Legion of Mary
Melbourne Senatus
Prayer with Action
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Legion of Mary
Melbourne Senatus Prayer with Action |
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Summer School 2006 WE ARE CALLED TO BE HOLY Talks presented by............ Bishop Mark Coleridge........Apostolic Renewal: Sacraments of Initiation – Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist. Fr John Winson SAC ............Growth in Holiness - The Scriptures in daily life. Fr Joachim O’Brien ofm..........Yes, the laity are a chosen race, a holy priesthood.(Handbook p.74) Dr. Ron Fitzgerald .................Sanctity in Legion Membership-‘Blessed be the Mother of God Mary Most Holy’ Fr Victor Farrugia.................Reconciliation and Healing: Sacrament of Penance Kathleen Mc Loughin ............Jesus through Mary – ‘Regina Coeli’ Fr Paul Newton...................Inner Conversion – Pre-requisite for all Ecumenical Progress Theme: WE ARE CALLED TO BE HOLY “Be holy in all that you do, just as God who called you is holy.” (1 Peter15) “The holiness of life which the Legion of Mary seeks to promote in the members is also its primary means of action.” (Legion Handbook page 68) Apostolic Renewal: Sacraments of Initiation – Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist. Bishop Coleridge
I am a Melbourne boy but I was brought up in Adelaide and during those years I was a member of a praesidium called Our Lady of the Way, a junior praesidium, do we have junior praesidia now? We do, well that’s good to know. We used to deliver the Catholic paper, that was our Legion duty. So I come here as some symbolic recognition that you are not just some tiny interest group on the margins of the Church or barely there at all, you are a group, a community, an apostolic community right there at the heart of the Church because if you understand what the Legion of Mary is about you will understand what the Church is about. You will understand what Christ wants the Church to be and in a sense that is what I’m talking about today. What is the Church? What does Christ want us to be in this time and in our place wherever you are all round Australia and in Fiji or wherever and in asking those questions I am also reflecting upon the question; What is the Legion of Mary?
In that sense I am also reflecting upon the still more concrete question of why are you here? Not just for a holiday although I hope it is fun and deeply refreshing but this is not just a holiday. It’s Sabbath time and that’s different. Do you know what Sabbath time is? The Jewish people taught us the basic rhythm of the spiritual life and the basic rhythm is the rhythm of the Sabbath. Sabbath is God’s time. See God doesn’t need our time, have you noticed? But we rather badly need God’s time so what we celebrate when we celebrate Sabbath time as we do on every Sunday the day of the Lord that day is given to us by God. This is the day the Lord has made, this is the day the Lord has given. But now these two days that you celebrate here as the Legion of Mary are also Sabbath time. Alright perhaps it’s cost you a bit of time, energy and money to get here and stay here but it’s not something that you do primarily, this is a gift of time that God gives to you. In that sense it is more restful than any other time. However, you will always be happy if the time you enter is the Sabbath of the Lord. The gift of His time. And in a sense the only real rest is the rest of the Risen Christ. Sometimes when I’m under pressure and feeling a bit stressed and that happens to bishops occasionally, I just say: “Lord Jesus draw me somehow into your Sabbath.” It’s the Sabbath or the rest that lies on the other side of Resurrection.
Only Jesus can be joyful and the human being can only share the joy of Jesus. We can have no joy of our own. Remember the Christian life, which is the fully human life, is always life on the other side of Easter. It’s is a very fundamental point that we can forget, you weren’t created to be miserable. Do you realise that? Do you realise therefore that you were created by God to share in the ecstasy of God. Isn’t that beautiful? But it’s true, too, it’s not escapist cosmetic beauty, this is the truth brothers and sisters. God created us to share in His ecstasy not to be depressed or disillusioned or downcast or downhearted or dead, all those words beginning with D. You were created for the E word the ecstasy of God. Do you know what the word ecstasy means?
