SS Peter and Paul 28 June 2008

Homily for the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul and the Start of the Pauline Year Sunday 29 June 2008 This weekend the Holy Father proclaimed the opening of the Year of St Paul, because historians place St Paul’s birth at some time between AD 7 and AD 10 and so this special Pauline Year commemorates the 2000th anniversary of his birth. The Holy Father hopes that as this year unfolds we will find occasions to reflect more deeply on the person of St Paul, his life and his thought that we have preserved for us both indirectly in St Luke’s account of the Early Church in the book of Acts and directly in the Letters of St Paul that form such a major part of the New Testament. Because of all this information, Paul is the person in the New Testament times that we know most about- apart that is, from Our Lord himself. And these letters are in fact the earliest Christian writings we have, all of them written before the Gospels came to be written down. No wonder Pope Benedict once described St Paul in this way; “He shines like a star of the brightest magnitude in the Church’s history”. For me, part of the attraction of St Paul is that he is a follower of Our Lord who is exactly in our own position- remember he never met Jesus during Our Lord’s earthly life, unlike the other apostles who knew Jesus personally and who had been with him all through his ministry. We too have never met Jesus in the flesh, have we, our encounters with him are all of a supernatural nature- chiefly of course when we meet him in the sacraments, when he comes to us in Holy Communion and when we come to spend time alone with him before the Tabernacle and let him gaze upon us and speak to us. Probably, alas, our encounters with Our Lord in this way are not, or at least not often, of the dramatic nature of the great encounter that Paul- then known as Saul- had with the Risen Lord in the famous incident on the road to Damascus. Luke gives a full account of this decisive moment in Paul’s life, “when a light from Heaven flashed about him”. Paul himself is more reticent. In his Letter to his converts at Philippi he just refers to when “Christ made me his own”, in the Letter to the Galatians he says God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me” and in his second Letter to his converts in Corinth he says “it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts”. His experience of this supernatural encounter with Our Lord was so vivid to him that he asks them “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” How wonderful it would be if we too could sometimes feel all this fervour and conviction! If we reflect on what we are really doing when we come to communion, what is really happening on the altar at Mass, who we are really talking to when we lament our sins in the confessional, maybe we too could come away from receiving the sacraments feeling that “Christ has made me his own” and saying “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” We are always in a sense on the road to Damascus, going about our routines, caught up in all the concerns of our lives, usually to some extent in all the compromises of our lives, let’s face it- and the sacraments are there as so many possible lay-bys and halts on that road that is our daily life- can Jesus speak to us too when we come to Mass? Will we too when we drop into church for a few minutes before the Blessed Sacrament feel so drawn into the presence of Christ that we will sense a light from heaven flash about us? Or are there just too many distractions? Well, the other thing I really like about St Paul is that he is very frank with us about his frail human nature. He is certainly one of us, no superman! Listen to him writing to the church in Rome: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” Sounds familiar? That is certainly often my own situation- full of good intentions, then swept away by some old stupid habit of thought into the very behaviour that afterwards appals me. That is the dilemma of human nature isn’t it, that we all are familiar with, the fatal flaw that we know as original sin. Paul goes on: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”. All of that makes Paul seem a very honest, ordinary human being, who has to battle with himself in order to be a faithful follower of Our Lord. And that is also our own position entirely, isn’t it. I leave to other occasions in the coming Pauline Year the various strands of St Paul’s theology; today as this momentous year in the Church’s history opens I want merely to remind us of how like us he is- a Christian, a follower of someone he has never met but only experienced in supernatural ways, a man caught up in the daily struggle within himself to be not just a follower, but a faithful follower, of Our Lord. As the Pauline Year unfolds may we share in some of St Paul’s experiences, may we too experience God shining into our hearts and know from our encounters with Our Lord in the sacramental life that “Christ has made me his own”. I close with the wish that St Paul enshrines in his first Letter to the Corinthians: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ”. Amen.

