the most powerful?

The irony is that the baby ultimately wields the greatest power.

The athlete could crush it, the dictator could kill it, and the rock star could out-glow it in sheer dynamism, but the baby has a different kind of power.

We have a new language we only use around babies (usually unintelligible to anyone!), the radio and TV volume are dependent on the sleep pattern of the newborn, as is the time to start up the motor mower.

The baby can touch hearts in a way that a dictator, an athlete, or a rock star cannot.

Its innocent, wordless presence, without physical strength, can transform a room and a heart in a way that guns, muscle, and charisma are unable to.

We watch our language and actions around a baby, less so around athletes and rock stars. The powerlessness of a baby touches us in a deeper moral place.

And this is the way we find and experience God’s power here on earth, sometimes to our great frustration, and this is the way that Jesus was deemed powerful during his lifetime.

Jesus, standing wordless before Pilate might be the most power-filled moment in the entire Gospel story.

The entire Gospels make this clear, from beginning to end.

Jesus was born as a baby, powerless, and he died hanging helplessly on a cross with bystanders mocking his powerlessness.

Yet both his birth and his death manifest the kind of power upon which we can ultimately build our lives.

They are two moments that are still celebrated the world over.

The world stops at Christmas and Good Friday.

Most shops are shut, public transport changes it schedules, usually meaning fewer services, and, maybe ironically, our Churches are most full!

When the Gospels speak of Jesus as “having great power” they use the Greek word, exousia, which might be best rendered as vulnerability.

Jesus’ real power was rooted in a certain vulnerability, like the powerlessness of a child.

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24th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B

Jesus asks of his disciples “Who do you say that I am?”

What I find immediately intriguing is that the Gospel writer, Mark, only records the answer that Peter gave!

The assumption is that Peter was answering for all of them.

But, was he?

Who gave him permission to do so?

Surely as grown men, able to answer for themselves!

That may well be the crux of the whole story – namely, have I been using the answers of another or others and very subtly avoiding answering the question myself.

“Who do you say I am?” is addressed to me personally; only I can answer for myself.

Or, need I answer at all?

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke has a fascinating little book titled, Letters to a Young Poet.

At the heart of the book is an aspiring young poet’s request to Rilke to let him know whether he (the young poet) ought to be a poet or not.

The young poet is insistent. At one point Rilke writes

“ . . . .  I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it – but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.”

Perhaps Rilke’s advice is advantageous for us, given the question in today’s Gospel  ‘try to love the question’ – who do you say I am; ‘Live the question’ – who do you say I am?; and live along some distant day into the answer.

Rilke’s final words of advice to the young man, perhaps had been written for us “and after all I do want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your innermost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”

This weeks image is an oil on canvas from the artist Claude Monet, titled “Path In The Forest”, painted in 1868 and held in a private collection.

What I find of interest and worth reflection is the title itself.

The title does not say, a path ‘through’ the forest, as if it is an access route in and out. Rather the title says a path ‘in’ the forest  – a path to take while ‘living’ and ‘loving’ the question!

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Birthday of Mary

This Wednesday we celebrate the feast of the Birth of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Have we missed the beat with Mary?

She appears, is named only a few times in the Gospel.

Many of the litanies and names of Mary were composed to hold a mirror up to Jesus and to name Mary.

For example Jesus is called the Redeemer, and so Mary is the co-Redemptrix.

By many, Jesus is called King, and so Mary is named as Queen (every King has to have a Queen, however the Son/Mother relationship does cause some questions?).

Mary appears by name in the Synoptic Gospels and in the book of Acts. Luke contains the most references to Mary and places the greatest emphasis on her role in God’s plan.

Mary is mentioned by name in the genealogy of Jesus, in the annunciation, in Mary’s visit with Elizabeth, in the birth of Jesus, in the visit of the wise men, in Jesus’ presentation in the temple, and in the Nazarene’s rejection of Jesus.

In Acts, she is referred to as “Mary, the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14), where she participates in the community of believers and prays with the apostles.

The Gospel of John never mentions Mary by name, but refers to the “mother of Jesus” in the account of the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11) and standing near the cross at the crucifixion (John 19:25–27).

(One author I once read suggested that Mary may well have appeared more often outside of the Gospels than within them!)

Mary is hardly present throughout the ministry of Jesus, or at least she is not named as being present.

Might I suggest that her not being present, or at least not being named is in fact her biggest being there!