It comes from the Greek, Ectasis, to stand out of yourself. Go out of yourself and yet so often the human being feels imprisoned in a self. You look for a doorway and all you see is a mirror. You want a doorway into life or through the looking glass like Alice and all you see is a mirror and yourself and no door. You’re locked in. St Paul knows all about this because at one point at the end of a reflection upon human frustration in the letter to the Romans 7:24 he says; Who would free me from this body doomed to death, from this prison of myself? And who will open the doorway onto the ecstasy of God which is the fullness of human life? The answer comes in the next verse. He says; “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.” So in the Resurrection of Jesus the doorway opens, the mirror of death becomes the doorway of life, the doorway into the garden. That’s where Alice in Wonderland is a fascinating parable, to go through the little doorway into the other world, into the other garden. If I say that you were created for the ecstasy of God that fullness of joy that comes when you go out of yourself, forget yourself completely, give yourself completely, that is what God is. The Pope has just said in his new encyclical letter Deus Caritus Est “God is complete self giving.” ‘Ectasis’ God is ecstasy.
It is the same thing as saying God is love. There is nothing else to say about God. But to say that you were created for that ecstasy for God is to say that your true home is the garden, paradise. You are not a desert creature, not too many deserts in Fiji, but Australia is four fifths desert. Now I once spent about ten days down in the Negev desert when I was a student in Jerusalem and it’s a fascinating part of the world and one of the things you learn very, very quickly as a human being in the desert is that you’re not made for the desert. You see what happens in the desert is that you sweat profusely but you never feel uncomfortable because, as soon as the moisture comes to the surface of the body it just evaporates, you never sweat and you never feel thirsty, isn’t that funny? But you have to drink, drink, drink, and in order to increase your capacity to drink in the desert you have to eat very salty and very sweet foods to create a thirst and to retain the moisture in the body. My point is simply that we are not desert creatures, we are garden creatures. And which garden am I talking about? Paradise.
Doxology. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and the church is a school of praise. Every morning when we get out of bed no matter how we feel the church puts in our hands and on our lips and in our hearts the morning prayer we call ‘Lauds.’ Do you know what the word Lauds means? Praise! Doesn’t matter how you feel, speak your mother tongue because we are like people who have had a stroke. This is what sin does. Original sin is like a stroke. Some of you might have had a stroke and after a stroke you have to relearn the most basic skills, even your mother tongue. So because of sin and the stroke, which it is, we are like people who have to relearn the language of paradise. And therefore learn to praise because only if you learn to praise will you be tuning into the truth of things. Now the ecstasy of God is all around us, can you see it? No, I can’t but I can’t see radio waves either but I know they are there. Can you see cyberspace? No. But it is there, all you have to do is boot up. So the ecstasy of God is all around you and all you have to do is tune in, like a radio, and if you are right off the station what do you hear, nothing. But if you come close to the station what do you hear? Static! Then if you actually tune into the station what do you hear? You hear music. You say; “I didn’t think there was music there. I thought it was all silence or all static.” Now keep tuning in and that’s the whole task before us as human beings, to tune into God and therefore to find our way home into the ecstasy, back to the garden. Isn’t that simple? It’s also challenging.
Now that’s all by way of warming up. Are you warm? The topic of this splendid gathering is something that struck me very much. ‘We are Called to be Holy’ and there was the quote from the first letter of Peter; “Be holy in all that you do, just as God who called you is holy.” It is an excellent choice because it puts the finger right on the nerve of where the church is now. Do you remember the Jubilee Year? I was working in Rome with Pope John Paul II, not quite his right hand man Fr John, but I did work closely on the production and translation of the letter Pope John Paul wrote at the end of the Jubilee Year. It had the Latin title of ‘Novo Millennio Ineunte’ which is ‘At the beginning of the New Millennium’. It’s a good read, not bedtime reading but it is a good read and not as difficult to read as some of the other things Pope John Paul wrote. But in it he talks of “Having to start afresh from Christ.” In other words we need a new beginning, brothers and sisters. I’ll come back to this.
It is crucial to recognise what the spirit is saying to the Church and therefore to the Legion of Mary. He goes on to say that this will always mean starting afresh to understand and to live holiness. So he stresses the ‘call to holiness’ that applies not just to the Pope or to the Bishops or the priests or the religious but to every single baptised member of the Church, including you. Here he was echoing what was said so powerfully and beautifully by the Second Vatican Council. The Council said many things but what it was saying at its heart was that every single member of the Church, not just some, but every single member, you, you are called no less in your situation to be holy, no less than the Carmelites or the Trappist Monks.