Easter V 20 April 2008

Homily for Easter V Year A Sunday 20 April 2008 Today we have another- and perhaps the most well known- of the “I am” sayings of Jesus that occur in St John’s Gospel. Last week we talked about “I am the gate”, this week we need to think about “I am the way, the truth and the life”. We need to try and see how these three things- the way, the truth and the life- are interrelated and what they mean. You see, when Jesus says “I am the Way”, he is saying two things at once really, because he is saying, in response to Thomas’s exasperated question “how can we know the way?”, that he is the way, he is the messenger and the message all in one, he is both the truth and how to find it, the truth and how to live it. What does it mean for us, this idea of living the truth? That is what I would like to reflect on with you today. Back in the 1990s, the last Holy Father, our beloved John Paul II, wrote an encyclical some of you may remember, called “Veritatis Splendor”, the splendour of the truth- it was about the Church’s moral teaching, and this week I found myself looking at it again. It begins by quoting the first Letter of St Peter, where it says that we become holy by “obedience to the truth” and straightaway Pope John Paul admits that this is a very hard thing for us to maintain, because as human beings we are always being “tempted to turn (our) gaze away from the living and true God”- we know the truth, we know what Our Lord teaches, and what the Church, interpreting the mind of Our Lord in every generation, expects of us, and yet, on the whole, we would rather go off and do something else- what difference will it make anyway? This attitude that we so often fall into, is summed up by St Paul in the phrase we find in Romans- “exchanging the truth about God for a lie”. We have seen before, in many reflections we have shared on the Gospels, how that exchange, which we are always so eager to make, is a con trick, an illusion, that leaves us empty-handed at the end- think of the prodigal son, squandering everything on pleasure and still starving at the end, still unsatisfied. How can we maintain that obedience to the truth that will make us holy, how can we keep to the way and have the life, life- as we heard in last week’s Gospel- that Our Lord wants us to have “to the full”? The Servant of God John Paul gives us the answer in this document in a memorable phrase: he says “the good of the person is to be in the Truth and to do the Truth”. We have got to do the Truth. Do the Truth! We find a similar phrase in the gospel of St John- “he who does what is true comes to the light” (Jn 3:21). It is up to us- God has given us brains, and he expects us to use them! We can think- we can use our reason to work things out, to weigh up the sides of an argument, to make choices and decisions, and we have our consciences, the basic knowledge of right and wrong that is written in our hearts, that we are all born with. These are the tools, and then it is up to us. This is how God made us, and how he expects us to operate- he wants us to work things out and make the right choices in our lives by ourselves, of our own free will. As it says in the Book of Sirach “it was he who created man in the beginning, and he left him in the power of his own inclination. If you will, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice” (15:14-15). To follow Our Lord, what we have to do, and keep on doing every day, is make choices. This idea of life being about choices, and the importance of our being free to make choices, was especially dear to the heart of that French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre- another John Paul, but rather a different one! He was obsessed with the idea that human beings could only be happy if they were what he called “authentic”. You couldn’t be authentic if you were always trying to fit in with what other people expected of you, he said. That is why he famously said “Other people are hell”- his idea was, you had got to make sure other people had no influence on you whatsoever, because only then would you have any chance of being free, and only then could you choose who you wanted to be and how you wanted to live your life. This is an attractive message, especially when you are young and wanting to rebel against all the adults in your life, which is why so many students back in my young days fell under his spell. But it is nonsense actually. We can never be a blank page, to write on what we want- we can never entirely free ourselves from the influences of our home and family, of our education and upbringing, of what has happened to us in our lives. We are stuck with all that, whether we like it or not, and what we have to do is a much harder, much more subtle task- we have to make our choices in life not by cutting loose from our background, not by re-inventing ourselves, but by absorbing what is there in our lives and making sense of it as best we can, by aligning ourselves ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, who has gone through every aspect of the human condition ahead of us and shown us the way. Not by shunning other people, so that they can make no demands on us and have no effect on our precious identity as a free agent, but by embracing them, and accepting and dealing with their demands on us, will we find our authenticity, our true selves. Because we know that all those paradoxes are true- it is in giving that we receive, in losing our life that we find it, and so on. Only when we stop worrying about our own happiness and our own tick-list of what we must have to be content, and think of the happiness of those around us and helping them to tick a few boxes, do we find that, to our surprise, contentment and peace have come to us. Jesus, help us make the choices day by day that keep us close to you for you have said “whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself”. Help us to recognise the truth, to do the truth, and never exchange it for a lie; for the truth will make us free and to serve you is perfect freedom. Amen.

