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January 2007

In the earlier part of the 20^th century the priests at St Mary’s Bourne Street in London, where Viscount Halifax was Church Warden, had visiting cards printed that they would put through the doors of those in the parish and pin up in pubs. There are still a few withered copies in the Black Bull Pub in Walisingham. They read simply

“The Holy sacrifice of the Mass; All the good works in the world are not equal to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass because they are the work of God. Martyrdom is nothing in comparison for that is the sacrifice of man to God. The Mass is the sacrifice of God for Man.   

The Cure d’ Ars, Saint Jean-Baptiste Marie Vianney, 1786 - 1859

It seems a bit extreme today but it is only the use of the language not the truth of the matter. The Rev’d Dr Eric Mascall OGS, one of my Oratorian brothers, says (Corpus Christi p. 112)

“What takes place in the Eucharist is not a new separation of the Body from the Blood, not a new immolation, but the identification, by that unique mode of efficient causality whose name is sacramental signification, of the bread and wine and the Body and Blood. Thus every Eucharist is the same sacrifice as every other one, and all of them are the same sacrifice as that which was offered by Christ in his earthly life.”

This is one point about Eucharistic theology that would help balance the overly social view of the sacrifice of the Mass common today.

It leads to that subtle mistake of separating the material from the spiritual. We are human and in the created order are neither the complete spiritual entities as the angels nor are we simply the material of the world. We are both. That is our nature. We are NOT spiritual souls trapped in material bodies. That is why our hope is the resurrection of the body. The duality of many thinkers divorce these two which makes a mockery of what we do at our main services, to partake of the sacramental presence of Christ. Christ shared our nature in the flesh and that is how we are to sense his presence in the Blessed Sacrament.  Charles Gore (in his book The Body of Christ) always emphasized the social nature of the sacrament. That the Mass was given to the Church and not just to individuals. The gift was objective and social. Gore says,

“The more and more we dwell on the social meaning of the sacrament, the more profoundly satisfying an answer does it supply to the difficulties raised by such false spiritualism as resents the attachment of spiritual gifts to outward conditions.”

So we begin to see that the duality that separates bread and wine as material and Body and Blood as spiritual must be denied. Dr Maschall again:

“When we get the material equated with the natural, and the supernatural equated with the spiritual, two consequences follow. The first is that the material realm escapes altogether from the over-arching control of religion, and the second is that religion becomes entirely concerned with the culture of the soul.”

The two are unified into one single nature. The sacrament does not nourish just our souls but our whole nature so that we may live in him just as he lives in us. The social nature of the sacrament gives life to this concept. We are all partakers of the one gift; we being many are one body for we all share in the one bread.

And this, of course leads us to the last important point. That, Christ in the sacrament is the same Christ we perceive in our fellow men. Catholic piety without Catholic social action is meaningless and can even be seen as idolatrous. The social nature of the sacrament must be used for the transformation of society and the world. I end with that great quote by Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar given at the end of his address ‘Our Present Duty’ to the Anglo –Catholic Congress of 1923.

“Now mark that—this is the Gospel truth. If you are prepared to say that the Anglo-Catholic is at perfect liberty to rake in all the money he can get no matter what the wages are that are paid, no matter what the conditions are under which people work; if you say that the Anglo-Catholic has a right to hold his peace while his fellow citizens are living in hovels below the levels of the streets, this I say to you, that you do not yet know the Lord Jesus in his Sacrament. You have begun with the Christ of Bethlehem, you have gone on to know something of the Christ of Calvary—but the Christ of the Sacrament, not yet. Oh brethren! if only you listen to-night your movement is going to sweep England. If you listen. I am not talking economics, I do not understand them. I am not talking politics, I do not understand them. I am talking the Gospel, and I say to you this: If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly—it is madness—to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.

There then, as I conceive it, is your present duty; and I beg you, brethren, as you love the Lord Jesus, consider that it is at least possible that this is the new light that the Congress was to bring to us. You have got your Mass, you have got your Altar, you have begun to get your Tabernacle. Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towe l and try to wash their feet.”

