The 13th-century Dominican friar and Cardinal, Hugh of St Cher, once said "First the bow is bent in study, then the arrow is released in preaching..." These are the sermons and reflections of Fr Lawrence Lew O.P., a Friar Preacher (Dominican) of the Province of England, which are illustrated with some of his photographs.
In less than a fortnight we will be marked with ashes and hear these words pronounced over us: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. We, who by our nature are related to the “first Adam”, a “man of dust”, all come from nothing, and indeed without God and his mercy we are nothing and have nothing. But God, in his mercy, has made us something, he creates us and gives life to these dry bones, and makes us to “bear the image of the man of heaven.” This is grace. And this is all gift, for as we sang in the psalm response: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious.”
If we remember this, our common dusty nothingness, then we shall remember that we are not in any position to judge or condemn another fellow person. I don’t mean by this that one cannot have reasoned opinions and ideas, and that one cannot hold that another’s ideas might be ill-conceived or mistaken or plain wrong, or even stupid! As such we can argue and judge the positions that others have, and we might even condemn their ideas and behaviour if these are wrong or sinful. However, in doing so we are still powerless to judge or condemn another person. We are not to be identified with our ideas, or our politics, or our positions even if these influence our actions, and our deeds form us in virtue or vice, and thus cause us to become either virtuous or vicious persons. Nevertheless, God is the just Judge, and it is he who is merciful. It is God who first had compassion on sinners, bending down in the person of Jesus Christ towards our wounded humanity and assuming our human condition, the condition of a slave. This the Son has done in all humility, and so he, our Master teaches us, to treat others with humility, especially when we disagree with what they think, or do, or say. For this is what is meant when Jesus says: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.”
For this is not so much a call to imitate God, as such, but rather, like that impending Lenten refrain, it is a call to remember our humble human estate: We are men and women of dust, and to dust we shall return; without the mercy of God who has made us something ex nihilo we would be nothing; as creatures, we have no being apart from him. This, I think, is the force of the phrase “even as your Father is merciful”, enjoining us to remember the mercy of God to each and every one of us. The Father has been merciful, and so he has given us life and being. The Lord has been compassionate, and so he has given us his Son to be our exemplar and to restore the integrity of our humanity. The Lord our God has been gracious and so he elevates us beyond our human nature so that as St Paul says, “we have borne the image of the man of dust… shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” God’s grace shall cause us to become like Christ, divinising us. So generous and fulsome is this gift of God, exceeding human and angelic expectations, that it overflows, as Jesus says: “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap”.
If we, who are nothing, have received so much from God, and moreover if we, who are baptised into Christ, have received the “good measure” of Christ’s fullness and grace, then, mindful always of God’s mercy and generosity, we are called to “be merciful” to one another, and so, to judge not, condemn not, and perhaps most challengingly, to forgive.
I think this is the hardest because we can perhaps accept that we cannot judge or condemn another’s person – this is the divine prerogative we can say, and we accept this rationally. And we might even manage to restraint our thoughts and words when someone does things we find despicable or damnable. However, the call to forgive is necessarily preceded by an action that is much more personal, that affects us and even offends us, angers us, wounds our person. As Jesus illustrates, we might have been hated upon, cursed and insulted, abused or struck, or robbed! The injury caused, therefore, is not like something we can just walk away from, or turn off, unlike arguments or ideas, but somehow that which needs forgiving stays with us, haunts us, besets us, and sometimes has an ongoing debilitating effect. How to forgive the insult, the injury whether bodily or spiritual, when it continues to affect me now? How to walk away, as David did, when the chance for revenge is given us?
“Give”, says Jesus: Give love; For-give; Be merciful.
And none of this is easy. Because none of this is human. The human thing would be to give like for like, or maybe even give a bit harder for the smack we received. The human thing is to seek domination and victory over our enemy and to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing him downtrodden. The human thing is to cancel and exclude and de-platform the ones we disagree with. Humanity, without God, is typically merciless. But without God, without mercy and love and forgiveness, we return to the dust from which we came – there is only death without God.
But God is mercy. Thus he is merciful and loving in his deeds. And so when Jesus calls us to be merciful, he is calling us to receive from God’s being; to be transfigured and changed by divine grace; to live in Christ and so to become as God our Father is. Christ calls us to a life in God that is therefore super-natural, beyond the merely human. Hence Jesus doesn’t just ask us to act mercifully but to be merciful. And the Greek word used here comes from ginomai meaning ‘to become’, ‘to come into existence’. Therefore a new me, a new way of being human, a new creation must come to be so that we will become merciful like our heavenly Father, like Jesus. This new creation is a work of God’s grace, which creates us anew in the image of Christ, the “man of heaven”. For grace alone can raise our bones from the dust and give us a heart of flesh, making something from our nothingness.
