St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 18(27A) Suffering and the Supernatural 8 October 2023

There are two main ways God manifests himself. 

These are through the supernatural and through suffering.

These two ways are the trademark of Jesus Christ who both suffered and rose again.

In today’s Gospel Our Lord speaks of both, coupling his retelling of Isaiah’s parable of the vineyard we heard as the Old Testament reading to predict his sufferings, to a quote from Psalm 118:22 to predict the supernatural intervention of God which would effect his resurrection: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?’

As Christians we have the same dual trademark so St Paul writes in our second lesson from Philippians in Chapter 3 verse 10: ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

When we were baptised we gained that trademark with the cross on our forehead and the promise of resurrection - Holy Spirit - empowerment. For us, bearing suffering makes sense on account of Jesus as he again and again opens up a forward vision in our lives.  

Christianity is less a moral code than supernatural empowerment through faith in Jesus Christ, ‘the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’. Once our faith gets woken up - and that happens repeatedly - we find ourselves loosened from the pains of life into achieving wondrous things through the supernatural working within us of the God who raises the dead.

There’s a lot of pain involved for any family afflicted by Alzheimer’s. You are dealing with relentless frustrations as domestic routines falter through increasing forgetfulness. These hardships bring people down. I observe, though, that where there is faith in Christ the sufferings that bring you down bend you like grass in the wind which is capable of springing up again. The truth of Easter comes real in life through sufferings born in faith, through spiritual perseverance. Christians are Jesus-shaped, J shaped irrepressible folk – you know if you press an I down it becomes a J - and a springy, irrepressible J springs back again. To be J-shaped, to be Christian, is to be on the winning side of life through the inner spring of perseverance.

‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

In today’s Gospel Our Lord spoke of his suffering and resurrection in the parable of the wicked vineyard workers who killed the owner’s son. That great poet and priest, Fr. Raneiro Cantalamessa writes of the Cross in these words: ‘In the Alps in summer, when a mass of cold air from the North clashes with hot air from the South, frightful storms break out disturbing the atmosphere; dark clouds move around, the wind whistles, lightning rends the sky from one end to the other and the thunder makes the mountains tremble. Something similar took place in the Redeemer’s soul where the extreme evil of sin clashed with the supreme holiness of God disturbing it to the point that it caused Him to sweat blood and forced the cry from Him, ‘My soul is sorrowful to the point of death...nevertheless Father, not My will but Yours be done’

‘O generous love!’ wrote John Henry Newman, ‘That he who smote in man for man the foe, the double agony in man (that is of body and soul) for man should undergo, and that he should do this, ‘in the garden secretly, and on the Cross on high.  Praise to the holiest in the height!’

Suffering is close to the supernatural action of God - this is Christ’s experience and ours. 

I remember my parish priest when I was an Oxford student evoking the victory of the Redemption in these sorts of words. Imagine, he would say, the immense pressure on a point in space which had the whole force and weight of the universe upon it.  Then imagine the moral universe and the weight of sin from the creation of the world up to now and beyond to the completion of things.  Then imagine that moral weight pressed to one point upon the heart of Jesus in Gethsemane.  Then see the value of the sweated blood and the victory it attains through a disposition of one human heart totally transparent to the love and power of God. It attains the resurrection.

I was once a Missionary in Guyana, South America where I worked among the native Amerindians. These indigenous people believe in many evil spirits, above all what they call ‘kenaima’. A youth around 18 was fishing one day and felt kenaima attack him from behind. The evil spirit is said to go up the rectum. Whether it was a physical attack by the demon or psychological I do not know. What I can tell you is that when I came to his hammock the life was literally ebbing away from him and his family were planning where his grave should be. To be attacked by kenaima was a death sentence without respite in the old village religion.

Praise God for the new religion and for the Cross of Jesus and his Sacraments that take their force from him! 

We encouraged the youth as we prepared him for Anointing and Holy Communion in words from St. John’s first letter: ‘Jesus in you is greater than kenaima’. Most of the village gathered into Church  for a prayer vigil for the boy during which a priest took Holy Communion to him. A vigil of prayer and praise to God continued all night as the boy’s strength returned. The next Sunday he was with the Music group playing the guitar at Mass.

