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Fr. Patrick Hederman

Somebody decreed that we lose an hour’s sleep last night and we all agreed. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We’d still be in bed. So, this morning in this church we are all suffering from DST.

DST is the acronym for Daylight Saving Time, a fairly recent invention of the British government. It was first proposed in 1907 by William Willet, an English builder and outdoorsman who, during a pre-breakfast horseback ride, was dismayed to see so many Londoners sleeping through the best part of the summer’s day. An avid golfer, he disliked cutting short his round of golf at dusk, so he published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight. He had two bills introduced to the British Parliament; both were rejected and he died of influenza, at the age of 58, in 1915.

Winston Churchill backed his scheme as early as 1911in a speech in parliament: ‘An extra yawn some morning in the spring, an extra snooze some night in the autumn, is all we ask in return for the most dazzling benefits.’ In 1916, when Britain and Germany were at war, Germany first decided to try Willett’s scheme to save fuel costs for lighting. A few weeks later, Britain hurriedly passed the Summer Time Act, and so, on May 21^st 1916, almost a month after our Easter Rising here, Britain’s Summer Time became a reality. In Ballingarry, Co Limerick, where I come from, we refused to put our clocks backwards or forwards. We stuck to what we called ‘God’s time’ which meant that we were an hour behind everyone else. We believed that by sticking to God’s own time we would reap ‘the most dazzling benefits’ of quite another kind.

Christianity has devised an alternative calendar year, a different way of living time. Three weeks from now, Sunday the 17^th April, is D-Day in that computation. If you look up google you will find that this all-important day is listed as National Espresso Day in Italy if your interest is in concentrated coffee; as National Haiku Poetry Day in Japan if you’re into concentrated poems; and as Bat Appreciation Day in the United States: to raise awareness of the critical role that bats play in our ecosystem.

For us, on the contrary, three weeks from today, Sunday the 17^th April, is the most important day of the whole year: it is the day of resurrection, the day when Jesus Christ transformed the whole of our ecosystem. He introduced daylight saving time forever and ever. From now on ‘They will need neither lamplight nor sunlight, because the Lord God will be shining on them forever.’[1]  Saint Paul assured us in today’s second reading:[2] ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’ Again he tells us in the Epistle to the Romans: ‘If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’[3] This is Daylight saving time by the new time, by God’s time; and you have three weeks left, during this special time of Lent, to prepare yourself for take-off.

God, thou great symmetry
Who put a biting lust in me
From whence my sorrows spring,
For all the frittered days
That I have spent in shapeless ways
Give me one perfect thing.[4]

[1] Revelation, 22:5.

[2] Corinthians, 5:17.

[3] Romans 10:9.

[4] ‘Envoi’ by Anna Wickham.

Fr. Christopher Dillon OSB

There is a riot of ideas competing for attention in these readings for this Third Sunday of Lent. The over-all context of Lent focuses on the notion of life as a journey, during which we learn to encounter God in the positives and the negatives of that journey. Today, the initial and startling encounter with God by Moses sets the scene for this journey and its adventure, in terms which have been described as the struggle between tragedy and hope, fighting each other without victory. Is this not a description of the current catastrophe which is Ukraine?

Some of you may remember that trendy book of the Self Help variety, some years ago, entitled The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck; and it began, if I remember well, with the lapidary statement, “Life is difficult”. The theme of today’s liturgy would seem to be visiting the same territory. That encounter of Moses with God in the Burning Bush turned his life on its head and perhaps defined the beginning of the rest of human history in bringing to birth the Hebrew people and the story of the Jews who gave birth to the Saviour of the world, in Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the foremost teachers of that people, Paul of Tarsus, with very specific reference to those early adventures of his people, as they emerged from servitude in Egypt to peoplehood in the desert and then in the Promised Land, elaborates on the inevitability of difficulty and the very real possibility of failure on the circuitous journey that we experience as life. His words for today conclude with that caution, “The one who thinks he is safe must be careful that he does not fall.”