Earlier this month we had the feast day of St Josephine Bakhita, a Canossian sister in Italy, but she started life in south Sudan where she was kidnapped, enslaved, and often physically tortured by her eight different captors before she was taken to Italy and freed through the intervention of the Patriarch of Venice and the Canossian sisters. Her life, Pope Francis said, became “an existential parable of forgiveness” as she forgave her captors, and forgave those who inflicted deep sufferings upon her. This grace came from her meditation on a Crucifix, which had been given to her by the Sisters and which was the first Gift she’d ever had. Looking upon the face of Christ she came to recognise the fundamental Gift of divine mercy that so many of us can take for granted and forget. Her example and her words help us to remember that although we are dust, yet with the grace of Christ, we are bound not for the earth but for heaven. Hence, as the Saint of Darfur said: “God’s love has always accompanied me in a mysterious way…The Lord loved me: you have to love everyone… you have to have pity!”
The reading from Genesis is full of little nuggets of truth, intriguing details which might distract us from the basic truth that is being conveyed, which is that God is the Lord of Life. He is the Giver of all life, and as such, life and the lifeblood of creatures is sacred. In particular God gives life to men and women who are made in his image precisely so that they can mirror his activity, and give life and perpetuate the human race. Hence, we’re called to be fruitful and multiply, to spread life. And because human beings are made in God’s own image, so we’re made to enjoy life from God not just for our current lifetime in this world but, moreover, through our immortal souls conjoined to our bodies raised up at the resurrection of the dead, we are meant to enjoy being alive in God eternally. God, then, is the Life, and as such he is the God of the living, giving life and sustaining life and protecting life, especially the eternal life of the human person.
The sign of the bow in the sky is a beautiful reminder of this fact, that God gives life to all living creatures, and he promises to sustain and not destroy life. After all, who, after a storm, is not uplifted by the sight of the rainbow? The rainbow, then, is the ensign of God’s promise of life and a reminder for us to be fruitful; a sign of hope and a reminder that God is faithful to his promises even when we are unfaithful and fall into sin. Never, then, should the rainbow be appropriated as the ensign of sinful behaviour contrary to God’s design, nor should it become a sign celebrating those whose actions would be inherently contrary to human fruitfulness, or thus lead one away from life.
Yet, even when humankind turned away from God, and even when we rejected God’s designs and were in our sins, God sent his Son to redeem us. So the Gospel tells of the costliness of the life promised to us. The rainbow, some scholars have said, is in fact the warrior’s bow which God places in the sky, but it is now pointing towards the heavens, to himself, so that God’s response to sin is not to send floods to destroy the earth but rather to find the remedy to sin in himself. God is Life, and so when Man chooses death, he sends the One who is the Life and who alone can defeat death and sin.
Thus “the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” God in the person of Jesus Christ, dies in the flesh, gives his life so that we sinners can be saved from eternal death and truly live. So Christ sheds his lifeblood for our sake, and under sacramental form gives us his blood to drink so as to restore the image of God in us which had been defaced by sin. For “the life is in the blood”, Scripture says, and so Christ our God, willing to give us a share in his divine life, says: “Take this, all of you, and drink: for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant”. For “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (Jn 6:53b)
Every morning we gather for Holy Mass, and whenever we receive Holy Communion, we “enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus”, through his flesh, we come before God, the Triune God. It may seem like we receive the Eucharist into our own bodies, and so God comes to us, or that we unite him to ourselves. But recall these words of the Lord recounted by St Augustine, “You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me”. The Eucharist, therefore, makes us like Christ, it unites us to him and so he is the Agent, it is Christ who changes us, elevating our relationship with God, so that together with him, “through his flesh”, through this “new and living way” that is the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we can enter into communion with the living God. And we do so with confidence. This word, parrhesia in Greek means, in the words of the Catechism, “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved.” (CCC 2778)
How marvellous it is to ponder again this wonderful and beautiful truth: Because of Christ’s incarnation, and his coming to us in the flesh, in this Sacrament of the Eucharist; because Jesus unites us to himself in this Sacrament, so he has opened for us the way to God, and now we have access to God through him. Baptism into Christ has washed us and purified us of sin so that we can now come before God “in full assurance of faith”, and we come before God as his own beloved sons and daughters, with confidence, with parrhesia. Again, because I think we all need to hear this repeatedly, through Christ and with Christ and in Christ we can come to God with “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved.”
This certainty, this faith, this assurance of God’s loving mercy and the gifts of his grace to sanctify us and save us from sin is not the same as presumption. But rather, it is the lifting of our eyes and our hearts to God our Father, turning to him with “filial trust” so that we desire more and more to conform our lives to Christ’s, and show by our way of living and acting that we are God’s. As St Ambrose says, “Suddenly you have received the grace of Christ: all your sins have been forgiven. From being a wicked servant you have become a good son… Then raise your eyes to the Father who has begotten you through Baptism, to the Father who has redeemed you through his Son”. For we have been restored to his likeness by grace, and so we must respond to this grace. We respond by drawing near with confidence, with parrhesia, and asking the Father for his gifts, confessing our weaknesses and failings but so remembering our utter need of the Saviour. And “he who promised is faithful”, and so he acts through the Eucharist and the other Sacraments, and through the gift of his Spirit to save us, to change us into himself. We can hope in the promises of Christ. So, in this passage there is reference to the virtues of faith and of hope.