Therefore, the question becomes this; What does holy mean because holy gets a bad press and in the past it has got a shocking press, it’s like charity. You know that fantastic blazing furnace of love at the heart of all things has dwindled to the old saying that something or other or someone or other is as cold as, now who could believe that? Now holy has suffered a bit of the same fate. You know deep down a lot of people would say; “Oh, I don’t really want to be holy.” In fact I’ll go one better and say the only way to be authentically holy as the Lord is holy is precisely to be human. The Christian life is simply a matter of learning the art of being human and you know what happens insofar as you and I learn the fantastic art of being a human being, we will become divine.
What do we say of Jesus? Fully human, fully divine. Now we even say it in one of the Eucharistic prayers. “Then we shall be like You.” In other words to share His ecstasy God wants to make us divine, not God, but sharing His life. To come to the fullness of human life is to enter into the depths, the vast abyss that we call the Trinity. The Trinity is not celestial mathematics; it is just this endless abyss of love. The love you can’t measure or even imagine.
I have just read a book called ‘A Brief History of Time.’ Have you read it? It is a fascinating book because one of the things it puts before you is the unimaginable vastness of the cosmos. You know we think the sun, moon and the stars and us are big but we are a drop in the ocean, just a part of a hundred thousand galaxies each containing a hundred thousand planets or stars. The sun is just a little star. Now we are talking unimaginably big ‘so what is that’, this huge thing we call the cosmos, the creation? It is simply the overflow of the Trinity. You see the nature of love is to overflow is it not? You know love never runs out. It is like a bottomless glass of something, you know you take a sip and it just fills up. You see it in a mother as she tends her family. She might have ten children but it’s not as if the love runs out at number seven, no it just keeps expanding. And there is something infinite about any love; it never runs out if it is love. Now the whole of creation and you as part of it, you are just an overflowing of the seething abyss of love that is the Trinity. And it all flows back into the abyss. You know, when we die we all just pass back through that membrane of space and time, that’s all. It flows back like a wave that rises from the ocean and then flows back. And that’s what it is. So the whole of creation and us here, we are just an overflow of God.
Therefore the question; “What does it mean to be holy?” I’ve already said it means to be human and any opposition to those two is bound to corrupt both. And if the Catholic Church has anything to say to this society and God knows we do and we must, it is what it means to be fully human, because we inhabit a culture where you have rampant understandings of the human being which take a part to be the whole. We see the same thing but we see more not because we are more gifted or more moral but because our eyes have been opened by Christ, this is grace. So because we see with the eye of Jesus, we see the full truth of what it means to be human and that is the most basic and life giving service that we have to offer a culture that often sees a tiny part of what it means to be human and thinks that is all there is and we are saying; “No! There is so much more.”
In the Bible there is a very clear understanding of what it means to be holy and I am going to give it to you now, no extra charge. Very simple. It is found in one of the most difficult books of the Bible to read, the book of Leviticus. This book has the foundation of what the Bible means by holy and it includes two elements and you have got to have both or else you get the whole thing wrong. The first element is; separate. You can never be holy unless you are separate or different or other. Because God is separate, God is different, God is other. God is not a prisoner of the world He created. That was the problem with pagan religion that made the divine a prisoner of the creation. You could only find God in nature of this world. But what the Bible says is utterly beyond, utterly other, utterly untrammelled, free. And what the Bible says then is that God can only be absolute love, absolute intimacy with us because God is absolutely distant, different, separate, other. But then God chooses to freely bridge that distance, to come to us and be close. If you think of your own experience of love, love doesn’t involve the abolition of distance between two people that is an emotional dependency which might look like love but which is actually the opposite and very destructive. What love does, is it leaves intact the distance between you and me. I am me and you are you and between us there is a distance which we freely and constantly bridge in an act of going out of ourselves. Ectasis, giving of ourselves. So, absolute love presumes absolute distance, different, otherness, separateness. So for us as the Church, the question is, not whether we should be different but how?
