Guest presenter Fr Christopher Jamison will be joining John Pantry. He’s a Benedictine monk and former Abbot of Worth Abbey in West Sussex, whom you may well have seen on the BBC TV series The Monastery. He’ll be with us on the show every Monday throughout Lent.
On the show we’ll be asking ‘Are there certain areas that Christians should not attempt to pray into without some foreknowledge?’. With the elections coming up, many of us are praying for our leaders and for parliament, which is good. Some Christians are planning on prayer marches to pull down spiritual strongholds in the country. However, are Christians making a mistake when they believe they have the authority to challenge the powers of darkness in the heavenly realms? You may have heard rhetoric about "taking back what the enemy stole" or "possessing the land" that the enemy currently inhabits, but do we have the authority to do this? We’ll be joined by church leader, author and broadcaster Gerald Coateswho has some experience in this area.
There will be a chance to hear Benedictine Fr Christopher Jamison every Monday morning throughout Lent, when he joins ‘Inspirational Breakfast’ on Premier Radio - beginning at 7am on Monday, 23 February.
Fr Christopher, former Abbot of Worth Abbey in West Sussex, became a familiar figure following the BBC 2 documentary series ‘The Monastery’. He is also the author of two books: ‘Finding Sanctuary’ -Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, and ‘Finding Happiness’ – Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life.'
The Australian-born monk will co-host Premier’s ‘Inspirational Breakfast’ show with resident presenter John Pantry, who said today: “Fr Christopher will be the first monk to present a programme on Premier and I look forward to sharing the show with him and our morning listeners.”
As the director of the National Office for Vocation, an office of the Roman Catholic Church, since 2010, Fr Christopher is responsible for creating a culture of vocation throughout the country. He said today: “I love radio, both to listen and to broadcast, but this will be my first experience of presenting on radio. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to engage with Premier’s listeners who are doing such a fantastic job sustaining this wonderful station.”
Premier Christian Radio broadcasts on 1305, 1332, 1431, 1566 MW in London and nationally on DAB and Freeview 725. For more information and to listen online see: http://www.premier.org.uk/
It’s a privilege to be invited to
preach on this occasion. It’s also a challenge. What to say and how?
Consecrated life is such a rich, complex, sometimes heavy reality. So many
issues cluster around it, so many roads run out from it. There’s so much
history, so much present, so much, please God, to come. There’s so much
theology and so much context. There are such strengths and weaknesses, so many
opportunities and threats. There is never lack of controversy. There are so
many ways a homily could go.
Well, when all else fails, there’s
always the word of God, there’s always the liturgy. It was St John Paul who chose this feast for the annual World Day of
Consecrated Life, beginning in 1997. It has been indicated as a light for
us who are consecrated. The feast, by its nature, is an epiphany. It’s the last
of that series of epiphanies which light up our winter: the birth of Jesus, his
showing to the magi, his baptism, the sign of Cana. It is an epiphany for us.
“The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, John Paul II said, is an eloquent
icon of the total offering of one’s life.” And also of the light that offering
can be and can kindle in others.
So, when I thought
of the feast, something did light up for me. First something general, then
three particulars.
First of all, there
is this play with light. Light, from Genesis on, is one of the great
biblical and Christian concepts, symbols. Concretely, there are the candles.
Our Mass began with this lucernarium, a fore-glimpse of the Easter
Vigil. The light is Christ, but it becomes ours. He is the light of revelation
to the Gentiles and the glory of your people Israel and we catch light from
him. We become light in the Lord. It is a baptismal symbol first of all, but it
evokes our profession also. How many good ‘lucifers’, light-bearers, we have
known and know among our brothers and sisters! There’s a monastic saying:
‘young monks look holy, but they’re not; middle-aged monks don’t look holy, and
they aren’t; old monks don’t look holy, but they are’. But sometimes, at the
beginning or the middle or the end, being and appearance really coincide. The
light is there and the light shines out. I feel immensely blessed by so many of
the monks and nuns I have known. I have been warmed and clarified by the light
they carry. We’ve all had this experience. Sometimes the light’s known only to
God and a handful of brothers or sisters; sometimes it’s set on a lampstand for
the Church and beyond. But it is there. ‘A candle burns at the expense of its
own substance’, said the German Jesuit Alfred Delp – and so do these folk. But
what light they give!
And here’s a symbol within the
symbol. This blessing and procession of candles is owed to a consecrated woman – one Hicelia. She is perhaps best
described as an abbess. She lived in Palestine in the 5th c. and according to St Cyril of Scythopolis
“led the way” in establishing this ceremony. What a future it would have! It
would be taken up by the different Eastern liturgies, then spread to Rome, and
from there to the West, and from the West to the whole world. The intuition and
initiative of one woman having a wide and continuing impact: it is a kind of
parallel and parable of the development of religious life in the Church. A
diffusion of light. There’s an idea very dear to Tolkien: we can’t choose the time and place in which we live, nor
the historical circumstances that shape our lives. These are allotted us. We
should not murmur at them. Our task, in our allotted span, is to refuse the
evil and choose the good; to make that basic choice and give our lives that
direction. ‘If we would escape the pains of hell and reach eternal life, says
St Benedict, then we must – while there is still time, while we are in this
body and can fulfil all these things by the light of this life – hasten to do
now what may profit us for eternity.’ Yes, to choose the light. To receive it
again and again from the risen Christ, from our founders, from the prophets and
saints, from the teaching of the Church, allow it to enlighten us and hand it
on and around. To join the stream of light that flows through the centuries. This
is our vocation surely as Christians consecrated to the Lord by vow.