And finally, in the final sentence there is reference to the virtue charity, to the works of love that we should find among us, within the communion of the Church: “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works [and] encouraging one another”. May this reminder from God’s holy Word of what God does for us daily, and may this daily Liturgy and our prayers together, and our fellowship in the refectory and elsewhere increase true charity among us.
I wonder if anyone else here is an expert in procrastination? As Bursar of the priory, I know that some of my brothers, like me, suffer from this, putting off for weeks the reconciliation of our monthly credit card statements. Or perhaps, in the more serious realm of the spiritual life we can be like St Augustine who once prayed for the virtue of chastity but “not yet”. Often we put off until tomorrow, or another day, or next Lent what in fact we need to give our attention and energies to today, for the good of our soul, for the sake of our relationship with God and also one another.
There is in fact a saint, popular around Turin, called St Expeditus, a 4th-century Roman legionary who was martyred under Diocletian, and he is the patron saint of procrastinators (as well as students and people facing legal and financial difficulties). An Italian friend of mine gave me a silver cross inscribed with the word “Hodie”, which is Latin for ‘Today’, and he explained that it’s said that when St Expeditus was wanting to become a Christian the devil appeared to him in the form of a crow, and it seemed to say “Cras” which means “tomorrow”. The saint then held out a cross, saying “Hodie” and so the crow fled. So, the ‘Hodie’ cross became a symbol of St Expeditus and his victory over the devil.
If we think about it, for us temporal creatures, who have no control over the future, nor any certain knowledge of what is to come, tomorrow does not have any reality. We can hope, of course, and we can legitimately have certain expectations for tomorrow, but we have no certainty; tomorrow isn’t real. What is real is now, today. God, who is not bound by time and who is Pure Act is, therefore, the eternal Now. And as our lives move from the past into the present, into the Now; from yesterday into Today, so we enter from potentiality into the Pure Act of being and goodness that is God. We stand in his presence now, today, so let us be open today, now, to his grace. For the present moment, now, today, is pregnant with God’s grace, full of his gifts which enable us to do his will; to act, to be, to choose the good, to choose to obey God and his commands, and so to empower us for virtue.
The 17th-century French Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade called this the “sacrament of the present moment”, in which we discern now, today, what God asks of us as his disciples, and how we should act, what we should do now, today so as to become more united to God and his will. Hence he says: “The present moment is ever filled with infinite treasures; it contains more than you have the capacity to hold. Faith is the measure. Believe, and it will be done to you accordingly. Love also is the measure. The more the heart loves, the more it desires; and the more it desires, so much the more it will receive. The will of God presents itself to us at each moment as an immense ocean that no human heart can fathom; but what the heart can receive from this ocean is equal to the measure of our faith, confidence and love… When the will of God is made known to a soul… then under all circumstances the soul experiences a great happiness in this coming of God, and enjoys it the more, the more it has learnt to abandon itself at every moment to God’s most adorable will.”
Hence the readings of today’s Mass highlight two moments in which God’s will is made known to his people, which brings joy and consolation to them. Firstly Ezra reads from the book of the Law, and the people respond as if God is present speaking, acting, teaching them. Hence the people are told “Today is holy to the Lord”, that is to say that God is present and active now, today, and he guides us through the Scriptures. And so, it is in each present moment that we can seek the Lord, seek his strength and grace and knowledge to do what is right and good by listening to his Word, reading the Bible, and we shall find our joy in this. This is what is meant by “Eat the fat and drink sweet wine… And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength”, for we are to be fattened by God’s grace, and to taste the goodness of his revelation and wisdom in the Scriptures which are like sweet wine. And then in the Gospel, Jesus, having recalled the wonders that are done by the Messianic Servant in Isaiah, says: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And it is to us that he speaks directly: Today, now, in your life, Christ, the eternal Word is present; present in the eternal Now of the present moment, especially whenever you read or hear the Gospel and contemplate divine Truth. Thus Origen said: “If scripture is true, it was not only to the Jewish congregations of his own generation that our Lord spoke. He still speaks to us assembled here today… Here too in this synagogue, that is, in this present assembly, you can at this very moment fix your eyes upon your Saviour if you wish. Whenever you direct your inward gaze toward wisdom and truth and the contemplation of God’s only Son, then your eyes are fixed upon Jesus.”
Since 2019, Pope Francis has set aside this Sunday, the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, as ‘Word of God’ Sunday. In doing so, we are being reminded to turn to the Scriptures daily, and to seek God’s will and God’s wisdom for our present moments. For today God has a word for us, today he comes to us to speak to our hearts, and today he reveals his will to us. “Your words, O Lord, are spirit and life”, we said, and so let us be sure to turn to God’s Word, to the Scriptures, today, and day after day. Hodie! Today, let us seek the Lord’s will and act upon it by his grace. Today, let us turn to him and away from the crowing of the devil! Today, let us embrace the victory of the Cross like St Expeditus. Hence, as we friars sing every morning, in the Invitatory psalm (95): “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” Amen.
