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Fr. Martin Browne OSB

One of the things that critics of Christianity often point out is how divided, argumentative, and sometimes downright horrible Christians can be. Mahatma Gandhi is reputed to have said, ‘I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ’. He had a point. Christians are always squabbling. Within the Catholic Church, the past year has seen much in-fighting, some of it truly vitriolic and nasty, over issues as diverse as climate change, papal authority and the pre-Vatican II Mass.

I’m not quite sure whether it’s a consoling sign or a depressing one – probably a bit of both – but it seems that it was ever thus. From the earliest days of the Church, for example, followers of Jesus disagreed and argued over the precise meaning of the mystery we have been celebrating for the past week: the mystery of God’s ‘Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law’. How could Jesus be both fully God and fully human? Was the Son of God himself truly God also? Great Councils of the Church took place to hammer out answers to these questions and they weren’t always edifying spectacles. There’s even a legend that Saint Nicholas, whom we have come to know as Santa Claus, got so frustrated with the heretical views of the priest Arius about the nature of Christ in debates during the Council of Nicaea in 325 that he slapped him in the face! Christians arguing and letting themselves down by the way they treat each other is certainly not a new phenomenon…

Just over a hundred years later, in 431, another important Council took place, this time at Ephesus. Among other things, it reaffirmed what the Creed said about Jesus – that he was God from God and Light from Light. If follows that if Jesus is not only the Son of God, but is also himself God, then Mary is literally the ‘Mother of God’. The term used at Ephesus wasTheotokos: ‘God-bearer’, or ‘the one who gives birth to God’. Of all the titles given to Mary, and there are thousands, surely this must be the most beautiful and the most important. She is not just the mother of Jesus, or mother of the Christ, but is truly the Mother of God, because through her, the true God became true man.

‘Today a wonderful mystery is announced: natures are made new; God has become human: he remained that which he was and has assumed that which he was not.’

The titles of Theotokos and Mother of God are not just bouquets of honour to be flung in Mary’s direction; they are powerful proclamations of the Incarnation. To reflect in prayer on Mary as Mother of God is as much a meditation on who Jesus is as it is a meditation on who Mary is. Through the birth of Emmanuel from the Blessed Virgin Mary, the path to glory was opened up to humanity.

‘O wonderful exchange! The Creator of human nature took on a human body and was born of the Virgin. He became man without having a human father and has bestowed on us his divine nature.’

Today’s Gospel picks up where we left off at Christmas Midnight Mass. Having heard the angel’s astonishing message, the shepherds went to see for themselves ‘and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger’.

‘In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,

she falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.

A red wire of pain feeds through every vein

until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.

Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.’

‘After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.’ The last few lines of today’s Gospel reading seem almost like an afterthought, but they remind us firstly of his humanity and his parents’ obedience to the Law, but also of his divine and miraculous origins, foretold by the angel, who named him before he was conceived in Mary’s womb. He was named Jesus, because, as the angel told Joseph in another place, ‘he will save his people from their sins’.

Mary’s motherhood brings God fully into the complex, messy and beautiful reality of human existence – she who, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

‘Gave God’s infinity

Dwindled to infancy

Welcome in womb and breast,

Birth, milk, and all the rest’.

And all the rest…. Yes, God truly became one of us. He visited us like the dawn from on high, but he is no spirit or spectre, but is flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood. ‘Birth, milk and all the rest…’.

Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Magi and his apostles and disciples all knew Jesus in the flesh. We know him now by faith, in the proclamation of his word and the celebration of the sacraments. We too can be bearers of him… can bring him to birth in our lives… Our homes can be new Bethlehems or new Nazareths, where the Word made flesh is revealed to others by our love – if only, unlike the Christians criticised by Gandhi, we would live like Christ.

Let this be our resolution, our hope and our prayer for this New Year.

‘Of her flesh he took flesh:

He does take fresh and fresh,

Though much the mystery how,

Not flesh but spirit now

And makes, O marvellous!

