Mysteries of Light.

Baptism in the River Jordan 

River flow brings life.
White dove glistens in sunlight 
confirming promise


Manifestation at Cana


Still water ferments
Through love transforming into
pure flowing red wine

Proclamation of the Kingdom of God

Mountaintop outline
Rising-suns rays shining. Song
of life sweetly trilling


The Transfiguration 

Suddenly He changed
glorious transformation. Inner
light seen. Winter ends.

Institution of the Eucharist 

Vines fruit ripening 
to transcendent purpose. Grain
reaped. Friends eat.

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Sorrowful Mysteries, 5 Haiku

Syllabic meditating as days shorten. Poems open mindful heart door.




The Agony in the Garden

Night sweats blood. Lamb waits
Spring sacrifice. Sleep under
stars nears awaking.

The Scourging at the Pillar

Behold as blood flows
The Man in full throes of Passion
Kingdom of earth's growth.


The Crowning with Thorns

Hails King with taunting.
Crowns King with scalp tearing barbs 
New seeds bursting through.


The Way of the Cross

Burdened beneath tree.
Sinks below scorn. New growth
Struggles against gravity

The Crucifixion 

View from a hill. Death
with dishonour. Winterlike 
dark descends. Awhile.

Passion Haiku

Spring life suspended
in air. Barbed crown piercing.
Deathly pain arises.

Witness to Hope

If the story of the Christian faith is about suffering, death and the power of God in the resurrection then the 20th Century story of Nagasaki and Auschwitz is about suffering, death and the power of Man in destruction. Maximilian Maria Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan Priest, in a unique way embraced both places. With his life he witnessed for the Christian faith in the first and with his death he witnessed for precisely the same faith in the second. He displayed the hope that is present and gives added joy to the springtime of peace and the hope that is present and gives the only joy in the winter of unchecked human cruelty and evil passions. Some will see this as no more than a great sign that, at its best, the human spirit is indomitable. Believers will see in it the power of God's Spirit at work in the hearts of men.

During his time in Nagasaki Father Maximilian was responsible for the creation of a monastery whose location subsequently enabled it to escape the force of the nuclear blast that destroyed that city. It remained, it endured, it was a sign of hope amidst devastation and destruction. In Poland he and many of his Polish Catholic colleagues gave hope to the thousands of Jews whom they sheltered and for whom he was incarcerated in Auschwitz. Finally on earth he gave hope to the man whom he volunteered to replace as a victim of reprisals by camp authorities for a presumed escape. After three weeks of starvation he was finished off by an injection of carbolic acid. 

At Father Maximilian's canonisation John Paul II said http://www.theworkofgod.org/Saints/Lives/MaxKolbe.htm "Maximilian did not die but "gave his life...for his brother." In that death, terrible from the human point of view, there was the whole definitive greatness of the human act and of the human choice. He spontaneously offered himself up to death out of love." The Saint went to Japan not because it would benefit himself in any way at all but because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that proclaiming the Good News about Jesus and about devotion to Mary Immaculate (the great love of Maximilian's life) would be of immense service to the Japanese people. He and his colleagues offered shelter to Polish Jews not because this would bring some benefit, on earth or in heaven, to the Franciscans but because it was the right thing to do. And he offered himself in exchange for a married man and a father because dying for love that life may more abundant is the Christian way. 

In the life and death of St Maximilian we see an icon of Jesus Christ. There are those who ridicule the whole "saint making" process of the Catholic Church seeing in it a presumption on the part of the Church in dictating to God who can or cannot be in heaven. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. The process of canonisation is not about putting people into the Blessed Place, it is about discerning some of those whom God has already placed there and then celebrating the fact. Most importantly it is first and foremost about those of us still here on earth. Each canonised saint is in one way or another, like St Maximilian, an image of Jesus. By studying their lives and imitating or admiring them we can grow ever closer to the Divine original. This is one reason why Blessed John Paul II presided over so many canonisations. By presenting to modern people modern saints, to indigenous people indigenous saints, to the disabled disabled saints to the lost saints who eventually became found the Church makes clear that Jesus because He is unchanging is unchangingly relevant in a changing world. He is hope without end especially to those whose hopes have been ended by human injustice and sin.   