Marriage, we say, is a sacrament. And so, within and through the marital relationship, God is present and active to transform our human ways of behaving and relating with his grace; we’re being opened up to God’s ways of seeing how we should be human, how we are to live as husband and wife. And “this mystery is profound… it refers to Christ and the Church.” (Eph 5:32) As such, the language of how a married couple relates to each other is like that of the head to its body, and this must surely imply mutuality and co-operation, and mutual need while respecting constitutive difference as well. For elsewhere St Paul reminds us strikingly that “the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” – not if we want to get somewhere – but at the same time each part of the body has its own proper and distinct part to play. Hence, husband and wife, united in the sacrament of marriage, are being formed by God’s grace in mutual love and partnership, helping one another to grow in holiness. So, St Thomas Aquinas describes marriage as “the greatest friendship” because husband and wife are “partners in the whole of daily life”.
But at first glance the language of submission found in today’s passage from Ephesians comes across as somewhat grating, and no doubt it has, when misunderstood, led to situations of abuse, and to the servile domination of women by their husbands. So is St Paul to blame for creating such conditions with his words? We might note that further on in this chapter, St Paul then looks at the relationships between children and their parents, and then between slaves and their masters. And again, one doesn’t find anything as such to forbid the Greco-Roman norm of slavery although Paul does remind both slave and slave owner that they have one Master, and they should both render due service to God. It seems to me, then, that the Apostle, in writing to the Ephesians, is not principally setting out rules nor seeking to change social norms in themselves.
Rather, we see what we might call “pastoral accompaniment” in action, as Paul seeks to change first the attitudes and the perspectives of the first Christians. For it is an interior conversion of the heart that St Paul seeks, a work of God’s grace, because only the converted heart, that places Christ first, can generate genuine change in a person and in a society. For the Apostle (and the Church) has to be a pastor of souls, a doctor of hearts, and not a politician. And the gradual work of God’s grace in our human society is to change us from within, giving us hearts of flesh in place of stony hearts, converting us so that we will act to change our cultures and human contexts. Thus the grace of the Gospel is like yeast that silently and invisibly leavens the flour, causing the advent of God’s kingdom. But, as we know, changing our lives and living up to the vision of the Gospel is a slow process and earthly revolutions seldom change hearts for the better.
So, marriage, which in the Greco-Roman world is an unequal relationship in which the man owns the wife as his own chattel, is being re-envisioned in the light of Christ and his Gospel. Thus St Paul says: “let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” No longer is the husband to see his wife as his property, or as one whom he dominates, and who is there for his service and enjoyment. Rather – and this turns the pagan notions of marriage on its head – the wife is to be loved as an equal, as his own self, even as his own body; “nourishing and cherishing” her. Indeed, he is to be Christ to her, which means the husband is called to be willing to lay down his life for his wife; he must love her sacrificially. And the wife in turn is called to love her husband like Christ, giving herself to him, and so loving him sacrificially. So, there is a fundamental call within marriage of mutual self-gift; a call to learn the way of sacrificial love, which is what the Christian vocation is essentially about.
Thus we can speak of Christian marriage as a sacrament and a vocation to holiness because in and through their marital relationship, God’s grace is at work to teach husband and wife to love as Christ loves, to be friends who are thus willing to lay down their lives for the other. For “greater love has no one than this”! Indeed, in the verse that precedes and rightly frames today’s passage, we find the lens for interpreting St Paul’s teaching on marriage, and indeed all our Christian relationships: “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Eph 5:21).
The saints strive to build up the Body of Christ, the Church on earth, even to the remotest ends of the earth. So it was that St Cedd, brother of St Chad, had consecrated his life to God as a monk of Lindisfarne in the 7th-century. At this time Anglo-Saxon England is being gradually evangelised, with missionaries coming from Rome, spreading across the land from the south, and also from the north, with missionaries coming from Ireland and from Celtic monasteries like Lindisfarne. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, St Cedd would advocate deferring to the customs of Rome, which is a sign of his regard for the unity of the Church centred around the Bishop of Rome. This Mass in the language of Rome, and following the current Missal promulgated by the Bishop of Rome, very much follows in the spirit of St Cedd – it is a sign and an expression of our love for the unity of the Church, and for the venerable traditions and chants that come down to us from that apostolic Church, ennobled by the blood of SS Peter and Paul.
And St Paul thus says that there are those apostles, and pastors, and evangelists and so on who use their gifts from God to build up the Body of Christ, to lead us to “come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God”. St Cedd is a shining example of such a person, gifted by God, for this mission as an apostle and preacher and pastor of souls, a man who was “fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.”
