Heart Surgery!

How do we create a reconciled heart? This is at the heart of the readings for the three days at the end of this week which celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Solemnity of Peter and Paul and the 13th Sunday in Ordinary times. The readings focus on one reality how do we as Christians seek to love Jesus as He loves us. Jesus dialogue with Peter calls him to discover a love which goes beyond mutuality founded in friendship towards a total giving of self. Often we share the struggle of Peter we want to love God with all our heart, mind and strength but somehow we fall short. We are drawn towards the love of Jesus but we find ourselves caught short when we try to act out of that love for others. 

Yet this is at the heart of our life of prayer where we are called to hold the living heart of Jesus as Thomas did. This calls us to not hold it the heart too tightly so that it stops beating nor is it about holding it too lightly lest we don't allow our hearts to beat in time with His. The reality of prayer is that we find that our hearts adopt a synchronous rhythm which allows our life to be at one with His. Yet we know how easy it is in community life to ask Jesus to follow the beat of our drum rather than resonating with His song line. When we bring this beat into community living it can sound more like a  cacophony of noise rather than a melody of life. When each person seeks to drown out the other we find that people discover more about us than they discover about Christ. 

The heart of the prayer of the Church, therefore, is how we allow Christ to set aside the natural division of being preoccupied with what interests ourselves towards a vision which unites us into deeper communion. This is the constant challenge of community life we need to allow prayer to be both an effective and an affective encounter with the person of Christ. It also calls us to notice the noise which can be more internal than external where we encounter more of our own spirit rather than the Holy Spirit. This I believe is the heart of prayer for us to notice and become aware of how important heart surgery needs to happen in our spiritual life if we are to be authentically present to others. In this, we echo Pauls words to the Galatians where we do not seek the critical voice which tears each other apart but rather the voice which enables us to love our neighbour as yourself. This changes all our relationships and the way we are called to live with each other.

We become what we eat!

Dieticians have started to notice that what we eat can change the way we think and the way we feel about life. This is not just about watching our weight but rather how we are called to live in this world. People are starting to ask important questions about what will actually nourish and sustain us. There is also a need to discover who provides the food that we consume to ensure that they are given just recompense for their labour. We start to discover that how we eat is not just about what we enjoy but how we are called to create communities which are sustainable and life-giving.

As we celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ, we see that at the centre of our Christian life stands a person who wishes to sustain us in our faith. His presence makes all the difference not just when we celebrate Mass but in how we are called to listen to the Word and be sent out into our daily lives with a spirit of thanksgiving. The Eucharistic celebration is never just about feeding myself but rather an engagement with the graced presence of God who seeks to draw us into a life which is more than a distant memory. It calls us to be present to the presence and to be transformed more and more into His Body and His blood which sustains the Church. 

In an age where people seek to exercise an increasing level of choice about what they eat, where they eat and when they eat we need to acknowledge that it is the Mass which can draw people together from a variety of backgrounds into the living body of Christ. Our obligation to attend Mass especially on Sunday is not a dry fact but rather a discovery that without this anchoring in our life we start to build our faith on our own opinion rather than on His Life. The Eucharist does change us, restore us and heal us from indifference to God and to each other. It calls us to see God at the centre of our lives. By being aware of this we see the world differently as a place where we live in relationship with the whole of creation and as stewards of the land in which we live. We see the connections between how we live and what we consume. We become what we eat!

Can we name God?

Whenever we celebrate Trinity Sunday we can struggle to gain a complete understanding of how God can be three persons equal in nature and divine in Majesty. Words can struggle to paint the picture of how we can come to be drawn into a relationship with God which articulates who we are called to become. We can witness this ongoing dialogue with God which cannot be contained by our own descriptions. This occurs in Genesis where God is seen as breath poured out on the world who brings life into being. God breathes out and creation is born. We see this in Abraham's dialogue with God in trying to understand "I am who I am". Moses also seeks to be drawn into the relationship as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Throughout the narrative which is contained within scripture, we come to a belief of how that self-revelation of God changes the lives of the people who listen and who are caught up in the mystery of God.

Then as Christians, we enter into the relationship which the person of Jesus had with Abba, God the Father. It is by being drawn closer to the words that Jesus used in His prayers and in His teaching that we start to discover how this relationship embraces all of us. The words that He chooses are not just words to be used in a private conversation but a level of intimacy to which all are invited. There is a revelation that we are not called to establish our own language but that we are called into the same relationship which Jesus has with the Father. We see this not only contained in our scripture but also in our liturgical action when we are formed and reformed into the mystery of that relationship through the words we encounter on His lips. In our own prayer, we join with Jesus in praying as He prayed.

This can often cause us some confusion in a world where the identification of God with a particular gender can cause resistance among some who find difficulty which sees our theology understanding of the Trinity as predominantly masculine. Yet one only has to look at the history of many of the Fathers and Mothers of the Church who can see both feminine and masculine dimensions to that relationship with God. Even in the picture of the Prodigal Son painted by Rembrandt we see this portrayed both in the hands and the face. Yet no picture can adequately paint our image of God or how our relationship is called to enfold us with light. I think essentially we need to acknowledge that our prayer is called to be both effective and affective. In our effective and liturgical prayer, we are caught up in the mystery of the dialogue of Christ in drawing us into a relationship with God the Father through the presence of the Holy Spirit. In our affective and personal prayer, we are called to discover for ourselves how God names us and draws us into a life-giving relationship. I think it is this difference which enables us to become prayerfully present in all things.

Whose spirit descends upon us?

We live in an age where our faith can be challenged by forces which seem to be out of control. We listen to so many opinions and believes that we can lose a sense of who we are called to be and what we are called to become. In such a climate we can easily be swept along by the latest opinion or be challenged by the latest revelation of how evil seems to beset our world. People can seem to provide solutions which will fix all our ills or keep us safe from the destructive forces which hide in the dark recesses of our world. There is a sense in which we can be confronted by a spirit of fear, anxiety and anger which reacts against others and which does not befriend us but rather oppresses us. There is a sense in which this malevolent spirit plays havoc with our lives by both causing us to believe that we should only act in our narrow self-interest and then accusing us of playing false to our upbringing when we do succumb to that way of thinking.

As we pray for the spirit of Pentecost, however, we are called to believe that God seeks to build a community of faith which sharply contrasts with this deceptive and destructive voice. It calls us to experience a life which will sustain us in the person of Christ in producing good fruits of charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control and chastity. This fruitfulness is found in the way we pray and the way we live. It calls us to become aware of how the Holy Spirit contrasts the forcefulness of a spirit which seeks only destruction, enmity and division. By seeking to call upon the Holy Spirit to descend we acknowledge our lives are called to be at one with God and at one with each other. This is recognised in much of the good work of the ecumenical movement which seeks reconciliation in Christ. 

By listening to what we have in common rather than what separates us we start to overcome the divisions which hold us apart. It also helps us to acknowledge that often we are engaged in a spiritual battle which can too easily create hostility and misunderstanding or even at times paper over differences with pious platitudes. We do no one any favours if we do not treasure our faith and listen to how Jesus is present in the way we live. Yet this way of being present which we all hold dear should allow us to be open to how another may hear the voice of Jesus spoken with a different tenure and tone. By allowing us to listen and appreciate this depth of divine praise spoken by many voices we come to experience the voice of Jesus who echoes over the centuries not in monochrome but in a rich splendour of colours which speaks of His Spirit resting upon us. Calling us to be fruitful in the way we live and preach the Gospel in our age.