Lucernarium - holding candles
And what might this
mean when we come to particulars?
I’d like to follow those two
light-bearers, Mary and Joseph, through today’s Gospel. A first thing that
comes to mind is how permeated they are by Scripture, by the word of the Lord.
How careful Luke is to highlight their obedience to the law of the Lord: to the
prescriptions of Exodus and Leviticus. Five times he does this. ‘Your word is a
lamp for my steps.’ It is that word that has turned their steps to the Temple.
And then there is Simeon who comes by virtue of a revelation to see the
comforting of Israel, the fulfilling of the Isaian hopes. And inspired by the
Spirit he will speak words of God himself. He will give what will become a
prayer, a canticle for the people of the New Covenant. And Anna too is a
prophet. She brings her own word. So Mary and Joseph make the transition from
the Old Covenant to the New. And this event becomes part of the content of
the New Testament and wholly a word of God.
If we are to fulfil our vocation as
light, Scripture is of the essence. Vatican II pointed us there so
strongly. ‘The ultimate norm of the religious life is the following of Christ
as it is put before us in the Gospel’, said Perfectae Caritatis (2a)
And again, ‘In the first place, let them have the sacred scriptures at hand
daily, so that they might learn ‘the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus’
by reading and meditating on the divine scriptures’ (6). I think nothing can
keep the home fires of the heart burning more brightly than this daily contact
with the Word. But there is more. Shouldn’t we align ourselves with our
founders and foundresses in their own turning to Scripture. I think we are
loyal to them if we do this, if in a sense we look beyond them, if with them we
lift our eyes to the mountains which, as St Augustine says, are the Scriptures.
We could say that John Paul II proposed this very path: in Vita
Consecrata he chose the Gospel of the Transfiguration as the icon to
inspire us, and in instituting this World Day pointed to the Gospel of today.
The primary inspiration for the religious life has always been biblical. Think
of the call of Ss Anthony the Great and Francis of Assisi. Think of St Dominic
who practically knew the Gospel of Matthew and the Letter of Paul by heart. It
has been both sayings and figures who have done the inspiring. How formative
have been the stories and paradigms of Abraham, Elijah, Mary, the apostles, the
early Christian community, and above all the Lord himself, the supremely
chaste, poor and obedient one! I remember a striking saying of a Benedictine
abbot: ‘It is the task of monks to keep the Psalms alive in the Church.’ We can
broaden it: ‘It’s a task of the consecrated to keep Scripture alive in the
Church.’ We need to read our Rules and Constitutions as a kind of practical
exegesis of the Word. This lets the air in. It undoes the knots that
occasionally entangle us. It makes us agents of unity instead of defenders of
our corners. And I think if we live our life in this light of the Word, then we
become a lived exegesis – in our weaknesses as well as our strengths. If we
make his word our home, if Mary-like we ponder it, then, dare I say it, we will
recover the inspirational poetry of our lives. And we and our communities will
be words of God, not meaningless cries. The French have this expressive word
for an envoy, an ambassador: porte-parole. We will be bearers
of light if we carry, bear, the word.
A second
particular. ‘And Simeon said to Mary his mother: “You see this child:
he is destined for the fall and for the rising of many in Israel, destined to
be a sign that is rejected – and a sword will pierce your own soul too – so
that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare.”’And so on the horizon
of her life, and in his measure of Joseph’s, there rises the mystery of the
Cross. Mary had already received knowledge of Jesus from the angel of the
Annunciation. And now she receives a second annunciation, different in tone.
It’s the first to suggest a rejection, to portray him as a sign of
contradiction, with a sword waiting for her own heart. This is the trailer for
the Lord’s death and resurrection and Mary’s participation in it. Today she is
drawn into the Paschal mystery alongside her Son, as she will be in every other
Gospel episode concerning her.
There is a striking passage in Vita
Consecrata: ‘From the first centuries of the Church, men and women have
felt called to imitate the Incarnate Word who took on the condition of a
servant. They have sought to follow him by living in a particularly radical
way, through monastic profession, the demands flowing from baptismal
participation in the Paschal Mystery of his Death and Resurrection. In this
way, by becoming bearers of the Cross (staurophoroi), they have striven
to become bearers of the Spirit (pneumatophoroi), authentically
spiritual men and women, capable of endowing history with hidden fruitfulness
by unceasing praise and intercession, by spiritual counsels and works of
charity’ (VC 6).