Easter IV 13 April 2008

Homily for Easter IV 13 April 2008 Today’s Gospel comes from St John, and as you know St John’s Gospel has lots of “I am” sayings of Jesus- you know them all: “I am the way, the truth and the life”, “I am the vine”, “I am the bread of life”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the good shepherd” and so on. Today Jesus says “I am the gate”, “I am the gate of the sheepfold”. What does this mean? Well, when I was researching this text this week, I discovered something that I hadn’t realised before, that in the Middle East in ancient times, although sheepfolds would have a stone wall or a fence around them, they didn’t actually have gates at all. When the shepherd had managed to herd all his sheep into the fold for the night, he kept them there by lying down across the gap and sleeping there- he himself was literally the gate, his body was the gate. In a very real sense, to get into the sheepfold you had to pass over the body of the shepherd and the shepherd’s body was in the most literal sense the great barrier of protection between the sheep inside and the wolves outside. How full of meaning all this is for us! It is through our intimate connexion with Jesus, through our belonging to his body, the Church, through our Baptism, through our frequent absorption into ourselves of his body in Holy Communion, that we enter and make our home in the sheepfold that is eternal life, the fullness of life that begins already for us here on the earth but will only come to its plenitude beyond the grave in the life to come. Once we are part of the body of Christ, we are through the gate and involved with the shepherd in the process of salvation- Jesus says “anyone who enters through me will be safe”. We have, by becoming Christians, by aligning ourselves with Our Lord, by belonging to the Church he founded, entered the sheepfold of which he is the gate, we have joined his flock, we have become the sheep which he says will “be sure of finding pasture”. Now that is another important point. Pasture. Why shepherds are roaming around the hills with a flock of sheep is not so they can admire the view or get some exercise, it is so they can feed- the shepherd’s main job, apart from keeping them all together and not losing any of them, is to find them places where they can eat, where they can eat the grass and so on. Sheep are not good at finding food for themselves, they are easily attracted to the wrong stuff, stuff that tastes great to them but is bad for them. There is that famous passage in Thomas Hardy, in “Far from the madding crowd” when Bathsheba’s sheep run off and get into a field of young clover, and gorge themselves on it until their stomachs swell up and they foam at the mouth. The peasants come running to Bathsheba- “they be getting blasted, that they be, and will all die as dead as nits if they bain’t got out and cured!” Sure enough, the bloated sheep start to collapse and die, and of course Bathsheba has to send for the man she has only just sacked, Gabriel Oak, and swallow her pride and ask him to sort the sheep out. (He does, she marries him.) Now this is us, isn’t it, we are not always the best judge of what is good for us, what will bring us happiness, contentment, fulfilment. We run after fantasies, we find the young clover of a thousand delusions, and fall on it ravenously, feeding every selfish impulse we have. We gorge ourselves at our peril. We can be however in safe hands, for we can choose to stay in the sheepfold with the shepherd, and our shepherd, Jesus, is the good shepherd, who ensures that we have good pasture- that is, that our souls are fed, that we have a diet that is good for us, that we grow in maturity and in our faith, that we find in unselfishness the road to true contentment and inner peace. For once through the gate that is our intimacy with Our Lord, we have entered upon the fullness of life, life as it is supposed to be lived and understood, life in its reality and in all its potential. As Jesus says at the end of this reading “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”. But to look at this parable a bit differently, we can say, as St Paul often tells us, that Jesus is the Head of his Body the Church- the Church is Jesus’s body on the earth, and we are the Church, so we are called as Christians to be for those around us the Gate, the way to eternal life. There is a church in the East End of London, near where I used to work, that actually has that written in huge letters round its walls- “This is the gate of Heaven”. Our dear St Saviour’s too is a gate, a gate between earth and heaven. We could say, whenever we come in, those words of psalm 117: Open to me the gates of holiness, I will enter and give thanks, this is the Lord’s own gate where the just may enter”. And the flock of sheep, that is of course the human race, now as then in urgent need of finding the right food, the pasture that will satisfy its needs, and therefore in urgent need of having good shepherds to protect and guide it. And that brings us of course to our need in every generation for men to be willing to discern in their hearts the calling of the great shepherd to join him in his task, in the priesthood and diaconate, to guide and nourish his flock on his behalf, for today is Vocations Sunday. Let us pray that there will be found in our own congregation boys and young men, and indeed men in their maturity, who will have the generosity of heart to respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and offer themselves for ministry in the Church. But in all this, let us never overlook the fact that each one of us, man or woman, has a calling to fulfil, a vocation indeed to be, as a Christian, a Gate, a way for those we work and live with to come into the safety of the sheepfold and the contentment of the good pasture. And as we come this morning to the pasture that is Holy Communion, to unite ourselves to the Body that is the Gate, let us say: “Lord Jesus, you are the Gate; may we enter through you and be safe, may we have life and have it to the full.” Amen.

