St Richard, Haywards Heath Listening to God 12.5.19

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice. John 10:27

We hear three voices - those from God, our neighbourhood and our self. Even when we’re speaking, those voices engage with us. We have two ears - I often need reminding - and one mouth! But we also have inner ears gifted by the Holy Spirit to listen from the heart and see our hearts touched, melted and enthused towards others. Building capacity to listen is about building awareness of those three voices.

We might not have ears like rabbits but our inner ears can grow !

As I look back on my life I think it's the people who’ve listened to me who’ve changed me most. I think of my mum and dad, my friends and teachers, my wife, my children and people who’ve lent an ear to my desire to follow God in the best way. As you’re listening to me now I also spend time listening in Church where I gain inspiration. I listen to God, to his word in the Bible, to the words of the Eucharist, sermons, to people who cross my path day by day and of course to myself. By listening to others I serve them and others serve me as they listen to my aspirations.

Priests do a lot of listening and bishops more so. I remember a conversation with Archbishop Rowan Williams who’d just come back from going round classes in a school. ‘I felt great sympathy with the children in their struggle to listen’ he said as one used to listening to the woes of priests. It’s one of the big challenges we have, the shorter attention spans of our children and grandchildren, which affects the classroom and among other things impacts church attendance. Children expect excitement in church. Wise children expect to be awed and intrigued - we have to cater for both!

This reminds me - I have a butterfly mind easily distracted - of a story about paying attention. It's about a shocked visitor to Crete who tackled a farmer she saw bashing his donkey on the side of his head with some sort of mallet. ‘How can you treat your donkey like that’ shouted the lady. ‘Simple’ the peasant replied. ‘I’ve got to get his attention’.

We should have sympathy. Life can feel donkey-like at times, like being on a treadmill, somewhat thankless. It's the same with the spiritual life at times. How many memorable sermons can I recall, let alone sermons that have really changed my life! One I must mention was on Jeremiah 31:17 ‘There is hope in thine end’. It was by a holy monk called Cedma Mack in the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield where I trained as a priest. ‘There is hope in thine end’ Fr Cedma announced as his text and dropped dead! Never forget it - you couldn’t lay on something like that! They carried him out.

The Creed was said not sung that day but otherwise the Community Mass proceeded as normal! Cedma was a much loved man - I held the holy water bucket at the grave and can tell you more tears flowed than holy water at his funeral!

The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice.

I found God speaking to me as I read St Richard’s annual report last week. To read the description of the seven core areas of our life was very stimulating. More of us are leading so more is being achieved. I was pleased to do my bit in the Churchyard and through the Week of Guided Prayer. I’m aware of more God talk among us which might evidence more listening to God. It’s good we feel able to share with our peers and our priests about our journey of faith because that’s our Christian distinctive.

Listening to God and to one another is packaged with the costly virtue of self-forgetfulness. I try to remember that ultimately I will be with God and people in the communion of saints so my longing for him and for my neighbour is pivotal. My life - my eternal life - depends upon it.

A few weeks back I had a really difficult phone call from someone so full of emotional pain they were hardly able to let me get a word in to say I had a train to catch! In this experience I was trying to listen to her, to myself - an impatient inner voice saying ‘end this call asap’ - and to God saying ‘be kind’. By the grace of God I got my train! Reflecting back on the conversation I was fast to judge the poorly lady’s demanding tone as it rattled my own self-will. None of us can be in two places at once but the capacity to listen to others in or out of a crisis is a servant gift I keep seeking - and with it the gift of self-forgetfulness.

A practical suggestion. Pray for two gifts - to forget yourself and never to forget God. Ask the Lord first to steer you from self-love in every guise or disguise since that above all else blocks your capacity to listen to others. Then, secondly, offer God the aspirations of your soul and the health and ability of your body and open your heart to his love, maybe in a prayer like this.

A prayer of Eric MIlner-White: ‘Let your love, O Lord, pass into the depth of my heart, into the heart of my prayer, into the prayer of my whole being; so that I desert myself and dwell more and more in you, in peace, now and evermore’

St Bartholomew, Brighton Easter 3 5 May 2019

‘Do you love me?’ John 20:16

Our Lord’s question to Peter extends to us all through the last chapter of the Gospel of St John read on this third Sunday of Eastertide.