This is the original of the article published at The Guardian
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Within You Without You

Reflection on Mark 10:13-15

 [13]And they brought to him young children, that he might touch them. And the disciples rebuked them that brought them. 
[14] Whom when Jesus saw, he was much displeased, and saith to them: Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God. 
[15] Amen I say to you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter into it.

Our Lord is clearly telling us here that before we can enter the kingdom the kingdom must first enter us. Elsewhere in Sacred Scripture we can see this point illustrated by analogy with the simple act of knocking upon a door.

 [20] Behold, I stand at the gate, and knock. If any man shall hear my voice, and open to me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

Apocalypse 3:20

 [7] Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and you shall find: knock, and it shall be opened to you.
 [8] For every one that asketh, receiveth: and he that seeketh, findeth: and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened. 

Matt 7:7-8

So what is this kingdom that we must first receive before it can receive us? Well, a clue surely is to be found in the nature that we must have in order to receive it, that is we must be as a little child. And a further clue is to be found in that it knocks before waiting for us to decide to let it enter (or not). A little child is vulnerable and can be compelled to many things but the little child who receives the kingdom is not so compelled. So the kingdom is characterised by both power and gentleness in relationship to the one whom it courts. The kingdom is great, the child is small, the door is shut and only the child can will to open it; the inherent gentleness of the kingdom prevents it from opening it itself. That is, the omnipotence of God can be foiled by the weakness of the infant because the greatest of the powers of God is love and this can never be compelled.

So, the kingdom is a suppliant and a lover. What else can we deduce about it? The kingdom is a shared meal between friends, the invited and welcome guest with the delighted host. I with him and he with me is not simply stating the same thing twice. It is making clear that the kingly guest receives from his host the things of loving friendship and also gives the things of loving friendship. The place where they meet is a privileged space not because the great is humbled or the humble elevated but because each is naturally what they are by nature; loving souls being loving the one with the other, without interruption, in perfect happiness.

For the kingdom which enters in to be the same as the kingdom which we enter then a transformation must occur. We must be changed. Having received the loving suppliant so that He is within us then we must enter into Him for it is He, Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, who is indeed the Kingdom Himself. And we can do so only by becoming one with Him, by becoming, in a mystical sense, Him Himself.

 [18] But we all beholding the glory of the Lord with open face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.

2 Corinthians 3:18

And this is another truth about the kingdom. We behold it.

 [17] That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation, in the knowledge of him:
 [18] The eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know what the hope is of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.

Ephesians 1:17-18

The kingdom is light. It enters us through the eyes of our heart. It fills our heart with such a superabundance of light that we become light ourselves and so we become of the realm of the King ourselves. And the first step is to receive the light.

 I write this on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and in this matter of the kingdom as in so much else she is our guide and exemplar. At the Annunciation she received the kingdom within her in the Divine Person of the Son of God and at the Assumption she entered definitively in the Kingdom of light. May her example guide us and may her powerful intercession aid us as we seek in our little, little way to follow her path of conquest through submission to light and love. Amen

We must respect our opponents' humanity

It occurs to me that I never got around to posting my Guardian article published in the wake of the Arizona shootings last year. This is that

Comments by and about Sarah Palin over the Arizona shootings have underlined the importance of civility in the public sphere. Photograph: Randy Snyder/Getty Images

The question: Does civility matter?

The opening lines of the Buddhist classic the Dhammapada are "Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox." Thought precedes words, words precede deeds. Does Sarah Palin precede the terribleshootings in Arizona?

Arguably anyone who answers that question by saying "yes" could be accused of creating a climate which legitimises the assassination of Palin herself. Incivility is a vicious spiral. It is a continuation of war by other means. The point of attack speech is not to convince but to defeat by humiliation or other means. It proceeds from the conviction that our rightness, the rightness of our cause is more important than the mere persons of those who disagree with us. If our opponents are not people but "wing-nuts" or "lifestyle gays" then it doesn't really matter what we say. If they are cut they do not bleed.

It seems to me that for a Christian the starting point should be Christ. Not so much "what would Jesus do?" as "why did Jesus suffer?". I have never met a person that Jesus did not die for, I have never spoken about a person that Jesus did not love. When I am thinking about my best friend's best friend then I think differently than if I am thinking about some warmongering hockey-mom that wants to nuke Iran. And that should be reflected in how I write, how I speak, how I act.