But, critically, the Gospel piece from St Luke provides a backdrop of positivity and hope. The fruitless fig tree in the parable may be taken to represent all the negativity of failure, whether in our collective or in our personal history. And, while the business-like course of action might be to cut it down and start again with a new tree, Jesus seems to ascribe to the Father the very un-business-like approach of working with it just one more time, for one more year. Divine patience is what is offered to us as a recipe to consider in our individual and personal story. Dare we hope for something like this in Eastern Europe, today?

St Benedict, the patron of our monastic life, appears to make much of this possibility in the mind of God, when he writes in the Prologue to his Rule, “The days of our life are lengthened and a respite allowed us for this very reason, that we may amend our evil ways. For the Apostle says, ‘Do you not know that the patience of God invites you to repentence?’ For the merciful Lord says, ‘I do not want the death of a sinner, but that he be converted and live.’” Vladimir Putin, are you listening? More immediately, perhaps, are we listening to this invitation of God, at this mid-point in Lent, to welcome his patience and to work with it? That is our task, in the amending of our ways; even in the extending to others God’s patience with ourselves. “For the one who thinks he is safe must be careful that he does not fall.”

Yes, life is difficult; sometimes, very difficult. But so, too, God is patient, very patient.

Fr. Martin Browne OSB

When you look at the News these days, one of the first things you’ll see is people on the move. Refugees. Vast numbers of Ukrainians have had to flee their homeland over the past two weeks and we see images daily of huge crowds at airports and train stations, and long tailbacks on the roads towards the border. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated on Friday that 2.5 million people had fled Ukraine so far. It really has been quite something to witness how hospitable and generous so many people across Europe have been. It is also striking to see how swiftly bureaucratic and administrative obstacles can be overcome in the case of a real continent-wide emergency.

Those millions of people are surely lucky to be safe and away from the bombs and shooting. But that doesn’t take away the fact that they have been uprooted from their homes. They have left loved ones behind, in many cases not knowing whether they are dead or alive. Many have arrived in countries where they don’t understand the language and are being hosted by people with whom they cannot speak. Some have arrived without passports or other papers. People have been extraordinarily generous. But we shouldn’t get sentimental about what is a truly horrific situation. Being uprooted and forced to go somewhere where you don’t belong is real trauma – no matter how warm the céad mile fáilte may be.

I thought of these refugees as I read today’s Second Reading. ‘Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.’ We may be uprooted and displaced, but at the deepest level, our true homeland is not of this world at all, but of heaven. St Paul is encouraging his audience with these words, bidding them to ‘stand firm’, in their faith that the Lord will indeed bring salvation. God’s ultimate plan is to transform and heal the entire creation and make it whole. It’s not hard to see how these words might touch the heart of a refugee, newly arrived in a strange country and culture, bewildered and without visa or passport. How consoling it must be to hear: ‘Our citizenship is in heaven’ – where the waters of baptism are the only visa needed.

But we need to be careful not to use these words as mere escapism. Simply telling people who have lost everything that all will be well in heaven is the type of attitude that caused Karl Marx to describe religion as the ‘opium of the people’; a kind of drug to dull the pain of the human condition – and stifle the impulse to rebel – with illusory consolations. As one satirical folk song puts it: ‘You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land above the sky. Work and pray, live on hay. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.’