I am convinced his right understanding of Holy Communion as bringing the power and presence of Jesus right into him saved his life. We saw a remarkable testimony to the victory of Our Lord over evil powers. Those words from St. John’s first letter chapter 4 verse 4 have never lost their power over me: ‘He who is in us - Jesus - is greater than he who is in the world - the devil’.

‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings’.

Do you want that - to know Jesus? His resurrection power is here among us as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day gathered around the Lord’s table - and - here’s the rub - in your individual life and mine, in our sufferings, not resented but born cheerfully with the Holy Spirit’s assistance. 

As you share the joys and griefs of your circle and carry their sufferings to Our Lord in prayer you will bear the irrepressible trademark of Jesus, J-shaped and on the winning side of life through him who ‘was sorrowful unto death’ and rose to make this day ‘the day of resurrection’. Alleluia!

 

Wivelsfield & St Richard, Haywards Heath St Francis 4.10.23

I have always been fascinated by today’s Saint - here he is in a picture that makes a 13th century face and life immediately real to us. It's from around 1278 and it's by the great early Renaissance Italian artist Cimabue who is thought to have best represented the Saint. 

As Cimabue’s portrait brings Francis alive to us so Francis himself brings Christ alive to us. One of the prayers that captures to my mind the power of today’s Saint begins ‘Lord Jesus Christ, when the world was growing cold, you renewed the sacred marks of your passion in the flesh of the most blessed Francis, to inflame our hearts with the fire of your love’. 

The centre of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is Our Lord’s suffering for us upon the Cross. We represent that suffering day by day at the altar and try to understand our own sufferings with a eye to his which are life-giving through Our Lord’s resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Just as his words ‘This is my body which is given for you… my blood which is shed for you’ are at the centre of the eucharist, whenever Christianity is refreshed in people or in cultures it is through the appreciation of just what God did in letting his Son bear the suffering of the Cross for each and for all. Though God’s love extends back to creation and forward to heaven it has found its focus in the wounds it bore on Mount Calvary almost 2000 years ago. 2033 will be a big year for Christianity across the world.

So was the 13th century and the early 1220s when one man was privileged to be made a fresh focus of the love of God shown in the crucifixion of Our Lord by receiving the wound prints of Christ’s passion on Mount La Verna. Show Pietro Lorenzetti’s fresco Francis, close to the end of his life, told of seeing an angel or seraph with six wings hovering above him, whose outstretched hands and closed feet were fixed to the Cross. Suddenly, he relates, traces of wound prints, so-called ‘stigmata’ began to be visible on his hands and feet as he had seen them shortly before on the crucified image above him, an extraordinary gift which continued to the end of his life about which Francis spoke little but which are well attested from the 13th century.

One of the mysteries of Christianity is its timespan. Over 2000 years Christian faith has waxed and waned across the world. Wherever faith has grown and spread you can always trace it back to the preaching of the Cross in some way and Francis, as you can see from what I am sharing, has become to us a very great visual aid if I dare say that. 

St John Henry Newman admitted that, though regular contemplation of the sufferings of Christ was essential to living in God’s love, it was for him more a discipline and less a joy for him to dwell upon them. The life of St Francis is an encouragement here, and an invitation to have cold hearts rekindled in love towards God, through pondering regularly the wounds of Christ borne on our behalf and to invoke the prayers of a great lover of God.

There is a coldness towards Jesus Christ in post-Christian culture. May the prayer and example of St Francis, who received the sacred marks of his passion in his flesh 800 years ago, inflame our hearts with the fire of God’s love shown to us in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

St Richard, Haywards Heath Requiem for Pope Benedict XVI 4.1.23

Today’s Gospel recalls how ‘Andrew took his brother Simon to Jesus. Jesus looked hard at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John; you are to be called Cephas’ – meaning Rock’. We read elsewhere in the Gospels how Our Lord renames Simon: Peter - literally ‘rock man’ - founding his Church on the ‘rock’ of Peter’s faith in Christ’s divinity.  To this day the Christian world takes note of the successor of St Peter, first Bishop of Rome, seeing him as a referee helping safe play continue down the centuries. This is why the death of a former Pope is being marked at the altar this evening.