Back in 1984 the IRA exploded a bomb in Brighton that very nearly killed Margaret Thatcher. Over the course of the next few days I lost count of the number of people I heard saying, on the street, in buses, at supermarket checkouts, how much they regretted that the IRA had failed to achieve its aim. These were not Republican sympathisers, these were people who hated Thatcher and without willing the means, terrorism, willed the end, assassination. And that at a time when dialogue had not been coarsened and brutalised in the way that appears to have happened since the culture wars began in the US. Which brings us back to thoughts preceding words preceding deeds. Unexpressed hatred is no less dangerous than its expressed variety, arguably it is more so. The supreme incivility does not consist of calling someone less than human. It consists in believing that someone is less than human.

In debate and discussion I usually (actually always) start from the assumption that I am right and that those who disagree with me are wrong. It seems pointless to argue from a point of view otherwise. What I do not begin with is the assumption that my correctness makes me a superior form of creature to those whom happenstance has placed in the camp of error. Being right is not the same as being better. And if I am not better than my interlocutor, why act as if I was? Civil discourse does not proceed from respecting your opponents' beliefs, which in the case of atheists are ludicrous tosh, but in respecting your opponents' humanity. Once you do that, your finger never tightens on the trigger.

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Orange Dreams

I submitted this to the Guardian perhaps over optimistically

Reading Andrew Browns recent piece on Creationism at the Giants Causeway on the weekend before the big Orange Order 12th of July parades brings about an interesting juxtaposition of ideas. Andrew writes of the Young Earth Creationists-

 the world will not take much notice of my preferences, or yours. If we are to change it, we need reasons and explanations, not just wants. And we can't get the reasons and explanations that we need without reaching outside science, and outside the market. To the extent that creationists, too, are trying to do that, we should sympathise.

Which reminded me of these words of Patrick Pearse The Orangeman is ridiculous in so far as he believes incredible things; he is estimable in so far as he is willing and able to fight in defence of what he believes. It is foolish of an Orangeman to believe that his personal liberty is threatened by Home Rule; but, granting that he believes that, it is not only in the highest degree common sense but it is his clear duty to arm in defence of his threatened liberty. 
http://publish.ucc.ie/celt/docs/E900007-005?fragment=6&numdiv=View

Whilst Brown and Pearse are an unlikely pairing, one a dewy eyed romantic with mystical leanings the other an Irish Republican, they both point to an almost universal reality. People have a need to explain the world to themselves and to explain themselves to themselves. Many of the religious, philosophical or political belief systems which we have do not consist of people making things up, the "imaginary friend syndrome", they consist of people encountering facts which contain for them some kind of emotional content. The facts may be true facts but the importance they have for the one who attaches themselves to them in a partisan fashion is that they convey a personal emotional "hit". They are facts which make us feel that we understand more than we did before we encountered them.

I think that it is more or less inevitable that most of us seek out such emotional truths or at any rate encounter them. And our immediate and passionate attachment to them is also practically inevitable. What follows on from that, however, is much more dependant upon personalities or the contingent circumstances in which we dwell. The Young Earth Creationist and the Orangeman stick doggedly to their facts and will forever combatively assert them against all other facts for which they feel no positive emotion. The parade they make of their attachment through the public streets, and especially the "enemy" streets, is a statement that the explanation that they have found is the end of the search for meaning, take it or leave it.

More commonly I think is the experience of finding fulfilling facts but not thereafter entering into a solemn pact and covenant to ignore all subsequently encountered unfulfilling facts. Not least because all our fulfilment is only ever partial at best. We still hunger and thirst for more and better explanations and this need fuels our continuing search. We resist the notion that there are no such universal explanations, and those who believe such a notion are themselves simply attached to an emotionally satisfying truth. Another unlikely pairing, Marx and Augustine, perhaps have between them described this as well as anyone ever has.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

 You move us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You.
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110101.htm

The important question each of us needs to answer is not so much "are the facts that I believe true?" but "are the facts that I ignore unimportant?" No universal explanation can ultimately satisfy us if, deep down, we know we are suppressing inconvenient truths in order to attach ourselves to pleasing ones.