Good Friday 2008

Homily for Good Friday 21 March 2008 Today, the most solemn day in the Church’s year, we come to place ourselves at the foot of the Cross and to contemplate our suffering Lord, our dying Jesus- “Jesus, our love, is crucified” as the old hymn says. We do well to focus our gaze on the crucified Jesus today, and to try and give some thought to the fact that the Cross, and the death of Jesus on the Cross, is so central to our faith. Some people, some theologians, have said that it is in fact only when we start to think about Jesus dying on the Cross that we can begin to understand what it means for us to be a Christian, to be a follower of Jesus, who said to us “Take up your cross, and follow me”. The Jesus who issues that invitation to us, is the God who became man for us. And as we look at the crucifix, we can see what that involved- what kind of man, what kind of human being he became- here he is: the outcast, the abandoned, the disgraced, the one with nothing, the one at the mercy of everyone, the one with no rights, the one with no say in what is done to him, the one who has only one motivation, the desire, that remains even to his dying breath, to love and serve, and identify with, “the least of my brethren”. The German theologian Juergen Moltmann says “God did not become man according to the measure of our conceptions of being a man. He became the kind of man we do not want to be”. And that is just as well, isn’t it, because deep in our hearts each of us knows that we too are in fact the kind of human being we do not want to be, we do not even measure up to our own standards let alone reach God’s aspirations for us! But Jesus is with us, alongside us in all our failings, in all the mess we make of our lives- he is what another theologian has called “the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands”. But there is another aspect we must consider as we gaze upon the Cross today. For there dying for us is our God. And just as the crucifixion shows us what kind of man God became in the incarnation, it shows us too, what kind of God we have- this is what our God is like! St John tells us “God is Love”. And here we see Love in its perfection- for as St Paul tells us in that beautiful hymn to Love in his letter to the Corinthians, “Love does not insist on its own way….Love bears all things….Love endures all things”. Here is our God who is Love, a Love that is- as we ourselves know from our own love that we give to our partners and our families and friends- happy to be humble, content in self-surrender, at ease in helplessness, always waiting on the response of those whom He loves, untiring in caring for them, and unsparing in his devotion to them. The idea that we could worship such a God was a source of bewilderment to the pagans in the first centuries of the Church’s history, used only to gods who they thought by definition ought to have power, real power, and use and display their power on all occasions. But here, on the Cross, is our God, and here he displays his power, the power of Love, a love that can contain all our failings, all our sin, all our disloyalty and defection, that can take the wounds we inflict on him and on ourselves as we lash out in the delirium of our selfishness. God is the almighty, the omnipotent, the all-powerful, but as Moltmann says “omnipotence is never loved, it is only feared”- and our God wants our love, he thirsts for our love. And so, dear friends, as we join the throng that will surge forward at the end of our Liturgy to venerate the Cross, let us remind ourselves as we come to kiss those sacred wounds, “This is the kind of man God became, this is what our God is like”. Amen.