Hence he was chosen by St Finan of Lindisfarne to preach the Gospel in Essex, and then, having been consecrated Bishop of the East Saxons, he built churches and monasteries and ordained priests and deacons to bring the Sacraments to the people of Essex until his mission was disrupted by the Vikings. I suppose the task of evangelising Essex today is no more challenging than it had been in the 7th-century! And so the parable we hear in today’s Gospel gives us pause for thought and prayer. For while we might be impatient for results, and while we might wish that our evangelising efforts were more fruitful, or that more might share our enthusiasm for Latin Liturgy, the Lord counsels us to be give it one more year, that us to say, to strive and work hard, and to allow the Lord’s grace to work invisibly and even imperceptibly, bringing about true good and genuine fruit. This parable is, in other words, an invitation for us to work to build up Christ’s Church, using the gifts he has given us, but to remember it is Christ’s Church, his Mystical Body, and so he will grant the growth and the increase and the fruitfulness in his good time. Our job, then, is not so much to be successful but to be faithful.
St Cedd knew this well. Every one of his monasteries would be destroyed, and he would die from a pestilence that struck him and his community at Lastingham in Yorkshire where he ended his days on the 26th of October in 664. And yet, although to earthly eyes it seems like he hadn’t accomplished anything lasting, it is clear that the fruit of holiness is found in persevering faithfully and heroically to the end, as St Cedd did. Holiness, indeed, is found simply in love, in giving oneself entirely to Christ and to his service. As St Paul says: “If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ.”
Therefore, in our times, let us strive to love Christ with all our heart. As Pope Francis reminded us in his beautiful encyclical Dilexit noslet us do this today by renewing our devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, present in the Eucharist. For here, Pope Francis reminds us, “the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart… Hearing and tasting the Lord, and paying him due honour… is a matter of the heart. Only the heart is capable of setting our other powers and passions, and our entire person, in a stance of reverence and loving obedience before the Lord.” To this end, may the Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us, and may St Cedd pray for us.
A few years ago there was a wonderful exhibition in the British Library called ‘Anglo Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War’. However this somewhat bland title masked the fact that the exhibition was really about the light that the Christian Faith and Christian culture brought to these lands during a time that is still referred to as ‘the Dark Ages’. For the Art that was featured came from illuminated Gospel books and psalters and were depictions of Christ, the angels, and Saints; the Word that was preserved was written by Christian monks and scribes, whose fine uncial script copied the words of Scripture, and the Rule of St Benedict, and the thought of Beothius, and the lives of the Saints, including of course, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People written by St Bede in the 8th-century. All this was written in Latin, the language of the Western Church and of Roman civilisation, and the ancient rite of Mass we celebrate today connects us to our common heritage.
And the War referred to in the title of this exhibition involved Christian kings and their realms struggling against pagan ideas and the pushback of pagan powers – the war for Christian civilisation in other words, which we in our generation are called to take up, for the Gospel has to be heard anew in every generation, and the light must shine through our lives and our example in order to keep the darkness at bay. Here in Oxford, which has St Frideswide for its patron saint, and in its venerable University, whose motto declares the Lord to be our light, we must strive to live up to that motto and to the example of St Frideswide.
For the saint we celebrate in today’s Mass comes from that ancient pre-Norman Christian world, and she is numbered among those Anglo-Saxon saints whom we do well to recall because they remind us that the Catholic Faith, founded on the faith of St Peter and linked to Rome, is truly the “faith of our fathers”. It is for this ancient and true Faith that the Oxford Martyrs shed their blood, after all. Our procession this afternoon to the site of Blessed George Napier’s martyrdom serves to bear witness to this, and to honour their sacrifice. Indeed, the Oxford Martyrs died defending the Catholic Faith which had been brought to this island by missionaries sent by Pope St Gregory the Great himself. In 597, St Augustine had come to England and the succeeding centuries had witnessed the establishment and flourishing of Christian civilisation in these lands. So from the beginning this Christian culture in Britain had, as the exhibition catalogue observed, “an umbilical link between England and Rome that persisted until the Reformation.”
St Frideswide is very much a part of that first flourishing of the Faith in Anglo-Saxon England. She was a princess of Wessex in the kingdom of Mercia, and her name is probably pronounced Frithuswith (rather than Frideswide), and she was born c.650. Like quite few other royal women of her age, she became abbess of a monastery she had founded with her parents’ help in Oxford, on the site that is now called Christ Church Cathedral. This suggests to me the close links between the Church and the political rulers of the time. But after the death of her parents, King Aethelbald of Mercia sought to marry her, disregarding her vow of celbacy. When she refused, he tried to abduct her so she fled to Bampton and then to Binsey. Aethelbald is thwarted when he is struck blind by God so he gives up. But a well springs up in Binsey, and people go to Frithuswith for prayers and healing, and she later returns to Oxford to her monastery where she was buried after her death on this day in 727. Later on, in the 1440s, some 200 years after the Dominicans first arrived in Oxford, St Frideswide is declared patron saint of Oxford, and the friars in Oxford back then would have celebrated the first solemn feast days of St Frideswide in the rite that is being used here today.
St Frideswide’s relics are still somewhere in Christ Church Cathedral but they had been scattered after the Reformation and so they’re not possible to locate, but we do well to visit the location of her medieval shrine, and to seek her intercession as countless other Catholics have done before us.