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Enter the Logos (Pt 2)

At first glance to say "follow me" is much the same as saying "come and see". The Theologian, however, is laying another aspect of his Divine Master before us. Here it is the case that Jesus deliberately seeks out Philip and issues a specific invitation to him. What the Theologian tells us about geography is significant. Jesus is a Galilean from Nazareth, Philip is a Galilean from Bethsaida, at this point they are situated in Bethabara beyond the Jordan and Jesus has taken the decision to return to Galilee. In the Gospels Galilee often stands as a figure for the normal everyday working life of ordinary folk by contrast with the high tensions and festivals of Jerusalem. Philip and his companions have taken a time out from their ordinary lives to seek out the truth and meaning towards which John the Baptist points. Now our Lord seeks him out and invites him to return to the normal and the ordinary but to experience it in a different way. Philip will return to Galilee changed by baptism and will lead a life who's guiding principle has now become the following of Jesus. A Jesus who is present amidst the fishermen and tax gatherers, the sowers and the reapers. It is an invitation that tells us that Jesus is the incarnated one. He is in our midst as one like us and also as God Himself. He is our bridge, He is our vital link between the inward and the outward, time and eternity. He is the strong become weak that the weak might become strong. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

And who is the "us" that Emmanuel is most with? Nathaniel is our model here. "..an Israelite, a true one; there is nothing false in him." To travel in friendship with Jesus to and through Galilee there must be no barriers within ourselves to truth. A true Israelite is not one who pretends. Nathaniel says what he thinks, that is honesty. It is not stubbornness though, what he thinks will change as the facts change. The kind of charge that Jesus will later bring against the Pharisees is not that they are blunt but that they stand by their bluntness in pride rather than examine the possibility that they might have made a judgement based on inadequate information. Nathaniel is honest enough to adhere to things as they are, or as they become, rather than simply sticking to his previously expressed opinion as being once right always right. The prestige of the Pharisees amongst first century Jews rested precisely upon their reputation for honesty and truthfulness. Jesus in his description of Nathaniel and not Pharisaism as true Israel is making the point that inflexibility and an obstinate refusal to see is not truth it is falsehood elevated to a system. 

 “Before Philip called you, you were under the fig tree and I saw you.” The Theologian allows us to see two things here. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, Jesus possesses great powers which suggest His divinity. Secondly, that He chooses to act through human agency. He could have called Nathaniel Himself but He did not. Philip performed that noble task. This I think links us back to the words of our Lord to St Peter. Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, has a mission as a human among humans using human means. He could, as it were, short circuit everything and achieve all His ends by direct Spirit to spirit contact but the Father does not will it so. It is His intention to save us and unite us to Him not as disembodied entities but as fully human persons with bodies as well as spirits, with weaknesses as well as strengths. And in service of that project He Himself takes on our frailty and uses that frailty itself; directly Himself and indirectly through His Apostles, disciples and friends to bring about the fulfilment of His plan. It would no doubt be more satisfactory to human imaginations if He used only perfect means to achieve perfect ends but He does not. He uses very imperfect means sometimes. Which is to say He uses you and me. If we are willing to do as Philip did.

....you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.  And so we come to the end of the Seven First Words. And the end is a promise. The promise of a new beginning. If, like Nathaniel, we follow Jesus into the Galilee of the everyday our journey will bring change. He does not promise and ever repeated sameness but an ever deeper and truer vision of Himself. However long we gaze upon Him He will never cease to be the carpenter from Nazareth. But we ourselves will change and will see that the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity are, in Him, not two things but one. And by His gracious gift when He looks upon us He can see that what He is by nature we have become by adoption on the day that we have, in our hearts, understood the question “What are you looking for?”

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Enter the Logos [Pt 1]

For many centuries the author of the fourth Gospel has been known to the Orthodox East as Saint John the Theologian. It is an apt title, his is the most highly structured of the Gospel accounts we possess. Each word, each incident serves a purpose and fits into a pattern. They signify themselves and beyond themselves. It is no surprise then to see that the first seven utterances of Jesus in the Gospel of St John, all contained in Chapter 1, constitute in a way an effective summary of our Lords mission and the life of the Church and the Christian. These are His seven first words-

“What are you looking for?”
“Come and see.”
“You are Simon, son of John, but you shall be called Cephas” (which means Rock).
“Follow me.”
“Here comes an Israelite, a true one; there is nothing false in him.”
 “Before Philip called you, you were under the fig tree and I saw you.”
 “You believe because I said: ‘I saw you under the fig tree.’ But you will see greater things than that.
 Truly, I say to you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
(Christian Community Bible, Catholic Pastoral Edition)