The Venerable Edward Simonton OGS

Priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd

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February 2007

The Saints

We celebrate the feast days of the Saints every week. On these days we concentrate on their special ministry. On All Saints, one of the seven great Feasts of the Christian year, we look at the Saints as a whole. It is the Church’s memorial day. It is the day that we remember all of those who went before us empowered with the knowledge of God and the love of the Christ and transformed the world, laid down their lives and pointed us towards the kingdom of heaven. Some of these men and women we know and we remember them on their death days, or their birthdays into heaven throughout the year. On those days we remember them individually. On All Saints Day we remember them collectively; known and unknown.

There are three ways that we can believe in God. One is to have a direct transformative revelation of the Godhead. One must be very lucky to have this experience. Most of us must be content with glimmers, the occasional rays of light that break through the clouds. Yet people do; through near death experiences, extremes of pain, extremes of joy, and through deep meditation and prayer. Yet this very personal experience comes only by the grace of God. St Augustine said that grace was like lightening sparking across the horizon and striking as it will with no predictability. Yet those who are struck with this grace are given an unshakable faith which gives them the strength to lead God’s people and to follow the will of God wherever it may lead them.

You can try and force it but it does not work. Or at least not in the long run. When I was a teenager I accompanied a couple of the Franciscans from Edinburgh to the West Coast of Scotland on a preaching tour. We stayed at Auchenellan House in Logilphead. When I was staying there no one had lived there since the late seventies when the old Laird, a chieftain, had died. The house had not been touched. The library was fascinating and was filled with books on religion and books on the supernatural. The laird's niece, who had inherited the house, would not live there because of a wraith that consistently appeared in the upstairs hallway where the old part of the house joined the new. I was fascinated. Also a little scared, I must say. I stayed up every night for three days waiting for it to appear. I was longing to see something that I could not explain. Something that would almost force me to accept the realm of the supernatural. Then if I could do that would it be such a big step to a firmer more rock solid faith in God? Well I all ended up doing was missing a lot of sleep. No apparition. I no longer think that having such an experience has anything to do with the existence of God. But I would still like a sign. A sign that would prove my faith once and for all.

The second way of believing in God is to believe in the faith of the Saints. We look at their lives, we read their works, and we see that their lives, in and of themselves, point at something larger than themselves. Their lives evoke in us a trust that they knew what they we talking about. 

The third way is more complicated and has to do with a feeling of emptiness and an indirect suspicion that there must be more to the universe than this small futile existence. The whole of creation and our mind and our heart niggles at us. There just must be more than the meaninglessness of endless rounds of life and death. To put it another way we feel an empty place and instinctively know that something is necessary to fill it. 

In the Saints we honor those who strengthen our faith in the second way. We remember and give thanks for all those who laid down their lives and shed their blood for the church of god. In the early years of the church the only Saints were the martyrs, those who shed their blood and lives for Christ. It was only in the second century that other people were given the title of Saint. It is difficult for us to imagine what it must have been like for Christians in the first few hundred years of the Church’s life when she was persecuted by the Roman Empire. It is even difficult to imagine the early missionaries who trekked out into the unknown expecting to be killed for the faith. 

I wonder how many of us in this church this morning would have a strong enough faith to go willingly to our death for Christ without wavering. I am pretty sure I would have my doubts. I would like to think that I would do it anyway, but would I? Could I face torture? Having my eyes plucked out, having my skin flayed from my body (I would go on but I have no wish to turn anyone’s stomach)? Yet thousand upon thousands of our forebearers did just this. They died for the faith. They died willingly for the Christ and went to their death with joy so sure were they that they were following the path of righteousness. We remember and honour these giants of men and women. Let us not forget that without them the Church would not be here. Again as St Augustine said, the Church has grown from the ground of faith watered by the blood of the Martyrs. I am reminded of the story of the Armenian Bishop and his Deacons who traveled to a remote Northern parish during the persecution that had not had a mass for years. The local faithful knew that if they attended their lives would be in danger. They came and filled the church. If I recall rightly they were boarded up in the church with their Bishop and burned alive. How many of us would go to church next Sunday if there was even a remote possibility we would be killed for it?

