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Fr. Cuthbert Brennan: Most of us don’t enjoy difficult conversations. Most of us would rather avoid them. We hope the problem will disappear. Or we tell someone else instead of the person  concerned. 

Yet today’s Gospel begins with a very simple assumption. 

If we live closely with other people, sooner or later we will hurt one another. And notice that Jesus doesn’t begin with punishment. He begins with relationship. Go and speak to your brother or sister. 

The goal isn’t to win. The goal is to restore. That’s at the heart of this morning’s  gospel. 

Perhaps the hardest three words in the English language are: 

“Can we talk?” 

Many of you have only recently returned to school. All of us here live in a  community of  

some form or another. It’s not difficult to imagine what the subjects of tension in community  

might be.  

Can we talk about……..deodorant? Can we talk about why you’re always late? Can  we talk about why you can’t fill the dishwasher correctly? Can we talk about what  you said about me? 

“Can we talk?” 

Usually it means we’ve done something wrong. Or someone is hurt. Or an awkward  conversation is coming. Most of us would rather avoid it. 

Yet the Christian life isn’t about avoiding those conversations. 

It’s about learning how to have them well.

Jesus isn’t interested in winning arguments. 

He’s interested in restoring relationships. 

God so loved the world that God said “Can we talk?” Through the prophets he  called his people back to himself. Again and again he said to humanity “Can we  talk?” Then finally in Jesus God came face to face with us and asked, “Can we talk?” God came among us in humility and compassion and kindness. But true to form we  got angry, we got defensive and we got violent. God knows all about the cost of  saying “Can we talk?”1 

Jesus is saying that being a member of the church means you have a responsibility. It  is not simply a place where we gather to worship. It is the place where we learn a  new way of being human. Here we slowly discover how to see one another as God  sees us, and to respond to one another as Christ has first responded to us. If your  sheep gets lost you don’t look for an hour and call it quits. You get out there and  find that sheep. And we know from the Gospel of Matthew how Jesus treated  Gentiles and tax collectors.  

Here we learn how to tell the truth without destroying one another, how to forgive  without pretending that wounds don’t matter, and how to seek reconciliation rather  than victory. We practise here what we hope to live everywhere else. If we can learn  

to speak about the little hurts, the small misunderstandings, then perhaps we are  already learning how to build a good marriage, a good community, a good school.  

We often quote the words, 

“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” as if Jesus were  talking about prayer meetings. Jesus is present, really present where two or three are  

1 Revd Dr Sam Wells, Can we talk?, A sermon preached in Duke University Chapel September 7th, 2008

gathered in the Divine Name, presumably this includes the two who cannot listen to  each other. Even there, perhaps especially there, Jesus is present.  

Christ is reminding us that he is present not only when we pray beautifully together, but when we struggle to tell one another the truth with love. 

His presence changes everything. 

It changes how we speak. 

It changes how we listen. 

It changes how we forgive. 

It changes how we tell the truth. 

Because when Christ is present, 

the goal is no longer to win. 

It is to restore. 

Perhaps sometime this week each of us will find ourselves in a difficult conversation. Before we speak… 

before we defend ourselves… 

before we walk away… 

perhaps we might remember one simple truth. 

Christ is already present. 

He is already in the room.

Abbot Christopher Dillon: “The way you think is not God’s way but man’s.” Just hear that again, “not God’s way, but man’s”; how else could Peter, as a man, have thought? The critical lesson that is being presented here by Jesus is seriously problematic, particularly in our man-centred, scientific, success-oriented culture. Mankind has made and continues to make exponential progress, or advance, in every field of life, however we think of “progress” and “advance”. But no matter how far we get, Jesus reminds us, whatever else they may be, our goals of progress and success are not in line with God’s way of thinking. Logically, then, when we turn our minds to the things of God and to prayer, are we to suspend our way of thinking, however that may be possible?

For the Jewish prophet, Jeremiah, way back in the 600s B.C., this conflict brought him insult and derision from his people, when he tried to deliver what he understood to be God’s message. The pathos in his words, as a man who was known as a gentle man of peace, is palpable. Six hundred years later, St Paul seems to be saying something similar, when he writes to the Jews in Rome, “Do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind.” What are we to make of it all? 

The world around us is wracked by the struggle for power and control, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or America; and it offers us some sense of what man’s way of thinking can lead to and it is clearly does not make for a happy environment. After the horrors of two world wars, the great powers appear to be bent on promoting more of the same, which, perhaps, re-affirms the point that Jesus’ words are making. If this is really what man’s way of thinking leads to, then we might just be persuaded to examine God’s alternative way of thinking which Jesus is proposing, when he says, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let his renounce himself, and take up his cross and follow me. Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.” It all seems to hang on that phrase, “for my sake”, for Jesus’ sake, which is what the martyrs of Christian history gave their lives for. This is the “new mind” of which Paul is writing. 