If we are to be bearers of light, it
will be in the measure we are bearers of the single but two-fold mystery of
Cross and Resurrection.
This can guide us past possible
pit-falls. There is a false seriousness we need to avoid. Far better to be practitioners
of what’s been called ‘evangelical light-heartedness’. ‘Where there are
religious, there is joy’ quotes Pope Francis – and laughter and fun. At the
same time, there is a superficiality to be avoided: the uncritical espousal of
every fashionable cause. It has often struck me that most of the sayings of the
Lord that have inspired the consecrated life – the words to the rich young man,
the answer to Peter’s ‘What about us, Lord? We have left everything and
followed you’, the disclosure of celibacy, the clearest calls to renunciation –
occur after the Lord has set his face towards Jerusalem. They are spoken en
route to the Cross, to the giving of his life as a ransom for many. The Cross
is our cause. And the Cross is the door to the Resurrection and Pentecost. It’s
along that stretch of the way of salvation that we live our consecrated lives.
That’s the Newtonian ‘gravity’ of our lives. That’s their pole. It is the
Paschal Mystery we have eyes for and are drawn to. We’re meaningless and empty
and tasteless outside it, fit only to be trodden underfoot. And if we are sent
to the young or the sick or the marginalised or the trafficked, or whoever, it
can only be for that very reason, because they too are in this mystery and we
want to go with them through it on the way to salvation.
Yes, if we are to be bearers of
light, it will be so far as Paul-like, Mary-like, we are ‘always carrying in
the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested
in our bodies’ (2 Cor 4:10). Think of St Francis.
‘When they had done everything the
Law of the Lord required, they went back to Galilee, to their own town of
Nazareth. Meanwhile the child grew to maturity, and he was filled with wisdom
and God’s favour rested on him.’ So the Gospel ends.
When Mary and Joseph emerged from
their encounter with Simeon and Anna, I think the world must have looked to
them different. I wonder if the Temple – for all its ancestral holiness – now
seemed less in their eyes. Their eyes had changed. Surely they had a new
awareness that they carried in their arms the holy One, the deliverance of
Jerusalem and Israel’s comforting, light and glory for Jew and Gentile –
something immense. Surely their respective parenthoods now seemed to them most
awesome. This fatherhood and motherhood went beyond the Child in himself. He
was born of the virgin to be born – or rejected – in a people. He had acquired
a new depth now. He was not just a great king rallying his troops from outside.
He was to be the decisive factor in the inner drama of every human being, of
what Simeon calls their ‘thoughts’ and ‘hearts’. What’s prophetically present
here is the mystical Body of Christ. And carrying such a One, they were content
to go back to the margins, to the peripheries, to obscure Nazareth, to Galilee
of the Gentiles, and there put themselves afresh at the service of the maturing
child. I think that rather like the disciples after the cloud and the voice on
Tabor, Mary and Joseph now ‘saw Jesus only’. But they saw him everywhere. And
they saw their mission with a new simple clarity. It was theirs to tend this
divine mustard seed planted by the Father in the soil of the world.
Once again, we may
find ourselves in the wake of Joseph and Mary. There
aren’t, in the end, many missions. There is only one: to serve the mysterious
growth of the body of Christ in the world, to be stimulators of his ‘rising’ –
and please God never of his ‘falling’ – in the thoughts and hearts of men and
women. To tend this seed, in each and everyone entrusted to us. To protect it /
them from the weeds, to water with prayer, to guide to the sunshine of God, to
grow with them to full stature. So that Christ grows and fills the whole world.
So that the world is no longer merely a setting for desecration after
desecration, but consecrated in him. So that there are in the world those
‘alternative spaces’ of which Pope Francis speaks, places lit and warmed by
Christ. He is all we have and he is enough. I remember Fr Cantalamessa
addressing abbots on the Benedictine theme of ‘preferring nothing to the love
of Christ’; it was a plea to us not to lose our Christo-centricity in the midst
of inter-religious dialogue or wherever. There was a gentle reminder to the
same effect in the recent Report after the Visitation of some American sisters.
‘Let us not lose sight of Jesus’ (Heb 12:2). ‘Christ be our light!’ Mary is
the Deipara, the God-bearer, and the word ‘bear’ also means
produce, give birth to. It will be in the measure we bear Jesus in this sense
that we will be bearers of the light. ‘Sadness’, Pope Francis has said, ‘comes
from not being a father or mother’. Let us be bearers and foster-ers of Christ,
Christ destined to rise in hearts and thoughts.
I’ve tried to follow Mary and Joseph
through today’s Gospel. I think theirs was a journey sustained by the Word. It
was a journey into the Paschal mystery. It was a journey to a deeper, more
expansive parenthood. And so, thanks to them – bearers of the Word, of the
Pasch, of Christ – Christ’s light had a home in the world, and ‘the darkness
could not overcome it’ (Jn 1:5).
And now it’s over to us.
Delivered
at Gillis College, Edinburgh on 2 February 2015
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