Homily on my return from pilgrimage 16 September 2007

Homily for Twentyfourth Sunday In Ordinary Time Year C 16 Sept 2007 I am just back from escorting a parish from Brentwood diocese round Portugal, and Fr Chris is back from his annual leave in Ireland, and I guess during the summer, if such we can call it, many of you have also been away. In France this time of year, early September, is known as “la rentrée”, the coming back, the coming home, because this is the time of year when we come back- the children go back to school, and we return to our routines, to our normal life. There is a saying, isn’t there, that weekdays are fact and weekends are fiction, and that is certainly true of the holiday season, which in England used to be called by the press the silly season, when because everyone was away and everything was shut down, the only news the papers had to print was trivial stuff. So perhaps we have been away, and indulged in holiday mood in what we might call fiction- we feel different, we may even look different, wearing our holiday clothes, our resort wear- or, as a friend of mine said when he saw some brightly coloured shorts I was planning to take to Turkey, our last resort wear. We go to different places, do different things, perhaps do uncharacteristic things, things we wouldn’t normally think of doing at home- we feel somehow liberated from the constraints of our ordinary lives, because we are away, we are on holiday, and often, in a sense, we are on holiday from ourselves. These experiences, these adventures, are all very well, perhaps a necessary letting off steam for us- perhaps we feel it is good for us to kick over the traces once in a while. Perhaps it is. But there is a danger in fooling ourselves into thinking that the fiction that we create on holiday is, or could become, fact. It must remain an escape, and be recognised as such, and we must accept the fact of our lives, of our real selves, which is greater than any fiction, than any fantasy, and return to them, because it is in the reality of our daily lives, in the very ordinariness of our ordinary lives, in the humdrum of our routines, that God is waiting to encounter us- not in the fantasies, not in the escapism of the emotional highs, but in our true selves, in our day to day existence. This is what the prophet Jeremiah means when he says “The heights are a delusion, and the orgies of the mountains also”, a phrase I came across in the breviary some weeks ago and which I cannot get out of my mind. Not in the highs of escapism, but in the plains of our down to earth lives will we find truth, and the God who is Truth. Look at today’s Gospel. Today the Church gives us a second chance this year to reflect on the parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son tires of his life, and goes off to have a permanent holiday from it, he exchanges fact for fiction, and lives out his fantasies to the full. And what happens? He finds at the end of the day that all he has left in his hands are husks, things of no substance, and he is desperately, supernaturally hungry, because all the fun of the fair has not been able to satisfy him and he ruefully recognises the sheer emptiness of all the pleasures he has been chasing after. What does he do? He returns! He comes home! And once he is on the path of return, what does he find? He has been rather grimly gritting his teeth about his homecoming, rehearsing a speech he is going to make, of abject apology, and being ready for life to be much harder than it was before, recognising he is no longer worthy to be called his father’s son, but actually it is not going to turn out like that at all- the Father is there, coming to meet him on his way, welcoming him with open arms, and giving him back all his former status as the beloved son. This is what we will find, please God, this autumn, as we return to our routines and the calendar moves inexorably on, with our old commitments and responsibilities making their claims on us afresh- it will be in the normality of things, “back in our own backyard” as Byng Crosby (I think) used to sing, that we will find Our Lord waiting for us. The return to ordinary life, the picking up again of our old familiar ways, will not be a thing to be afraid of or resentful about, for if we approach our lives in the right spirit, we will find that God is there and God will reward us and make our burden light. Are we the returning prodigal son? We may, some of us, baulk at identifying with that wayward young man, we may be thinking “Well, that’s all very well, but I haven’t escaped ever, I’ve just been soldiering on, and very hard work it’s been”. In that case perhaps we are rather like the other son, who is so annoyed at all the fuss when his brother suddenly turns up again, and who remonstrates with the father: “Look, all these years I have slaved for you and never once disobeyed your orders!” He clearly has got just as fed up with the day to day drudgery of life on the farm as his brother had. And our daily routines and our ordinary lives can indeed seem a drudgery, a treadmill, grinding us down. If we see the Christian life as obeying orders, if we see ourselves as slaves, with no say or interest in what’s happening around us, then of course we will be fed up, and we will go a bit sour and resentful, like this other son. Alas, we can all think of people who have been turned sour by religion, who have kept all the rules and ended up bitter and twisted. We must keep the rules out of love, not out of fear, we must follow loyally the teachings of the Church not because we have no choice but because that is our desire, what we do to show our love for Our Lord, Our Lord who said “I do not call you slaves any more, but friends”. Lord Jesus, accept us as we return to you; come and find us in our ordinary lives, and let us find in our daily routines a hundred ways to serve and please you, for the heights are a delusion and we need the truth, the truth of our lives, if we are to know you who are the Truth. Run to us, clasp us in your arms at this Mass and kiss us tenderly as we receive you in Holy Communion. Amen.

Pilgrimage to Portugal

Homily for Our Lady of Sorrows 15 September 2007 delivered in Oporto Cathedral Today’s Liturgy shows us how close to her beloved Son Our Lady was, and how that closeness, that total identification, meant that his pain became her pain. That is a terrible phrase, a piece of psychobabble we hear all the time, but the parents among you, especially perhaps the mothers here, will know the truth of it- how you go through all the turmoils of your children’s lives with them. Closeness to people eventually means that we become like them, we take on some of our friends’ ways, their speech and turns of phrase, even perhaps their opinions. And when we look at that special form of friendship that is marriage, we all know married people who have grown so together that they always know what each other is thinking, what they’re going to say before they say it, and so on. That is why it is very important for us to choose our friends well, because they will influence us. Parents know this very well, that is why they are always so anxious about their children’s friends, especially in the teenage years, when children can become such copycats! As you know, I worked in the East End of London for many years with delinquent teenagers and their families, and one of the first questions I would always ask when I first met a youngster in trouble was “Who are your friends?” In German there is a saying, “Mitgegangen, mitgehangen”, which means, the people you hang around with will get you hanged. So who are our friends then? Well on our pilgrimage this week we have made a deliberate effort to come close to some really major saints, those closest in life to Our Lord. We went to Compostela to get to know St James, to acquire some kind of intimacy with one of the disciples- Peter, James and John- who was always in Our Lord’s inner circle, one of his special friends, one to whom he gave special insights. Then yesterday we journeyed to Fatima, to Our Lady, to draw close to Our Blessed Mother, the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of us all, the person who was and is closest of all to Jesus, who always has his listening ear. Can we let them influence us? I think we should. Let us be a bit rash in our love for Our Lord, like St James- when Jesus said to him “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?”, even though he didn’t really know what that meant, nevertheless, he said straightaway “Yes, we can!” We want to have some of that enthusiasm of St James too, that is why we hugged him at Compostela, we want to be one with him and make the same kind of enthusiastic offering of ourselves to Our Lord. And as for Our Lady- do you remember the Gospel reading we had the other day, when the angel appears to Joseph and says “Do not be afraid to take Mary to your home”? Well, that is a message for us- we must not be afraid to take Mary with us to our homes as we return to them this evening. May each one of us have no fear, and be willing and happy to take Mary to our home. Let us make the saints our friends and let our intimacy with them influence us, change our lives and bring us ever closer to our Blessed Lord. Amen.