In contemporary terms, we would call this standing up for Christian principles, which is exactly what Pope Leo seems to mean when he speaks of the primacy of valuing the dignity of every human being, a dignity which the Pope relates intimately to respect for the environment. In a way, it means being courageous enough to stand up and be counted, when it matters; to maintain a determined and persistent support for truth and goodness, particularly when the general trend is pushing the other way. That is, indeed, a cross which can be heavy and costly, as the prophet, Jeremiah attested for us, just now; and it is the cross every day, until the Son of Man comes in the glory of his Father to relieve and reward you.

There is a challenge here, then, for each of us to address, and that is to consider what “this new mind”, as St Paul puts it, is saying to us, so that we discern ‘what it is that God wants, what is the perfect thing to do.” 

All of you who have just come back here to school should keep that in mind, as you work your way through the year. The success that you are pursuing here is not just about exams; it is about each of you as a person; it is about discovering that ‘new mind”, coming to know what is the perfect thing to do, now and every day. And that is true for every one of the rest of us, along with you.

The month of September that we have just begun invites us to revisit our Christian and monastic identity lived here in Ireland. On the 3^rd day of this month we shall contemplate the figure of Saint Gregory the Great, monk and pope, who had an indisputable impact both upon the development the Benedictine life throughout centuries, and the shaping of Christianity in the Early Middle Ages in Ireland.

Gregory left a secular career and became a monk, and for the purpose of his spiritual life transformed his family property on Rome’s Caelian Hill into a monastery during the 6^th century. Although he was later summoned to more active roles in the Church, his love for the monastic spirituality remained. It is to Gregory that the famous Life of St Benedict is traditionally ascribed.

His teaching, especially the Moralia on Job and the Pastoral Rule, quickly spread through the Continent. He soon became a leading authority for the Christians in Britain and Ireland.

The finest example of his influence in Ireland of that time is arguably the so-called Cambrai Homily. Written around 700, it is the oldest preserved homily in Early Christian Ireland and draws heavily upon Gregory’s Homilies on the Gospels. It surprises its reader with its bilingual form, as it uses both Latin and Old-Irish. Above all, it calls readers to revisit their own spiritual attitude towards the fundamental Christian calling.

May the excerpt from the English translation of it serve as a source for our reflection in these early days of September, so that we may celebrate the upcoming Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in a new, and personally more meaningful, way.

Jarek Kurek OSB

““If anyone wishes to come after me, let them renounce themselves, pick up their cross and follow me.”

This is the word that our Lord Jesus Christ says to every member of our race, that we should banish from ourselves our vices and sins, and that we should develop virtues and receive stigmata and signs of the Cross for Christ’s sake, for as long as we are in harmony of body and soul, and that we should follow our Lord in good thoughts.

There he says: “If anyone wishes to come after me, let them renounce themselves, pick up their cross and follow me.”

To deny ourselves means not giving in to our desires and turning our back on our sins.

To take our cross upon ourselves means to accept loss and martyrdom and to suffer for Christ’s sake, as has been said: The name of the cross comes from the word for torture, and we bear the Cross of the Lord in two ways, either when we afflict abstinence upon the body or when we believe through compassion that the need of our neighbour is our own need.

Whoever suffers through the suffering of others carries the cross in their minds, as St Paul says: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the role of Christ.” And as the Apostle says: “Weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice.” And “If one member suffers, all suffer together.”

For this is its use, if there should be any sickness in someone’s body, an inflammation somewhere, on the foot, hand, or fingers, then the sickness inflames the whole body. Thus it is appropriate for us ourselves that every sickness or disease that afflicts our neighbours should inflame every part, for we are all members of God, as the Apostle says: “Who is offended and I do not blush? Who sickens and I do not grow sick?”

The holy Apostle has said this from his great love; everyone’s sickness was his own, everyone’s offence was his own, everyone’s weakness was his own. In the same way it is right for each one of us to share in the suffering of all, in hardship, poverty, or weakness.

In these wise words of the wise man we see that the fellow-suffering is a kind of cross.”

• “The Cambrai Homily” in Oliver Davies, trans., and Thomas O’Loughlin, ed. Celtic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 369-370.