Today is the Jewish Sabbath and if you went down to St Kilda or Caulfield you would see the orthodox Jews walking and they would have the big funny hat and side locks and the black coat and stockings and the women would have wigs and lots of kids. Now people look at them and say how weird. But all that is a way of being different, separate. Now is that the way of Christians? No, it is the way of Jews and we respect that absolutely. I look a bit different but you don’t look different at all, so it’s obviously not a matter of dress in your case the baptised so what is the difference?
The difference is our first element and now I want to put in place the second element. The Bible says that to be holy as God is holy is to be separate for the sake of service.
So we are to be separate for the sake of service. Service of whom? Ourselves? No, no, no. God so loved the world, so God wants us to serve the world because God loves the world. He doesn’t condemn the world. He condemns things that are done but God does not condemn the world and does not condemn the creatures He has created. It is absurd, it would imply a contradiction in God that God has created us for ecstasy on the one hand and then treats us with disdain on the other. This cannot be so. That doesn’t mean to say that God can be twisted around our little finger. Sometimes God will seem to be an aggressor because God’s a fighter. And sometimes love can seem like a threat or aggression. There is a parable told of a man who found life too hard to bear. No he didn’t commit suicide. He thought of it but he said no. What he did was he went out and he bought a large corrugated iron tank and he furnished it with all the necessities of life. A bed, books, a desk and a big crucifix on the wall to help him to pray and there he lived a life without stress for a while but there was one problem. Volleys of bullets would rip through the iron tank. Now he didn’t know who the gunman was and all he could do was lie down on the floor. This went on day after day and eventually he began to look through the bullet holes in the tank and he began to see the children flying kites, the birds eating, life going on and eventually one day the tank rusted and fell apart and he walked out of it with very little regret and he saw the man with the gun and he said to him; “I know you are going to kill me but before you do tell me one thing, why are you my enemy when I have never done you any harm?” And the man with the gun simply put the gun down and said; “I am not your enemy.” And the other man looked at the gunman and saw that there were scars on his hands and feet and these scars shone like the sun. Now you see how love can seem violent, can seem like an aggression but it’s not; “I am not your enemy.” God wants to bless the world. All through Abraham and Abraham’s descendants, us, all the tribes of the earth will be blessed, Genesis 12:3. That’s what God is on about. That’s the plan, the blessing, the ecstasy and that’s the service we are called to give. We are called to be different from the world around us, a light in the darkness, and the salt of the earth. The New Testament has many images for what I am saying but basically we are called to be different in order to give the world blessing, to lead the world into the ecstasy of God, out of the forest into the meadow land. That is the call and that is the shape of holiness. So do you understand?
So we are to be separate but we are separate for the sake of service. And we call that service the redemption of the world, salvation of the world, there are a lot of phrases for it, but this is the blessing, the wound becomes the fountain. That fantastic passage towards the end of John’s gospel, where one of the soldiers pierced His side with a lance and immediately there flowed forth blood and water.
The cosmic wound of the dead Christ becomes the cosmic fountain of life. And the great promise, therefore, is that there is no wound that cannot become a fountain, that’s the gospel. A lot of people out there in the forest, they know they’re wounded but they don’t think there is any healing, they have just got to bleed to death or the wound will simply fester but we are the ones who can go to them and say; “No, no, no there is a healing and that wound that you think is your death can become a fountain of life.” How extraordinary. Who would have thought of that but God.
Now apostolic, that’s my next word. Have you got holy? Separate for the sake of service. I’m going to read to you a line from Mark, chapter 3. “Jesus went up on the mountain and He called to Himself those whom He wanted and they came to Him. And He appointed twelve” and this is the bit I want to underline, “to be with Him and to be sent out to preach and to have authority to cast out demons.” What demons are we talking about? Not Casper the unfriendly ghost. We are talking about the demons of hopelessness, depression, despair, disillusionment, all that stuff, these are the demons. Now notice the way it is put in Mark’s gospel. The first thing they are called to do is to be with Him so the womb of apostolic life and hence your life as a Legionary is to be with Jesus and if you don’t spend time being with Jesus then all you are going to be doing, brothers and sisters is jobs for Jesus and you are called to do much more than simply jobs for Jesus. That’s not the Christian life. So to be an apostle, to be holy, you must be with Jesus.