His first words are directed to St Andrew and one other (possibly the Theologian himself) who follow after Him because He has been pointed to as the Lamb of God. Few people in the world today know nothing at all about Jesus. The disciples who left John the Baptist to find out more about the Lamb had no clear idea what this title meant and still less did they have an understanding of the One who bore that title. We also when we begin to walk after Jesus, not to obey Him but to question Him, have no clear idea whom it is we are behind or what power for us He carries within Himself. So He first questions us and not we Him. What are we looking for? Truth? Peace of heart and mind? Love? Rest of soul? Perhaps all of these things, maybe others beside. We do not need to know in detail what it is that we seek. All we need to know for certain is that we are restless and will never be at rest until we find that one thing we need. Nor, at the beginning of our journey, do we need to know or affirm that we will find that certain rest in Jesus. What we need is to acknowledge the reality of our permanent restlessness and express the hope and desire that in knowing Jesus we will come to know just what it is we are looking for. Something we can only really know in full at the moment when we see that we have found it.

"Come and see," it is an invitation to abide with Jesus. It is a journey from where you are now to some other place. It is the promise of a vision at journey's end of something unseen before by your eyes. How can we, thousands of years later, accept this invitation for ourselves and walk where St Andrew walked and see what he and one other, beloved of the Lord, saw? We must make the same decisions which they made, for then we shall be in an identical place with them. They first accepted the authority of St John the Baptist, they believed him when he pointed and said "Behold the Lamb of God". There are a cloud of witnesses before us who point in the same way, some famous some perhaps known to only a few within our own little circle. If we accept on the authority of the sanctity and purity of their live's, of the fruits they have borne, that they are a powerful testimony to the One who has changed them then we can seek to learn more about that One also. That is the first decision. The second is a twofold abandonment. Having heard John's witness the companions straightway abandoned him. Later he would say of Jesus  It is necessary that he increase but that I decrease. (John 3:30). In a purely human scale this has an inescapably sad ring to it but John himself gave this as a reason for him greatly to rejoice. Indeed, he said that his joy was now full. For if we abandon a truly faithful witness to fly to the heart of Jesus we will find, amidst other treasures, that same faithful witness only now we will understand them better and love them more.

Almost simultaneous with their abandonment of St John the companions abandoned themselves. The direction of travel they left to another. To another they gave the guidance of their eyes so that they would come to see what He put before them to gaze upon. On the apparently slender basis of John's brief witness and Jesus's brief invitation they struck out in a new direction, impelled by a divine restlessness and buoyed up by a divine hope. It has been the fate of many over the centuries deceived by charlatans, misguided by rogues, to set out on similar journeys only to end up bitter and crushed, robbed, deceived, betrayed and themselves abandoned. Indeed, a few short years later that seemed to be the experience of the companions themselves as they saw their beloved one dead upon a Cross. This was, ultimately, what Jesus was calling upon them, and us with them, to "come and see". If we abandon all and stumble at the Cross then we lose all. And if we, with Mary, stand firm at the Cross then we gain all. But for us, without the firmness of a perfect faith, it is always a gamble. If we make the same decisions as the companions then it is a promise that we could see what they saw and abide where they abide. It is not a guarantee that we will though. A journey is not itself an ending.

His first words to Simon are of an altogether different kind. He looks at him and immediately gives him a new title. He is to be the Rock. Almost at the beginning of the Gospel Peter becomes the Rock at the command of Jesus. Almost at the end he becomes the Shepherd “Feed my lambs.” “Look after my sheep.” “Feed my sheep" (John 21) The word reported by the Theologian  are never without significance or purpose. If he places Simon Peter in a special place then it is a sure sign that his Divine Master had done so before him. Each of us who seeks Jesus has a reason for doing so, we desire something or a something from Him. But it is a two way relationship, He desires something or a something from us also. And that something is different for each one of us. Some, and not the least important in the Kingdom, spend their lives and fulfil their purpose in obscure well doing, prayer, service, in solitude or in the midst of a bustling family. Others are called, not by themselves, to live prominently. To lead, to guide, to discipline, to exhort, to command. If the first word of Jesus was to call for followers his second was to establish a hierarchy amongst them. We cannot, if we are faithful to the words of Scripture, pretend that the Jesus Community consisted of one Saviour and an undifferentiated mass of followers. It consisted of first Jesus, then Peter. As it was so it now is in the Church He left established with His blood and upheld through His Spirit and that of the Father.