For we have much need of the help and example of the saints to inspire us and to fortify us as we seek to build the kingdom of God in our times and in these lands. And so we too need now to take up the weapons of our spiritual War and contend with the powers who seek to pursue us and silence us. Thus we need to pray and to fast and to struggle against the political powers who want to ban us from even praying silently. We need also to proclaim the Word faithfully and confidently, to seek Truth in places like the University, and in this Dominican House of Studies, Blackfriars, and to joyfully preach the Word and prudently refute error. And finally we also need in our time to pay attention to Art, that is to say, to Beauty which draws souls to Christ – beauty in the Liturgy, beauty in the sacred arts, and above all, beauty in lives of holiness and Christian friendship.
It seems to me that one beautiful gift from Our Lady sums up war, word, and art and this is the Holy Rosary. Pray it daily, as Our Lady begs us to do, and know that it is the most powerful weapon for banishing the darkness. These are dark ages, indeed, but the light of our one true Faith shines brightly whenever the Rosary is prayed. So, in the words of one of Oxford’s most well-known residents, J.R.R. Tolkien, “May [this] be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out”.
“Do you not care if we perish?” (Mk 4:38). What disciple of Christ has not cried out like this? The suddenly-stormy sea reflects life and its vicissitudes; it reflects the storms in our heart and the disturbances in our faith journeys when we’re suddenly met with danger, disease, and disaster. In life, everything seems sunny one moment and the next moment a squall comes over us; we’re devastated. Christ is with us, but often God seems to be asleep, distant, and even, uncaring. “Do you not care if we perish?” we think, as the Tempter’s voice tells us that God doesn’t care or doesn’t even exist. Where is God, we wonder? Why is he aloof from our troubles and worries (– and these seem to daily increase in our world)? Does Christ not care if we perish?
But an answer is found, I think, in St John’s Gospel. How much does the Lord care for us? Well, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). God cares so much that he gives himself to us so that we should not perish. And he continues to do this day after day in the miracle of the Mass, in the gift of the Eucharist, which is called the “source and summit of the Christian life”. So, huddled together in the boat, that venerable symbol of the Church, and in the middle of the storms of life, both external and internal, we, little apostles of the Lord, would perish were it not for the Lord who lovingly gives himself to us in the Mass. But the Lord’s Eucharistic Presence is hidden, humble, and veiled. It is as though he were asleep; passive and unremarkable. And yet, in this little white Host, God is with us.
St John says, “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And so, looking at the Host, gathered here for Mass, we come in faith, and we go to Christ who is loving present, remaining with us until the end of time, and who thus cares that we shall not perish, neither in body or in soul. Yet the Lord said to his apostles, “Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?” These words of Our Lord haunt us. How is it that we have no faith? We will all know those moments when we have felt frightened and alone, when the stormy challenges of life cause the tiny flame of faith to gutter and flicker perilously; and we can be sure that sudden gusts of wind will arise and threaten to extinguish what faith we have.
But recall those wise words of St John Henry Newman in one of his best known hymns. Although beset throughout his life by uncertainties and fears and difficulties, he learnt that faith is often the gift of having just enough light to make one step forward on life’s journey towards the safe harbour. So he wrote: “Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.”
Often, the issue is not that we no faith at all, but rather that we do not see far enough. We want to see further than just one step, further even than the horizon, to transcend our human limitations. We would like to see ahead, to know what is to come, to foreknow the future, so that we can plan ahead and avoid mishaps. This, of course, is quite prudent and reasonable. But in seeking to control the future we tend to trust in our own ingenuity and skills, and fail to see that there is a much more fundamental virtue that we need, namely confidence and trust in the God who is with us always, and who has promised to give us the virtues we need to weather the storm, to endure the temporary trials of this life.
Fundamentally, then, faith, such as Jesus speaks of in the Gospel, is believing that God is with us and so he, who lives eternally, shall not let us perish; he shall never abandon us, not even in the grave. St Paul thus speaks of a “new creation”, calling us to “regard no one from a human point of view” but rather to believe and know that Christ “died and was raised” for our sake. And so, he will not even abandon us in death but rather, by his falling asleep in death, he has destroyed our death. Thus Scripture calls Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2), that is to say, faith in the Resurrection; faith in the final end that Christ has promised us if we believe in him for he is with us so we shall not perish; faith in the new creation that lies beyond the horizon of our human mortality and all its sorrows. So fr Bede Jarrett put it: “And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight. Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further; cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly”.
So, how does Christ lift us up and help us to see? How can we have a deeper trust and faith in the God who leads us on with his kindly light? How, like Newman, can we be content to see just one step forward at a time, knowing that Christ is not asleep but is ever with us, leading us to salvation?
In the 1830s Newman writes in a letter to a Catholic friend that knowing the presence of God in the Eucharist helped him. He says,“after tasting of the [awesome] delight of worshipping God in His Temple, how unspeakably cold is the idea of a Temple without that Divine Presence!“ Newman marvelled that God was present for us in the Tabernacle, lovingly awaiting us, seemingly asleep, as it were, but always actively present for us. Thus, in his difficulties and stormy times he wrote that “to know that He is close by – to be able again and again through the day to go in to Him” is “such an incomparable blessing.”
