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14th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

Shortly after his conversion, St. Augustine of Hippo, penned these words:

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unlovliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”

(Confessions.  Confessions is an autobiographical work consisting of 13 books written in Latin between AD 397 and 400)

We do not pray to make God present to us. God is already present, always present everywhere.

We pray to make ourselves present to God.

English author Sheila Cassidy colourfully puts it,

“God is no more present in church than in a drinking bar, but we generally are more present to God in church than we are in a drinking bar. The problem of presence is not with God, but with us. “

The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God.

The secret to finding beauty and love in life is basically the same.

Like God, they are already present.

The trick is to make ourselves present to them.

Rarely are we enough inside of our own skins, present enough to the moment, and sensitive enough to the richness that is already present in our lives.

Our experience comes brimming with riches, but too often we are not enough inside of it.

Like the young Augustine, we are away from ourselves, strangers to our own experience, seeking outside of ourselves something that is already inside of us.

The trick is to come home.

God and the moment do not have to be searched out and found.

They are already here.

We need to be here.

The image is of what is known as the Hubble Cross or the Cross of Hubble, taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

The image is some 30 million light-years from the planet earth.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaXcMPffhNU

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14th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

This Sunday’s Gospel has Jesus returning to his home village, Nazareth and the people of the village “took offence at him” (v3).

Whenever I read this story in Mark’s Gospel, I am reminded of a most intriguing novel I read some years ago.

The novel is by the Irish author and playwright Brinsley MacNamara and is titled, The Valley of the Squinting Windows.

Written in 1918, the novel is set in the fictional village of Garradrimna, in central Ireland where everyone is interested in everyone else’s business and wishes them to fail.

Gossip and finger-pointing are rife. [The Valley of the Squinting Windows, so enraged the Westmeath community in which MacNamara lived that the book was publicly burned, its author humiliated and his father, the local schoolteacher, boycotted and driven into exile.]

The novel exposed the bitter cruelty of village morality.

The smaller the society, the more controlling this narrow spirit.

“Beneath the charm of the rural town or village, there often lurks a lethal intolerance.”

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13 Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

The 3rd Century theologian and biblical scholar Origen insightfully comments that it is this woman who has the divine touch: He writes,

The outer human being has the sensible faculty of touch, and the inner human being also has touch, that touch with which the woman with a haemorrhage touched the hem of Jesus’ garment (cf. Mark 5.25-34 parr). She touched it, as He testified who said: Who touched me? (Mark 5.30). Yet just before, Peter said to Him: The multitudes are pressing upon you and you ask, ‘Who touched me?’ (Luke 9.45 parr). Peter thinks that those touching are touching in a bodily, not spiritual manner. Thus, those pressing in on Jesus were not touching Him, for they were not touching Him in faith. Only the woman, having a certain divine touch, touched Jesus and by this was healed. And because she touched Him with a divine touch, this caused power to go forth from Jesus in response to her holy touch. Hence, He says: Someone touched me: for I perceive that power has gone forth from me (Luke 8.46). It is about this healing touch that John says: Which we have touched with our hands concerning the word of life (1 John 1.1).

(Treaty on the Passover, p. 72)

I find this line from Origen thought-provoking, “those pressing in on Jesus were not touching Him, for they were not touching Him in faith”.

My reading of it is that presence ‘with’ does not mean the same as present ‘to’.

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13th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

The Gospel story this Sunday begins with a request, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her.” (Mark 5:23)

In the environment of today, that request would not be responded to with the immediacy Jesus showed.

Rather there would be caution, a sense of alertness, a sense of “ is this ok?”

Each of the rites of our Sacraments has as part of them a ritual laying on of hands.

I know several priests who, today, are very wary of that ritual action! particularly when the Sacrament is celebrated privately, for example, the First Rite of Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick in a private home or hospital.

Is there cause for us to reclaim a genuine theology of the body and of touch?

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