Pope Benedict XVI, whose funeral is tomorrow, was an exceptional Bishop of Rome and one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century.  Some Bishops, priests and Popes are more pastors and some more teachers.  Benedict, like his friend Archbishop Rowan Williams, came to office from being a theology professor. That friendship, one of many he had with Anglicans, came to the fore when he visited the United Kingdom in 2010 to canonise John Henry Newman.

Unlike his successor Pope Francis, more pastor than teacher, Benedict has gained an unfair reputation as over dogmatic churchman. This is despite his being instrumental with other theologians of the revolutionary empowerment of the laity at the 1962-5 Second Vatican Council. Picking up on failure to address clerical abuse under the reign of Pope St John Paul II, Pope Benedict acted only to be blamed himself  for the abuse crisis, one reason he resigned and handed over to Pope Francis. 

I speak as one widely read in his writings. Only last week I was reading his book on the biblical texts related to Christ’s birth. His writings, so rooted in scripture, transcend the Catholic-Evangelical divide in the Church. Benedict’s passion was to help rise above Christian divisions to commend to the next generation the reality of the risen Lord. In this  he used captivating images such as his commending to people, young and old, what he calls ‘Jesus’ Hour’, attendance at Sunday Mass, through which the Lord manifests himself to us transformatively in word and sacrament week by week, day by day, down through the centuries.

As Anglicans who value our Church’s place in the stream of Christian believing through the centuries we should be grateful for steps he took in 2012, seen as provocative by some, to establish an Anglican Ordinariate which has become a sort of bridge between our Communions under the patronage of Blessed John Henry Newman. Though both the action of and the secession of many from the Anglican Church over female ordination in recent years is controversial Pope Benedict’s action remains an affirmation of the intrinsic catholic credentials of historic Anglicanism which would warm Newman’s heart. 

When we compare how global media treat Pope Benedict’s reputation compared to informed church circles it is evident how very little the reputation has to do with the man. It is our reputation before God, each one of us, that will count when at last we stand before him. A holy and gentle soul Benedict’s last recorded words were ‘Lord, I love you’. He knew God’s love and laboured to bring others into its orbit. As St John puts it so beautifully in the passage we read yesterday at Mass ‘Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children; and that is what we are… what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is’. So be it for us - and for Pope Benedict, blessed in name and in life.

St Mary, Balcombe Trinity 17 (28C) Thankfulness

I have no tattoos myself nor have any of my children or grandchildren but I am increasingly surrounded, as we all are, by young people who have them, especially when I go to the gym. That can be a good place for conversation. The other day I met a young man called Lewis who had a very significant tattoo mainly visible to himself and not to others. On his wrist he had the word ‘Gratitude’ embellished which he told me was an aide memoire. Hour by hour he looked down on his wrist recalling things he was grateful for.

Lewis trains boxers. He is convinced he’s a better trainer because he cultivates gratitude since thankfulness is a key character quality. Each day he’d try and find two or three things to be thankful for, thankful in his case towards the universe. I talked with him about how my own gratitude was towards to God, who is the source of all good things, and we agreed to put our chance encounter with one another on each of our gratitude lists. 

‘Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done’. 

Today’s readings pick up on this theme of thankfulness alongside the theme of healing. In the Old Testament story from 2 Kings Chapter 5, Syrian army commander Naaman is healed by bathing in the Jordan. This reading was chosen in parallel to that of the story in Luke Chapter 17 of the ten lepers healed more simply just by meeting Jesus. This story is a reminder of what healing is in Christianity, beautifully and concisely expressed by Bishop Morris Maddocks: ‘Christian healing is Jesus Christ meeting people at their point of need’. 

