Category: Fr Eamonn’s Blog

THE WORD WHO IS LIFE
A time of Prayer and Reflection on the future of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton
(https://www.dabnet.org/news/view/205)

The readings today – the third Sunday – have something to say to us about time, the proper use of the time given to us and to use it before it’s too late. Jonah warns the people of Nineveh that they will be destroyed in 40 days if they don’t repent and change their ways; Paul tells us that “our time is growing short” and Jesus says “the time has come! Repent and believe in the gospel!” And He invites the fishermen to move with Him in a new direction in life. It is a personal invitation to each one of us now and it is a communal one.

Bishop Richard, who is our Father and leader in our Catholic Spiritual life, has asked us to think and pray about the future of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton.

The background to this is the fact that the number of priests is decreasing and we are growing older, plus the fact that there are few young adults attending Mass. We have some very fine young people coming to Mass here in Hastings, there are wonderful young families but there is a general trend that sees religion being for young children and old people.

It’s vital for the future of the Church that the children now preparing for first Holy Communion do not disappear once they have received, we need them to stay with us because they are the future.

To help us in this time of reflection Bishop Richard has given us a few questions which are posted on the Sacred Heart School notice board in the church porch. Some of these questions are also available on a handout that will be distributed after Mass. You can take these questions home with you and in the course of the week I invite you to prayerfully ponder them and bring your responses back here next weekend. Boxes where you can place your questionnaire will be available in the porch.

There are two prayers printed on the questionnaire and I suggest we pray these as often as we can so that our responses may be influenced by God. Bishop Richard is very keen that this process be blessed by prayer so that our discernment is of the Holy Spirit and not simply human thinking.

One of these prayers is based on Pslam 25 which is the Responsorial Psalm for today, “Show us the right path, O Lord, point out the road for us to follow. Guide us by your truth and teach us, for you are the God who saves us.”

Another way of sharing your responses is to post your answers on the notice board. Post-it stickers and pens are available in the porch.

Everyone’s opinion matters; no voice is more or less important than another – the innocent voice of the child, the enthusiastic voice of youth, those who are single, married and the wisdom of those who have lived long years in the faith. It might also be good to talk about this as families around the table at home.

St. Vincent Pallotti, founder of the Pallottines, believed strongly that every baptized Catholic has the right and obligation to be involved in the work of Jesus in the Church, so we ask St. Vincent to pray for us that, like him, we may draw our inspiration and strength from Jesus in the Eucharist, in Holy Communion. The Eucharist is the source of all Catholic life and without it we have nothing.

Let’s pause and listen to the prayer of St. Richard of Chichester who is secondary patron of this diocese:

“Thanks be to you, my Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits and blessings which you have given to me, for all the pains and insults which you have borne for me. O most merciful Friend, Brother and Redeemer, may I know you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly.” (St. Richard of Chichester, a patron of the diocese of Arundel & Brighton)

THE QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

Each Catholic in the Diocese is called to be a disciple of Jesus and to bring others to know Him. We are invited to reflect on how we can best do this as a Community by prayer and by reflecting on the following questions:

1. What three things do you think we most need in order to fulfil our task as a parish and as a Diocese?
2. What roles can be best carried out by the lay-faithful?
3. What can you do as a member of the Catholic Community?
4. If we were starting the Diocese today, with 25 priests, where would you place them? (here we are asked to think beyond our own local parish)

[Optional:
Please circle the age bracket you belong to: 18 or under; 19-30; 31-50; 51 or over.
You are welcome to sign your name at the end if you wish.]

Please use the space below and on the reverse side to share your observations and reflections:

The greatest among you must be your servant. Anyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and anyone who humbles himself will be exalted.’ (Matthew 23:12)

Experiences of humiliation can lead us to become humble but they are not in themselves virtuous; feelings of inferiority can also lead us to humility but they are not in themselves virtuous. Jesus calls us to humility and not to humiliation or inferiority.