Rite of Entry 16 December 2007

Homily for Advent III 16 December 2007 Sitting at the front of our church today we have a group of people who have been attending our weekly course of instruction in the Catholic Faith with the aspiration of joining the Church and becoming fully one with us and with Our Lord next Easter. Shortly they will be coming forward to make the first public act that signifies their commitment to this process of discernment and growth, in the Rite of Entry, when they will be formally accepted as catechumens or as candidates, if they are already baptised. You are a great sign of hope for us all and a proof that the Church is constantly renewing herself with new blood, and we welcome you. This Gospel today is very appropriate for you, because of the question that Jesus puts three times in slightly different forms- “What did you go out into the wilderness to see?” Now, the wilderness, the desert in other words, is often used in the Bible to mean a place where you go to grow and to learn, to be purified and to become holy, often as a preparation for some special task or vocation. You too have gone out into the wilderness, you have left the cares and commitments of your busy lives each week to come to St Saviour’s and to find out about our Catholic Faith and how to align yourselves more completely with Our Lord by entering the Church which he founded. And so, you can answer that question that Our Lord teases the crowd with in this passage- “What did you go out to see?” And also you can answer the question John the Baptist sends his messengers to ask Jesus- “Are you the one who is to come or have we got to wait for someone else?” You came week by week, not just for the company, although we get to know each other and support each other and sometimes become friends; not just for the intellectual stimulation of finding out about our religion, although the joy of studying and thinking is there and we certainly have to use our minds to appreciate our faith; not ultimately for any other reason but to follow Jesus, to sense his presence in our midst, to prepare to meet him more fully in the sacramental life that awaits you, and to deepen your awareness of Our Lord Jesus, so that it can develop into friendship and into love. “What did you go out to see?” Why, on these cold and dark nights, have you set out after your day’s work, left your cosy fireside, roused yourself from that armchair and switched off the TV and made your weary way to the presbytery? You dear good people, you have done this to follow Jesus, in the knowledge that the Holy Spirit has given you, that the best and surest way of following him is in his Church. God will reward you! Having realised who Jesus is, we face immediately the other question- what does he want of me? what does he want me to do? Our Faith must be translated into action! Love that is only words is not much good, is it! Jesus, in the echo of the passage from Isaiah we heard as our first reading, gives us the programme as he describes the miracles he is doing that prove he is the Messiah and that he is ushering in the Messianic Age, the reign of justice, peace and concord, the start of that ideal world that we all long for. He tells the messengers to go back to John the Baptist and tell him “the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life”. Now we are all attempting in the Christian life to make our lives more and more like Our Lord’s- the Holy Father, speaking on the recent Feast of the Immaculate Conception, says “we will be judged on our similarity to Jesus.” So can we be like Jesus, can we do what Jesus did? Well, you may be saying, how can I do any of that? I can’t cure the sick or raise the dead. I certainly have no such powers! But let us just think for a moment about what we might try to do- we can’t change the word single-handed, we can’t bring about a revolution, but we can do something every day to change our corner of the world, we can start in our own backyard. We may know people who have been blinded, dazzled by what Pope Benedict called last week “messages that offer false models of happiness” and “the dead-end roads of consumerism” – can we show them the reality of God’s love and where true contentment lies? We may know people who are lame, lame ducks, whose lives have got into a mess for all sorts of reasons- can we lend them a hand, offer them some practical help and advice? And the lepers, the outcasts of society, the people other people steer clear of, can we approach them and let them see that there do exist people whose minds are not clouded with prejudice and offer them a neighbourly greeting? And as for the deaf- Fr Chris recently spoke of “the lullaby of materialism”, that drowns out all other voices and deafens us. Can we counter that with a broadcast of our own, with a message of the unselfishness that is at the heart of the Christian life? If we can do these things, witnessing to our Catholic Faith day by day to those around us, in our street and workplace, by our kindness and openness, what the Pope calls being “united in the task of building a more just, supportive and peaceful world”, then indeed we shall see the dead raised to life, we shall see people given new life, new hope, new confidence, a new dignity as sons and daughters of our heavenly Father. May our love for Our Lord Jesus Christ cause us to grow more and more like him, whom the Pope has called “the standard God gave humanity to live by” and may the example of our lives help those around us to answer that question “What did you go out to see?” Amen.