Hence the Holy Father Pope Francis reminded us in his first encyclical Lumen Fidei that “Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives.” So, when the storms suddenly arise in our hearts and in our lives, let us, like the apostles, be found kneeling beside the Lord, kneeling before the Tabernacle, gathered around the Holy Eucharist, crying out to him in our need. Perhaps we can make St Peter’s words our own: “Lord, I do believe, help thou my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24) And in his presence, we shall hear him say to our turbulent hearts and minds: “Peace! Be still” (Mk 4:39).
A few days ago, the Rosary Shrine welcomed its first group of pilgrims of this year: five women and one Dominican friar had come on pilgrimage to England, and they were devotees of Fr Bede Jarrett OP who had served as Provincial for 16 years; revered as a retreat giver, spiritual writer, and tireless in his work of expanding the Dominican mission in this country. Like all good Catholics, Fr Bede had a great aesthetic sense, a love for beauty, which is inherent in human souls, and also in beautiful things made by the ingenuity and hard work of human hands. He once spoke of beauty being found “not as a secret but as a gospel, not as a thing hidden but as a friend revealed.”
This love for beauty, which must be both spiritual and material in order for it to reflect the splendour of the incarnation of Christ, a splendour glimpsed in its magnificence by the three disciples on Tabor, is ultimately a love for God, for the Son who is the splendour of the Father, the icon of the unseen God. As such, when Dominicans preach the Word, they don’t only focus on what is spoken, nor even just on what is written, but also on what is seen, expressed artistically through the painter’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel, or the photographer’s lens!
For the Dominican seeks and preaches beauty, “not as a secret but as a gospel”, as good news in a world darkened by sin and destruction, and in moments when we might be tempted to cast our eyes downwards in the face of so much ugliness and brokenness. In such a world, beauty is needed all the more, to give us faith in God and his goodness and beauty and power to save and redeem. Thus Christ revealed his divine beauty to his disciples, transfigured on the heights, to help them look up and give them hope of the Resurrection in advance of the terrible suffering of his Passion and Cross which was to come. Likewise, the Dominican find and makes manifest beauty “not as a thing hidden but as a friend revealed”. For the One who has befriended us, and who has revealed his glory to us, even when we were made ugly by sin, is Christ, who is Beauty himself and the greatest Friend of humanity. Dominican preaching, therefore, calls us to look and see that God is with us, and his grace fills this world with divine light, to dispel the darkness, and to beautify us.
Bede Jarrett thus wrote to an aspiring Dominican who did not think he was much of a public speaker that “Fra Angelico used his paint brush” to proclaim the Gospel, and “these [paintings] are effective” and perhaps more so than the voice. For spoken sermons fade and become mere memory but, he implies, paintings live on. Clearly the painted sermons of Fra Angelico (or Blessed John of Fiesole, as he is properly called), this blessed Dominican friar who we commemorate today, and who is the patron saint of artists, have an endurance and an interior beauty that powerfully communicates the Gospel to us even today. Indeed, many, who would not read a sermon or spiritual writing, do still flock to the museums and churches that are blessed with Fra Angelico’s works, and there they can see in his frescoes and paintings a world transfigured by divine light, and a beauty that gives hope and draws us forward in life’s journey, calling us to look up towards heaven.
In part due to the example of Fra Angelico, who himself was inspired by the preaching of St Antoninus, Dominican bishop of Florence in his lifetime, beauty, then, has been firmly established in our Dominican life, especially in our churches and in every aspect of our liturgical life. So, I want to momentarily pay tribute to our Dominican Sisters of the English Congregation of St Catherine of Siena, who are based in Stone (Staffordshire), and who were renowned for their beautiful and painstakingly embroidered vestments and liturgical furnishings. This past week, a significant part of the Sisters’ beautiful heritage was handed down to us to be used in the Rosary Shrine, for the glory of God. My hope is that we can have an exhibition of these works in October this year. Such things are, unfortunately, regarded these days by many people, even Catholics, as unnecessary luxuries that shouldn’t concern serious Christians. After all, we should be feeding the poor! However, the Sisters who educated the poor (and fed them) knew that Catholics also couldn’t neglect beauty and art. For the human person needs to be fed in body and soul; the human heart longs for beauty, longs for God and so looks for his beauty to be revealed as gospel and as friend.
Hence, the austere observant Dominicans, of which Fra Angelico was a member, also had paintings in their monastic cells at San Marco in Florence for we pray not just with our lips and in our minds, but also with our eyes, and indeed, our whole bodies. The goal, therefore, was that such external beauty would lead to interior beauty, so that as we look on the face of Christ and Our Lady and the Saints, our lives would be transfigured by the gospel of Jesus Christ, made beautiful by his grace as, through beauty, we befriend Jesus and so we are made beautiful. For as St Thomas Aquinas says the divine communication of beauty is beautifying, ie, the revelation of divine beauty and our recognition of it produces beauty in things; Beauty himself acts to make us truly beautiful.