I wonder, as we gather to the Lord in this eucharist, whether there are people here aware of a deep need. Like Naaman they may be too shy, or even too proud, to bring that need forward to the Lord this morning. May this sermon prompt you, as the young girl who served Naamon’s wife prompted him, to approach the God of Israel and see Jesus meet you at your point of need. The Bread and Wine, or the priest’s hands outstretched in blessing, are to be the Lord who awaits you later on in this service. Think about it, look to God and expect him to meet you at your point of need this morning!

In the second part of the Gospel one leper is praised for showing gratitude. ‘Were not ten made clean?’ Our Lord asks. ‘But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then he said to the Samaritan, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well’ - translated whole, or saved in other Bibles.

Notice the nine were spoken of by Our Lord as being ‘made clean’ but the thankful leper was said by Jesus to have been healed inside as well as outside. In other words, thankfulness is a quality that demonstrates the fullness of life we Christians call salvation. It’s a sign we’re living life to the full, life as God wills it. Archbishop Michael Ramsey described thankfulness as ‘a soil in which pride finds it hard to take root’. If we see our whole life as given by God that recognition protects us from obsessive self interest. 

To walk through life with gratitude on our wrist, or better still, in God’s company, makes us less out for ourselves and more out for those on the heart of God.

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest’ he says in Matthew 11:28. As Christians we are bearers of that invitation through practical action towards those in our circle overwhelmed, for example, by the cost of living. Of course there’s politics here, issues of lifestyle, family breakdown and the like. The beauty of thankful living is that it helps you to go blind to all of that and, to see all you have as a gift, including those you meet, hour by hour, to be welcomed as part of that gift.

Today 9 October is kept as the commemoration of Saint John Henry Newman, an ecumenical saint who died in 1890 after a life of service both as Anglican and then Roman Catholic priest. Saint John Newman was canonised by Pope Francis three years ago. I preached at Roman Catholic Vespers in St Paul’s Haywards Heath on that day as part of local celebrations. I mentioned then as I do now Newman’s motto ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’, let heart speak to heart, which captures what it is to live thankfully with compassion towards others. I want to end with Newman’s famous fragrance prayer, his prayer for grace to radiate Christ to a needy world.

Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go.
 Flood my soul with your spirit and life.
 Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly, 
that my life may only be a radiance of yours.

 Shine through me, and be so in me 
that every soul I come in contact with
 may feel your presence in my soul.
 Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!

 Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine,
 so to shine as to be a light to others; 
the light, O Jesus, will be all from you; none of it will be mine;
 it will be you, shining on others through me.

 Let me thus praise you the way you love best, by shining on those around me.
 Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by my example,
 by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do, 
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to you. Amen.  

Sermon at Vespers in St Paul, Haywards Heath on the day of St John Henry Newman’s canonisation 13th October 2019

Love and truth walk in the presence of God, writes the Psalmist (89:14) and so do his saints. Saint John Henry Newman’s walk with God appeals to both heart and mind as expressed in his motto and grave inscription. Cor ad cor loquitur - let heart speak to heart. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem - from shadows and images into the truth. 

Today the Christian world gives glory to God for raising up an exceptional servant who has moulded Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions up to this day through his teaching and holiness. Both traditions helped form our Saint and both are built up in love and truth through his patronage. I stand here this evening grateful to Newman with millions of fellow Anglicans. Through his influence and that of the Oxford Movement the 1662 Prayer Book Catechism was revised 300 years later in1962 to include this definition. ‘The Church of England is the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed. It proclaims and holds fast the doctrine and ministry of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church’.

Our Saint contributed to a recovery of Anglicanism as being in continuity with the early and medieval Church though that perception was so unwelcome in his day as to trigger Newman’s transition to Roman Catholic obedience. I dare to say such a perception is more accepted nowadays even if recent discontinuities in Anglican ministry await the verdict of history.