What Jesus learned as a human person he learned from his human family, namely his mother, his human father, maybe his siblings, his grandparents, the village folk in Nazareth, and what he learned from living with a group of twelve sometimes, grumpy men.

Who knows the name of Pope Francis mother?

Who knows the name of the mother of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King jr, Mahatma Gandhi?

The “absent” mother is present in the son!

I, along with many others of my generation, grew up with a Mary imaged from art and sculpted statues; a virginal young girl, not a wrinkle to be seen, her hands clasped in front of her, her white garment without a stain or wrinkle, and a blue veil.

That all changed me on my journey through the Holy Land in 1984.

It was late August, brutally hot, sandy and arid.

I remember lying in bed one evening after a full days tour and suddenly realizing this was the environment in which Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all those I had become familiar with through the Gospel stories, had lived and grown up in.

However, they

      • did not have the air conditioner on high;
      • they had no cold shower to cool off in;
      • they had no refrigerator to keep the drinks cold;
      • they had no toilets.

How could Mary have had snow white, wrinkle free skin in such a climate?

How could her feet have remained like a porcelain doll walking dusty tracks, carrying heavy vases of water from the well; gathering wood for the fire would not do the fingernails any good!

And I might well imagine the harsh sun and wind chiselled a weather-beaten face to her complexion.

For the record, I didn’t see a blue veil my entire journey through the Holy Land, so where did we get blue from?

The answer is ridiculously simple.

The rarity and difficulty of accessing blue pigment encouraged civilisations to imbue the colour with mystical properties.

In Christian iconography, blue became one of the most sacred colours.

The religious connotations of the pigment were also because it was so expensive.

Artists preserved the most costly colours for important religious subject matters, like the Virgin Mary. A particular shade was even named after her, ‘Marian blue’.

So, once again, Mary has become “costly” and “expensive”.

Would she have wanted that?

When reading the lives of saints my attention is often caught by how many, especially women saints, have come from a poor, uneducated background.

So too Mary, a poor village, and given the culture, she grew up uneducated.

The question I hold is this, have we in our attempt to give due and proper reverence to Mary as the Mother of our Saviour we have unwittingly made of her a model inaccessible to the young women of today.

The image I offer is my personal favourite Of Mary.

The actual painting has nothing to do with Mary. Rather, it is a detail by the Dutch artist Peter Paul Rubens.

The painting is titled “Old Woman With A Basket Of Coal”, painted between 1616 – 1618. In most of our artistic representations of Mary she is never allowed to grow old!

Well, here she is with lines of toil, of dirt, of searing heat, of relentless toil. H

owever, take a moment to stare into here eyes; you may well see grace, wisdom, understanding and compassion.

You may just well be looking into the eyes of her Son.

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Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

My name is James, the son of Anna and Barnabas.

Being completely deaf, I was deprived of so much that others take for granted. I had never heard the shouts of children at play, the song of a bird, of the wind in trees, a word of comfort or encouragement.

The fact that I was practically dumb as well added to my sense of deprivation and isolation. And when you are different, people, often, are afraid of you. I was full of self-pity.

One day a man came to my village, I couldn’t hear his name, but I could tell from his dress he was a Jew. What on earth was he doing in a Gentile village in the Decapolis?

Many of those from the village gathered around him.

I followed them.

Many of the villagers looked at me with scorn, “What are you doing here?” their eyes said, ‘you should have stayed at home” the grimace on their face declared.

This man took me aside from the crowd and gave me all his attention. Now, I felt important.

He did not speak to me as it would have been a waste of words. Instead, he touched me; a tender, patient, loving touch.

He made me feel what I couldn’t hear.

Then he put his finger into his mouth, and said, “Be opened!”

And I was!

I heard children laughing, birds singing, the wind in the trees. And I laughed with the children and sang with the birds.

Why am I telling you this?

I discovered many new things in the months that followed.

My first discovery was that a touch offered in love heals!

Also, I learned that many people listen without hearing; many have loose tongues that would be better tied; many have ears to hear, and tongues to proclaim.

But why proclaim if no one is listening?

And at times all are proclaiming so loudly that no one can hear.

Hearing and speech are great gifts. They are heart gifts. It is only with the heart that we can listen rightly, and only with the heart that we can speak rightly.

You know the very best thing about receiving my hearing?

I heard my Mother and Father call my name! And the very best thing about receiving my speech? I could proclaim, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening!”