May Blessed Fra Angelico pray for artists today, and for create beautiful things in this world. May God use the work of their hands to reveal himself to us. Amen.
Jesus today has advice for his apostles, to those who minister in the Lord’s vineyard by preaching and teaching the Gospel. As such, he is speaking to us priests first of all, but since a priest is first of all a Christian and a disciple like you, then what Jesus says to us, to his apostles, can also be applied to every one of us Christians gathered here today. So the Lord says to us after we have been engaged in work and ministry and the service of the Gospel: “You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while”.
Many of us in the world today fear loneliness; we fear being alone, or having no one around us. But to be in a lonely place all by ourselves, as Jesus put it in the Gospel, is not to become isolated and without support and friendship. The Greek word for the lonely place is eremos, that is to say, a place that is uninhabited, where nobody else is present. So, it is a place of solitude, and Jesus calls us to be by ourselves so that we can truly be ourselves, taking off our masks and our ‘brave faces’ which can be the cause of so much anxiety and stress. All of us will know, I think, that in our dealings with other people, whether as priests, or as mums, or nurses, or teachers, or shop assistants, people come to us looking for help, advice, or sometimes to offload their grievances, or to ask questions. Not infrequently, I think, we have to think on our feet, and speak in our ‘professional’ capacity, even if we don’t really have the answers. And so we put on a persona, one that is projected onto us, or which is somehow expected of us; we put on a brave face and a facade for others to see as we go about our work.
Perhaps this is what the apostles had been doing, as they went out on their mission of preaching and exorcism and healing – after all, they hadn’t been trained for any of this, but they just went and did what they could, trusting in the Lord who had called them and sent them out, and hoping for the best. We know that when they returned they were often amazed and elated at the fact that God worked through them, frail and weak vessels that they were. As St Paul would say: “we have this treasure in earthern vessels” (2 Cor 4:7)
The Lord, full of mercy and compassion, knows our weaknesses, and that we often have to adopt a persona in carrying out our work. And what does he say, then? “You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while.” Why? Because, in a place of solitude, where nobody else is present, we can be ourselves, we can let our guard down, we can relax. But we are never really alone. For God is present, God is with us. So Christ is calling us to follow his example, and to go off to be alone in prayer with God. Prayer, therefore, must be authentic: we can be ourselves, we can speak freely, openly, and honestly to God, and we must lower our barriers, our pretence, our facades so that we can allow God to look upon us, and to shine his grace and light on our face. Prayer, then, is coming away from the world and from work, in order to be with God, and indeed, to rest in God. Thus St Augustine says, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you.”
Jesus, knowing what the human heart needs, and knowing what we long for, thus calls you and I to retreat in prayer, and to find rest in God. It is God who will restore us, and heal us, and strengthen us; He will love us after the knocks and bruises and negligence that hurt us in our daily interactions with others. And this is what we need: to rest in God.
The Gospel tells us that, however, Jesus is followed by a crowd who he teaches. But what about the apostles? Are they there too, hard at work again? The next verse which is not included in today’s passage suggests that they were not. So, Jesus himself ministered to the people, and he also ministered to his apostles by making sure they were able to steal away and be by themselves, and so find rest in God. Hence, I found the advice of Pope Francis, given on 2 February to the priests and seminarians and religious of the Democratic Republic of the Congo very timely, and he gives us some practical reminders on how we can follow Jesus’s command to go away to a lonely place.
The Holy Father said: “The Presentation of the Lord, which in the Christian East is called the “feast of the encounter”, reminds us that the priority in our life must be our encounter with the Lord, especially in personal prayer, because our relationship with him is the basis of everything we do. Never forget that the secret of everything is prayer, since the ministry and the apostolate are not primarily our own work and do not depend solely on human means. You are going to tell me: yes, true enough, but commitments, pastoral priorities, apostolic labours, fatigue and so on risk leaving us with little time and energy for prayer. That is why I would like to share a few pieces of advice. First of all, let us remain faithful to certain liturgical rhythms of prayer that mark the day, from the Mass to the breviary. The daily celebration of the Eucharist is the beating heart of priestly and religious life. The Liturgy of the Hours allows us to pray with the Church and with regularity: may we never neglect it! Then too, let us not neglect Confession. We always need to be forgiven, so as then to bestow mercy upon others.
Now, a second piece of advice. As we all know, we cannot limit ourselves to the rote recitation of prayers, but must set aside a time of intense prayer each day, to remain “heart-to-heart” with the Lord. It may be a prolonged time of adoration, in meditation on the word, or with the Holy Rosary, but a time of closeness to the One whom we love above all else. In addition, even in the midst of activity, we can always resort to the prayer of the heart, to short “aspirations” – which are a real treasure – words of praise, thanksgiving and invocation, to be repeated to the Lord wherever we find ourselves. Prayer takes the focus off ourselves, it opens us up to God, and it puts us back on our feet because it puts us in his hands.”