Fr. Fintan Lyons: The gospel passage we have heard has, at its centre, the exchanges between Jesus and Peter, about who Jesus is, and then who Peter is to become. It’s easy to do what we tend to do, move quickly through the text to its centre paying little attention to the first words: ‘Now when Jesus  came into the district of Caesarea Philippi…’. 

The sequence of events in Matthew’s account indicates that Jesus and the disciples travelled some distance northward by boat after the miraculous feeding of a crowd, before undertaking a trek across towards the Golan heights to reach the district of Caesarea Philippi, far north of the sea of Galilee, the furthest north Jesus ever went. Afterwards, he would turn south towards Jerusalem, and speak on the way about his forthcoming passion and death there. The significance of where they had  arrived can be missed.

They were in the ‘district of Caesarea Philippi’ – it doesn’t say they entered the city, which was the exemplar of Roman power, built over the ruins of Greek and earlier pagan cultic sites, the principal building being the Temple of Augustus, the divinised Roman Emperor, indicating that the Roman empire was now dominant and there to stay. 

Pope Leo, in his homily at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate with the Cardinals in May last year, said they went into the city with its gleaming marble palaces. He said that in such a setting the question of who Jesus was would be answered by judging him to be a completely insignificant person, at best someone with an unusual and striking way of speaking and acting. Pope Leo went on to talk about how Jesus is seen today. 

More significant, however, in the whole incident is not the city, but the massive bulk of Mount Hermon behind it, with an ancient spring which was one of the sources of the Jordan, emerging from the mouth of a cave said to be the gateway to the underworld. Pagan rites had involved throwing infants as sacrificial victims into its depths to worship the Greek god Pan, half goat, half man. This was the backdrop to the city, and apparently a frightening place associated with demonic, even obscene rites, with no Jewish population in Jesus’ day. Approach to it would violate Jewish purity laws. Why then did he go to this remote place?  Remember his saying earlier in Matthew’s gospel: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’ (Mt 15.25)

We know the answer. It was the appropriate dramatic setting for the dialogue which began ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ He was obviously a real man, but the question was meant to cause his disciples to reflect on what they recognised was his mysterious identity. And Peter seems to have understood, at least partially: ‘You are the Messiah’, the one long  awaited to overthrow the Roman dominance.

Peter was rewarded in a way which he did not, could not, really understand. He was to be the rock on which the new kingdom would be built, but it was to be a spiritual edifice. The gates of the underworld – symbolised by where they were standing – would not prevail against it.

We can speculate about Jesus’s movement and motivation, but the fact is that the unusual location for the enormously important exchange between him and the disciples, and Peter in particular, must be highly significant.

Sadly, that location marked also the beginning of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem and his prediction of his passion on the way, and Peter’s protest against his prediction, leading to – ‘Get behind me Satan’, showing that Peter had much to learn about Jesus and about his own calling, with stages such as ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man’, ‘I know not the man’,  ‘Lord, you know that I love you’. As it turned out, it was for him the work of a lifetime.

 I believe that for us, knowing Jesus and ourselves – our calling – is also the work of a lifetime.

Fr. John O’Callaghan: Today’s readings concern immigration, immigration into the kingdom of God! The  readings all highlight the porous nature of the borders of that kingdom but also points to a few requirements for entry.

Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities, part of the gentile world and largely avoided by Jesus. And we are told that the woman who approached him was of Canaanite origin. That means she was of the people ousted from those Canaanite lands when the Israelites moved in. They were worshipers of the main rival to Israel’s God, namely Baal, the god who controlled the rain and fertility of the land. She couldn’t have had worse credentials! However she had “great faith”, Christ says, not only in approaching him but also in holding him to what he said about the house-dogs! She had enough faith to recognise that this ‘son of David’ could cure her daughter. St Augustine says that  ‘Every saint has a shady past’, and this woman surely had, but it was not the whole the story. Christ would make the most of the faith she had. 

The prophet Isaiah speaks about such outsiders. His words unambiguously proclaim, in the name of God: “my house will be a house of prayer for all peoples!’ Jewish prophecy had moved beyond religious exclusivism and opened up a universal perspective: it was a harbinger of the salvation offered to all in Christianity. Christianity is not exclusivist, not the privilege only of a specific race or ethnicity. Christians are a motely collection of all types, but they have to have a pass, a passport, like the Canaanite woman. The one which Isaiah identifies is:  ‘to care for justice and act with integrity’. Such basic human values give access to the kingdom. And there are many ‘holy pagans’, perhaps unknown to themselves, working undercover for justice in the most troubled spots of the world today. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be recognised as children of God’. 