New Nazareths in us,

Where she shall yet conceive

Him, morning, noon, and eve;

New Bethlems, and he born

There, evening, noon, and morn—

Bethlem or Nazareth,

Men here may draw like breath

More Christ and baffle death;

Who, born so, comes to be

New self and nobler me

In each one and each one

More makes, when all is done,

Both God’s and Mary’s Son.’

Fr. Cuthbert Brennan

Only yesterday we encountered the all too familiar scene of Mary and Joseph in a stable in Bethlehem with the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. This morning the gospel forces us to move the baby out of the manger, out of Mary’s arms and into the world, to Jerusalem, where this gospel will end. Luke, the great storyteller gives us in these few sentences echoes of his entire Gospel. The place is Jerusalem, where the gospel begins and ends. The place is the Temple, where the gospel begins and ends. And maybe you heard some other familiar words and phrases –  Passover, three days and seeking Jesus in the wrong place, such words and images we will encounter again and again as we continue our pilgrimage through the liturgical year. All we have to do is read the entire nativity story in Luke to make the connection between the baby and the man, between the heart-warming sentiments of Bethlehem and heart-stirring story in Galilee and the heart-breaking passion in Jerusalem. All you have to do is read the story and you will begin to hear his claim on your life.

When Jesus spent three days in the Temple he found out that there was a higher claim on him than the claim of Mary and Joseph. For Jesus the real authority in his life is his heavenly Father, and his life’s work and obedience to the Father’s will, will lead him back to the Temple again, where he will claim his own authority and where this time the religious leaders will conspire to kill him.

The gospel this morning shows us that Jesus is moving out of the circle of his parents, Jesus had to break with the familiar in order to truly be himself. And as followers of Christ it is a move we too have to make at times – break with the familiar, break with our families, our homes, if we are to truly find ourselves.

And maybe you hear echoes of another story in Luke. The rich young man who came to Jesus and asked “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response is to ask him to sell all he has and distribute it to the poor and come follow me. But when he heard this he became quiet sad for he was very rich. He was too at home in his wealth and couldn’t break with the familiar.

Jesus’ family got him to Jerusalem in the first place but his ministry calls a new family into being. A family not constituted by blood but by a free decision to become a disciple. This Feast of the Holy Family is an invitation to rethink the multiple families that enfold us. Particularly a family that shares one faith, one hope, one love through baptism, shares the same Holy Spirit as God’s free gift, shares the same body and blood through the Eucharist, shares the command of Christ, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

What sets Jesus’ family apart as holy, long before later Christians capitalised the “h” and painted halos on their heads is their commitment to the will of God. Joseph is characterised by Matthew as a just man, faithful in his relationship with God and Mary’s primary gift was that of a disciple. She listened to God’s word and did it. Such is the example set before every Christian, fidelity to relationships, to responsibility that stems from a covenant with God.

It’s easier to keep him in the manger, wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes. We like the familiar. But the story that the church puts before us this morning forces us to move with Jesus out of the manger, out of the loving and sheltering arms of his parents, into the world – a world that is filled with sin and death and great need, with powerful people who continue to oppose Jesus and with others who turn to him for life. Just as the story moves from Nazareth to Jerusalem, so we will have to move with Jesus on the long road to Jerusalem again, to the temple again on another Passover where he will upset the authorities and upset ultimately, all the powers and dominions of this world.

The twelve year old Jesus in the Temple makes us take his power – and his claim on us – seriously. With him we move out of the safety of the manger into adulthood, into maturity, as disciples of the one who called God “Father.” Like Mary we will keep these things in our hearts until we understand who he really is. And then we will know how great this gift truly is, this sacrifice of love that claims us as family and calls us to follow him, out in to the world, into demands and needs and confrontations; out into the world, away from this safe and familiar place, to the call that claims our own lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fr. Christopher Dylon

Christmas in a time of Covid is still Christmas, strange though it may feel. In fact, when you think about it, the inconveniences, the anxieties, the discomfort of it all, connect us somewhat to the situation of Joseph and his heavily pregnant wife, for whom there was no room in the inn. What an introduction for the Son of God to the world of his creation! “He was in the world that had its being through him and the world did not know him. He came to his own domain and his people did not accept him.” What might have been expected to be a stupendously triumphal entry, was a non-event, unnoticed, unwanted.