The Pope in that letter at the end of the Jubilee Year puts it much better. He says; “To contemplate the face of Christ.” To be with Him. To know Him. Christianity in many ways is not religion. It is not a system or an ideology, it’s an experience of what? Of encounter. Encounter with the whom? The Risen Christ in whom alone you discover the truth of who you are and the truth of who other human beings are. Only if you see Him do you see the full truth of yourself and the full truth of the human being. That’s why it is so important that we see Him. You know those stories at the end of the gospel where the disciples encounter the Risen Christ these really are the seeds of Christianity. And there is a pattern to those strange stories. The pattern is this. The Risen Jesus comes out of nowhere. They are not sitting around saying; “Um, I wonder what time He is going to appear?” He just popped out of nowhere and His appearance shakes their foundations. We are often told they are terrified. “What’s going on?” Their whole sense of what is true and certain is shaken. Like Isaiah when God appeared in the temple, the foundation of the temple shook. The foundations of the lives of the disciples shake when they encounter the Risen Christ. So He is deeply disconcerting like the man with the gun. And the third thing that you see in all those stories is that they always get a job. If you don’t get a job you can take it from me that the Jesus you have encountered is not the real Jesus. It is some Jesus you’ve constructed or concocted for your own false solace. You always have to do something. But the doing always comes last.
Where it all begins, is this experience of encounter, not just once but over and over again. You’ve got to kind of drown in Jesus. You know it’s like the journey of the two disciples who as they begin their journey they think they can see but they can’t. So they take their journey and at the end they sit down at a table with the Risen Christ and He breaks the bread. And what are we told then? “Ah, now we see. Everything’s different.” And then a strange touch. As soon as their eyes are open what happens? He vanishes, now isn’t that weird? You would have thought that would have been the prefect time to have a lovely long chat over dinner. But He vanishes from their sight, why? Because your eyes are open you don’t need Jesus sitting physically across the table because you see Him everywhere. There is no place that He is not. Can I repeat that? There is no place that He is not. No matter how dark or horrible, even the darkest, darkest corner of your heart, He is there. You try and keep the door locked on that corner but you can’t because He has got through the door. Do you notice the way He walks through doors? You can’t keep Him out, He is always there before you and in the most horrible part of the world, the most abysmal depths of human suffering and He is there. You know the sick I told you about in Adelaide, where is Christ? He is there in the sick bed but He is also in you or me as we go to be with the sick, to say; “You are sick but you are my brother or sister.”
So to be with Him and then to be sent out. Another phrase very dear to Pope John Paul was; ‘The New Evangelisation.’ What he meant by that is that we are in a new threshold in history so enjoy the ride, it can be disconcerting, but you and I are caught up in an extraordinary moment in the history of the Church and what is called for now is a new kind of preaching of the gospel. Going into the forest in new ways. When he first talked about evangelisation way back in 1979 John Paul said we need a new surge of evangelising energy that is new in ardour, new in method and new in expression and they called him a conservative pope.
In other words it’s not just business as usual folks, sorry. We’re at a turning point. It’s not that we’re abandoning the past; on the contrary if we abandon the past we abandon the future. The Church has always gone back to the future. But to preach the gospel in other ways and imagine other ways, to have a go at new things. You know I find as a bishop that I go best these days if I have people around me who say: “What about this, what about that. Let’s try this or that.” Now ninety eight out of a hundred of those suggestions might be mad or a least useless but a couple of them might be gems. What do you think Frank Duff did when he founded the Legion? Fantastic imaging and some people would have said; “Oh you’re mad Frank Get real.” And look what happened. He is a classic case, the founder of the Legion. Alright the Legion is fine but it must re-imagine, reinvent, re-energise itself, that’s why you’re here. It can’t be just doing the same old things in the same old way and if anyone saw it with power and clarity it was John Paul II and that’s why he was such an unconventional pope and why he didn’t just sit around in the Vatican. You know sometimes when you’d see him and he was going out on one of his big journeys, an apostolic voyage, he would look tired, pale and you would wonder how the old bloke was going to manage this but after about a fortnight of the most exhausting apostolic activity he’d come back looking taller, fresher suntanned, that’s what energised him because he was an apostle. But the power in that mans ministry was born from that experience of being with Jesus. You wouldn’t believe the time he spent in the chapel, for instance.