Brussels pilgrimage

Homily preached in the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Brussels 7 December 2007 Here we are in Brussels, in this vast church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a devotion dear to so many of us at St Saviour’s. As you know, this great church took an extremely long time to build, the first stone being laid in 1905 and the last in 1970- and what events, what dramas had taken place in that time between the start and the finish of this colossal undertaking! It was a very different world in 1970 from that tranquil world of a hundred years ago, a world that was forever swept away in 1914. And not only was the world completely different, but the church, the finished edifice, imposing as it is, came in the end to bear very little resemblance to the first ideas of those who laid out the original foundations- we have ended up with a beautiful and holy place, but it is far from how the people who began the work imagined it would look. I suppose our lives are like that. How surprised we would all be if, when we stood on the threshold of adult life in our teens and first began to imagine what kind of life we might like to fashion for ourselves, we could have done a sort of fast-forward to today, and seen ourselves in our later life- very few of us, I imagine, have been able to stick faithfully to the blueprint we had sketched out at the start of our lives, we have probably had to have a few rethinks, rubbing out a bit here and there which no longer seemed appropriate or possible, having perhaps to demolish a bit that no longer worked or was what we wanted. Probably also a few changes have been forced on us, there have been unexpected developments, surprises, shocks perhaps, that we have had to muddle through as best we can and try to make something of. But in the end, although we are not exactly- or not at all- what we thought we might be, I imagine that on a good day we can look at ourselves with something like approval and say with the poet Tennyson “That which we are, we are”. But actually, of course, it can only be a good thing that we have not been trapped in a rigid plan, a self-centred vision of ourselves that dates from a time before we had acquired much in the way of maturity. Change is growth, and in the changes of our lives we will have grown- Cardinal Newman, whom I rarely quote because I don’t really get on with him, said “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often”. We are all, as Christians, trying to align our lives ever more closely to the life of Our Lord, and that is a lifelong task that we are engaged in, and it requires a readiness to be constantly making a few adjustments to the plans, to be doing that fine tuning of our souls. We need to develop a habit of introspection- not an unhealthy obsession with ourselves, but a habit of reflecting prayerfully on our daily lives, a habit that will of course inevitably involve us coming frequently to lay our findings before Our Lord in the Sacrament of Confession, and entrusting ourselves, and the lives we are trying to make and make sense of, to Our Lord’s infinite mercy, to his Sacred Heart. If we are adapting ourselves little by little to Our Lord, as we come to appreciate more and more what he wants us to be, what we could be at our best, then our lives will be what this great church was for so many years, a work in progress. St Philip, whom I do get on with, used to say “nulla dies sine linea”, no day without a touch- and so, if we have had a retouch here and there, a rethink now and then, it may be, please God, that at the end of our earthly lives we shall realise that what we have achieved with our lives is a magnificent edifice, a Shrine, like this, where the Sacred Heart of Jesus is at home. Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, Touch our hearts, and make them like thine own. Amen.