But, His ways are not our ways. As the heavens are high above the earth, so are his ways above our ways; His thoughts above our thoughts; so the prophet, Isaiah, reminds us. For He is full of grace; he is all gift, in our regard.

Did you notice those words of the Opening Prayer, just now; “O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ.”? Not content with the dignity of our human nature, we ask for more. This is the Christmas present which we ask from God.

What is it, exactly, that we are asking for? What does it mean, to “share in the divinity of Christ”? That we become God-like; that we become, in some way, similar to Christ, the Lord of the Universe, whom we believe to be the Second Person of the triune God? How has it come to this, that we should presume to consider such a possibility and, even, dare to ask for it?

The dignity of that human nature which God created in the beginning, seems, in some fashion, to have included this possibility, the possibility which we destroyed by sin. But the coming of God in Jesus Christ into our world, by assuming our human nature and being born of Mary, has restored that original possibility; and that is now made available to us by God’s grace, by God’s gift. The gifts we give one another, for Christmas, are a pale, but precious, reflection of this gift of God to us, that we should be His children, adopted and precious to Him, as Jesus Christ is precious to him. Is this not good News, even in these times of Covid?

Why this should be so, why God should so endow us, is sheer mystery; but it is the Good News which Christians celebrate, particularly, at this time of year, the news that God has become man, in Jesus, so that all men may become God; that is, all humankind, for “from his fulness we have all received, grace in return for grace”. 

But, of course, the gift has consequences and it makes demands of us, that we behave, as best we may, as Jesus Christ, that we become ever more like him; in a word, that our behaviour brings about God’s kingdom in our world, bringing about that peace on earth, of which the angels sang, in Bethlehem, and the justice that it implies.

The Covid miseries, which all humankind is experiencing, with all their attendant  difficulty, are of this existence only. The truth is, there is a larger picture; there is an infinitely greater reality ahead, for all of us. The manner with which we can embrace this truth and live with its consequences will be the measure of how far we will make God’s gift a reality in His world.

Happy Christmas, from all of us to all of you. 

Fr. Abbot Brendan Coffey

C.S. Lewis wrote a Christmas essay about the fictional island of Niatirb – Britain spelled backwards, where every citizen is obliged to send to each of their friends and relations a square piece of card stamped with a picture. Finding cards from someone to whom they also have sent cards, they throw them away and give thanks that this labour is over for another year. Finding cards from someone to whom they have not sent, they beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain and buy a card for them also. Sound familiar? Is this really, what Christmas has become?

Nothing, however, says Christmas in this part of the world like Charles Dickens. He has shaped many of our Christmas traditions with his stories. These dominate the Christmas Season even today and first among them is undoubtedly the heart-warming tale, A Christmas Carol. From Tiny Tim to Ebenezer Scrooge, this story has captured our attention like no other.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a central protagonist in this tale, but who, or what, is an ebenezer? Did you know that the word “ebenezer” comes from the First Book of Samuel? The Philistines had stolen the Ark of the Covenant. The country was in disarray. It was then the people turned their hearts back to the Lord. Samuel set up a stone and named it “Ebenezer” meaning, “the Lord has helped us”.

An ebenezer is a memorial of God’s faithfulness and our repentance. The stone is a marker for transformation and conversion and this is exactly what Ebenezer Scrooge becomes in Dicken’s story. 

Gregory of Nazianzus tells us that instead of garlanding our porticoes and titillate our taste-buds, we should luxuriate in the word and in the law and narratives of God. So for a moment let us do just that.

When human history is complete and the last books are written, one of the saddest lines in all of that history will be this one: “there was no place for them in the inn”. How strange and how very sad that God simply doesn’t fit into our world and yet on this holy night his favour rests on each of us, on our communities and families and on all who suffer and feel afraid. Mary and Joseph, for whom there was no room, are the first to embrace the One who comes to give all of us our document of citizenship, for this night the Lord has truly come to help us. God has set up his own ebenezer.