So now onto a New Evangelisation. Start thinking up new ideas but be faithful in your humble, undramatic, half hidden way. That’s one of the great glories of the Legion. You get out there and you do things. You don’t blow trumpets and bang drums that’s your charism and that’s wonderful but what else can we do? How can we pick up the broken? How can we heal the wounded? How can we go into the forest? Where are the forests? So to be an apostle these days is to be sent out by Jesus in a new way.
Now let’s look at the Sacraments of Initiation; Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist. That’s the journey of Christian initiation that all of you have made. Now what this does, it makes you part of Jesus. Does that sound a bit strange? You are drawn into Jesus. It’s not Jesus out there and you are here because what did St Paul call the Church, the Body of Christ. And when you were baptised and confirmed you were drawn into the Body of Christ and what do we celebrate at the altar of Christ’s sacrifice the fact that we are the Body of Christ and we are made anew as the Body of Christ and what the priest say as he gives us the communion born from the table of Christ sacrifice, the Body of Christ. This is what you receive and this is what you are, because if you are not part of the Body of Christ there is no holiness, there is no experience of being with Jesus and there is no sending out. Because when Jesus sends you out He doesn’t abandon you. That’s what the gift of the Holy Spirit is about. Jesus actually goes with you and those with eyes to see will see not you or me with all my imperfections, will not see the Legion or the Bishop but will see Jesus. St Paul says in one of his letters; “There is only Christ. He is everything and He is in everything.” So if we are not in Jesus there’s no holiness, there’s no being with Him, there’s no power in what we do. We become part of Him through those sacraments. The Body of Christ, bearing His power says to preach and have authority to cast out demons. Whose authority? Not yours. His. And when you receive the Holy Spirit as you all have, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into you. It happened when you were baptised. It happened again when you were confirmed. So then this is the life of Jesus. His authority, His holiness, His power. This is the truth.
The other thing is this there is nothing more frustrating than to be asked to do something that you are unable to do or you are unequipped to do. It’s like if I asked you do some mathematical equation and you have never studied maths, you couldn’t do it and you would be absolutely frustrated. Such frustration leads to anger. I think that at times in the Church we ask people to do things that they are not equipped to do. Now Jesus never does that. You have been called by Jesus to be with Him to be sent out and the way you do that is fantastic. But Jesus also equips you with the Holy Spirit. Without that you would be dead. Oh, you would look alive but inside you would be dead. With the Holy Spirit you are alive with a life that is not your own. All of you have been fantastically equipped to do things that you never dreamt of doing and perhaps to do things you will never know you have done because once we are talking about the power of Jesus and the Holy Spirit we could never see the full scope of what we do or how we touch people lives. So you are called, you are sent out and you are fantastically equipped. There is nothing that you lack. To quote another one of St Paul’s letters he says; “In Christ we have been given every spiritual blessing.” Every blessing, because God has held nothing back, nothing. So you have got it all, you might not realise it and you might leave some of the blessing in your bag, well open it and start using them because that’s what we need on this threshold of the new evangelisation.
Let me conclude by saying the prayer the Holy Father has given us at the end of this encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est, God is Self-giving Love, Self-sacrificing Love, the end of it he wrote a prayer to Our Lady.
Holy Mary, mother of God you have given the world its true light Jesus your Son, the Son of God. You abandoned yourself completely to God’s call. So you became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from Him. Show us Jesus. Lead us to Him. Teach us to know and love Him so that we too can become capable of true love and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.
**************** All the Talks are available in a booklet from the Senatus |
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