As a scientist by training, I have always been attracted to Newman whose writings counter what would put a brake on the best forward thinking. His great Apologia affirming both Anglican and Catholic heritage was published 5 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), a story of spiritual evolution complementing Darwin’s thesis on biological evolution. To live is to change Newman wrote and to be perfect is to have changed often. Life is a forward movement we can choose - he chose it - from what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 as from such shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

Our Saint, though aware through his sufferings of life’s sad limitations, is a teacher affirmative of life’s value and dynamic, an ecumenical, forward looking saint whose teaching, love and prayers are with both Churches he belonged to over his long life.   Saint John’s work on church development and how we protect the church from godless innovation to secure godly reform came into its own at the time of the Second Vatican Council of which he’s been called patron This through his stress on the centrality of Christ and the dignity of the laity and their role in keeping the Church faithful to God’s truth. What Catholics, what Church doctors, as well as Apostles, have ever lived on, he wrote, is not any number of theological canons or decrees, but ... Christ Himself, as He is represented in concrete existence in the Gospels.      In those words Newman speaks true to his Evangelical Anglican upbringing about the centrality of Christ to Christian experience which is at the heart of the reshaping in emphasis within Roman Catholic teaching expressed in the decrees of Vatican II.

Our Saint was always ready to defend dogma, the fence alongside the well trodden path of Christian believing, but intellectual formulation of Christianity was second to his warm hearted approach to God. His motto Cor ad cor loquitur expresses this, let heart speak to heart. Newman teaches us holiness is the best guide to the science of God, not argument, as in his hymn Lead, kindly light. There he speaks of surrendering rational choice, fears, and pride to be opened up to a fuller vision by the light of the Holy Spirit. This poem written during a health crisis admits the importance of the trials of life in leading us into more certain faith. Whereas scientific research reaches conclusions by appeal to the necessary and unchanging, human action by contrast works beyond logic. Certitude is moral not intellectual and its shown in humble determination to head from shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

To Newman church development and reform is rooted in such individual transformation, under the authority of both the faith of the church through the ages and the golden thread of spiritual direction reaching down the Christian centuries. Faith is nurtured from discipleship, from upholding in our lives worship, prayer, study, service and reflection. Such disciplines express our choice to be nurtured in holiness by and with those who have sought and today seek the Holy Spirit within the Christian Church. Newman found such a community at Littlemore and later on in the Oratory of St Philip Neri he founded in Birmingham and London. 

When our Saint decided to make his transition into communion with the See of Rome, his Anglican friend, Edward Pusey observed wisely of the separation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics: ‘it is what is unholy on both sides that keeps us apart’.
 Today’s Canonisation is both a celebration and a challenge. The Church’s mission to the world is damaged by its spiritual immaturity expressed in its divisions even if there are friendships across denominational divides. 

It is appropriate to recall Anne and my friendships with many here at St Paul’s through our 18 years in Haywards Heath or nearby Horsted Keynes. The recent loss to Christine and all of you of Deacon Gerard Irwin was our loss as well. Over recent years I recall heart-warming occasions like the 24-7 prayer in St Paul’s Hall in 2004, Churches Together events in the Dolphin Leisure Centre and bridge building occasions fostered by charismatic renewal and the True Life in God apostolic network. I’m delighted to hear of a new venture of ecumenical prayer starting at St Paul’s and we hope to be part of it.

As someone who attends Mass at St Richard’s and here on occasion Saint John is my patron. I yearn for the visible unity of the Church to complement the spiritual unity expressed tonight. ‘We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord’ - but let’s not stay there, as the song continues, ‘and we pray that all unity may one day be restored’. Why? So that Our Lord’s prayer for us in John 17:21 can be answered: ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me’.

That prayer and task is ours for the good of Haywards Heath and the world. In such an aspiration, heart will speak to heart as we invoke our new Saint trusting God for many among us to be drawn from shadows and images into the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

Trinity 17 (28C) St Richard, Haywards Heath 

I live by God and my phone. One of those who never uses cash, flicks their phone over the till and goes off paperless. Anne and I were driven mad by chasing till receipts and comparing them with bank statements at three monthly intervals. Now it's a monthly perusal of a rather longer bank statement in which we recall our till transactions with five A4 sheets rather than 200 unreadable till receipts.