Our gospel tells of a world thrown into turmoil for a census: but what Augustus and no one else realised was that this turmoil had the hand of God behind it. A virgin named Mary, betrothed to Joseph of the house of David, arrived in Bethlehem, the city of David for the census, “while they were there, the time came for her to have her child and she gave birth to a son, her firstborn.” It is all said so simply, just one sentence, and indeed that was how it seemed to everyone at the time too.

In Bethlehem, a small chink opens up for all who have lost their way, their land, their country and their dreams. Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world. God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of great power. He chose instead to be incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. The faith we proclaim tonight makes us see God present in all those situations where we think he is absent, for God has come to help us.

All of the trappings of this Christmas Season are only significant insofar as they are “ebenezers.” They are important because they mark a change and remind us of the change that is happening now and that is still to come; for I too am called to become an Ebenezer, “O Christian be aware of your nobility, it is God’s own nature that you share.”

 

 

 

 

As Christmas approaches we chant here Psalm 110 with the antiphon “Jerusalem, rejoice with great joy, for the Saviour will come to you, alleluia!”  📖🎼 

O God, you are my God, for you I long…” 🎶📖 

Fr. William Fennelly

Today we celebrate the third Sunday of Advent, also called ‘Gaudete Sunday.’ It’s called ‘Gaudete Sunday’ because it takes its name from the first word of the entrance antiphon meaning rejoice. So we’re supposed to rejoice today, to be happy, but why? Advent as a whole is about expecting and preparing, hoping and working. That expectation and preparation; however, has a twofold character: expectation and preparation for the coming of Christ at Christmas, his birth; but also expectation and preparation for the second coming of Christ at the end of the world, the end of time. So during Advent we’re not just looking towards Christmas, but we’re also looking beyond that to Christ’s second coming at the end of time. And whilst the best way to try and prepare ourselves during Advent for these events is to pray earnestly that Christ will indeed come, to pray that we will repent and change our way of seeing, nevertheless on Gaudete Sunday we take a step back from that earnest atmosphere, so we can allow ourselves to experience that joy and gladness which Christ’s coming holds out to us. Our preparing has a joyful quality because of what is to come but also because the joy of that coming transforms our daily round. But what is it that we are rejoicing about and why should it make us happy?

Today’s gospel uses the contrast between Our Lord and John the Baptist to help us understand what is going on. To begin with, they both had a long history together, going right back to their childhood. Their relationship, therefore, was neither casual nor insignificant; it was deep rooted. So when Mary discovered her friend Elizabeth was pregnant she came to visit Elizabeth to offer her support. That decision to offer support, however, led to the occasion of an even more important event, the first meeting of Our Lord and John the Baptist. The God of Israel left the temple to dwell in Mary’s womb. By this act he forever changed God’s relationship with the flesh, with our humanity. He doesn’t just draw near; he inhabits our world as one of us. This was why John, as he experienced the presence of the Lord in the womb of Mary for the first time, he famously leapt for joy in the womb of his own mother, Elizabeth and so began the relationship between these two as John realised all the good work that the Lord would do.

John’s own contribution to that work is in no way minor or lesser. He represented a culmination of all that was good in Israel. He represented the culmination of prophecy in Israel. He called Israel to repentance. He called Israel to change their way of seeing and as we can see in the gospel that he pleaded Israel to change their behaviour. He insisted that people should be just, honest, and generous. But, as important as all that John did, was; moral goodness alone, which effectively was what John, preached, couldn’t and wouldn’t change the world. There is no shortage of morally good people who can testify to this. Moral goodness alone, for all its value and importance, won’t free us from our sin and it certainly can’t earn us eternal life with God. For that to be possible something more is needed and that’s what Our Lord offered through his life, death, and resurrection. This great torrent of grace, this great torrent of his gift to the world, what does he give? He gives his love at work in the world.  That’s what unleashed by Our Lord’s sacrifice, it perfects our moral life, it raises up our human nature, and it makes possible eternal life with God.

