“At that time Jesus answered and said, ‘I confess to Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones. Yea, Father; for so hath it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered to Me by My Father. And no one knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal Him. Come to Me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For My yoke is sweet and My burden light.”
Gospel of S. Matthew, 11: 25-30 [link]
I deliberately put that old image of Christ on his Cross up on this post, nailed but dressed as the Priest-king, the legend at the top saying Pontifex Amoris, Victima, which means ‘the Bridge-builder of Love is a (sacrificial) Victim.’ And yet, He says in this Gospel extract that His yoke is easy, and His burden is light. That’s the yoke and the burden He proposes to set upon us. But His greatest Christians are the Saints of the Church – the little ones of the reading above – many of whom were badly tormented, and suffered greatly before giving their lives for Him. As He is the sacrificial Vicim, He still calls His own to be sacrificial victims in our own times. And the Saints die with smiles upon their faces, exhausted after years of illness, or a few days and hours of extreme suffering.
We do not understand this, and yet, there it is – the dramatic consequence of the Christian offering to God. We do not quite understand the Saints anymore, their lives are the lives of aliens, their self-sacrifice seems impossible to us. And yet they answered the same call of Christ that echoes in our own ears. What will you give up for My sake?, He asks us. Come to Me, and I shall give rest to your souls.
In the last few weeks, I have been talking about prayer, responding to my own observations, and attempting to address some common difficulties people have mentioned to me.
I mentioned silence as establishing the locus of prayer, and also as respecting the God Who dwells in the silence. Silence is difficult for us these days, because of the endless noise that has been normalised in our society. It’s time to rebel against the noise that we have been taught to desire.
I mentioned order and discipline in prayer, as part of our own mission as Christians to bring the divine order to bear on earth, and to extend that order to every corner of Creation. Order/discipline is again difficult for us modern people. We feel annoyed with the discipline that is demanded of us at work or at school, we don’t usually want our non-work and non-school hours to also be ordered. Here again, we must rebel against ourselves and practically schedule our prayer. If we do not, we know from experience that we shall manage every type of hobby or leisure activity, but we shall stop praying.
Last week, I mentioned the basic Christian demand of purity as necessary for the Christian life of prayer. That doesn’t only mean avoiding sin – all the do not do this, do not do that of the ten commandments, for example – but also building virtue. Basic Christian virtue. It’s not only that we do not commit murder, per the commandment; with a strong and virtuous life, we shall not even call somebody we do not like an evil name or insult him/her. Charity, chastity, obedience to superiors, temperance, diligence, etc. These virtues do not only pull us out of the abyss of sin and death, but raise us up toward holiness.
I shall in the next few weeks go through the various Christian virtues, which militate against the deadly sins or vices that threaten to derail the Christian life. Today, I want to mention the role of the Saints of the Church in our prayer lives. In the language of the New Testament, all Christians are saints – holy ones – chosen by Christ and made holy by Him. In the later history of the Church and in our time, Saints are those men and women who lived heroic lives of virtue, living the virtuous life to a very high degree, becoming often in their own lifetimes (in the same manner in which they often shine in the stained-glass windows of our churches with the light of the sun behind them) transparent for the light of Christ to shine into the world through them.
I want to mention two aspects of the cult of the Saints which have a particular connection with our daily prayer. First, the Saints are our models of faithfulness, holiness, and right relations both with God and with the secular world around us. Second, the Saints are our friends (or, more accurately, our elder brothers and sisters in Christ) and stand with us in our prayer, and having acquired heaven themselves they can pray more effectively than ever before for us. Each of us has multiple patron Saints, related to (i) the names given us by our parents or guardians in baptism, or (ii) to our chosen professions, or (iii) by our own adoption because certain of them have inspired us by their lives. Let us ask for their help. And when we come to the end of the Creed, and we say, I believe in the Communion of Saints, let us remember that we stand in the presence of spiritual giants.
“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Sion, shout for joy, O daughter of Jerusalem: BEHOLD THY KING will come to thee, the just and saviour: he is poor, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. And I will destroy the chariot out of Ephraim, and the horse out of Jerusalem, and the bow for war shall be broken: and he shall speak peace to the Gentiles, and his power shall be from sea to sea, and from the rivers even to the end of the earth.”
Prophecy of Zecharyah, 9: 9-10 [link]
A quick look at our readings this weekend. This prophecy of Zecharyah in our first reading is the basis for the expectation that the Messiah of the Jews would ride into the City of the Great King on the back of a donkey, and He did just that, didn’t He, on Palm Sunday? Here is another moment to honour Christ the King, and rejoice that it is He Who rules our hearts, and not some human potentate or government, much as these would like to…
In our second reading below, S. Paul seems to want us to literally have our heads in the clouds, even though that is sneered at by the world we live in. We are supposed to be grounded, quite discouraged from the perceived foolishness of religion. But, says S. Paul, You are not in the flesh, Christian soul, you are not of this world, you belong to Christ. Remember that, as Christians, we have to prioritise Christ over everything and everybody else, and prioritise our eternal lives to come over our short lives in this world. We have to be prepared even to choose God over our families and friends. Is Christ asking very much of us? Yes, He is, I suppose. Those Saints I keep talking about more often than not lived lives of great suffering, the great majority of them are martyrs who gave their very lives for Christ and His Church. Yes, Christ does ask very much of us.
And as the gospel story says (the very top of this post), He wants us to receive His message and his revelation about God with the simplicity of children, full of trust in their Father God. And if we get this right, the biggest sacrifices we make in this life become a yoke that is easy, and a burden that is light. And we begin to understand better the Lives of the Saints, their fleeing to the solitude of the desert, the cloisters and the hermitages, their faces in our best icons and paintings always turned heavenward.
“But you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His. And if Christ be in you, the body indeed is dead, because of sin; but the spirit liveth, because of justification. And if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead, dwell in you; He that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead, shall quicken also your mortal bodies, because of His Spirit that dwelleth in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you shall die: but if by the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Romans, 8: 9-13 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 