My mother had a very simple answer to my inferiority complex! She said you should neither look up to anyone nor look down on anyone and that Jesus is the only one who is perfect.

So in my search for humility I am called to focus on Jesus rather than on self and through Jesus to be taken into the perfect embrace of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – where we encounter love and mercy in its perfection. Humility is born when I have the grace to be still and know that God is God and in His presence I “bow and bend low” in worship.

In His presence I discover who I am and who you are. None of us is either greater or less than the other. As Jesus says when He warns us against self-promotion, “you have only One Father”, One Master, One Teacher and we are all brothers and sisters.

Psalm 131 introduces us to the deepest possible form of humility:

Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord.

O Lord, my heart is not proud

nor haughty my eyes.

I have not gone after things too great

nor marvels beyond me.

Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord.

Truly I have set my soul

in silence and peace.

A weaned child on its mother’s breast,

even so is my soul.

Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

both now and forever.

Keep my soul in peace before you, O Lord.

My heart is not proud! Truly I have set my soul in silence and in peace. A weaned child on its mother’s breast, a child at rest in its mother’s arms, even so my soul! The heart of humility is here and this is who we are called to become – a trustful child in the arms of God.

I have had the grace to hold my five nephews and three nieces in their infancy. It has always been an experience filled with love and emotion. At Mass this morning I was asking the children if they had ever held a baby and a number of girls and boys said yes. “And what did it feel like?” I asked. The boys shrugged their shoulders but the girls said immediately that they felt love and they felt emotional! I guess the boys did too but they didn’t know how to put it into words.

Babies can be trustful and sometimes cautious and restless in the embrace of an adult. I’m thinking of the two youngest because my experiences with them are the most recent and therefore my memories of them are clearer.

Laura was the most chilled baby ever. I often tell her that she was silent for the first six months – until she found her voice and when she found that then there was no stopping her. She would just lay there sleeping or in a dreamlike daze. I have memories of her sound asleep on her father’s shoulder. She represents the kind of trustful abandon that is at the heart of Christian spirituality.

Katie was more alert and less inclined to sleep but I had this experience with her when she was a few months old. I went to visit one Saturday and Elaine was doing the cleaning, so she put Katie into my arms, put me into the sitting room, asked me to look after her and closed the door.

So we sat there on a rocking chair, Katie and me, playing and chatting in the way one does with a baby. And after a while she rested her head on my chest. So I sang to her. Sang songs in Swahili, sang hymns and she fell asleep with her head resting on my chest and she remained like that for over an hour.

This became for me a most precious period of meditation. I simply held her, gazed on her, felt the warmth of her. I was deeply touched by the way she trusted me enough to fall asleep and it seemed in this that God was inviting me to be like her – a child resting trustfully in His arms.

I go back to this from time to time. Each one of us can enter into such an experience in prayer. Simply close your eyes and in the privacy of your soul where only you and God abide. And there you can surrender to Him, be held by him, loved by Him.

In our strength we resist going to such a place within ourselves but Alcoholics Anonymous have discovered that surrender to the Higher Power is essential for recovery. Addicts in recovery understand this too.  Our Higher Power is God, revealed to us in Jesus.

It is especially important for us to surrender to the Divine Embrace where we are not well. Another memory from my own childhood is in a time when I was very sick with shingles, my mother took me into bed with Dad and herself and, though she could not take away the pain, could not make me better immediately, I felt secure in her embrace. And it’s the same with God. Not that He cannot take away the pain but He holds us through the necessary experience of pain and sees us through to the other side of it.

Two of our Pallottines – Fathers Phil McNamara and Jose Campion – died in the past couple of days and it strikes me that both their lives are very fine expressions of the Mission of the Church which wr are celebrating today.

As God called King Cyrus by name, so He called Phil and Joe and they responded with all of their lives to that boundless divine stirring, the soundless whisper of God’s voice in the depths of their soul. They left home and country as young men to serve in Christ’s Mission to His people.