And if this doesn’t make us happy, then what will. Because after all the point of Christ’s coming is to renew the world, that is to say to give us newness of life and this renewal won’t just be in some modest or slight way. It won’t be the sort of thing we have in mind when we say, ‘well, things could be better’. No, when we focus on the ultimate point of Christ’s coming and allow ourselves to rest contentedly in the joy that this can let loose in us, then we will realise that what’s envisaged here is a fundamental change that will overthrow the shackles of our own inadequacies, the sticky molasses of our power plays and our petty rivalries, the effects of sin; in ourselves and in the world and after this change nothing will ever be the same again. No one will need ever to wish that things could be better for them in any way at all. Everything will be as God always intended things should to be and all of us will be better for that.

So today then let’s pray for the coming of Our Lord. Let’s immerse ourselves in the joy that this gives rise to and let this be our springboard to ever better discipleship and together let’s work to build the kingdom that is to come. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The monks of Glenstal Abbey chant Psalm 112 with the Advent antiphon ‘Ecce veniet propheta magnus et ipse renovabit Jerusalem, alleluia’ 📖🎶

Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman

John Cage, the American composer tried to change our attitude to music. He was ‘a voice crying in the wilderness.’ Probably his most famous piece 4 33 has musicians coming on stage as if to play music, and then sitting with instruments raised, doing nothing for four  minutes, thirty-three seconds. This was not meant to be four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, in his view, but an invitation to the audience to hear the real music happening around them. The  sound of a lawn-mower outside the window, laughter from another room, someone sneezing in the audience. Music, according to Cage, should not be an attempt to make our ugly world seem more lovely. Music should be a way of waking us up to the very life we’re supposed to live. Listen to the cries of  the 60 million refugees in our world today, the families of those drowned trying to cross the Channel between England and France, the starving people of Syria and Afghanistan. Then you  can  eat your turkey and sing Happy Christmas.

  Peggy Guggenheim, his friend, was having none of this. John Cage was a sourpuss killjoy according to her. She  brought him to hear some real music, to shake him out of his lawn mowers and belching cattle outside the window. A Christmas performance  of Handel’s Messiah was where they went. ‘Well john, wasn’t that wonderful? Didn’t you just love the Alleluia chorus, weren’t you moved?’ I don’t mind being moved, he replied, but I hate being shoved!’

We should not allow ourselves to be shoved into Christmas. When I tell you that there are only 21 shopping days left to Christmas, do you feel a twinge of panic or of guilt? What the hell are you doing here listening to this nonsense when you could be out shopping till you drop with Harvey Norman; and when they’re gone they’re really gone and there’s no use crying about it, you missed your opportunity.

Let’s try not to celebrate  Christmas at too high a pitch. The media and the advertising moguls wind us up to high doh, an hysteria  of gluttony and greed. We don’t really need any of this stuff – it’s a false  illusion.

Advent should be a time of quiet anticipation.The mystery we celebrate is a singular and a silent one. Because it is almost impossible to understand, it becomes easy to  swop the facts for the fiction.

It is going to take something pretty  original, something miraculous, something unheard of,  to make this world of ours in 2021 a happy Christmas. And you might be the very one one being asked to initiate some of that originality, or at least contribute towards it. But you would have to step off the whirligig to hear the off-stage whisperings.How could this world we are living in become a better place for the seven billion people presently alive on  our planet?  Step back and  ask yourself:  How’s it going? Am I on the right track? Am I driving my own vehicle, or is someone else at the steering-wheel? I would need to find a small stable, an out-house near the three-storey mansion I  have just built; somewhere small and simple where something personal, original, something divine, could be brought into being against all the odds.  Remember ‘What the Donkey Saw’ who was present on that first Christmas beside the crib:

No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable,
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host —
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love nor money. Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.

 

 

‘What the Donkey Saw’ by U.A. Fanthorpe [1929-2009]