The disciples, Peter and John and James, had a wonderful, mystical experience in today’s Gospel story. They experienced Jesus in his ‘glory’, accompanied by Moses and Elijah. It was an extraordinary privilege. They didn’t have to wait till they died or for life in the sky in order to taste heaven. They had ‘pie’ on earth while they lived…
And so, understandably, Peter wanted to prolong the experience. He offered to build three dwellings, one each for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. But Jesus wasn’t interested in having a mountainside ‘glamping’ holiday. He was focused on his journey to Jerusalem and what the Gospel calls his ‘departure’. He had told the disciples this just eight days before: ‘The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.’ That is the ‘departure’ that he was talking to Moses and Elijah about: his Pascha – his Passover through death to life, his cosmic battle – and victory – over the forces of sin and death. It is the mystery we celebrate every Sunday and most especially at Easter. They had forgotten what Jesus had told them, but the Father reminded them. Like Moses on Mount Sinai, they were enveloped by a cloud, signifying the presence of the Almighty and Holy One. A voice from that cloud said: ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’ This extraordinary moment of transfiguration on the mountain wasn’t a show or a treat for Jesus’s mates. It was a revelation and preparation of what was to come.

Just as the first Passover and Exodus had been the means by which God liberated and saved his people, the Passover of the Lord Jesus – his death on the Cross and his passing over from death into life – was how the Father willed to reconcile the whole world to himself and free us from death and sin. There would be suffering. There would be death. But the future would be one of transformed, reconciled, healed, freedom. It is something too beautiful for words, but the disciples were given a glimpse of it on the mountain as they saw the appearance of Jesus’s face changed and his clothes become dazzling white.
‘Then this world’s walls no longer stay my eyes, a veil is lifted likewise from my heart,
The moment holds me in its strange surprise, the gates of paradise are drawn apart,
I see his tree, with blossom on its bough, and nothing can be ordinary now.’ [Malcolm Guite]

‘Listen to him.’ ‘He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.’ ‘Listen to him.’ Our citizenship is indeed in heaven, and these aren’t just nice words to pacify refugees and other suffering people into accepting their lot with stoic resignation. It is not ‘pie in the sky’. It is the deepest truth of our identity as God’s people. After the Lord God revealed it to Peter and to John and James, ‘nothing can be ordinary now…’ What was revealed to them at the Transfiguration gives context and meaning to all the madness and absurdity of human suffering and sorrow. ‘Listen to him.’ Let’s not expect too little of what he can and will do. There is more to existence than the bodies in which we suffer now. Greater things await us, infinitely more glorious than what we know now. Death is not the final word. And neither are Terror or War. ‘Hope in him, hold firm and take heart. Hope in the Lord!’

Fr Abbot Brendan Coffee OSB

‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’

There is only one other time we hear these words in the liturgy and that is at the graveside and if we are the one being buried, it is too late at that point to do anything about it. So, ‘now is the favourable time, this is the day of salvation.’

We have heard how the Israelites returned to the Lord with fasting, weeping and mourning to reassert their identity as the people of God. As we begin the holy season of Lent, we prepare to do the same. However, we have to be very careful and very honest, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” We need to be particularly careful when trying to claim our identity as the people of God that we don’t make a performance out of it. The world is not a theatre and the God who made us won’t be applauding any kind of theatrical performance. Who is our audience in this season of Lent? ‘Our Father in heaven who sees all that is done in secret’.

Jesus tells us that we can easily become caught in the contradiction of audiences. On the outside we can appear to be seeking God, or trying to do what’s right; but on the inside we can be preoccupied with making a certain impression on other people.

It is not a question of whether we have kept the law or not, but whether the law has become so much ourselves that it has grown into the mystery of love. This then, is the point of Lent. ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return’. Take stock of reality and open your eyes to the mysterious relationship that we call mercy. Come face to face with being human, being dust and accept the love of the Lord.

It is mercy that gathers us here. God came into a broken world because He had mercy on us. We can choose to remain broken and indifferent. We can look at the hungry and say, “Not my problem,” we can look at the terrible conflict in Ukraine and think, “that’s very far away”; or we can view these victims of violence and declare, “There but for the mercy of God go I”. If we know anything about mercy, we know that mercy doesn’t make us any better than anybody else. We are in this together and mercy only makes sense when we share it with others. Who needs our help? The question is not difficult to answer. That is the invitation for us this Lent. We remember that we are dust, nothing more than dust and it is only by the mercy of God that we journey forward in the middle of the mess, which is this world of ours.