All very good, but what do you do faced with a street person seeking assistance if you don’t carry cash? At least talk to them, listen to them, affirm them, rather than passing by on the other side. Homelessness is a growing scourge. In Bentswood some of my neighbours recently found a man camping in the woods, took him in and fed him. That’s why I’m pleased St Richard’s is taking note of World Homeless Week with harvest collections and goods today being given to a local homeless charity.

I’m pleased to ‘speak into’ a eucharist geared to advancing God’s kingdom in this realm having two years ago left a village divided over building more homes. Horsted Keynes has yet to finalise it’s village plan over where houses should go as quite a few don’t want them in their backyard. A very human response, but Sussex has a housing crisis on that account.

Today’s Gospel from Luke 17:11-19 fits our harvest theme of thankfulness which might prompt us to be more grateful for a roof over our heads. As I engage with people living on the streets, my first thought is, what it must be like to live outside through a blustery night let alone the deep chill of winter that’s approaching? My hedge is covered with berries, said to be a pointer to a hard winter ahead.

To the Gospel! It’s linked to the Old Testament story of Syrian army commander Naaman healed by bathing in the Jordan which is parallel to the story of the ten lepers healed more simply just by meeting Jesus. In the second part of the Gospel one leper is praised for showing gratitude. ‘We’e not all ten made clean?’ Our Lord asks. ‘The other nine, where are they? It seems that no one has come back to give praise to God, except this foreigner.’ And he said to the man, ‘Stand up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you.’ 

Notice the nine were spoken of by Our Lord as being ‘made clean’ but the thankful leper was said by Jesus to be saved. In other words thankfulness is a quality that demonstrates the fullness of life we Christians call salvation. It’s a sign we’re living life to the full, life as God wills it. Archbishop Michael Ramsey described thankfulness as ‘a soil in which pride finds it hard to take root’. If we see our whole life as given by God that recognition protects us from obsessive self interest. 

To walk through life in God’s company makes us less out for ourselves and more out for those on the heart of God - and can we imagine Our Lord’s heart other than warmly extended to those living on the coldness of the streets? 

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest’ he says in Matthew 11:28. As Christians we are bearers of that invitation through practical action, such as we’re about at harvest festival, but also by our presence alongside the homeless. Of course there’s politics here, issues of lifestyle, family breakdown and the like. The beauty of thankful living is that you go blind to all of that and, seeing all you have as a gift, those you meet, even on the streets, can be welcomed as part of that gift.

On a recent visit to Crawley Down Monastery being a Feast Day there was a talking meal. I sat beside a man who explained to me how the monks took him in regularly as he had no home. I learned quite a bit about what it was like to live on the street, the way drunken youths harass street people, and so on. I asked him what was most important to him about the way people react to the homeless. ‘Speak to us’ he said, ‘recognise our humanity. That’s much more important than any coin you can give us’. 

It’s easier said than done. I’m more on the case than I’ve been in the past, fuelled by a lack of 50p pieces, determined though to provide something as from the Lord.

This morning in Rome Pope Francis is canonising former Anglican priest John Henry Newman. Some of you know I’ve been invited by Fr Trevor to preach at 6.15pm Vespers up the road at St Paul’s. Newman’s motto ‘Cor ad cor loquitur’, let heart speak to heart, captures what it is to live thankfully with compassion towards others. I want to end with his famous fragrance prayer, his prayer for grace to radiate Christ to a needy world.

Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go.
 Flood my soul with your spirit and life.
 Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly, 
that my life may only be a radiance of yours.

 Shine through me, and be so in me 
that every soul I come in contact with
 may feel your presence in my soul.
 Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!

 Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as you shine,
 so to shine as to be a light to others; 
the light, O Jesus, will be all from you; none of it will be mine;
 it will be you, shining on others through me.

 Let me thus praise you the way you love best, by shining on those around me.
 Let me preach you without preaching, not by words but by my example,
 by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do, 
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to you. Amen.