The Gospel of the Sermon on the Mount gives us a glimmer of the vastness of the task we are called to. The Christ ascends a great mountain, and sits down, faces the people and teaches the beatitudes. The very epitome of the religious figure. The beatitudes turn everything on its head. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”. Blessed are they that mourn. For they shall be comforted” He refers to that great mystery of the universe. All things turn and become their opposites. These teachings make a mockery out of our world, our respectability, our comfort. What happens to one who follows this completely different drummer? What happens to one who tries to follow the commandments of Christ? History has certainly given us the answer. So does the Christ. He refers many times to the fact that his followers will be persecuted. He even foretells the death by torture of the eleven. Here he gives encouragement to those who will die for him. 

“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

The words that Cervantes, that great Spanish Contemporary of Shakespeare’s, put into the mouth of that mad old man of la Mancha, Don Quixote paraphrased in the Man of La Mancha give an voice to the cry of the Saint. Here we can hear the greatness of the vision of the Saint and the courage of hearts that are wider than we, in our humility, can ever reasonably hope to have. In these words we give thanks for idealism, strength, greatness, and the unshakeable faith of the Saints in Glory.

“Here me now O thy bleak and unbearable world, Thou art as baste and debauched as can be, And a knight with his banners all bravely unfurled now hurls down his gauntlet towards thee. I am I Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha, my destiny calls and I go. And the wild winds of fortune shall carry me onward whither so ever they blow onwards to glory I go.

To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go, to right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar, to try when our arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star; this is my quest to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To fight for the right without question or course, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause. And I know if I only be true to this glorious quest that my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I am laid to my rest. And the world will be better for this, that one man scorned and covered with scars still strolls with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star.”

The Venerable Edward Simonton OGS

Priest of the oratory of the Good Shepherd

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March 2007

Since I was a boy I have been fascinated by traditional Japanese art. My father lived in Hokkaido in the North of Japan after the Korean War and my mother collects Japanese pottery and ceramics. My mother is an interior decorator and designer and is known for her ‘Japanese’ style. When I was a teenager my brother gave me The Book of Tea, written by Okakura Kakuzo in the early twentieth century, which lays out the basic philosophical and aesthetic principles that lie behind the Japanese tea ceremony. I was hooked but I did not know why.

Most people know that there is something about traditional Japanese art, you just know the style when you see it. The simplicity and the rustic beauty and the asymmetry give it away. Most do not know that there is a deep religious purpose that lies behind it. That principle is known as Wabi-sabi. The word refers to comprehensive world view that take sits origin in the first Noble Truth of the Buddha – Anicca know in Japanese as Mujyou. The first Noble Truth is that of Impermanence. All that is passes away. Nothing remains the same. Wabi-sabi as an aesthetic is beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.

Japanese traditional art, music, poetry and literature all reflect the principle of Wabi-sabi. It is as central to the Japanese aesthetic as Greek art is to Western art. It is characterized by transmitting to the beholder a sense of tranquil melancholy. It awakens a peaceful spiritual longing for that which is always just beyond our grasp. Three simple spiritual truths lie behind the art: nothing lasts; nothing is ever finished; and nothing is perfect.

Wabi originally meant the isolated feeling of living alone in nature. Sabi meant something withered or frozen. In the 14th century began to take on a changed meaning. Wabi is now taken to mean something that shows the characteristic of rustic simplicity and serenity while Sabi now means the beuty that comes with time, in the wear and tear of the use of an object. Both words evoke a sense of isolation and melancholy. To the Buddhist mind these are eccential truths about the nature of life and the universe. Wabi-sabi is, however, more of an aethetic feeling than a concept. This traditional Haiku invokes the feeling.
“Standing in the streets of Kyoto
I long for Kyoto
O sweet bird of time.”
The feeling one has when one returns to a place where one once belonged and finds it changed and empty. Thomas Wolfe said that you can never go home again. People change and more importantly you change. You stand in the very place you remember and find it occupied by the ghosts of your past life.

The Japanese flower arranging art of Chado is another example. Unlike the formal flower art of Ikebana, Chado usually involves the simple arrangement of one flower or one flower and a twig, freshly picked and placed in a simple and rustic vase. The arrangement reflects the simple beauty of nature in such a way to focus the mind on that which we never notice. By drawing attention to just a couple of things such as a single flower or a simple vase one becomes aware of the swiftly flowing stream of time all around us. Wabi-sabi pottery is always hand made and is produced in a way to allow imperfections in texture and shape. This shows the individuality and imperfectness of all things.