The question comes three times: ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’. Three times to counter Peter’s three denials before Easter. The exchange ends with an affirmation we’re invited to make our own: ‘Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you’.

Our love for the Lord represents our capacity for the infinite. It’s the most important thing in our lives.

Saint Catherine of Siena wrote as if from the Lord: ‘I who am infinite God want you to serve me with what is infinite, and you have nothing infinite except your soul’s and love’s desire’. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it similarly. ‘It's not what you are or have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes but what you would be’.

Our love for God is our infinite tendency so it’s cultivation is pivotal. We all bear God’s image but an image isn’t reality. The reality of God’s life builds in us as our longing for him reaches out towards him, often like Peter in deep penitence for our practical atheism. We recall how Peter says three times of Our Lord I do not know him. How many times do we act in denial of the presence of God?

We profess our belief Sunday by Sunday in ‘the maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible’ but day by day, hour by hour we act in denial. We do not practice the presence of God to the best of our ability. We affirm our belief in a God who loves us, all people and all things through and through but lack transparency to that love which we profess reaches down to us from this altar.

In awesome reflections on the Eucharist Aloysius Roche writes these words of prayer to Our Lord: ‘Would that all earth-bound minds and hearts might know the truth, and break their bonds and fly to him through thee!  Would that all whose souls are cold and dead might draw near thy fires and warm them back to life, that so the divine Love which stretched out its arms to all on Calvary and holds them open hourly in the Mass may at last be satisfied’.

‘Do you love me?’ Our Lord asks us this morning. How deep and strong is your longing for me? How earth-bound are you?

From his sick bed the Abbe de Tourville wrote this guidance to an earth-bound soul: ‘Say to yourself very often about everything that happens, ‘God loves me! What joy!’ And reply boldly, ‘And I love him too!’ Then go quite simply about all you have to do and do not philosophize any more. For these two phrases are beyond all thought and do more for us than any thought could do; they are all sufficing’.

One of the blessings of sickness is space granted to reflect on life and see more fully the things that matter which will be ours in that place where ‘mourning and crying and pain will be no more’ (Revelation 21:4). What matters is the infinite God of infinite love who calls all in his image into the reality of holiness with all the saints.

God and people - they alone last forever - with our longing love for them in the communion of saints!

It's all invitation! No one’s compelled to love God or neighbour but all are invited. ‘I who am infinite God want you to serve me with what is infinite, and you have nothing infinite except your soul’s and love’s desire’.

When the tide of death sweeps over us it will remove useless self regard and leave us with the thing that lasts – love for God and people. That can’t be swept aside. It stands for ever as a component of the communion of saints. When death’s tide sweeps over the sandcastle of our lives it will reveal how much substance there is within us, sorting that from what is sandy and ephemeral. That solid residue will be the outgoing concern that draws us out of ourselves into generous communion with others. Our Christian belief and longing is for that communion, that one thing stronger than death central to this eucharist which is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

How then can we love God more?

We build that love as we reflect on his love whose ‘fires warm us back to life… the divine Love which stretched out its arms to all on Calvary and holds them open hourly in the Mass’. As we reflect on scripture which also warms our hearts, seek spiritual guidance from our peers and priests, confess our sins, pray, worship and serve the needy. Above all our love for God grows from determination. St Seraphim asked why certain people who strive for holiness really get transformed while others hardly make progress answered why this is in two words: ‘Just determination’.

‘Do you love me?’ Our Lord asks Peter at the end of the Gospel of St John.

At the end of our lives the only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy will be not to become a saint. In other words not to have fuelled the infinite longing within us represented in our love for God. To be anything less than holy is to remain unactualized in the spiritual world like the millions of seeds unactualized in the natural world.

We are being actualised - we are reaching our potential - as we build love for Our Lord who at this season opens up to us an infinite horizon through his resurrection. As we commit afresh to him this morning we stand determined, seeking love for him, aspiring to holiness suited for a happy eternity.

Our Lord asks us this morning, ‘Do you love me?’ With Peter in the Gospel we affirm:  ‘Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you’.

Picture - re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion in Trafalgar Square on Good Friday 2019