Thirdly, Paul’s letter to the Romans echoes the same universal message: God’s purpose, as he writes, is to ‘show mercy to all mankind’. The ‘open borders’ policy was made explicit in Paul’s mission to the gentile world, beyond ‘the pale’ of old Israel. Did he not arrive in Athens and soon praise the Greeks’ recognition of ‘the  unknown God’?  In our own times the philosopher Edith Stein counselled to “Accept nothing as the truth if it lacks love; and accept nothing as love which lacks truth“. These twin values she found united in Christianity and they brought her to baptism and to be revered today as St Benedicta of the Cross. 

So, back to immigration! The borders of the kingdom of God are porous and God’s invitation extends to all. But one must rise to it by at least faith or hope or love. In our society where ultimate hope can be replaced with a superficial, short-term optimism, let us retain the deeper hope that there is meaning in life and it is worth the journey to a kingdom beyond this one. And let us show that friendship and love can endure; that our relationships are called to something more than a transient utility for a more or less selfish purpose. Love is possible. Finally, let us keep alive the faith that makes for a God-centered life, a life has ultimate meaning and can even overcome suffering and death, as we saw in the case of the woman from Tyre. We have no reason to despair, as revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. 

Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman OSB. Elijah bursts onto the Biblical scene without so much as a by your leave. We know nothing of his background or his forbears. We just hear his thunderous voice coming from the 9th Century before the era of Our Lord Jesus Christ. From the harsh silence of the desert, his voice is almost as if heaven itself had broken the silence. With Elijah a line was drawn in the sand. On one side is the living God; on the other everything that has replaced the living God. The scene of our first reading this morning has this prophet holed up in a cave at Mount Horeb. He has just murdered 450 rival prophets and called on his God to reveal himself by scattering thunder and throwing down fire. Elijah is complaining that his enemies have it in for him, that life as a hell-fire preacher is not worth living. The message from the living God, both to him and to us, is clear. Turn down the volume and listen for the silence.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Paul Simon wrote the words of  “The Sound of Silence” when he was 21 years old. He was in the bathroom, where he turned off the lights to better concentrate. “Because, he says, the bathroom had tiles, it was a slight echo-chamber. I’d turn on the tap so that water would run (I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me) and I’d play in the dark. ‘Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.'” He finished the lyrics on February 19th 1964. 

But ‘the vision that was planted
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

When King Ahaziah asked for a description of the prophet whom he had never met, he was told that Elijah was a hairy man who wore rough clothing made from animal skins, that he had a wild unkempt appearance about him. 

Elijah was certainly an angry person, ranting and raving, basically a rough diamond.  The living God, the God of mercy and compassion,  had to  slow him down, soften him up, and above all, get him to reduce the volume. 

Earthquake, catastrophe, disaster are not the idiom or the media of divine self-revelation. We have to learn the language of stillness and the sound  of silence if we want to communicate with the God who is, who was, and who always will be.  ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ 

God is God and cannot be otherwise. 

God is infinite, eternal, without beginning, without end.

We are the work of God’s hands: we are created, we did have a beginning and we will have an end. 

The strange and wonderful possibility is that God, having created the universe, fell in love with it. God wishes to make us part of God’s livelihood, which means being with God forever and ever. So, we must learn a new language, the one that God speaks. We hold ourselves out to the darkness with complete trust and love. We know that the darkness is not such because God is hiding or withdrawn or playing some game. It is the way God is in relation to the way we are. All our normal ways of loving, of expressing love,  must shrivel. We hold ourselves, as we are, in His presence. We offer our attention to the darkness. We stand still in the humility of our desire. 

This requires that we attune to the difference, acclimatise to the emptiness, adjust to the refinement of this Divine presence, which may register on our radar screens as total blankness [“is dona linn an briseadh seo”]. 

The butterfly lands in the semi-darkness on our thoroughfare; The leaf falls at our feet in the empty forest. Elijah had to learn, between Mount Carmel and Mount Horeb, that the words of a prophet are heard in ‘the sound of silence.’

Fr. Henry O’Shea:

The dripping blood our only drink

The bloody flesh our only food

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound substantial flesh and blood.

T.S. Eliot

If the crowds gathered all over the world, and particularly in Europe and the United States, in the second week of November, 1918, were agreed on anything, it was on the phrase, ‘Never again!’ This is a natural reaction to the shock of what civilized people did to other civilized people in the first quarter of the twentieth century. 