All of these elements are present in the Japanese tea ceremony. The ceremony is a meditation in action with the purpose of invoking in the participant an awareness of time and the futility of trying to hold onto it. The concept is that if one allows oneself to stop struggling against time then one can appreciate the universe for what it is. It is quite similar to the Western philosophical concept of death consciousness found in the writings of Heidegaar. It is also what lies behind the service of the impiosition of ashes on Ash Wednesday: Remember man that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return; Memento Homo Quia Pulvis Es.

I would interpret the purpose of being a way to help one become aware of God. God is not found in the past nor is he found in the future. God is only found in the eternal present. God simply ‘is’. “I am that I am.” Most of us spend most of our time either dwelling on the past or anticipating the future. Neither the past or the future is actually real. It is always the present and has always been the present. Wabi-sabi is not only an aethetic response to that reality but  it is also a way to transcend it. The three priciples behind it prys our fingers off of the edge of the bridge of control and allows us to fall into the flow of the river of time. Nothing lasts: if we really understand this then we are able to let go of trying to control everything in our lives. Nothing is ever finished: this allows us to step back from that sense of desperate control freakness that poisons so much of our daily activity. Nothing is perfect: reminds us that God alone is the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer – not us. Wabi-sabi helps us avoid the heresy of Pelagius that we can accomplish salvation by our own will alone.

“All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people is grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; bu the word of our God will stand for ever.”
Isaiah 40: 6-8.
Lying behind the ever changing reality of the universe lies the one thing that does last, the one thing that is perfect, the one thing that is finished: God.

The Venerable Edward Simonton OGS
Priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd

May 2007

Jarndyce & Jarndyce

 Bleak House is undoubtedly one of Charles Dickens’s finest works and C.K. Chesterton believed it was by far his greatest novel. The story revolves around a generations long protracted court case in the High Court of Chancery to settle the matter of the Last Will and Testament of a Mr Jarndyce. The case is known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce or Jarndyce verses Jarndyce. The estate left by the will is enormous and so the winners of the case will be immensely wealthy.  There are two Wards of Chancery that might be the direct beneficiaries, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare. Mr John Jarndyce, another potential beneficiary, has long sense given up hope that the matter will ever be settled in court mostly as a reaction to his beloved Great Uncle committing suicide out of frustration over the case. He has turned his attention to ‘getting on with things’ and not worrying about the outcome of the case. He, out of kindness, attempts to mentor the two wards of court and attempts to dissuade Richard Carstone from placing his hopes on the outcome of it. In this he fails and Richard, mistrusting Mr Jarndyces good motives, becomes more and more drawn in to the devious and financially runious world of unscrupulous lawers. At the end of the book The Lord High Chancellor, having confirmed the legitimacy of a newly found will of the origional Mr Jarndyce, finally closes the case and finds in favour of the two wards. Thus it ends happily ever after and Richard Carstone is justified in his attempt to settle the case and the serious risks he has taken with his health whilst doing so. Well, actually the book does not end like this. The Lord High Chancellor has one more announcement, the decades long court case has produced such significant legal fees that the entire estate has been consumed. There is nothing left. Richard, his health broken, collapses and dies in classic Dickensian fashion. 

Thus the phrase Jarndyce and Jarndyce has become synonymous with anything that consumes ones life by enticing one to use all of ones time and energy perusing a future reward that never arrives. I do not think I need to be very persuasive to put the case that for most in our society a better epitaph than ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce’ would be hard to find. We are always looking to the future, hoping for the day ‘when’. When we are young we worry and hope about what we are going to do with our lives, in middle age we wonder why we are doing what we are doing with our lives and look forward to better days, in retirement we wonder why we did what we did with our lives and look forward to finding the time to do things promised by retirement (often those in retirement are busier than they ever were before), and in our declining years we hope that the next life will be better.  No matter what stage we are in we look forward to the day when there will be enough time to do what we want or find a way to be happy. We look forward to the day when we can spend quality time with our children. We bewail the fact that everything is so rushed and that there are always a million things to do. When we finally do have the time, our children are grown. We work ourselves into exhaustion to save the money to survive and ‘do something special’ but in the meantime our days are frustrating and meaningless. Even priests spend exorbitant time on administration and buildings and policy so that ‘one day’ they can have the time to have a healthy prayer life and be pastors to their people. The endless pursuit of escapism in recreation relationships and passive entertainment in reality eats up our hours and our days to such an extent that we often can not remember what we have actually done with our days. If we are not sure what we have done with our days it really means we do not really know what we have done with our lives.