33rs Sunday of the Year C 18 November 2007

Homily for 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C 18 November 2007

These readings today which we have just heard seem to refer in their various ways to the end of the world, and one of their messages is, how fruitless and futile it is to speculate on when and how this may come about. St Paul is very down to earth in his letter to his converts in Thessaloniki, telling them to put their minds and their energies into living now, rather than into worrying about some possible cataclysmic event in the future- he says they should “go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat”- that is, being productive members of the Church and of society. And Our Lord too speaks in similar vein, when, at the end of his rather grim predictions of what life will be like for his followers in the years leading up to the destruction of the Temple, he ends by saying “your endurance will win you your lives”. We are being told today in our Scripture readings to “go on quietly working” and to endure, to stick at our Christian vocation.
I have said before that although we cannot be sure about when the end of the world will come, we can be quite sure about one thing, that the world will end for us, that one day my world will end, that I will one day die and be here no more. What awaits us beyond the grave? And how can we prepare for it? To try to answer those important questions I want to use the wise words of two of our greatest saints.
St Thérèse of Lisieux knew for a long time that she was terminally ill and reflected a great deal, especially in her last months, on what the after-life would involve. In one of her prayers she uses a memorable phrase, when she speaks of eternal life as being like a constant conversation we will be holding with Our Lord, caught up, as she puts it, in an eternal face-to-face. We shall see Our Lord face to face, and be held by his loving gaze. It will be like two lovers meeting who have been apart for a long time, the sort of meeting you might see at a railway station or an airport, when they run to embrace each other at the barrier, and in the intensity of their emotions have no words to say, they just are lost in looking at the one they love. St Thérèse says that once all the things that get in the way of our loving Our Lord have vanished, what she calls the shadows, that is to say, all the passions and desires we have for material things, for the things of this world, the things that so easily cloud our vision and sidetrack our thoughts, once all that has gone, we shall be able to concentrate on our love, the love that we always knew was there, the love that we sometimes glimpsed in ourselves, the love we have for Our Lord- then, she says, “I will be able to talk to you of my love in an eternal face-to-face” –“vous redire mon Amour dans un Face à Face éternel!” In death she imagines that her soul will “throw itself….into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love”.
Now we are not, I suspect, Christians of the stature of St Thérèse! We may be thinking, how far we are from feeling ready to throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus in this way. The whole idea of an encounter at this level of intimacy with God may seem quite beyond us, may be making us squirm and feel very uncomfortable. How can we ever hope to approach death with that kind of confidence? Well, now I turn to another great favourite of mine, St Augustine! Only this week I read this, from one of the sermons he gave to his congregation in North Africa all those centuries ago: “Let us choose every day to know who we really are in case, while we are without a care in the world, the Day arrives at last, and, of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real.” Let us think about that a minute. St Augustine is saying that the only way to be ready for death when it comes, the Day with a capital D, our D-Day that will finally liberate us from this world and the tyranny of sin, the only way to prepare for death is to be real now - not to hide behind falsehoods, a false perhaps rose-tinted view of ourselves, not to start to believe all the half truths about ourselves that we often present to the outside world, you know what I mean, the version of events that we put across when we describe ourselves to new people when we meet them, that ensures they think well of us- no, hard though it is, St Augustine recommends that the best thing, the safest course in the long run, is for us to stick to the truth about ourselves, to deal with the realities of who we really are and what our lives are really like. This is, I think, what the endurance Jesus speaks of means- if we can hold on through our lives to a version of ourselves that is more or less accurate, that if our version of who we think we are isn’t that too far from God’s version of who we are, then we will be in with a chance, and then our meeting with Our Lord at the end of our lives will not be too painful, too awkward to contemplate. If we have faced up to the truth, we will find we can face the one who said “I am the Truth”. God forbid that we die believing in all our fantasies, and so adrift from the reality of our lives and our true selves that “of that which we thought we were, nothing is found to be real”.
I have wandered far from our texts, but I hope you see the link I am trying to make- that our big chance for eternal happiness lies in our living now, “going quietly on” as St Paul says, embedded in the reality of who we really are. Help us, Lord Jesus, to be among those whose endurance will win them their lives, so that on the Last day we may stand with confidence before you, the Son of Man, and spend our eternity with you, telling you our love face to face. Amen.