But now, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century – and several ‘never-agains’ later – we who imagine ourselves to be civilized people have nearly exhausted our capacity for astonishment at the ever-developing inhumanity of modern warfare in whatever form it takes. Too great an exposure to scenes of violence, be that violence, domestic, continental or in video-games accessible to the youngest children – this exposure is blunting our capacity to imagine, our ability, to grasp the reality, the horror, of it all. Too much reality, real or virtual, is bad for my health, or more likely, shrugging out shoulders,  bad for my peace of mind and comfort.

Except, perhaps, when the anaesthetic of the soundbite wears off, when the avalanche of facts and statistics becomes ripped-open-flesh in the face of a person one might have known in a shot-down plane. Except, perhaps, when someone one knows is prevented from returning home because he or she is a Christian, Except, perhaps, when one experiences the trauma of a priest who sees 200 of his parishioners blown up in front of his church. Except, perhaps, when we see the devastation of the neighbouring family who have lost a loved one through suicide, perhaps when we read the annual statistics for abortion every year. 

Then, there are the realities of our own society’s dealings with the most vulnerable – and this in every period of our history. Women, perhaps, unmarried mothers, perhaps, orphans, perhaps, the homeless, perhaps, believing and practising Catholics, perhaps.  

Most awfulnesses remain other peoples’ awfulnesses, remain at a remove, until, or even after, we come into contact with them.

This is one reason for feeling a certain reserve, a certain reticence, about today’s second reading from St Paul to the Romans. It can be too easy, too glib, to proclaim to the distraught, to the traumatized, to say to those who have been or really are put to the test, that theirs are the trials through which we triumph, by the power of him who loved us. 

But, this reticence, or reserve does not make it any less true that, ‘… neither death nor life, no angel, prince…can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.’  Expect, perhaps ourselves. Except we who claim to believe in him, to love him, to be the only hands he has. 

With his unerring instinct for popular Marxist trivialization and profanation, Berthold Brecht, in his Threepenny Opera makes one of his characters sing, Erst kommt das Fressen dann kommt die Moral or: Grub first, then morality.  Eat your fill – and not just of food – and then you can think about other, even higher, things – poetry, music, even love. For all his mockery and cynicism, Brecht has a point. We all need to eat, we all need a minimum of security to live truly human lives. But, having one point does not mean missing another, missing every other. 

Clearly, the disciples in today’s gospel were not thinking in a Brechtian sense when they came to Jesus with advice about the catering arrangements – or lack of them – for the crowds that had followed him to the lonely place. Remember that Jesus went to that lonely place when he had heard of the swinging party in Herod’s palace, with wine, dancing – think of Salome – and, as the climax of the entertainment – John’s beheading, even if this had been part of the original programme for the evening.  What kind of banquet can there be in a lonely place? The disciples are practical people. 

As usual, Jesus is good for a surprise. The New Testament contains six stories of Jesus feeding the crowds. In every case, Jesus involves the disciples. In every case, Jesus instructs them to organize the crowds and to feed them. In every case, Jesus gives thanks over the loaves and fishes – that is, blesses them – in some cases raising his eyes to heaven, and then tells the disciples to distribute from the resulting abundance. 

The reference in these accounts of feeding to the Eucharist, to the Mass, to what we do at every Mass, is unmistakable. 

Unmistakable, too, is Jesus’ entrusting to his disciples the task, the duty of feeding the crowds. Is it purely by chance that most accounts refer to there being twelve baskets of leftovers from this Eucharistic superabundance, all having eaten as much as they wanted? Twelve baskets, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve tribes of the new Israel, the Church, twelve apostles. Us. 

The first reading from the Prophet Isaiah is one of the classic texts of the kingdom to come. Brecht might mock and, yes, food is mentioned, its importance is not denied – why spend money, the prophet asks, on what is not bread. But what, in the long run is bread? What fails to satisfy? The same Lord who feeds the five thousand says, ‘Pay attention, come to me, listen and your soul will live.’ This me, this I, who am calling, who am promising, is word and bread. 

In all our living, there is a spiral of poetry and prose. Prophecy and promise have to be rooted, have to be made concrete in response and responsibility. Prophecy and promise have to be made real in attentive, fruitful, action. Concrete response and responsibility have to be inspired by the poetry of the everlasting covenant made out of the favours promised to David.

We are called, commissioned to become shockable, to be astonished, astonishable, once more, called, commissioned, to fertilize the prose that we have become with the poetry of a loving, hoping, believing doing. ‘Never again?’

How many say: I would like to see his face, his clothes, his sandals!
Well, here you see it, here you touch it, here you eat it.

He is given to you not just for you to see,
But that you may touch it and receive it within you.

St John Chrysostom