The prince of this world holds the carrot of ‘tomorrow’ constantly before us so that we do not live ‘today’. We know that God is found only in the eternal present and never in the past or in the future. St Teresa of Lisieux said:

“IF I did not suffer minute by minute, it would be impossible for me to be patient, but I see only the present moment, I forget the past and take good care not to anticipate the future. If we grow disheartened, if we sometimes despair, it is always because we have been dwelling on the past or the future.”

St Francis de Sales said:

“DO not look forward to what might happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today, will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either he will shield you from suffering or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, then, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginings.”

Mr. John Jarndyce learned this lesson through the pain of seeing his Great Uncle, who was like a father to him, waste away in despair in Bleak House. The pain of loss made him, as the Prayer Book says, “deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of life.” This realization created in him a turn of heart that made him strive to live the way he wanted to live in the future, today.

There is little in this world that we need to live simply and in a relationship with God. Most of what we think we need to be happy actually leads us further away. Think of the happiest people you know. Do they not, for the most part, spend lots of quality time with those they love? Do they not laugh a great deal about things that others would be anxious about? Do they not have a simplicity in their way of living? Most of all, do they not march to a different drummer?

If the deceiver were to have his way all of us would get tangled up in our own Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We would never be happy with what we have but would sacrifice it all for a promise of a future glory that never comes. By so doing we would never be in the present and by never being in the present we would never know God. By never knowing God we would walk eternally in darkness.

The Church in today’s society is comparable to Mr. John Jarndyce who took his uncle’s Bleak House and made it a place of life and beauty and truth. We have given a glorious hope to this age of darkness and, through the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, have showed forth beauty and nobility in our fallen humanity. He has triumphed over Death and Darkness and the Bleak House of this world has been utterly changed. The Church continually tries to convince people that it is ruinous to pursue the paths of darkness that are renounced in our Baptism: the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of this world, and the sinful desires of the flesh.  We tell Richard over and over again to turn away from Jarndyce and Jarndyce and live.

Memento Homo Quia Pulvis Es: Remember man that thou art dust and to dust shall thou return, repent and believe in the Gospel.

From the Ash Wednesday Liturgy

The Church stands as Moses on the plains before Sinai and says to the world

“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life..”

DEUTERONOMY 30.19

Richard, as often as not, refuses to hear. Still it is our call to continue to preach the Good News and seek to be heard even if we feel that all we have is to

“Stand on street corners with nothing to sing but the songs which no one wishes to be heard sung.”                                       T.S. Elliot, Choruses from the Rock

But for those of us who have heard the words of eternal life let us continue to call the case for what it is and let us disentangle ourselves from it and let the outcome of Jarndyce and Jarndyce be nobody’s business but God’s alone.

The Venerable Edward Simonton OGS

Priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd

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June 2007

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

II Corinthians 12. 7-10

Christians are marked by their particular emphasis on the strength of weakness: the weakness of the incarnation of God as a helpless infant, the weakness of Christ as a nomadic non-violent preacher instead of a mighty warrior king, the weakness of the Messiah crucified and dying as a common criminal, the weakness of the command to love our enemies, and the weakness of faith as submission to the will of God in meekness and humility. Yet even for those who understand weakness in these terms, St Paul’s assertion that “when I am weak, then I am strong” is often difficult to relate to.