The details of the Mission given to each of us are different but it always involves being called personally by name to represent Jesus in this world in whatever sphere of life we are involved in. Ours is a communal calling in the Church, lived out in a uniquely personal way and the most authentic expression of Mission is one that stems from our personal experience of Jesus, an experience that draws us into the mystery of the Trinity.

                   Fr. Johnny McDonagh, Br. Jim McCartan and Bishop Winters in Galapo

Give to God what belongs to God, is what Jesus tells us in today’s gospel. What belongs to God in the first place is the essence of Who He Is. Not that we can give that to Him, but it is an essential ingredient in Mission to acknowledge and honour who God is. “I am the Lord, unrivalled; there is no other God besides me…that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that, apart from me, all is nothing.’” (Isaiah 45:4-6)

Too often we regard God simply in relation to our own needs and, unconsciously, we try to manipulate God into being whatever suits us; we manipulate the “things of God” to suit our own purposes, often forgetting that it is we who are the servants of God rather than vice versa. And then in the mystery of His Love He becomes servant in Jesus and in doing so He shows what is the true quality of Christian service. It is the service of daughters and sons; it is the service of mutual self-giving of lovers.

What is accomplished in the Eucharist is that God gives the fullness of Himself to us in Jesus and we are invited to give all of ourselves in return. “All that I am, all that I do, all that I ever have I offer now to you”, an offertory hymn we sing at Mass. Giving to God means giving my whole self and everything that makes up my life and discovering in the process that by giving away everything I lose nothing and gain everything in return.

The giving of ourselves to God, and in turn to others, in the Mission is always in accordance with the gifts that God has given us – gifts of nature and of grace. God accomplishes His work in us according to who we are, the person He created us to be. I cannot do things as another does and God doesn’t seek to do anything in me that is out of tune with my nature.

When I went to Tanzania in the early 80’s at the age of 26, I was overawed by the work being done by generous and seasoned missionaries in the area of human as well as spiritual development, work that I knew I was incapable of doing. And I was a bit lost for a while.

Then Bishop Patrick Winters came on a visit to Tanzania. He was the retired Bishop of Mbulu, a Galwayman who lived near us at home. I was like a son to him and he clearly saw my limitations and my gifts. When I was appointed to Galapo he advised me to concentrate on preaching the gospel which is what I did.

To my delight I encountered in people a great hunger for the Word of God which was received not only as words but, like St. Paul says, “as power and the Holy Spirit and as utter conviction.”

Utter conviction is a phrase that attracts and challenges me right now. An utter conviction that inspires rather than forces, that appeals rather than demands. An utter conviction first and foremost about the person of Jesus Christ and about the Gospel, the Good News which He himself has given us. He is himself the Gospel, He is the Word. I am utterly convinced of this even if I struggle to communicate that conviction.

I think of the conviction I had when I was a boy, the intense hunger I had for Jesus and, what may seem excessive, I used to go to the Augie in Galway on my way home from school and would pray an act of “spiritual communion” even though I might actually have received Communion at Mass that morning.

It’s a prayer that returned to me when I was with Radio Maria Ireland where it was prayed live on air when we celebrated Mass in the studio. Prayed for the benefit of those who would like to attend Mass but were unable to do so, it’s a prayer that can be used by the many who come to Mass but are unable to come to Communion.

“My Jesus, I believe that you are present in the most Blessed Sacrament. I love You above all things and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot now receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You have already come, and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.”

That was the strength of conviction I had as a child and, while I am still utterly convinced, something has been lost along the way. I’m not sure that I can ever recover what was lost but I am certain that it can be found in a new way in my present life. It is the beauty of life in Christ that all is never lost and there is always something new, maybe even something better to be gained as happened at the wedding at Cana.

– Father Eamonn Monson SAC (https://eamonnmonson.blogspot.co.uk/)