In our society we are expected to be always strong, and not only strong but also rich, clever, beautiful, sexually appealing, funny and most of all successful. Every advertisement emphasizes the need to fulfill these unrealistic goals. We relate to events as successes or failures. We relate to people as making the grade or falling short of it. We attach impact reports to projects and have formulas for arriving at realistic viability projections. I believe that many of these things are necessary and even helpful for good management and stewardship. Without them we lower the standards to the realm of mediocrity. However, as a spiritual outlook, a success based value system is deadly. The reason is simple: if we feel we must always be strong and successful then we do not rely on the grace of God to sustain us but on our own will. It is the ancient heresy of Pelangianism fought against so passionately by St Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century. The Prophet Malachi reminds us that no one can stand on their own merit before God; “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”.  The Psalmist in Psalm 130 also reminds us of the same thing “If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it?” as does St John in his first letter “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

We know in our minds that we are only justified and able to approach God because of our redemption by Christ. Atonement theology, in all of its various forms, is a working out of this one belief. Yet even those of us who know this do not necessarily feel it. I have long known that I am a Pelagian workaholic that tries to justify myself and my ministry by the production of good works.

I believe many of us forget more often than we remember it, that it is the grace of God alone that frees us and makes us able to accept love and forgiveness. From youth we have learned to hide our weakness and mask our failures. We struggle with anxiety about how other people perceive us and worry whether they like us or respect us. We wonder if those who say they love us actually do. Part of us thinks that if they really know who we were they would turn away. The former Primus of Scotland, The Most Reverend Richard Holloway, used to say that if you leaned over to a stranger in the street and whispered urgently “They’ve found out! Run!”, most would. These fears are the chains that bind us and keep us from taking chances, the fears that keep us from reaching out to others.

Ich bin nur einer deiner Ganzgeringen

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,

haphazardly assembled

from voices and fears and little pleasures,

we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

 
Somewhere there must be storehouses

where all these lives are laid away

like suits of armour or old carriages

or clothing hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,

to the repository of unlived things.

 From The Book of Hours: The Book of Pilgrimage, II.xi, 1899-1903 by Rainer Maria Rilke

I believe the Christian path of Transformation, The Way as Christianity was called in the earliest church, is to come to realise with our hearts what we already know in our minds: that we are loved by God just as we are. That there is nothing we can do, nothing, that will make him love us any more or any less and that the same is true for your worst enemy. Often this transformation can only come when we have been battered to within an inch of our limit. Complete and utter failure and humiliation is often the greatest of gifts as it opens our hearts to need help, to need love, to need forgiveness. This desperate, overwhelming desire is the way to ask, it is the way to knock at the door. “Ask and it shall be given unto you, seek and ye will find, knock and the door will be opened unto you.” The only reason it seems that what we are asking for is not given is that we ask in the wrong way, the asking, the way to knock upon the door, is to drop the pretence that we can justify ourselves or make ourselves worthy of love and forgiveness, the way to ask is to speak out from behind the mask. Psalm 51 tells us “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise”.

St James is perceptive in his letter when he reminds us to be thankful for trials and worldly failures. This weakness helps us realise our real weakness. When we realise that we can not do it ourselves, and that we need the Lord, then we are free. 

 Wenn etwas mir vom Fenster fallt

How surely gravity’s law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of even the smallest thing

and pulls it toward the hearts of the world.

Each thing –

each stone, blossom, child –

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we each belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth’s intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God’s heart;

they have never left him.

This is what things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

From The Book of Hours: The Book of Pilgrimage, II.xvi, 1899-1903 by Rainer Maria Rilke

Many people hide their weakness, they hide their failures. They are ashamed because they are not beautiful and sexy, cleaver and witty, wealthy and powerful. They also are afraid because they know deep down that they are guilty. These people hide in the shadows because they are afraid.  There are children of the light, who I believe are few, and there are also children of the dark, which I also believe are few, then there are the children of the shadows – those who have not yet made a choice, and they are legion. 

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God.

St John 3.19-21

We, however, are the redeemed, the children of God. We may be ugly, poor, lame and blind. We may lack power or respect,  and we may be foolish and awkward. We may be weak. The difference is that for us none of this matters. We are not afraid to be seen in the light of God, we are not ashamed by our weakness, we glorify in it. We do not despair of our own death for we know he lives in us and we have our life only in him. We know that in the eyes of God we are beautiful and attractive, we are forgiven, we are loved, for we are the redeemed. “Once you are loved you can never be ugly, except to those who do not understand.”

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

II Corinthians 4. 7-12  

The Venerable Edward Simonton OGS

Priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd